2023 Consumed Part 2
Movies, Music, and Books!
Hopefully not too late into 2024, here are some of the other nonfashion favorites of 2023. Understandably, I had to catch some final 2023 films and get a job (a fine way to start the new year). So, without further ado…
The Movies
2023 Releases
Poor Things
Perhaps the wildest, most expansively madcap and deliciously boundless world Yorgos Lanthimos has ever brought to life. Here is a film that despite holding such a focus on eroticism, sex work, and to an extent, socialism, is so full of amazing performances, mind boggling production design, and very funny stuff that it has deflected the vitriol of many of its critics. There are few films that look like Poor Things, that wield the same tone, or that have all those things framing a performance as strong as Emma Stone’s. Unlike similar films that question humanity from foreign vehicles, whether they be angel, barbie doll, or wooden puppet, Poor Things involved a more collaborative process with its lead star. The result, I think, is a more considered and sensitive yet no less playful work. See on the largest screen possible, while you still can.
The Boy and the Heron
What happens when the fable fractures? If you don’t know the rules, will you keep moving? Is it a dream, or a twisted world of truths so slight in their strangeness that it might as well be? Here is a film with the scale of Princess Mononoke, a linear, fantasy-rooted fable, fractured into the split worlds of Spirited Away and stripped of its logic. In many ways, this is a deeply cruel and unsettling film that resolves and works because of an overwhelming love of life. Here is a film that brings you inside its magnificently crafted walls and lovingly turns you loose, because even the most devastating of heartbreaks contains more than the endlessness of art - so says the retiring Miyazaki, here personified as an old man fiddling with building blocks. I love this film as a loose amalgamation of dreams and half-laid ideas, woven together by desire, love, and a good ol’ quest.
Passages
Embodies the best of the queer wardrobe of the pan European-elite, from Ben Wishaw’s soft boys in floral blazers to Franz Rogowski’s animal print narcissist. The best dressed film of 2023. Passages moves at a pace that isn’t quite slow, but one that encourages introspection. We move with the chaos of Rogowski’s Tomas until we, like the film’s other players, begin to pick up on the cruelty of his tricks and the hollowness of his words. The film is a record of Tomas’ narcissistic spell, and those with the awareness to attempt escape. In this sense, every aspect of the film’s style is so precise, from the furniture in their apartment to the music in the club. Passages leaves us and its victims complacent with its prettiness until heartbreak strikes, and we are pushed back to Tomas, empty yet free.
May December
What a pleasure that a film like this can still exist. I came into May December knowing nothing about the film, and its function seems even to throw the viewer off from the trail of its context and reveal itself bit by bit, opening like a blooming flower. Even by the end, we are learning more about the worlds of these characters, doubting truths, and being corrected on stray facts, until we realize the nitpicking doesn’t matter: we could always see the scenario for what it was. The hidden fact, the lingering detail that explains it all, is a trap. May December functions almost in pre-reaction to its discourse. Its melodrama undercuts any pretension that it could depict “truth“, just as the drama of the film illustrates the destructive nature of such a search in the name of art. And this, really, is just the tip of the iceberg.
Asteroid City
I’ve had many moments in which I’ve questioned the way this film imprinted upon me so powerfully. I have seen the analyses of those who find value in art for its ability to be intellectualized as opposed to its beauty and wondered if I loved Asteroid City more for its vast materials to poke rather than the work itself. I’m interested in this criticism because the whole trick of the film is that as an indecipherable play its players must learn to find their way through, Asteroid City shows an artist using the false walls of his signature style to analyze both the players the falseness. In other words, its intellectualization works because it refocuses attention back on its craft. With a gargantuan star studded cast, perfect dollhouse production design, and a shoo-in for song of the year, I have no problem calling Asteroid City one of my favorite films of the year.
I wrote more about Asteroid City at the time of its release here.
