I learned two things about myself this year: I now prefer writing directly into the CMS over the daunting terror of a blank Microsoft Word document, and spending as many as 11 hours every weekday writing and editing for work has squashed my ambition and desire to write in my limited free time.
But to be honest, I like the name of my blog too much to let it end with a rant about Wonder Woman 1984, so here I am, back again to reminisce about the pop culture and even some real-life moments that made Year 2 of the COVID-19 pandemic a little more bearable.
The final shot of Identifying Features. Cinematographer Claudia Becerril Bulos produces at least a half-dozen shots that made my jaw drop in Fernanda Valadez’s electrifying directorial debut (!!) about a woman searching for her missing son after he attempts to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. 90 minutes of slow-burning dread culminates with an image so unexpected, inevitable, and haunting that I instantly predicted I’d still consider it the best movie of 2021 by the end of the year. I was right.
Farmers’ markets. The combination of wanting to support local businesses and recoiling at the idea of eating inside a restaurant (someday, I hope) led me to discover the modest joys of patronizing my neighborhood farmers’ markets, particularly the food stalls. If you’re in the D.C. area, the cheeseburger empanada from DMV Empanadas and the apple pie from Savagely Good are irresistible.
“How do you know what I want?” I went into Mare of Easttown skeptical that the world needed yet another moody crime drama about an antihero seeking redemption through the investigation of a white woman’s grisly murder, even with an actor as formidable as Kate Winslet in the lead role. But the lived-in setting and sensitively drawn characters won me over, with Mare and Zabel’s endearingly kooky partnership as the emotional lynchpin. Evan Peters’s delivery of this line — tender, with just a touch of cockiness — remains lodged in my brain, as does the feeling of being punched in the gut that followed.
Adaptation that reframes the source narrative, part 1: The Green Knight. Dev Patel and Sarita Choudhury’s casting as Gawain and Morgaine, respectively, intrigued, but it wasn’t until the virtuosic “time passes” montage at the climax that I fully grasped what David Lowery was doing with his “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” interpretation. A poem about a hero’s struggle to stay true to his society’s highest ideals becomes a film about a striving outsider who gradually realizes the hollowness of those ideals and the brutality that they were designed to justify. The Green Knight conjures up the primal mystique of Arthurian myths, while challenging their very foundation.
A Tale of Two Cities. Who knew a Charles Dickens novel would be my favorite thing I read this year? Where Oliver Twist drenches its social critique in stereotypical Victorian moralizing, Dickens wields irony in his French Revolution epic with the merciless precision of Madame Defarge’s knitting needles, dissecting the hypocrisy of those who mete out justice with violence as well as those who create the conditions that lead people to see no other option. Mostly, though, the way his prose bridges countries, time, tones, and even the living and the dead renewed my appreciation for English as a language.
Saving and slaying creatures in Dungeons & Dragons. My party freed a bear and took down its first dragon, and I’ve never felt more accomplished.
The Superstore finale. I laughed (the feet!), I cried (that Amy and Jonah reunion!), and I wanted to applaud showrunners Jonathan Green and Gabe Miller for crafting the rare workplace sitcom conclusion that understands that cameraderie forms between coworkers not because of their jobs, but in spite of them. It’s fitting that a series about the thankless grind of service work didn’t even make “Emmys snubs” lists, but that doesn’t make the lack of recognition any less outrageous.
“Carnaval del Barrio.” When deciding what to highlight from In the Heights, I was tempted to choose the innovative staging and Olga Merediz’s heartrending performance in “Paciencia y Fe,” but nothing encapsulates the infectious, defiantly joyful energy of Jon M. Chu, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Quiara Alegría Hudes’s musical like this showstopping ensemble number. The goosebumps I get at “Can we raise our voice tonight?/Can we make a little noise tonight?” are why I go to the movies.
Seeing Ema at The Avalon Theatre. Speaking of going to the movies, I’d watch all of them at this 1920s-era independent theater if getting there didn’t involve an hour-long Metro ride. I liked Pablo Larraín’s classification-defying thriller/marital drama plenty when I streamed it from MUBI last year, but a two-story-tall, nearly empty auditorium with a Renaissance-style ceiling mural is the kind of grandiose setting a movie as audacious and immersive as Ema deserves. There, I felt a hushed reverence that makes comparing movie theaters to churches seem almost reasonable.
The Laszlo/Colin Robinson arc in What We Do in the Shadows. Of course this dumb/smart show turned a seemingly throwaway quip about masturbation into a significant, retroactively poignant beat as part of a season-long effort to set up a character’s sudden demise. Take a hike, Annette! There’s only room for one deranged baby puppet in this town, and it has Mark Proksch’s face.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons introduces cooking. The Nintendo game got a major refresh with its most recent — and apparently final — major update, which finally gave users the ability to make their own food and drinks, among other changes. The irony is that the dishes are so cute I can’t bring myself to actually eat any of them.
