{"id":1209,"date":"2014-12-18T01:21:57","date_gmt":"2014-12-18T01:21:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?p=1209"},"modified":"2014-12-18T01:57:34","modified_gmt":"2014-12-18T01:57:34","slug":"only-a-few-of-my-favorite-things-for-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?p=1209","title":{"rendered":"Only a Few of My Favorite Things (for 2014)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Because I don\u2019t have to, I\u2019m not going to bother with a Top-Ten movie list this year. This is also because there wasn\u2019t a whole lot I saw at the multiplexes in 2014 that got me as wound up as the stuff I\u2019m listing below. And if I bothered to enumerate the movies that did, I\u2019d likely end up with a list that more or less looks like everybody else\u2019s, which precisely none of us wants.<\/p>\n

Instead, I\u2019m going to pull together a rag basket of items that for various reasons made the most resounding connections with my frontal lobes through the prevailing media din of weapons-grade white noise and free-styling schaudenfreude. Most came out this year; some didn\u2019t, but I got around to them for the first time this year, so they count. (My list, my rules.)<\/p>\n

Quite likely, I\u2019m forgetting, or blocking some stuff. It\u2019s been that kind of year. And there were some things I couldn\u2019t bring myself to include, whatever my absorption level. Scandal,<\/em><\/strong> to take one example, remains for many people I trust an irresistible sack of Screaming Yellow Zonkers. But outside of Joe Morton\u2019s righteously Shatner-esque scenery chewing and the mad electricity vibrating in Kerry Washington\u2019s eyeballs, I\u2019ve found that its live-action anime antics can go on without me for at least a couple weeks at a time.<\/p>\n

So anyway\u2026(as this fellow<\/a> might out it)<\/p>\n

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\"Max-Brooks-Harlem-Hellfighters-Graphic-Novel\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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The Harlem Hellfighters<\/em> by Max Brooks<\/strong> \u2013Brooks made his name mythologizing the walking-dead (World War Z, The Zombie Survival Guide)<\/em>. But he proves himself just as conscientious in rendering factually grounded savagery in this fire-breathing graphic (in every sense) novel about the legendary all-black 369th Infantry Regiment that roared out of Harlem to fight in World War I, the hinge between post-Reconstruction\u2019s legally-sanctioned terrorism of African Americans and the gathering pre-dawn of the civil rights movement. Though the Hellfighters\u2019 passage from raw, often humiliated recruits to take-neither-prisoners-or-shit-from-anybody warriors is rousing, the visual depictions of squalor, disease and violence (thanks to the classic-war-comics \u00e9lan of illustrator Canaan White) deepen the many ironies layered onto this saga; not the least of which was that it was only through the horrific, demeaning process of war that black men could begin proving their worthiness as American citizens \u2013 and even that wasn\u2019t enough. To establish its own validity as historical fiction, Brooks\u2019 account brings in such real-life badasses as James Reese Europe, Henry Lincoln Johnson and Henri Gouraud for colorful cameos. Of course, a movie is planned. Good luck trying to top this<\/p>\n

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\"Lucy-Scarlett-Johansson\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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Scarlett Johansson<\/strong> \u2013I\u2019ve already waxed rhapsodic about the commanding way she works the alien-enigmatic<\/a> in the polarizing Under the Skin.<\/em> By contrast, the art-house crowd showed relatively little-to-no-interest in Lucy<\/em> in which she played a hapless, sponge-faced drug mule accidently injected with a drug transmuting her into a time-distorting, matter-altering, ass-kicking wonder woman. But Luc Besson\u2019s acrylic pulp fantasy proved that few, if any movie actresses today are as cavalierly brilliant at throwing down wire-to-wire magnetism in such nutty eye candy. Manny Farber would have wallowed in the termite splendor of it all. Even her by-now borderline-gratuitous Black Widow turn in support of yet another Marvel money machine (Captain America: The Winter Soldier<\/em>) retained enough droll slinkiness to make one suspect that giving the Widow her own vehicle might be a bit of a let-down. Then again, Ms. Scarlett never let me down once this year, so why dwell upon the purely speculative?<\/p>\n

