What I Watched in 2015

This last five best list is the hardest one. All of the movies listed below are terrific. The next two movies I didn’t include on this list are also pretty great. Yet, I think there is a virtue in ordering experiences and with that in mind, Mad Max beats out competitors. I’m not sure if this is a better movie than Spotlight or Ex Machina, but it certainly occupied more of my attention this year.

Mad Max: Fury Road. To be clear, this is an action film. A well-made, sincerely wrought exercise in mayhem to be sure, but ultimately this is a long car-chase. But there is something about Fury Road that, for me, goes beyond a good movie and enters the realm of myth-making. This movie didn’t work on all of my friends and I’ve seen very detailed break-downs on how Imperator Furiosa is not a new-wave feminist icon, or how the plot has major holes, or this and that. But in the end, this film stands unmarked by carping. It found a way to make action movies cool again, sketching in 120 minutes a world entire while leaving plenty of alluring blank spaces.
Star Wars: The Force Awakened. After my second watching I think I have a better handle of what this film is and isn’t. Whether or not this film entertained you or sent you into rapturous heights of fandom depends on how much faith you have that the sequels will answer the questions of Episode Seven. For me, I entered this film wanting to be convinced I wasn’t wasting my time and I left exhilarated by what comes next.
Ex Machina. This movie wants you to underestimate it. It wants you to think of it as a rip-off of half-dozen other “androids amok” movies. To a certain degree, its plot depends on you making such mistakes. Because what this movie really is about only becomes apparent in the final reel. Because what this movie is really about is information and how it’s used against us.
Spotlight. If Ex Machina paints the downside of of knowing too much, this movie effectively describes how the opposite. With strong acting, a brilliant script, and determination not to turn the drama of the story behind the Catholic priest sexual abuse scandal into melodrama, this story focuses on one thing - truth and its consequences.
Inside/Out: This year had two Pixar movies but only one that I’ve seen. Funny, poignant, and thought-provoking, In/Out continues Pixar’s exploration of secret lives. Here, we see the inside of one girl’s mind, as personified by five disparate emotions. Similar to the other movies I’ve listed above, as fine as the movie itself is, the part that kept me thinking about it were the layers of invention and imagination glimpsed around the edges.

Then, of course there was television. “Game of Thrones” seemed to lose its way before giving us its best set-piece yet. The second season of “Leftovers" became a completely different show that somehow said all the same things as the first season, only better. Marvel’s small screen was far more interesting than its tent-pole movies (Agent Carter, Jessica Jones, Daredevil, and the constantly improving Agents of Shield). I binge watched the first four episodes of “The Expanse,” pretty sure I found the next Battlestar Galactica.

Reading Response to "A Good Man is Hard to Find."

Reader Response to “A Good Man is Hard to Find” Morgan Crooks I once heard Flannery O’Connor’s work introduced as a project to describe a world denied God’s grace. This critic of O’Connor’s work meant the Christian idea that a person’s misdeeds, mistakes, and sins could be sponged away by the power of Jesus’ sacrifice at Crucifixion. The setting of her stories often seem to be monstrous distortions of the real world. These are stories where con men steal prosthetic limbs, hired labor abandons mute brides in rest stops, and bizarre, often disastrous advice is imparted. O’Connor herself said of this reputation for writing ‘grotesque’ stories that ‘anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.’ This is both a witty observation and a piece of advice while reading O’Connor’s work. These are stories about pain and lies and ugliness. The brutality that ha...

Death's End by Liu Cixin

Having recently finished the last book in Liu Cixin's instant classic "The Remembrance of Earth's Past" series, Death's End, I can only report a feeling of total amazement and awe. There is so much about this novel that blew my mind, that offered different and better ways of viewing the universe. This novel did what I wish more novels would, serve up a new universe entire, evoking beauty and horror, nobility and disgust, in a timeless monument to unfettered speculation. Obviously, in discussing the events of the last of a trilogy books, spoilers are to be expected. I am, however, going to try to avoid discussing much beyond the first 100 pages of the third novel. I read the translation of this novel, as ushered into being by the amazing talent of Ken Liu. Ken has written of a certain prickliness when it comes to translating work. He makes an effort not to anglicize the source material, not smudging away the occasional difficulties in bringing Cixin...

With the title World War Z

Early on in the mostly disappointing zombie epidemic thriller World War Z, UN Investigator Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) hides out in a Newark apartment, trying to convince a family living there to flee with him from the hordes of sprinting, chomping maniacs infesting the city. The phrase he uses, drawing from years of experience in the world's troubled war-zones is "movement is life." Ultimately he's unsuccessful, the family barricades their door behind him and they join the ever-swelling ranks of the undead. As far as a guiding philosophy goes for a pop-action thriller like World War Z, 'movement is life,' isn't bad. And for the first half of the movie or so, it follows its own advice. Similar to other recent zombie movies (Dawn of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead) the warning signs of what the rest of the movie will bring are subtle and buried until all hell is ready to break through. The television mentions 'martial law,' Philadelphia traffic snarl...

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