Movies of the Decade

As the 2010s (the teens? the tens? the-aughts-plus-ten?) crumble away into dust behind us, it’s time to take one last look at the decade we’re leaving behind – in terms of movies, of course!  Because nothing else is really real.

It was the Decade of Marvel, and it’s hard not to see that as a good thing.  Marvel proved that big action franchises didn’t have to be stupid (Transformers), slapdash (Star Wars), or stolidly mediocre (DC’s uninspired post-Nolan efforts).  Instead, they can be funny (Guardians of the Galaxy), gritty (Captain America: Winter Soldier), bold (Avengers: Endgame), and beautiful (see Dr. Strange below).  Martin Scorsese is certainly entitled to his low opinion of Marvel movies (none of which he’s actually seen), but when was the last time he made a movie as good as Dr. Strange or Captain American: Civil War?  Marvel has built the world’s most powerful movie brand on a reputation for quality – on the paradigm-shattering notion that audiences might actually enjoy good movies.  (The rest of Hollywood is still mulling this over.)

As Marvel waxed, Pixar waned, but Inside Out was an undeniable highlight (and so was Toy Story 3).  The Hunger Games was the most consistently excellent film series, while X-Men was perhaps the most wildly inconsistent.  And smaller films made their impression too – from Winter’s Bone to Lady Bird to Inside Llewyn Davis to The Babadook.

But enough preamble; let’s get to the list.  If these weren’t the best movies released in the last decade, they were certainly my personal favorites.

Keith’s Top 10 of the 2010s

1.     Whiplash

Lean, mean, and cinematically exhilarating, Whiplash is like pure movie magic injected straight into the vein.

2.     Inside Out

One of the most brilliantly imaginative movies I’ve ever seen – a dazzling feat of invention that never loses sight of the simple human story at its core.

3.     Edge of Tomorrow

Definitely the most underrated movie of the decade – a clever, thrilling, and visceral action spectacle.

4.     Her

Quietly visionary and tenderly personal, this is that rare film that combines genuine futurism with genuine feeling.

5.     Dr. Strange

The best of Marvel’s many astonishing achievements over the last decade – a jaw-dropping visual experience, deftly plotted, and with moments of real profundity.  I’ll never forget the Ancient One pausing on the brink of eternity to watch the falling snow…

6.     Life Itself

A tour de force of documentary filmmaking, and a stirring, heartbreaking portrait of one of cinema’s greatest champions.

7.     Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation

The high-water mark in one of the best action series ever – twisty, suspenseful, and genuinely frightening.

8.     Mad Max: Fury Road

A throwback to a time when action movies had – if you’ll pardon the expression – balls.  What amazes me about this movie isn’t just the virtuosic action set pieces, but the way the story keeps spiraling dizzily onward, at the speed of a souped-up post-apocalyptic dune buggy.  An amazing narrative feat.

9.     Looper

Ruthlessly clever and fearlessly bleak.  An all-time great time-travel movie.

10.  Captain America: Civil War

Of all the great Marvel movies of the last decade, this is the one that feels the most like reading a really good comic book – full of action, intrigue, and emotion, and grounded enough to be more than just a fantasy.

Honorable Mentions

Hell or High Water

Marvel’s The Avengers

Free Solo

Inside Llewyn Davis

Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

Inception

10 Cloverfield Lane

Lady Bird

Phantom Thread

The Babadook

Special Prize for Achievement in Comedy

Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping

And now, on into the 20s!  We’ll see if we can’t make some good movies in the next ten years…

Book Report 2019

I read 33 books in 2019, which I believe is a personal record.  (Apparently Stephen King reads 50-70 books per year, but that guy isn’t human, so it doesn’t count.)

Below, just for fun, is my Top Ten list for the year.

1.     Miss Pym Disposes, Josephine Tey

A strange and wonderful book – witty, compassionate, vividly written, and as far from conventional crime fiction as anything in Tey’s unique and enchanting oeuvre.