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\"whiskey_tango_foxtrot\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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Whiskey Tango Foxtrot<\/em> By David Shafer<\/strong> \u2013 This novel took me by surprise as it did several other critics this past summer. Up till that point, it hadn\u2019t occurred to me that the legacies of both Richard Condon and Ross Thomas could, or even should be filled. Nevertheless, anyone whose familiarity with these authors\u2019 works extends beyond Condon\u2019s The Manchurian Candidate<\/em> or Thomas\u2019 The Fools In Town Are On Our Side<\/em> will recognize Shafer\u2019s sardonic humor, crafty plotting and humane characterizations as reminiscent of both authors \u2013 which is another way of saying these qualities aren\u2019t what readers of contemporary techno-thrillers are used to. Also, much like Condon, Shafer knows, or strongly suspects, what we\u2019re all afraid of, deep down, and finds a surrogate for this fear that\u2019s both outrageous and plausible; in this case, a sinister cabal of one-percenters planning to seize total control of storing and transmitting information worldwide, thereby making recent abuses by the NSA, or whoever has it in for Sony Pictures, seem like benign neglect. This premise scrapes somewhat against territory controlled by what used to be called the \u201cCyberpunk School\u201d as well as Thomas Pynchon, except that Shafer\u2019s three 30-ish hero-protagonists are at once unlikely and recognizably human: an Iranian-American NCO operative who stumbles into the conspiracy so haphazardly she\u2019s not sure what it is until it goes after her family, a self-loathing self-help guru in debt to his eyeballs who\u2019s recruited by the cabal to be its \u201cchief storyteller\u201d and his estranged childhood friend, a substance-abusing misfit with a trust fund as thick as his psychiatric case file. They are all swept into an underground movement called \u201cDear Diary\u201d which knows what the cabal is up to and is deploying its own secret network to bring it down. Social comedy, political melodrama and digital menace don\u2019t always blend as well as they do here. And this is only Shafer\u2019s first novel, meaning, as with the other masters cited above, he can only get better at this stuff from here on.<\/p>\n

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\"james-brown-chadwick-boseman-get-on-up-2014-billboard-650\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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Get On Up & Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown<\/strong> <\/em>\u2013 The former is a feature biopic; the latter an HBO-exhibited documentary. Both told me things I didn\u2019t know about their shared subject \u2013 or, maybe more to the point, framing what I already knew about James Brown\u2019s story in a manner that showed him as far more than an unholy force-of-nature. If I lean more towards the documentary, it\u2019s because the revelations are more striking (not just the spectacular \u201cwhat\u201d of Brown\u2019s showmanship, but the painstaking \u201chow\u201d of its components along with its savvy adjustments over time). And its testimonies are altogether more enlightening (Mick Jagger, who co-produced both, sets the record straight on how the \u201cT.A.M.I. Show\u201d sequence of acts really went down) I loved listening to band members let loose on what they really thought of their sometimes thoughtless boss as well as what second-generation Fabulous Flames as Bootsy Collins learned on and off the road from Brown. Tate Taylor\u2019s biopic has a different agenda, but it strives to be just as faithful, if not always to the facts, to the facets of Brown\u2019s fiery, hair-trigger temperament. Maybe it tried too hard. (As far as B.O. was concerned, Get On Up\u2026<\/em>didn\u2019t.) But Chadwick Boseman\u2019s, conscientious rendering of Brown\u2019s tics and turbulence is almost as breathtaking to watch as one of the Godfather\u2019s actual Soul Train<\/em> appearances. Now that Boseman\u2019s successfully portrayed two historic icons, I remain anxious to see what he can do with a Regular Guy role sometime between now and Marvel\u2019s Black Panther movie.<\/p>\n

\"FX<\/a><\/p>\n

\"FARGO<\/a><\/p>\n

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FX<\/strong>\u2013 The third, and best, season of Veep;<\/em> the harrowing, jaw-dropping single-take night scene in True Detective<\/em>; Billy Crystal\u2019s astute, heartwarming 700 Sundays<\/em>; Girls<\/em> and its discontents; the sheer how-can-it-possibly top-itself-again-and-again momentum of Game of Thrones<\/em>\u2026There was so much to love about HBO this year that I feel like an ingrate for professing my affection for a rival, even though there are things in both FX and HBO that I\u2019ve neglected (American Horror Story, Boardwalk Empire<\/em>) or shortchanged (The Strain, The Leftovers<\/em>). Nonetheless anyplace I can find Louie, Archer, The Americans<\/em> and (for me, especially) Justified<\/em> is a cozy, stimulating home for my mind. Add to this the deep-dish pleasures of Fargo<\/em>, whose greatness sneaked up on me the way Billy Bob Thornton\u2019s meatiest, slimiest character since Bad Santa slithered through the frozen tundra, and of The Bridge<\/em>, whose shrewd and nervy evolution from its first, somewhat derivative season went mostly unnoticed by the professional spectator classes and I\u2019m not sure FX doesn\u2019t have a deeper bench, pound for pound, than its bigger rivals., I prefer a lean, mean FX that takes so many worthy, edgy chances that it can be forgiven for something as lame and sad as Partners.<\/em> (Never heard of it? Good. We shall speak no more.)<\/p>\n

