January 2020 - Leah's birthday at Point Dume
Welcome to a new year! After a 2020 marked by plague and political instability, we no doubt deserve something better.
Here, we spent much of last year making sure we weren't part of the problem (i.e., the problem of being an inadvertent virus spreader), so we spent a lot of time at home. On the unhappy assumption that you’ll need to be doing the same for at least part of next year, here are some of the diversions that kept us entertained last year. Let us know what we missed!
Aaron Caplan
I last saw movies in a theater in early March 2020. One was Swallow (2020), where our protagonist hones her special skill of ingesting marbles, buttons, batteries, and thumbtacks. The other was The Whistlers (2020), a Romanian heist movie where the pilfering uses bird calls learned in the Canary Islands. They were both pretty good (or at least memorable), though I doubt they’ll be getting much attention during awards season. In retrospect, I’m glad the theaters were close to empty, since a room full of people whistling and swallowing might have become a super-spreader event.
Since then, like all of you, I’ve been watching things on the home screen, where longer stories seemed to fit the bill.
NOTE: The title of this section was going to be “For Your Bingeing Pleasure,” but “bingeing” looks funny when it’s written down. Besides, do you pronounce that like bin-geng? The dictionaries I consulted also approved of “binging,” but that looks like it should be pronounced bing-ing, which ought to be what a baritone does when crooning into a big microphone. Even formulating this note was tough sledding, since I was going to be helpful and say “it rhymes with singeing” – but that looked funny too. So “bingeworthy” it is.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. Anything good you’ve heard about this series is true. Leah confirms that you don’t need to have read the graphic novel to love it.
What to do when the super-heroes are (literal) corporate tools.
I never read any HP Lovecraft, but have fairly vivid memories of seeing a set of paperbacks with a unified cover design with a different horrifying face on each cover. I have now learned that this series was published by Ballantine with the covers painted by a British artist named John Holmes (thanks, internet!) Turns out Lovecraft was a terrible racist, which makes this series even smarter when its heroes find ways to use the occult to battle Jim Crow.
It's the future, and humans have populated Mars and the asteroid belt. But they keep acting like Earthers, jockeying for position and splitting into factions. Looks like you can take the people out of the Earth, but can’t take Earth out of the people.
It turns out you don't need to have that good of a personality to create a cult of personality.
The competition show that covers some genuinely important competitions, like cheese rolling, dog dancing, and fantasy hairstyling. There's only a few episodes, so compared to some of the heavier binges, this one is a veritable palate cleanser!
Then there are various homemade channels on YouTube, including my favorite marble racing channel and Leah’s favorites: Bailey Sarian (who narrates a true crime story every Monday while putting on her makeup); and for the hobbyist with an interest in larceny, there's the Lock Noob and The Lockpicking Lawyer.
In alphabetical order, here are items designed to be finished in one sitting:
AKA Jane Roe (2020)
Band Teacher Double-Feature: Soul (2020) and Whiplash (2014)
Barking Dogs Never Bite (2001)
Bombshell (2019)
Get On Up (2017)
The Farewell (2019)
Horrible Bosses (2011)
Leave No Trace (2018)
Let It Fall: LA 1982-1992 (2017)
Logan Lucky (2017)
Manny and Lo (1996)
The Love Witch (2016)
Marriage Story (2019)
Personal Shopper (2017)
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
Reds (1981)
The Social Dilemma (2020)
This video made me teary-eyed but also cheered me up. I was searching for versions of "Better Things" by the Kinks ("here's to what the future brings / I hope tomorrow you'll find better things") I discovered this clip of Fountains of Wayne playing it on the Conan O'Brien show on September 21, 2001 - the first week back on the air after 9/11. So far so good. Then I learned that the band's co-founder Adam Schlesinger died of Covid-19 in April 2020, as explained here. That's the teary-eyed part.