Killers of the Flower Moon
Epics like this are rarely made like this anymore. That being said, it’s fascinating to see a film at this scale with such clear seams in terms of its negotiation with an expansive source material and a painful history. Reading the book made the feat of Killers all the more impressive. This is a slick, riveting, incredibly well constructed tale of categorical murder and exploitation. It reveals a fundamental working of American society, a malicious racism that runs through every crevice of its ruling sector. Scorsese’s most original flourish is to call attention to the film’s own functional slickness - its inner working as a three hour drama that potentially trivializes, or at least converts into entertainment, generational suffering. Whereas reading the book one is left with answers, perhaps the defining answer of inconceivable evil, Scorsese leaves us with more obtuse questions of culpability to consider.
Showing Up
I watched Showing Up while my partner slept in my arms. They fell asleep in about twenty minutes because the film creates such a calm, comfortable environment (especially for fellow liberal arts kids). What I stayed awake for quickly became one of my favorites of the year simply for its brilliant slightness. It tells the story of an unpleasant artist preparing for a show. She watches other artists, visits her parents, and complains endlessly. The undercurrent of the film is the rescue of a bird who the artist heals, one of the more potent metaphors of the film. It’s a world that feels like home, full of wise looking adults who dress like home, and a soaring, endless natural world. The film questions the artistic process, the mindset of the artist, and what it means to support yourself by supporting others. Showing Up is more than a mood piece, although even as that it’s incredibly effective.
How To Blow Up a Pipeline
One of the most rhetorically powerful films I’ve ever seen, perhaps for its ability to turn praxis into entertainment, and pipe dream politics into a thriller with stakes. Watching this film, you can’t help but seem implicated and questioned in your role in the end of the world, and things that stop or inspire us to act. How To Blow Up a Pipeline animates the moral struggles of the leftist in a manner so arresting and convincing that it inspired an FBI terrorism warning. Regardless of your political affiliation, How To Blow Up a Pipeline is one of the year’s best thrillers - perhaps because of just how real it all feels.
Past Lives
Past Lives is an exceptionally well structured and engineered film, meditative and slow and emotional, yet devised to work while playing over twenty four years. Past Lives is, despite the feats it pulls off that few films succeed in (emotional storytelling about/with screens for example), about good old fashioned yearning. It’s a film that lays bare the navigations of race and love for immigrants - whether in China or New York - and articulates the resulting issues with bare grace. Ultimately this film couldn’t be anything but devastating, yet the way Celine Song comes to the inevitable moment of parting is deeply artful. A very quiet, sad film.
Master Gardener
What to say about Master Gardener that John Waters hasn’t? What starts as a southern backdrop for a classic modern Schrader on repression, forgiveness, and introspection quickly takes on insane, almost exploitation motifs of reform Nazis, drugs, revenge, and Sigourney Weaver as a spiteful sugar mommy. Don’t let any of this fool you into thinking this isn’t a film about gardening. Here, the garden is a space of repentance and renewal; a place to ironically hide from original sins. If all that isn’t enough reason to watch, the wonderful Dev Hynes composed the music for the film.
First Time Watches
A.I.: Artificial Intelligence
The Black Cat - The best of 30s pulp and universal Horror, mixing schlock and a genuinely enticing production design. Karloff and Lugosi are great, it’s a tight hour, and as criterion reminds us this month, it’s a cat movie!
Career Girls - Technically, “minor” Mike Leigh films exist. That being said, I have never seen a Mike Leigh film with minor emotionality, or with minor influence on me. I watched this film after graduating college, and so was appropriately gutted by Leigh’s depiction of college friends reuniting and reconciling their experiences at 30.
The Cry of the City - Sensational pulp noir thrills abound in this collection of stern faces, fantastic character actors, and slick writing. It’s a peculiar morality tale that seems to play long enough with the binaries prescribed to it to define it as a subtle questioning of good and evil. There’s a very tall masseuse in a fur who almost strangles a man, there’s fake Italian accents, and there’s great lighting. Everything one could want from a noir.
Dries - The film behind last year’s Dries Van Noten obsession, Dries is one of the finest fashion documentaries I’ve seen. Beyond the stories behind Van Noten’s life, work, and company that make the film so fun to watch, it’s refreshing to see a designer who is so unpretentious, so pleasant, and so devoted to his work. Few are as lucky to have a film like this as Van Noten, but then, few seem quite so lovely.
