It's listicle season, again. Music,
movies, books, what-have-you. Do you bother with any of it? If so,
which ones?
For me, the older I get, the fewer I
attend to. At the end of December, I'll head over to Metacritic to
see which games made the year's top ten. By April (June, at the
latest) those should all be affordable, and I'll nab the ones that
looked most interesting.
There are book lists I'll glance at,
just to see if there isn't the occasional oddball the prestige
outfits missed (or ignored). I haven't seen anyone put Aleksandar
Hemon's The Story Of My Lives
on any such list, so here's me, whacking the dinner-bell on its
behalf.
For
some reason, I've gone cold on movie lists. I really could not be
arsed, and I'm damned if I can put my finger on precisely why that
is. I've cooled toward movies, too (obviously). It's not that they're
dead to me — I recently enjoyed The
Way Way Back,
and consider Gravity to
be this year's
Mandatory-Pay-The-Bucks-And-Sit-In-The-Theatre-You-Won't-Regret-It
movie. I could mull over the unique insights and minor quibbles I had
with both movies, but neither of these experiences caught me with the
emotional urgency of, say, the fourth season of Friday
Night Lights.
That's
not to sing the standard chorus of “Television Is Better Than The
Movies” (although you'll get little argument from me on that
score). But I can remember a week some sixteen years ago when my wife
and I spent five hours in a hospital emergency room with our infant
daughter possessed by a raging fever that could not be tamed, and
when we finally returned home with a correct diagnosis and the
appropriate antibiotics, I could not
fall asleep, so I went out to see L.A.
Confidential and
was just SO BLOODY GRATEFUL to experience a flickering projection
that could pull me out of all that and so immersively into its own
weirdo, whacked-out world for a solid two-hour stretch, that OF
COURSE I had to write
about it. What other response was there?
But
movies aren't really that,
anymore. Even Gravity,
which gets so close to that,
serves as a glum reminder of just how much closer Cuaron got to that
with Children Of Men
(my God, what a devastating movie — still. Here's a list-topper for
you: Children Of Men
was the
movie of the last ten years, and remains as yet unchallenged for the
current decade.
Discuss).
And
then there's Music — holy shit and holy cow, what list could
possibly do any justice to the pre-Cambrian explosion of little
scenes, little audiences, little bands and the sub-sub-sub-sub-genres
that have proliferated like so many digital spermatozoa and ovum? No,
we bedraggled listeners have to stake a particular claim on our
peculiar aural fixations, and if you just happen to have a list that
might speak to said fixations — well, okay, I'll take a look.
To
be continued.
6 comments:
I've been enjoying the golden age of television we currently seem to be in. Don't get me wrong, there's still a lot of crap out there. And once I get the sense that a tv show is deliberately spinning out some plot point for as long as they can because they don't have other ideas, I usually leave. But there have been a few great serialized shows lately that create such a wonderful immersive world that just can't be done in a 90 minute movie. And after that, it's hard for me to go back to movies again with the same enthusiasm.
I think Breaking Bad has changed the field -- for eeeeeverybody. And good on 'em.
Joel, I am laughing at myself re your remark about deliberately spinning out plot...I am hooked on that silly nighttime soap opera, "Revenge". Insults my intelligence like Miss Miss Doreen with a dull cat o'nine tails.
"Gravity" - best pot-less claustrophic paranoid ride this year.
As for books. Yes. Well. I have suddenly acquired a very ADD approach to any book I've picked up lately. I am interested for about 100 pages, then it gets tossed to the floor, or flicked out of my Kindle Carousel never to be finished. My attention span and once stellar ability to shut out the world with a tiny tome has moved to Siberia.
Oh - I left out music...
Have you tried a Denton, Texas band called "Midlake"?
http://www.amazon.com/Antiphon-Midlake/dp/B00EIGQKHO/ref=pd_sim_m_4
Any recommendation -- musical or otherwise -- from CP is one I take seriously. I shall look further (thank you!).
Hm. This morning Goodreads greets me with, "Congratulations! You read 5 books this year!" Well ... I rated and reviewed five books. Still, I must admit my rate of literary consumption has indeed slowed -- alarmingly.
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