{"id":2903,"date":"2020-12-31T04:59:39","date_gmt":"2020-12-31T04:59:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?p=2903"},"modified":"2021-09-26T16:40:32","modified_gmt":"2021-09-26T16:40:32","slug":"gene-seymours-top-ten-favorite-things-from-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?p=2903","title":{"rendered":"Gene Seymour’s Top Ten Favorite Things from 2020"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

Just so you all know: I had a tougher time than usual with my annual everything-but-jazz list and not for the reasons you think. There was an awful lot that gave me comfort and joy in the past year because what else did I or anybody else have to do in 2020 but seek such things whenever they could be found. So I left a lot of things I could have included to the side. But I don’t regret anything I retained because the main point for me is to let you know that I recognized and embraced the same things you did and also found out stuff that you may not know about, but need to. So here we go and sorry if I missed something. Chances are I didn’t. But because I once again reside in the global capital of It Is What It Is (a.k.a. Philadelphia), I’m in no position to regret anything here. Next year? That’s next year. For now…in no particular order…<\/p>\r\n

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American Utopia<\/strong> <\/em>\u2013 I saw it live in January on one of its last pre-lockdown Broadway performances and again this fall as a Spike Lee movie. The whole bouncy, juicy enterprise is just as you\u2019ve heard: an invigorating, beautifully staged tonic for nerves frayed and hopes stressed by the previous four years (if not longer). Yet for all the show\u2019s ecumenical uplift and big-tent benevolence, I couldn\u2019t help but think back to its producer-writer -star\u2019s early life as a Talking Head. And by \u201cearly,\u201d I mean all the way back to Talking Heads \u201977<\/em> and such lines from that long-ago breakthrough as: \u201cOther people\u2019s problems\/They overwhelm my mind\/They say compassion is a virtue\/But I don\u2019t have the time.\u201d Of course, David Byrne\u2019s a different person from whatever or whoever he was back then, as am I. And I\u2019d like to think he now wonders sometimes, as I do, whether the spirit animating that chorus from \u201cNo Compassion\u201d is in any way partly responsible for whatever culminated over the intervening decades into a Donald Trump administration (especially given how some of you kids, at whatever age, may not be as fluent in irony as you think you are). But while there\u2019s plenty of Heads music to sing along with here (and you invariably will), you\u2019ll never hear a song like that in this<\/em> show. And you don\u2019t see even a trace of Byrne\u2019s I\u2019m-smarter-than-you glower from those late-seventies days when CBGBs was the place to go for the Next Big Thing. You do hear a lot from Byrne\u2019s gnomic side; the part of him that can\u2019t stop bringing up potato chips even as he\u2019s urgently decrying injustice in all its domestic and foreign manifestations. Only now it doesn\u2019t register as smart-assery so much as cozy schtick and, as such, it enhances Byrne\u2019s bright-beaming avuncularity and, yes, compassion. He\u2019s evolved from not-having-the-time-for-empathy to: \u201cAs a people, we\u2019re a work in progress. Who we are extends beyond ourselves.<\/em>\u201d Just another way of saying \u201cHappy New Year.\u201d

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Lovers Rock<\/strong><\/em> \u2013 Taken together, the films that make up Small Axe,<\/em> Steve McQueen\u2019s multi-tiered chroniclie of the West Indian experience in London from the 1960s to the 1980s, are a revelation, sweeping and intimate in their depiction of tribulation, perseverance and resistance in the face of white bigotry. The eruption of militant Black protest is given the same respect as the determination of a young Jamaican to protect his community by becoming a patrolman. The harsh coming-of-age of a celebrated YA writer illuminates an era as powerfully as the account of promising, but misunderstood Black children systemically funneled into subpar educational facilities. At times, McQueen can be overly emphatic. In Education,<\/em> for instance, he piles on the soul-killing drudgery imposed upon warehoused children, making you, at one point, resent the movie almost as much as the clueless white teacher mangling \u201cHouse of the Rising Sun.\u201d But you don\u2019t in the least mind the way McQueen goes all out in Lovers Rock,<\/em> a one-of-a-kind depiction of a 1980 reggae house party in which two young people (Micheal Ward, Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn) manage to go through a full courtship during a tightly wound night of music, food and dance. You\u2019re spellbound by the way these smart, resilient and beautiful kids inject their own martial arts movies into \u201cKung Fu Fighting.\u201d And you give in to rapture as the young women keep swaying to and singing the lyrics of Janet Kay\u2019s \u201cSilly Games\u201d<\/a> after the record stops playing, in key and keeping the beat. You fall in love with the movie in the same way that the movie \u2013 and McQueen\u2019s series — loves its people.<\/p>\r\n