The catharsis of A Quiet Place Part II. From a storytelling standpoint, this horror sequel is entertaining but superfluous, failing to expand the world much beyond John Krasinski’s tense, surprisingly touching directorial debut. As a representation of repressed grief and familial love tested by a relentless existential threat, however, it felt vital. With her silent scream, Millicent Simmonds seemed to release all the rage, fear, and sorrow that had built up during the pandemic’s first year but went unacknowledged by a world already eager to move on.
“Inception Gave Me a Way to Dream.” In this essay for Catapult, Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya interweaves a personal narrative about realizing her queerness, her grandfather’s memory of watching a 1948 war movie, and an analysis of Inception‘s recursive dream logic. Seeing her braid the disparate threads together produced the same hypnotic rush that I get when the dream layers sync in Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster — the satisfaction of parts coalescing into a seamless whole.
Kristen Stewart singing to “All I Need Is a Miracle.” For a movie that mostly struck me as pretty yet frustratingly distant, Spencer sure did make me cry more than anything else I saw in theaters this year. It was just nice to see Stewart bop to a fizzy ’80s pop song after 100 minutes of her looking miserable. Let her be happy, Hollywood!
Hawk defects to Miyagi-do. I didn’t choose to catch up on all three seasons of Cobra Kai in one month (such is the danger of living with other people), but it’s irritatingly enjoyable, and now Andrew Garfield and I have feelings. Jacob Bertrand excels at conveying victim-turned-bully Eli “Hawk” Moskowitz’s internal conflict through his physicality, letting us see the struggle between compassion and aggression without telegraphing which will win. When that tension finally paid off with a flying kick in the third season finale, I cheered.
Belfast‘s “High Noon” showdown. Young Buddy’s fantasy of his father as a paragon of moral fortitude a la Gary Cooper’s stalwart town marshal collides with reality when Protestant militant Billy Clanton threatens him and Ma. Unlike Marshal Will Kane, who confronts the forces of anarchy alone, Pa gets a little help from his wife and elder son in a thrilling display of teamwork. When the family huddles together to find safety from the battle unfolding around them, Kenneth Branagh’s love and gratitude practically radiates off the screen.
Adaptation that reframes the source narrative, part 2: West Side Story. Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner don’t update the 1961 movie so much as pull off its Technicolored glasses to see more clearly what was already there. This time, the punches bruise, the Jets’ tribalism sours into overt white supremacy, and even at the height of their romance, Tony and Maria seem aware that it will end. Instead of sapping the material of energy, the grit injects West Side Story with renewed urgency. Giving “Somewhere” to Rita Moreno’s Valentina suggests this isn’t a love story; it’s a battle for survival.
Soto vs. Ohtani. I’ll be honest, baseball hasn’t really existed for me since the Nats won the World Series (the sport peaked here), but then Juan Soto agreed to participate in the zero-stakes spectacle that is the Home Run Derby, and I had to tune in. Lasting two bonus rounds and a swing-off, his dinger duel with Angels slugger/ace Shohei Ohtani was a giddy, suspenseful display of athleticism and star power that had me thinking — unironically, for once — “What a time to be alive.”
The North Water‘s episode titles. I could recommend this Arctic thriller by praising the deliciously raw performances by Jack O’Connell and Colin Farrell or how Andrew Haigh uses his affinity for alienation to render the close quarters of a 19th-century whaling ship and the vast frozen landscape outside equally perilous. Or I could just point to its hilariously grim episode titles, which start tamely with “Behold the Man” and end at “To Live Is to Suffer.” If The Terror was literature, The North Water is dime-store pulp, a bleak vision of men and capitalism that stinks of booze and rot and imbues murder with the intimacy of sex. I respect a show that wears its dark heart on its sleeve.
Seeing Tenet in IMAX. Thanks to a stray glance at The Washington Post‘s movie showtime listings, I caught a screening of Christopher Nolan’s time-flipping action flick at the Smithsonian’s Airbus IMAX theater in November. If this was my first encounter with the film, the scale of the venue might’ve overwhelmed, but as a third big-screen viewing, the experience was pure pleasure. Instead of straining to follow the plot, I could just revel in the crisp images and layered sound design; an establishing shot of the Amalfi Coast that barely registers on even a large TV becomes staggering in its intended format. How am I supposed to go back to the Blu-Ray after that?
lovingly derivative 