For a few years I\u2019ve been doing this thing where I assign themes to each week, going in roughly chronological order through my life and praying a decade of the day\u2019s rosary for that theme (for the people associated with that time in my life, etc). I also try to match up some of what I\u2019m reading and watching with the theme, with part of the pleasure, of course, coming from stretching the idea of \u201cfitting the theme.\u201d This whole practice has been great, honestly. It\u2019s been fun and it\u2019s also helped me reflect on various times in my life (I was an absolute monster the year I became Catholic!!! good grief) and bring some painful times or relationships to God. It\u2019s also been a chance to use a \u201creading plan\u201d to go deeper, exploring more in areas I already cared about, rather than wider. A++ would recommend.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s also meant that I\u2019ve spent a lot more time rereading and rewatching, in the past few years, than in the decade or so before that. I got used to keeping revisitations out of my year\u2019s-best roundup, and I do like keeping the year\u2019s-best for new discoveries the year brought me. But that means there\u2019s no obvious place to round up the best stuff I revisited or rediscovered in the past year. That is what this post is for!<\/p>\n
The first thing I revisited in 2020 was The Baby<\/strong><\/em> and you know what, I should have known then and there what this year would be. The Baby<\/em> is still a very great, very disturbing, very<\/em> \u201970s tale of three women in clashing glamour fashion who keep an adult man as a baby. Recommended for the kind of people who read that description and think, \u201cWhoa, okay, I\u2019m down.\u201d<\/p>\n A quick list of disappointments: Henry Reed\u2019s Journey<\/strong><\/em>, now mostly notable for the endearing Robert McCloskey line drawings; I\u2019d remembered How Much for Just the Planet? <\/strong><\/em>as hilarious but it\u2019s mostly reference humor and unconvincing set-piece scenes; I sort of expected The Fisher King<\/strong><\/em> to disappoint me and it did, less fantastic and more magical-homeless-man than it thinks it is. It\u2019s likely my own fault but I still just don\u2019t get, almost thirty years later, Derek Jarman\u2019s Wittgenstein<\/strong><\/em>. Again I knew Snakes on a Plane<\/strong><\/em> would probably not hold up but it is really quite bad. When I saw it in the theater, people clapped at the end!<\/p>\n The Great Gatsby<\/strong><\/em> is haunting and crystalline and also more politically perceptive than I remembered. Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions<\/strong><\/em> extremely does what it says on the tin so thanks be to God for that. Harry and the Hendersons<\/strong><\/em><\/a> was more clunky and bickery than I wanted but retained a sweetness and an occasional strangeness.<\/p>\n The Witches of Worm<\/strong><\/em> is the rare \u201cmagic or just imagination???\u201d tale where the ambiguity doesn\u2019t irritate me. It\u2019s a suspenseful story of an unhappy girl and her possibly-possessed cat, and unlike most books for this age group, it allows the girl to do and contemplate some really<\/em> awful things. Strongly recommended especially if your copy has the Alton Raible illustrations.<\/p>\n The Ghost Belonged to Me<\/strong><\/em> is good but there\u2019s a servant subplot so memorably awful that I ended up making fun of it in the novel draft I was writing. There\u2019s an article to be written about servants in children\u2019s fantasy (Philip Pullman: all the servants have dog spirits Me: ??? Pullman: because they\u2019re so uhhh loyal Me: *stares, laughs in Christian*) but I couldn\u2019t quite get it together, I\u2019m afraid.<\/p>\n The Headless Cupid<\/strong><\/em> is wonderful, a believable portrait of an unhappily \u201cblended family\u201d learning to live together. A mystery, and yet another \u201cmaybe the magic is just in your head???\u201d story which still manages to feel<\/em> haunting rather than mundane. The Egypt Game<\/strong><\/em> is superb.<\/p>\n Bugsy<\/strong> <\/em>isn\u2019t good but Annette Bening is hot and that goes a long way.<\/p>\n The Last Days of Disco<\/strong><\/em> is still my second-favorite Stillman (after Damsels<\/em>) and I don\u2019t have much to add to what I said here<\/a>. Manhunter<\/strong> <\/em>is still very good to look at, because it is a Michael Mann joint and it Michael Manns with main and might. Thief<\/em> is probably a better film but Manhunter<\/em> is an extremely satisfying rewatch if rewatching serial-killer flicks is already a thing you do.<\/p>\n The Last Unicorn<\/strong><\/em> is, like the sea, always good. Always so beautiful and scary and weird; and, not for nothing, so unconcerned with the usual children\u2019s-movie resolutions of romance for all, the nuclear family, and the restored comfort of the bourgeois hearth.<\/p>\n My Enemy, My Ally<\/strong><\/em> is a top-tier Star Trek tie-in novel but not as terrific as The Romulan Way<\/em><\/a>. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home<\/strong><\/em> is still the fun one. Tapeheads<\/strong> <\/em><\/a>is still a joy. Beetlejuice<\/strong> <\/em>is just enough Tim Burton and not too much, and also handles the titular character\u2019s crassness much better than I\u2019d feared. Beetlejuice gropes Lydia but the camera and script don\u2019t, if you see what I mean. Pump Up the Volume<\/strong><\/em> is dumb, it\u2019s very \u201ccussing and saying sex stuff will liberate us!!!