2.     Z for Zachariah, Robert C. O’Brien

Spare, harrowing, moving, masterful.  Not an easy book to read, but an easy book to admire.

3.     The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain

An extraordinary book – spare, brutal, and heartbreaking, like a wail of anguish sent by telegraph from Hell.

4.     A Fire Upon the Deep, Vernor Vinge

A little repetitive from a narrative point of view, but packed with fascinating ideas, and often unexpectedly moving.  A Fire Upon the Deep is a novel both epic and intimate – a staggering feat of imagination, and a damn good read.

5.     Too Many Cooks, Rex Stout

The mystery itself is nothing to write home about, but the setting and characters more than make up for it, and the book offers a very intriguing glimpse of the racial politics of the pre-WWII South.

6.     Dream Golf, Stephen Goodwin

A bit long and a bit redundant – and definitely written for golf aficionados more than ordinary human beings – this is nevertheless a vividly told and inspiring story of perseverance, vision, and the power of a guiding ideal.

7.     Magpie Murders, Anthony Horowitz

Slightly plodding, but very clever, with two layers of mystery satisfactorily resolved.  In some ways, reading Magpie Murders really is like reading two different books, but each book is pretty involving in its own right, and the connections between them add another level of interest.  Impressive stuff.

8.     Fer-de-Lance, Rex Stout

The pleasure of these Nero Wolfe mysteries is the world they inhabit – a hard-boiled but mercifully rational world, where every problem responds to the application of enough patience and intelligence, where bullies are made to look like fools in the fullness of time, where dinner is always served on time and there is always plenty of milk for Archie Goodwin to drink.  It's astonishing how well-developed that world already is in this, the first of the Nero Wolfe mysteries; it's as if it was always there, patiently waiting for Rex Stout to discover it.  We can only be glad he did.

9.     The Antiquary, Sir Walter Scott

A perilously slight novel, with precious little story to speak of, but so abundantly warm and charming that all other considerations are cheerfully forgotten. All in all, a delight.

10.  The Brides of Solomon, Geoffrey Household

A mixed bag, but Household is always enjoyable. His writing is characterized by an almost uncanny worldliness, as if he had seen everything, done everything, and thoroughly understood it all. War looms large over this collection, but chiefly as a backdrop for humor, heroism, and humanity. “Moment of Truth” is extraordinary – spare and deep and stunning. For that alone, this book is worth reading - but do yourself a favor and read the rest, too.

With Apologies to John Donne

Every man is an island,

Every woman an island, too, 

And the seas between them are rough,

And the boats ply them fitfully;

And every man is lonely,

As he watches the pounding shore,

And dreams of a worldwide continent

He knows he will never see;

But sometimes a drifting bottle

With a message in its hold

Will come ashore on the island,

Having skirted the whole archipelago,

And although the ink is blotted 

And the paper is waterlogged,

Some words can still be distinguished,

Some meaning, at length, teased out;

Then every suffering island

Is linked in a gleaming chain;

For a moment, the islands mingle,

And the world has a single soul.

Song for December

Winter is firelight,

Flickering madly

Over the mantel and onto the floor;

Winter is listening –

Listening gladly –

For bells in the distance and hands on the door.

Winter is music,

All music and silence –

The hush of the snow and the song of the trees;

Winter is wind,

With its casual violence –

The roar in the chimney, the house on its knees.

And winter is wonder,

A time for a child,

A season of innocence, new or new-found;

Winter is tender,

And winter is wild,

And waking, one morning, to snow on the ground.

The Gospel According to Time

The good news is also the bad news:

None of this matters very much.

In ten thousand years it’ll all be dust -

But forget the long view; just take tomorrow.

Tomorrow your today will seem a dream

And things will be far better, or far worse.

And Thursday! Don’t even dare imagine it.

Thursday will change everything, and if it doesn’t

Friday will certainly make up for lost time.

So none of it matters much – but it all matters.

Even the petty frustrations, even the seeming dead hours.