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! - Hard to imagine anything living up to its legacy and reputation quite like this film, particularly when screened at Los Angeles’ palace of reclaimed film trash, the New Beverly Cinema. There’s something wonderful about just how earnestly exploitative, sexy, and odd this thing is. It prioritizes the down and dirty unlike anything else, crafting a strange subversiveness from its commitment to spurning a straight and moral world. Beyond intellectual reclamation of something still called “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!“ (count three exclamation marks), its also a fantastic time.
Malcolm X
Martin Margiela: In His Own Words - Imagine a man you’ve never seen. Here, the intentionally hidden author, Margiela, speaks about his legacy alongside glimpses of his work. It’s a glimpse that feels fascinatingly voyeuristic, almost wrong, yet deeply special.
Metropolis - Had the pleasure of seeing this on a huge screen at the Academy Museum, and I can’t imagine seeing it any other way. Seeing Lang’s retro futurist cityscapes, crowds, and vicious close ups tower above the audience was incredibly powerful. For the modern viewer, for whom even some classics of the 1970s retain a slower pace and energy, it’s important to remember the lasting emotional power, and downright fun of silent cinema from almost a hundred years ago. In a year desperate to reclaim cinema as culturally significant, profitable, and optimistically bound, nothing feels quite as epic as Metropolis.
Mon Oncle - I started 2023 with Mon Oncle, a film which predicted me crying a lot more at the movies during that which may not have been intended as sad. Still, the destruction of the old world for its modernist, multicolored facsimile is enough to make any romantic tremble.
Nostalgia
Nowhere - The first Los Angeles film I saw as a New York transplant, at the trusty IFC center, triggered as much glee as it did homesickness. Araki’s Los Angeles is dystopian and cynical, yet beautiful in its excess. He depicts a long gone 90s queer underground of the city I’ve longed to better understand, and under one of the finest film soundtracks I’ve heard. Nowhere is sick, sad, sexy, and brilliant.
Ran - A masterpiece. Ran is a heart wrenching epic, a display of impeccable performances and lavish cinematography at the highest scale. Watch on the largest screen you can - it was worth the wait. A film I’ve loved sitting with, and that I look forward to revisiting.
Shanghai Express
Showgirls - I didn’t listen to enough podcasts this year to deserve a formal list, but Karina Longworth’s You Must Remember This created a fascinating episode on Showgirls, situating it in its various contexts, reclamations, analyses, and cultural offspring. I, on the other hand, watched Showgirls with no context and had a blast. It’s a sprawling American dream in Vegas glitz and bold faced sexuality, in which B-side Prince needle drops are forgotten, Kyle McLaughlin is a sexy and evil mogul, and eroticism dies at the altar of the visual. Showgirls is a film that, in spite of its difficult content, has had a powerful set of afterlives.
Suture - Perhaps one of the greatest results of taking a college course called “strange cinema”. Suture tells a story of identical twins, one of whom attempts to kill the other to fake his death. Instead, the twin survives an amnesiac and is rehabilitated while thinking he is his twin. Sound like ridiculous melodrama? What if one of the brothers was played by a Black man, a fact that goes unmentioned during the entire film? Suture is unlike any piece of Americana, any modern noir or thriller that I have seen, if not simply because of its self seriousness, its brutality, and its mood.
Switchblade Sisters - The only double feature in which both films made this list was for Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and Switchblade Sisters at the New Beverly Cinema. Switchblade Sisters is a result of 70s gang fear channeled into a relatable tale of suburban Los Angeles ladies who wield knives and fight crooked government officials. Aside from being both ridiculous, stylish, and a very good time, Switchblade Sisters, like Pussycat, brings with it a politics from excavating what it means to be society’s “other“. There is a show of solidarity(?) from a cartoonish reproduction of the Black Panthers, frequent mentions of a corrupt union leadership, and more. In this sense, the film is a fascinating exploration of how pulp can serve as a vessel, no matter how awkward, for politics and more complex subversion.