\u201d, it\u2019s the dumbest version of the \u201990s, I still enjoyed it quite a bit and found the closing audio montage of teen radio genuinely moving. That was the zine world, you know, that was real.<\/p>\n My Own Private Idaho<\/strong><\/em> never quite escaped the sentimentality of its tragic-hustler tale, and never quite made that fable illuminate the Shakespearean text. But I didn\u2019t care that much<\/a>, because who else would even try to do this? A must-watch if you\u2019re interested in what it\u2019s trying to do. The Addams Family<\/strong><\/em> was fun and had a surprisingly smart sense of when to be edgy and when to be sweet. Most films of that kind eventually slide into either cloying sentiment or dislikable unkindness. Not Gomez and Morticia!<\/p>\n \u201cWhat game?\u201d Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains!<\/strong> <\/em>is a perfect movie. Mi Vida Loca<\/strong><\/em> is not perfect, it feels less revolutionary now than it did then, but it\u2019s still a touching meander through a world of hot colors. Borges\u2019s Ficciones<\/strong> <\/em>was colder than I remembered, and I found that I wanted more honest emotion in my cerebral games, more anguish and longing, isn\u2019t that what labyrinths and libraries are for? I liked As I Lay Dying<\/strong><\/em> a lot more this time around: I personally care about apocalypse now, I\u2019ve spent more time thinking about how children try to understand distorted and violent family dynamics, and I have more appreciation for a passage about how hard it is to afford a pie or the way a horse looks coming down a hill.<\/p>\n \u201cGoblin Market\u201d is still the only Christina Rossetti<\/strong> I really love. Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets<\/strong><\/em> shows more of its swooning surrender to the police worldview, on rereading, but that makes its exposure of the contempt cancering along that worldview all the more persuasive because unintentional. The prose is still chewily noir and the moments of greatness still so well-observed. Definitely recommended if you\u2019re interested in life and death on the crest of the last crime wave.<\/p>\n The Bacchae<\/strong><\/em> is always scary. The Chimes at Midnight<\/strong><\/em> is always enrapturing<\/a>. The Usual Suspects<\/strong><\/em> is ok I guess. The Queen<\/strong><\/em> is fantastic and ridiculously suspenseful for a movie where the big events include \u201ca flag is not there\u201d and \u201ca flag is placed there, then lowered.\u201d Also this time I listened to the director\u2019s commentary and Stephen Frears really tried to make a scathing satire of the monarchy! I love it when people try to do scathing satires and end up in apologia.<\/p>\n Grosse Pointe Blank<\/strong><\/em> is iconic, one of the best examples of the Gen X \u201cdid u know\u2026.. morality is real?\u201d genre<\/a>. Airplane!<\/strong><\/em> is still funny. The Art and Craft of Feature Writing<\/strong><\/em> is still the single best book on any kind of writing that I\u2019ve ever read, sorry to Stephen King but you got beat by the Wall Street Journal<\/em>. You don\u2019t need me to tell you that Die Hard<\/strong><\/em> is good.<\/p>\n Shattered Glass<\/strong><\/em> is still lowkey terrifying. If I had a car, and I had a bumper sticker on that car, that bumper sticker would say VISUALIZE GETTING CAUGHT.<\/p>\n Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, And Gangster Dreams<\/strong><\/em> is a strange book which bears the marks of its 1998 publication date. This book about the reality and fantasy of the Jewish American gangster basically thinks violence is cool, obviously I personally would not murder a man, I get good grades, but powerlessness is bad and therefore violence is cool. Nobody wants to be a Holocaust victim; everybody wants to be Ben Siegel. This opinion is expressed at length (it\u2019s a repetitive book, especially on this subject) and if you think that calling the Israeli army an army of occupation in the first chapter foreshadows any moral reflection or self-criticism later you shoulda asked before you bought. An occupying power is an occupying power<\/em>, baby.<\/p>\n My basic feeling is that I am always down for that \u201990s amorality as long as you don\u2019t then try to moralize about it. Don\u2019t defend it! The book inevitably dehumanizes the noncriminal victims, most notably when it treats the rape of a gangster\u2019s girlfriend exactly the way the rapists did, as an assault on him not her. AND ANOTHER THING why can\u2019t this book have either a chronological or a clear thematic structure? It just wanders. MUCH LIKE THE JEWISH PEO\u2014-<\/p>\n (gunshots from a speeding car, I am mercifully silenced)<\/p>\n I actually enjoyed this book more than I\u2019m making it sound, mostly because it does capture the same style of Jewish masculinity that I talked about in my old Ravelstein<\/em> <\/a>review (not in the gangsters themselves but in their fans). But it could use less posturing and more thinking.<\/p>\n
\n\u201cIt\u2019s called, \u2018Is there a God?'\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n