Though nothing at all depends upon a wheelbarrow,

The wheelbarrow still counts, in its trivial wheelbarrow way.

And you are also trivial,

And infinitely precious,

And when you think you’re doing nothing,

You hold the whole world in your hand.

Sunset, Santa Monica

When it happens, it happens fast.

All day the sun is slow and dignified,

Making a stately circuit in the sky,

Then all at once it drops; hits the horizon;

Spreads out like melting mercury; is gone.

The ceremony is unceremonious,

The climax anticlimactic;

The vanishing is vanishingly brief.

And that’s the way to go.

Don’t linger in your leaving;

Learn from the sun, which blazes like a god,

Fires the firmament, and slips away,

More like a guilty thief than anything,

Letting the living supply the ceremony –

Which we, atremble in the rising dark,

Are more than grateful to fearfully do.

The Ride

I wake up and I say:

Today, I will have an experience.

It will be good and bad, generally in succession,

But sometimes simultaneously,

Since men are complicated things.

Some of it I will be responsible for,

In ways I do or do not understand,

But other things will come to me at random,

And I will deal with them gracefully,

Or clumsily, depending on my mood.

My experience will overlap with other peoples’–

Because we all occupy the same world –

And sometimes, if I keep my eyes open,

I will glimpse what someone else is going through,

And he may likewise get a glimpse of me.

For the most part, though, it happens to me alone,

This fourteen-hour experience of things,

And most of it I’ll forget before my head hits the pillow,

But some of it may linger for the rest of my life.

In any case, it will be an experience,

And it will end in sleep, like so many before,

And tomorrow I’ll get up and have a different experience –

Though not completely different –

And so on, till no more.

It’s natural to have feelings about it –

In fact, that’s very much a part of the thing –

But silly to give it too much importance.

It washes over you; it’s gone; you’re gone.

The Prodigal

I come back to a place gone poetic,

A New England already battening down

For a long warm fireside winter

With frost on the windows and lights on the town.

I come back, and the autumn is over;

The leaves are in tatters and rags,

And they’re stacking up wood for the fires

And raking the fall into bags.

I come back to the place I belong in,

And it’s cold, but we like it that way,

And there’s nothing like home in the winter,

So I’m back, and God willing I’ll stay.

The One Kind of Fate I Believe In

We all find what we’re looking for;

It isn’t the same as what we want.

The coward seeks a reason to run;

He finds it.

The cynic seeks a reason to sneer;

He finds it.

The martyr needs a cause and a death;

He finds them.

The hero craves an enemy;

They’re everywhere.

To change what you’re finding,

Change what you’re looking for.

It’s all available

In the world’s wide aisles.

But if you look for meaning

In the Pleasure section,

Or wisdom in the back room

Where knowledge is dustily stored,

Don’t be too surprised

To walk out with what you searched for,

Instead of what you wrote this morning

On your hopeful grocery list.

Existential Crisis

 

Overheard at Bradley International Airport:

"I called my mom in a FULL meltdown because, like, what IS business casual?"

Tey Appreciation

You guys, it’s time to appreciate Josephine Tey.

Born Elizabeth MacKintosh, Tey wrote eight mystery novels, including The Daughter of Time, which is considered one of the genre’s great masterpieces.  I’ve now finished reading all eight of them, and here is my report.

The Man in the Queue is a slightly half-baked effort; it’s clear that Tey is still working out what she wants to do in the genre.  A Shilling for Candles is stronger, but still perhaps a little generic.  Miss Pym Disposes is the first one that really feels like a Josephine Tey novel – a novel that straddles the line between crime fiction and literary fiction, in which the characters’ inner lives – their joys and yearnings and frustrations – are accorded much more time and attention than genre impedimenta like suspects and clues.

The Franchise Affair is solid, but too procedural to be really fascinating.  And then comes Brat Farrar, my personal favorite, with all the scope, depth, and feeling of a genuine human tragedy.  If ever a book proved that there is no limit to the resonance of mystery fiction, this book is it.

