Well, here we are again, at the end of another year and I’ve failed to finish fiftyfifty.me once more. However, this is my finest effort in years, as I got to 33 books and 64 movies. I spent my NYE trying to cram in one last movie and book -- a very excellent Mustang and a confusing The Hour of the Star, respectively. Obviously I went into the new year right, and totally set the stage for twelve months of productivity and progress. Ahem. Anyway, let’s just get right into it shall we?
MOVIES: Considering I’ve averaged eighty-four movies for the past four years, this year’s sixty-four seems awfully low. But that’s okay, quality over quantity! And there were some good ones on my list. But first, where do I watch my movies? Apparently the breakdown is forty-two movies in the theater and twenty-two at home or in airplanes. I recently calculated that I spent about $1,000 at the movies last year, which comes out to a whopping $23.80 per movie I watched. (By comparison, I spent $300 buying books, clearly many unread ones.) Something about that seems awfully wrong, but it just goes to show that I either paid for a lot of other people's tickets, went to some real luxurious theaters, or I rewatched a lot of things. Like Captain America: Civil War, saw that gem three times. And La La Land, which I saw twice in four days, and almost another time last week.
Stop right here. Pay attention... LA LA LAND!!! I was so in on this movie beforehand it was hard to be overhyped. Ryan Gosling. Emma Stone. Singing. Dancing. The director of Whiplash. More Gosling (check out my all Gosling edition of Cool It Now). How could it fail!? For the most part, La La Land totally lived up to my expectations, and it actually got better upon a rewatch. Needless to say, I’ve been slamming the soundtrack hard the past two weeks. I don’t care what (some) haters say, La La Land is amazing -- and it's gonna take the Oscar this year.The best movie of the year was probably The Lobster though. I need to watch it again but I just remember how simultaneously weird and fantastic I felt after walking out of the theater. If I had to name a film of the year, it would have to be The Lobster. With La La Land a close 1B if you want to feel happy instead of intensely morosely "whoa" — the after effects of a Lobster viewing -- then go with La La Land. Actually, Gosling + Stone in The Lobster would be interesting too. Gosling + Stone in anything really, and especially a new Sound of Music, as Juliet and Amanda from this Ringer podcast episode suggested. Semi-blasphemy, I know...
2016 list of straight A movies: 10 Cloverfield Lane, Arrival, Captain America: Civil War, The Lobster, The Handmaiden, Moonlight (which I watched by myself in an empty theater as we descended officially into Trumpworld), La La Land, and Moana.
I also gave high marks to these too: Dearest, Dope, Hateful Eight, Love & Friendship, Manchester By the Sea, Mustang, The Revenant, and Zootopia. Here’s me talking about how much I giggled through Zootopia. And I guess that's about it for movies. I’ll have to get another MoviePass now that I’m back in the States. That almost $24 per movie figure is ridiculous right? All-you-can-watch please!
The numbers breakdown comes out to fourteen fiction books, ten non-fiction books, six graphic novels, and um, three zines. I know, do we even count zines? They were long zines, so I don’t care! Actually, moving forward, I think to be honest with myself, I need to eliminate graphic novels and zines from the list. So fine, I only read twenty-four “real” books this year.
Of the ones I want to push, at the top of the list is Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others. With the release of Arrival in multiplexes recently, I finally read some Chiang earlier in the year. Wait, looks like I already plugged Chiang on this very blog. So I'll skip the re-gushing. Next on the list is Shawna Yang Ryan’s Green Island, which again, I’ve plugged already. But if you read one book about the White Terror in Taiwan this year, let this be it! And also, another recommend I briefly mentioned was The Folded Clock by Heidi Julavits.
I know I didn’t talk about United States of Japan though. It’s an alternative history action-y book about what it would have been like if Japan had won WWII. While it falls into a few too many tropes, I did like the ideas Peter Tieryas threw into the east defeats west setting. “A fun romp, plus giant mechas,” is what my one line review would say. My final recommend is Michael Lewis’ The Big Short. I watched the movie twice, finally read the book, and got all fired up about the 2008 mortgage crisis (again). Fuck Wall Street right? Lewis is consistently great and The Big Short is one of his best.
Stop me if you’ve heard this, but I also really liked the graphic novel Asterios Polyp, which I (once again) talked about already. Ugh, drone drone drone.
Of the high recommends I’d put Atlanta, Black Sails, Chewing Gum, Orange is the New Black, The Night Of, and Westworld at the top. And I guess Stranger Things but everyone already watched that this summer. I want to especially put in a plug for Black Sails, which gets really good after a so-so S1, but then the subsequent seasons filled the Game of Thrones hole for me, with 80% of the conniving and plot twists GoT serves up. Too bad I have nobody to talk Black Sails with… And Tatiana Maslany finally won a well-deserved Golden Globe for Orphan Black, as she is simply amazing. We ripped through all four seasons of Orphan Black in short order, and can’t wait for the finale.
Along with all that, I watched some of The Get Down, Luke Cage, Black Mirror S3, and Joe Swanberg's Easy, but didn’t finish those quite yet. And to be honest, may never return to them. I wanted to like Luke Cage better, wanted to love Easy a lot, but both were pretty hit-or-miss. And Black Mirror, as a series, tends to disappoint on the regular so I may have to give it up altogether. All in all, I effortlessly finished fifteen shows — who knows how many seasons — and that just proves how easy TV goes down.
Sidenote: 2016 also marks the year my mom discovered binge TV, as she was high on Grand Hotel (basically a Spanish Downton Abbey) and Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, a serialized detective show from Australia. She never used to watch television, like at all. And since she's not the best with technology, she didn't realize there were many more seasons of each show until I navigated to them. Now she loves her Apple TV more than she loves me, I'm sure. Netflix, bringing joy to all generations!
Okay, that's it for all things consumed 2016, thanks for listening. Remember to subscribe to Cool It Now, my newsletter for pop culture left behinds to feel less behind, as I'll soon be putting out its twelfth issue. And teaser: it's all about Gosling!
