I thought what we could do, is incorporate books and movies into it.
Books
I didn't read a lot of new books. I spent most of the spring reading books I hadn't read in 8 years or more, for the purposes of this, I'll stick to stuff that was new to me. The fall was a little better, thanks to my dad, but even so, there weren't a lot of books that really stood out. Hemingway's Boat was interesting, certainly made for a more detailed perspective on Hemingway. I don't know how much to agree with some of his suppositions about Hemingway's personal life, but the letters he wrote, the conflict they portray inside Hemingway's mind, that stuff was fascinating. But I didn't feel like the boat was as strong a hook for it as the title implied. How much I should hold that against it is up for debate.
The Savage Garden was the strongest of the three Mark Mills stories I read. I appreciated how much thought Mills put into how the garden would be designed to tell this story, and how it would slowly be unraveled, tied together with dual stories of hidden murders. That same sort of attention to detail and world-building (or world-deconstruction) was the strongest part of World War Z, though I like how Brooks occasionally has certain characters show up in different accounts. Since the writer is supposed to be writing up a report, it provided this sense that he was piecing it together following any thread he could get. The United States and Chile: Imperialism and the Overthrow of the Allende Government wasn't the feel-good book of the year (not many of these were, except maybe The Dark Monk), but I liked the depth of research Petras and Morley put into it, even if the conclusions weren't exactly surprising.
Worst book? I gave up on Robert Goddard's Beyond Recall within 30 pages, which isn't encouraging. I wasn't a huge fan of Found Wanting, either. it was a decently tense suspense story, but I kept expecting the main character to come to his senses and go home. Of books I actually finished, Allende: Death of a Marxist Dream, by James Whelan. It wasn't any less slanted than Petras and Morley's book, but they at least backed their bias up with facts, and information, rather than slanted tales by people with a vested interest in justifying their actions. Whelan put enough in there you figure there's an argument to be made about whether Allende needed to go (setting aside the question of whether Pinochet specifically was an upgrade or not), but he clearly wasn't the one to make that argument. Too much of an ax to grind.
Movies
When I made up some preliminary lists for this, I was dismayed to see I had more movies in the bad category than the good. I didn't even include things like Nightmare on Elm Street, which I didn't care for. Well, that's how it goes. Let's figure out what was the worst.
The Long Ships was just aggressively mediocre. It had the cast to be better, but didn't bother to try, but it wasn't terrible. Except for the comedy rape scene. That was terrible. The Riddle of the Sands wasn't bad, just lacking in tension. My problem with Betrayed was dissatisfaction with the ending. The movie was OK, otherwise. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows was enough of a mess I hardly paid attention the last hour.
There are three films on the list that tried to hang their hats on a gimmick (or stylistic choice, if you prefer). Lady in the Lake, shooting everything from the Marlowe's perspective, meaning we are responsible for every cutting remark he makes, and there are a lot of those. If you enjoy being a dick constantly, then it's probably great fun, even if you can come up with better insults than Robert Montgomery. Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid had to use those clips from old noir films, and have Steve Martin pretend to interact with them. Too bad, I thought the movie could have been good otherwise, but too much reliance on it. Sucker Punch, of course, had an absurd amount of slow-mo, because it's Zack Snyder, and not much else.
That leaves two options, Six Three Three Squadron and Dark Star. The first one isn't the first war movie to try and brush off loss of lives with some pap about abstract constructs like squadrons surviving, so it's OK, but it was particularly galling to me here, because it was so blindingly obvious how they could have done things differently to try and minimize it. After I watch a dozen 2-man crews die because command is a bunch of dumbasses, I don't want said dumbasses to reassure me it's OK because the squadron lives on. As for Dark Star, it was supposed to be a comedy, but I didn't laugh once. That's a pretty complete failure on its part so Dark Star wins! Congratulations! Sucker Punch, you tried hard, but you'll have to settle for the consolation prize.
Enough crap, what did I like?
Touch of Evil was interesting from a cinematography standpoint, especially since this version included the memo Welles sent the studio execs, where you can see exactly how much thought he'd given to how to set up scenes, dialogue, and music to get across the themes he was interested in. But it wasn't a movie I loved as entertainment. It's like Citizen Kane that way. Hanna was a really good action film, even if it wasn't quite what I thought it might. I still figure it's as close as I'll get to a Cassandra Cain Batgirl film. Other than Isaacs, who was totally unbelievable as a threat to Hanna, it was well put together, some decent twists and character moments, and the fights were done very well. Nothing too flashy, just effective and mostly realistic. Well, Eric Bana's fights felt realistic, Hanna's less so, but that was OK.
Call this paragraph the one for standard plots that were boosted by a particular performance. His Kind of Woman certainly wasn't anything special as a film, but Vincent Price was excellent in his delivery. It's strange to see him play a genuinely nice guy, rather than a spooky one, and pull it off. Even so, he's a bit of a windbag, but he gets poked enough you don't mind. The Enemy Below was a standard hunter/hunted war story, but Mitchum and Jurgens' performances elevated the material (contrast that with Widmark and Poitier in The Long Ships). The Violent Men uses the corrupt, greedy cattleman, but in this case it's Barbara Stanwyck (rather than her husband, played by Edward G. Robinson) as the ruthless Martha Wilkison. I liked the fact they didn't try to mitigate or dampen that. Westerns were known for having unambiguously evil antagonists, and in this case it was her, which seems an unusual role for a woman, and Stanwyck ran with it. Martha wants all the land, and everyone around her is just a pawn to that purpose. Husband, brother-in-law, daughter, incompetent, wussbag sheriff, all the townspeople. She'll sacrifice any of them to get what she wants, no hesitation. Plus, they let her be obviously racist which was surprising.
All that said, the two strongest films I saw this year were Attack the Block and Duck, You Sucker. I thought they had the best combination of engaging plots, good acting, and strong dialogue. And each one deals with unintended consequences. In both cases, the main characters tend to regard people not in their group as disposable, to be used or terrorized as suits them. And in both cases it backfires, badly, in ways they probably never would have imagined, which kind of emphasizes the random nature of things in a way I appreciate.
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