Let’s talk about the past year on screens – big, small, and phone.

MOVIES

As has become the norm, I didn’t see a lot of new movies this year, although my wife and I did venture out to theaters a couple of times. One of those was to see the movie that I thought was the best of the year, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer.

I don’t have a lot more to say about that movie, as it’s been reviewed and discussed to death since it came out. I will not say it is my favorite of Nolan’s films (I have a soft spot for The Prestige and always will), but it may be the most impressive. I thought James Camerson did well wringing drama out of a shipwreck we all knew about going in, but the tension developed during the scene with the Trinity test was another level.

The other 2023 movie I wanted to highlight was very different, a documentary called The Mission.

You may remember in 2018 when a missionary named John Chau decided he should try and convert a remote, isolated tribe on an Indian Ocean island and wound up being killed for his troubles. The Mission tells that story, based largely on Chau’s own diaries, along with letters from his father to the filmmakers. It uses animation to fill in the visuals, along with some talking heads that cover broader issues of missionary work and whether it’s more of a plague than a blessing. What really got to me is how Chau’s father watched helplessly as his son became more and more devout, captured by an evangelistic spirit, and charged headlong to his death.

As for the “new to me” class, it turns out that I spent 2023 getting caught up on a lot of good stuff from 2022. The first two are a pair of very different horror(ish) flicks, The Menu and Men.

The Menu is another in the recently popular “eat the rich” genre, this time skewering the wealthy and aloof via a snooty, high-end restaurant with the world’s worst customer service (or best, depending on your point of view). It’s darkly funny and enjoyable in a sick, twisted way. As for Men . . . well, it’s bizarre. A woman who suffered a recent tragic loss departs to a small English village as a retreat, only to find that it’s entirely populated by men (and boys, even more creepily) who all look alike (all played by Rory Kinnear, who’s a good enough reason to watch just about anything). It goes from unsettling, past creepy, into confusingly disgusting by the end, but it really stuck with me. It was the high point of several folk-horror movies I saw last year.

For something completely different, the absolute funniest thing I saw last year was Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.

It’s a biopic of Weird Al Yankovic’s life, only it really isn’t. Instead, it skewers biopic tropes and pokes fun at Al’s own image and history. I watched it on a plane on the way to the UK last year and there were a couple of times I drew stares for laughing so hard.

TELEVISION

The watchword for television in 2023 was “endings,” as several excellent series came to an end, most notably Succession. Don’t sleep on the final outings of the gang at Archer, though. That was a show that had no business running as long as it did and continuing to be that funny. I wanted to highlight another couple of excellent shows that wrapped things up last year, however.

The first is Reservation Dogs, the Native American-led dramedy from FX (or Hulu, whichever).

Set largely on an Indian reservation in Oklahoma, the show was about four young adults trying to make sense of their world and culture in the wake of their best friend’s suicide. It was often funny (the recurring presence of one character’s spirit guide in particular), but also quite moving. And while I would have loved to have gotten more of it, the series wrapped up in a very satisfactory way.

The other ending I wanted to note was also a return, and of a show I knew nothing about before its return, Happy Valley.

The ironically named series is set in Yorkshire and follows the tribulations of a woman who is both a police officer and stand-in mother to her grandson, the product of a rape that led her daughter to kill herself. It’s pretty rough stuff and, plotting wise, I have some issues with how they keep the father/rapist around as the series bogeyman, but the whole thing is held together by an amazing performance by NAME as the officer/grandmother. Very glad I stumbled into it on BBC America.

A pair of new shows really caught my attention, too. Each could have additional seasons, I suppose, but they work well as standalone experiences, too.

One is Scavengers Reign, an impressive sci-fi series from HBO (or Max or whatever the hell they’re calling themselves these days).

The setup is really simple – the crew of a deep-space flight crash land on an alien planet and struggle to survive. That’s really it for plot, which is slight, but that’s not the point of this show. Rather, the creators use the flexibility of animation to conjure a world that is truly and utterly alien, both amazing and terrifying in equal measure. In a way it reminded me of 2001 in the way it takes complete advantage of its medium. A trip well worth taking.

By contrast I wouldn’t recommend the trip taken by most of the people involved in Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God (another Max offering), much less the titular mother herself.

On the one hand, this documentary is part of the current boom in docs about cults. What sets this apart is that so much of it is populated with video taken by the members itself as their leader goes from somewhat inspirational spiritualist to complete crank wasting away from overdoses of colloidal silver. It’s three episodes and there’s a part in the second where people say things that are just so stereotypically culty that you have to laugh. Then it becomes more clear is what we’re watching is a woman who surrounded herself with true believers that, once she needed help, weren’t able to provide it because they had gone so deep down this particular rabbit hole. It winds up being very tragic.

PODCASTS

I am not what you’d call a devout podcast listening (in spite of hosting one), but I do have a couple of favorites from the last year that I really enjoyed.

The first has been around since the early days of the pandemic, but I hadn’t highlighted it before – The Album Years.

Hosted by musicians Steven Wilson and Tim Bowness (who’ve worked together as No-Man, in addition to a host of other projects), each episode takes a particular year and works through albums from that year that stood out to them. The idea is to leave the obvious choices to the side and feature some lesser known, or perhaps lesser loved, work. Wilson and Bowness are literate in the area and have enough overlap in tastes that they can talk about a lot, but have enough areas of disagreement to keep things interesting.

The other was new for 2023 – If Books Could Kill.

Hosted by journalist Michael Hobbes and lawyer Peter Shamshiri, the tagline says it all: “The airport bestsellers that captured our hearts and ruined our minds.” For each episode one of them (only one, usually) reads the featured book and they walk through the clichés, spurious claims, and just plain weirdness that infests pop psychology, self-help, and popular political/economics books. It’s funny, and often deeply sarcastic, but the work is kind of serious – we lap up a lot of bullshit as a society, often packaged in innocuous ways, so it’s good to call it out every now and then.

With that said, on to 2024!