To Love and Be Wise is deft and clever, but slightly inconsequential.  On the other hand, it’s obvious why The Daughter of Time is reckoned to be Tey’s masterwork; it’s bold and original and massively impressive, and it contributed to the reevaluation of Richard III as a historical figure.

Lastly, but not at all leastly, we have The Singing Sands, a starkly lovely and ruminative work that has the feel of an elegy – which is appropriate, since Tey didn’t live to see it published.  It’s a masterpiece of mood and restrained emotion, in which the mystery component, while present, is almost entirely an afterthought.  In a way, it’s a summation of Tey’s whole approach to crime writing, which is stubbornly humanistic in a field that can often – even in the hands of geniuses – treat its characters more like pieces on a chessboard than living, breathing people.

And that’s it.  That’s the whole canon.  Tey wrote other books, and a number of well-received plays, but her chief legacy is her mystery novels.  The British Crime Writers’ Association named The Daughter of Time as the greatest mystery novel ever written, and although it isn’t even my favorite Tey mystery, it’s hard not to see it as a worthy choice.

For those who are interested – you poor, sad, desperate souls – here’s my own personal ranking of the eight Tey mysteries.  The first four I would recommend without reservation, to anyone who enjoys a good read.  The next two are worthwhile, and the last two missable – though far from bad.  After you’ve read one or two, you may find yourself wanting to become a Tey completist, and I certainly wouldn’t discourage it.  It won’t even take you very long.

1.     Brat Farrar

2.     The Daughter of Time

3.     The Singing Sands

4.     Miss Pym Disposes

5.     To Love and Be Wise

6.     The Franchise Affair

7.     A Shilling for Candles

8.     The Man in the Queue

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Selleck Hill

Time changes nothing.  Look around you now.

The world is all the same – the people too.

We make safe homes, in clusters, cheek to cheek,

Resent our neighbors, and rely on them.

We love, grow bored, raise children, drive them off,

Welcome them back, love more, swift-slowly die;

Our children, then, have children; then

Their children do and die, and nothing’s new.

We scar the earth; it heals, or doesn’t heal;

We breed survivors, and the earth does too.

Wars happen, wisely or by accident,

And wise wars kill as many as the rest.

Great men, great women, rise and fall,

Remembered and forgotten, gone and gone.

Time changes nothing.  Look around you now.

Fall falls, and winter freezes; then the spring,

Grateful or hateful to the human heart,

Buds forth in raw magnificence, and soon

The summer sprawls out endless, ripe as joy.

You sit.  The leaves are color.  Light is light.

You sit in silence, waiting for the rhyme.

Time changes nothing, but it leaves you this:

This life, this moment, this brief gift of time.

Old Men Sitting Too Long in Coffee Shops

Old men sitting too long in coffee shops

Are the great sages of the world;

And old men in chairs on sunny sidewalks

Are Buddha and Solomon, Jesus and Groucho Marx.

It’s possible just to sit, they say.  It is.

You might have coffee, or a paper handy,

Or an old friend who knows all your old jokes,

And laughs with pleasure, hearing them again;

But then again, you might have nothing –

No coffee, no paper, no friend, no jokes –

And that would be all right too, and much the same,

Especially if a bird hops by on the sidewalk,

Or the waitress absently smiles on her way,

Because it doesn’t take much – they say –

It doesn’t take much.  It may even look like nothing

If you’re used to something more.

But that’s the trouble, isn’t it?

You all expect the world.

And we did too, and now we sit,

Triumphs and griefs forgotten –

Or not forgotten exactly, so much as put aside,

Like the paper, the coffee, the friend, the bird,

All of which are very nice, very nice indeed,

But not quite of the essence, which is something else,

Something we can’t quite explain to you, but if

You sit here quietly for a year or twelve,

You’ll start to have a feel for it, and then

You’ll finally know what we were talking about,

Not quite too late to thoroughly enjoy it

Before you disappear, unmissed, unmourning,

As we by then will long ago have done.