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The Queen\u2019s Gambit<\/strong><\/em> \u2013 Its worldwide popularity has set off the inevitable backlash for any number of perceived sins, e.g. too slick, too soapy, too pulpy, whatever. But I was all in with this Netflix adaptation of Walter Tevis\u2019 novel, if for no other reason that I preferred living a world in which America\u2019s leading contender for global supremacy in chess dead center in the American century was a moody, pill-popping orphan girl from Kentucky instead of the bombastic, deranged Bobby Fischer. In the lead role of Beth Harmon, the winsome Anya Taylor-Joy grabbed and sustained your attention with the way her complicated, not-always-admirable character grew from gangly teenaged social awkwardness to demure grownup self-possession, even when, near the crest of triumph, she\u2019s still barely holding it together. Verisimilitude is always valuable when it comes to such period melodrama and the series kept excellent time with its sense of detail from the fifties showroom nature of the furniture to the sixties chic of its fashions and, most especially, the soundtrack that took in the Vogues\u2019 \u201cYou\u2019re the One,\u201d the Association\u2019s \u201cAlong Comes Mary,\u201d<\/a> Quincy Jones\u2019 chrome-plated arrangement of \u201cComin\u2019 Home Baby,<\/a>\u201d Gillian Hills\u2019 \u201cTut Tut Tut Tut,<\/a>\u201d and Shocking Blue\u2019s “Venus.”<\/a>\u00a0The supporting cast was uniformly excellent; in particular Marielle Heller as Beth\u2019s thwarted dreamer of a stepmother and Moses Ingram in a best-friend-from-childhood role that she almost single-handedly rescues from hackneyed \u201cmagical negro\u201d convention. But it\u2019s Taylor-Joy\u2019s star-making show all the way through. And her total magnetism was more than enough to get most of us to dust off our old chess sets and figure out how her character\u2019s huge, espresso eyes are able to see everything happen before it happens \u2013 as useful a skill in art as it is in chess.<\/p>\r\n

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Glynn Turman<\/strong> \u2013 In a world that makes much more sense than this one, Glynn Turman would be nationally renowned as a generational icon of his profession. It\u2019s enough to say that, at 73, he is a living, breathing retrospective of Black cultural advancement from the civil rights era to the present day. At 12 years old, he played Sidney Poitier\u2019s son on Broadway in the original production of Lorraine Hansberry\u2019s A Raisin in the Sun<\/em>. Less than a decade later, at 21, he helped integrate TV\u2019s Peyton Place<\/em> and was to the 1975 coming-of-age comedy Cooley High<\/em> what fellow child actor Ron Howard was to its 1973 counterpart American Graffiti<\/em>. Over the succeeding decades, he became as much of a cult hero for the parts he got (the spit-and-polish Army colonel on A Different World<\/em>; the sleazoid Baltimore mayor in The Wire)<\/em> as for the one he didn\u2019t (he auditioned for Han Solo in the first Star Wars movie, but George Lucas reportedly backed away from the idea of a Black Han playing approach-avoidance games with White Princess Leia). Plus which, he was once married to Aretha Franklin. This year found people sitting up and taking full notice of Turman\u2019s contained intensity and mastery of space. In Netflix\u2019s production of August Wilson\u2019s Ma Rainey\u2019s Black Bottom<\/em> he was Toledo, the circumspect piano player for Ma\u2019s band trying to retain composure and dignity amidst the tempest of resentment and rage in the recording studio. And in the fourth season of FX\u2019s Fargo<\/em>, he was Black mob consigliore Doctor Senator, who displays so much shrewdness, gravitas and diplomacy among the short fuses going off like fireworks throughout circa 1950 Kansas City that you wish he were in charge of all the city\u2019s warring mobsters, Afro- and Italo-American alike. The attention Turman\u2019s been getting for these turns is as gratifying as the grace with which he\u2019s greeted the renewed acclaim. He seems more than happy to be regarded at this stage in his long and illustrious career as an \u201cactor\u2019s actor.\u201d And while some of us still wish he were regarded as so much more, if he\u2019s cool with that status, we should be, too.