To Be or Not to Be
To Catch a Thief - I tried continuing to play catch up with some canonical Hitchcock, and this was one of my favorites. There’s a sense of old-Hollywood glamour to the film, from the dresses and set pieces, the on-location shoot in southern France, and a pretty good twist!
The Wind Rises - One of my favorite Miyazaki films, perhaps for its formal subtlety and comfort with its many unanswered questions. The film is perhaps Miyazaki’s most authored in its thematic parallels to his own career, which makes its already jagged emotional edge all the sharper. Authors aside, the colors, illustrations, dreams, cities, nightmares, fires, and so many planes of The Wind Rises are unforgettably crafted and deeply beautiful.
What’s Up, Doc? - Do you ever have the feeling that you have reached the point of having seen almost every very funny movie ever made? That when you want to reach for a new comedy there is no sure shot? I was beginning to feel this way until I saw What’s Up, Doc? This is a very, very funny movie. Streisand plays Buggs Bunny to Ryan O’Neal’s Porky Pig (but if they kissed), winding their way through San Francisco car chases (I’ll say it: best 70s car chase) and trading rapid verbal barbs.
The Music
Armand Hammer - We Buy Diabetic Test Strips
Black Thought, El Michels Affair - Glorious Game
Cat Power - Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert
I’ll be the first to admit that I am not a Bob Dylan person. Cat Power changed that. Having seen Cat Power in concert in 2022, I loved the way this album’s recreation of a historical moment allowed for the feeling of seeing Power live again. Power has always had a great eye for covers, and it’s fascinating to see her work at this scale.
Earl Sweatshirt, The Alchemist - VOIR DIRE
A stereotypical pick? I think it would be difficult for this not to be good. Mixes all the best aspects of an Alchemist produced album (making it his best of the year) and all the fanfare of an annual (if we’re lucky) Earl Sweatshirt project. And by the way, the real stereotypical pick is three albums down, so direct your ire there.
HiTech - Détwat
One of my favorite artists I started listening to in 2023 was HiTech. It was a love born of the discovery of DJ Assault and his unique brand of Detroit house, juke, and what he refers to as “booty bounce“. HiTech takes a different approach, retaining the sound and rhythms of juke along with the playfully obscene lyrics of booty bounce; I may be missing a fundamental sub-genre title, but what’s important is the result of the fusion. When it returns to Spotify, I will return to my ritual of growing obsessed with a new song from this album for a month.
John Carroll Kirby - Blowout
Seeing John Carroll Kirby in concert this year, he brought out his flutist (also a saxophone player), who turned every one of Kirby’s soothing melodies into an intense jam. Seeing his sound broken down into a flute, a keyboard, a bassist, and rhythm sections (there were three) so enhanced both my appreciation for the particularity of his sound, and my understanding of the work’s vast influences. Kirby seems like a kind guy who makes gentle music. A great album to leave Los Angeles to.
JPEGMAFIA, Danny Brown - Scaring the Hoes
What does it mean to “lead the arcane”? That’s what Earl Sweatshirt declared of himself a couple years back, but these days I’m interested in JPEGMAFIA’s conceptualization of how the “arcane” functions in contrast to the monied mainstream, in the wake of endless collaboration albums, in part thanks to the Alchemist’s success and Grammy, JPEGMAFIA described this project as an attempted reproduction of MADVILLAINY’s creative blueprint: two artists who share an authentic relationship playing off each other’s strengths to find a feeling greater than the sum of their own parts. It’s a self-conscious approach that authentically celebrates collaboration and artistry rather than synergy. Here is a model for the arcane to flourish: through knowledge that together, the underground will always have a greater impact than the optimized and bastardizing mainstream.
Liv.e - Girl in the Half Pearl
I remember exactly when I realized how the lead single Wild Animals (produced by John Carroll Kirby) was constructed. I heard the soft piano, the dusty yet muted scraping of the drum, and similarly, the pauses where the 808s and electronic additions revealed themselves. It was like magic the way Liv.e imbues such a quiet and traditional sound with the power of her sound collage perspective. There’s a mixture of early 2000s cute in the aesthetic, funny skits, freakout dance tracks preceding glossy meltdowns, and everything in between. If any album defined my year it was this one.