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\"Oxford<\/a><\/p>\n

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The Oxford American \u201cSummer Music Issue\u201d<\/strong> \u2013 I, along with many of my friends, have lots of reasons for being mad at the once-and-future Republic of Texas. But I still love its literary heritage and, most especially, its thick, spicy blend of home-grown music, which takes up C&W, R&B, Tex-Mex, swing, funk, hip-hop and even some avant-garde jazz courtesy of native son Ornette Coleman. They\u2019re all represented on a disc accompanying a special edition of this always mind-expanding quarterly. Compiled by Rick Clark, this CD provides the kind of kicks your smarter buds used to slap together on cassette as a stocking stuffer. Besides the aforementioned Ornette (\u201cRamblin\u2019\u201d), there\u2019s some solo Buddy Holly (\u201cYou\u2019re the One\u201d), early Freddy Fender (\u201cPaloma Querida\u201d), priceless Ray Price (\u201cA Girl in the Night\u201d) and the unavoidable Kinky Friedman (\u201cWe Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to You\u201d). The left-field surprises include an especially noir-ish take of Waylon Jennings doing his signature \u201cJust To Satisfy You,\u201d a deep-blue rendition of \u201cSittin\u2019 On Top of the World\u201d by none other than Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, Ruthie Foster\u2019s espresso-laden performance of \u201cDeath Came a-Knockin\u2019\u201d and Port Arthur\u2019s own Janis Joplin fronting Big Brother and The Holding Company on a \u201cBye, Bye, Baby\u201d that swings as sweet as Julio Franco once did. I don\u2019t want to shortchange the actual magazine, which includes James Bigboy Medlin\u2019s reminiscences of working with Doug Sahm, Tamara Saviano\u2019s portrait of Guy Clark and Joe Nick Patoski\u2019s story about Paul English, Willie Nelson\u2019s longtime drummer. It doesn\u2019t beat a spring-break bar tour of Austin, but it\u2019ll do until I get a real one someday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Because I don\u2019t have to, I\u2019m not going to bother with a Top-Ten movie list this year. This is also because there wasn\u2019t a whole lot I saw at the multiplexes in 2014 that got me as wound up as the stuff I\u2019m listing below. And if I bothered to enumerate the movies that did, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[124,185,368],"tags":[29,618,30,620,616,617,629,637,631,214,605,614,626,610,632,601,55,604,603,609,602,623,625,613,630,635,636,600,611,506,621,627,606,634,607,633,488,638,622,612,615,619,628,608,624],"class_list":["post-1209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","category-on-writing-lit-and-unlit","category-tv-reviews","tag-louie","tag-700-sundays","tag-fx","tag-archer","tag-billy-bob-thornton","tag-billy-crystal","tag-bob-wills","tag-bootsy-collins","tag-buddy-holly","tag-chadwick-boseman","tag-david-shafer","tag-fargo","tag-freddy-fender","tag-get-on-up","tag-guy-clark","tag-harlem-hellfighters","tag-hbo","tag-henri-gouraud","tag-henry-lincoln-johnson","tag-james-brown","tag-james-reese-europe","tag-janis-joplin","tag-joe-nick-patoski","tag-justified","tag-kinky-friedman","tag-luc-besson","tag-manny-farber","tag-max-brooks","tag-mr-dynamite","tag-ornette-coleman","tag-oxford-american","tag-ray-price","tag-richard-condon","tag-rick-clark","tag-ross-thomas","tag-ruthie-foster","tag-scarlett-johansson","tag-soul-train","tag-tex-mex","tag-the-americans","tag-the-bridge","tag-true-detective","tag-waylon-jennings","tag-whiskey-tango-foxtrot","tag-willie-nelson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1209"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1209\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1229,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1209\/revisions\/1229"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}