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Soul<\/strong> <\/em>\u2013 Ethan Iverson has declared this latest Disney Pixar project to be the best jazz movie in a long time<\/a>. And as I\u2019ve written elsewhere, I\u2019m with him on this — with the caveat that one of the things that disquieted me a little was its implication that the jazz calling and the dedication it requires so obsessed Joe the protagonist that it kept him from appreciating everything in his life that had meaning and resonance. Most of us who love music (and I’m not just talking about “the music,” but all music) believe it to be one of the gateways towards embracing life in all its outward and inward graces. Maybe Pete Docter’s movie was saying the same thing ultimately. But I fear it will nonetheless give haters more ammunition for disdaining or dismissing “the music.” As soon as the closing credits started rolling, there was also the melancholy suspicion that Soul<\/em> wasn’t going to find as much love out there as other Disney\/Pixar inquiries into the metaphysical such as Coco<\/em> or I<\/em>nside\/Out<\/em>. It left more questions open than answers, which makes it my favorite DizPix movie since WALL-E<\/em> \u2013 and 2008 now seems a long time ago. Meanwhile, the jazz head in me was more caught up with the movie’s digressions and diversion e.g. the rat dragging the pizza slice in one direction while the cat is dragging another one in the other; the offhand little jibe by the afterlife’s gatekeepers over how too many new souls were being herded into the hovel set aside for self-absorption; the modernist depiction of those gate-keepers that tipped its cap to the UPA and Terrytoons shorts of the 1950s; and. most of all, the characterizations of all its Black supporting characters from the older ladies rocking with Joe’s mom in the tailoring shop to the brothers at the barber shop simultaneously keeping it real and cool. When Oscar time rolls around, I’ll be rooting for Wolfwalkers<\/em> to win the best animated feature prize because those guys at Cartoon Saloon deserve the love for keeping hand-painted animation alive and kicking in the digital age. But as Ethan says, if there’s an envelope somewhere for Best Jazz Movie of this year (if not the last 10-to-30), this is what it’ll say on the card inside.<\/p>\r\n

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Quarter Life Crisis<\/strong><\/em> \u2013 I\u2019ve watched enough Netflix stand-up comedy specials over the now-all-but-completed decade to know that the raunchiest, most incisive and most double-dog-daring of these comics have been women. I\u2019ve found something to like and\/or admire in most, if not all their provocations. But for whatever reason, none of their specials have kept me coming back for seconds this past year like this recital by Taylor Tomlinson. The title refers to her up-front fatigue with being in her twenties. \u201cI am done with this shit!\u201d she declares. \u201cThey are ten years of asking yourself, \u2018Is this a phase or is it a demon? Am I fun or should I go to a meeting?\u2019\u201d She\u2019s had a fairly conventional rise through the talk-show circuit and Last Comic Standing<\/em> duels, but has somehow pulled together a fascinating self-portrait of a Millennial caught squarely in a conflict between her nice-girl upbringing and her nascent yearnings to be a bona-fide mean girl. (And she probably would be, if she didn\u2019t find mean girls to be lame as well.) Watching this tension play out is what keeps you strapped in her passenger seat, along with her gift for the seemingly offhand, Day-Glo zinger. (“[If] love is blind, lust is Helen Keller.”) She\u2019s got so much figured out at such an early age, even with her white-bread religious upbringing, that you can\u2019t wait to see what’s spilling out of her next. And even if she doesn\u2019t figure all of it out (and who does?), it\u2019s still going to be fun watching her try well into her thirties.<\/p>\r\n

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