L’Rain - I Killed Your Dog
A beautiful album independent of genre, classification, or limitation. L’Rain’s I Killed Your Dog is (if you couldn’t tell from the title) a haunting, hypnotic, and totally singular work. It worked in its vast fuzzy soundscapes of crystalline vocals and shimmering electric guitars, it worked in its sparse acoustics, and it worked whenever the two met. I remember this album releasing just as the weather began finally changing and fall arrived; just as I settled into my first month in New York. This was an album that translated my ambivalence, my processing of all the new contradictions of “adult” life, and frankly, the fun I was having amidst the terror.
MIKE - Burning Desire
I love a lot of albums and artists on this list; MIKE was the only one I saw two nights in a row in concert. MIKE’s work got me through the pandemic. He is a superstar producer, a sensational rapper, and a stand up guy. Burning Desire showcases just how seamlessly MIKE brings new voices and sounds into his fold. The way he brings in artists like Liv.e, Niontay, Sideshow, and Earl Sweatshirt allows them to showcase aspects of their sound that sound separate from MIKE’s work and world, yet additive to the aesthetic and sound of the album. This is a funky, knotty, heady album that also soundtracked my first month in New York.
Mndsgn - Snaxx
Niontay - Dontay’s Inferno
During my aforementioned back-to-back MIKE shows, I also ended up seeing opener Niontay two nights in a row. Both nights I enjoyed his knotty rhymes and the bleary quality of his production. A few months later his debut album released, synthesizing his work in a way that allowed the quirks of his production to shine through alongside his infectious flow. Niontay has had a busy year, and his output is only increasing and improving.
Nourished by Time - Erotic Probiotic 2
I can’t say I was familiar with Nourished by Time before 2023, so Erotic Probiotic 2 hit me like a brick. It’s a slick, funky, almost silly album. There’s an aspect to its danceability reminiscent of early Blood Orange, sometimes sounding like a steamy midnight concert and other times like retro new wave camp.
xSystem Olympia - New Erotica Collection
I’m not sure of the story behind System Olympia, but the synths and grooves on New Erotica Collection are divine. It gives the feeling of a slightly more polished or commercial Dam-Funk, often imbued with more elements of disco.
Tisakorean - Let Me Update My Status
The Reading
South of Pico by Kellie Jones
An enlightening history of various Black artists in south Los Angeles whose work was instrumental to the avant arts scene in the city. A great intertext with City of Quartz’s definitive LA arts chapter, and a thorough introduction to the major artists of the time. This book allowed me to look at my neighborhood through a different lens, and study my home museum collections more carefully.
Tropic of Orange by Karen Tei Yamashita
A more fictionally minded Los Angeles novel of seven intertwining characters over seven days witnessing the city at its most magically realist. There are legendary traffic closures, poisonous fruits, angels, noir obsessives, and poets. For lovers of Los Angeles and tourists, a beautiful ode to the city through fiction.
Milk Fed by Melissa Broder
This one deserves a three cheers for book clubs, and the members of mine who lent me a copy to read. Milk Fed describes a relationship spanning habit, Jewish denomination, politics, and spirit. It celebrates both extremes and their ups and downs with such incredible specificity that it left me genuinely unable to guess Broder’s personal relation to said binaries. This is an intense read, but an emotionally cleansing one.
Gods and Kings by Dana Thomas
Moving to New York in your twenties to work in fashion seems to align nicely with Dana Thomas’ nonfiction morality tale of Mcqueen and Galliano. Another favorite voice of the year, Cathy Horyn, quipped at the book’s release that Thomas’ comparisons are sometimes shallow - I would agree only in that
Sleeveless by Natasha Stagg
Sleeveless is somewhere between rhetoric fueled fiction and juicy nonfiction, it presents banal, human, characters who sharply decipher the cultural spaces they inhabit. Sure, Stagg moves between more formal academic work and less critical short fictions, but the in between date where the power of Sleeveless lies. An analysis of our cultural (and specifically fashion) era that is both compelling and sharp.
Stay tuned Monday for a preview post of my paid tier! Hooray! Monetized tiers!