2013 Year in Review: Movie of the Year, Frances Ha

Sometimes you find something that is so incredibly great that you can’t help but hate it a little. 

 

I wouldn’t even pretend that I’ve see enough movies from this past year to give the title of “Movie of the Year” definitively to any film.  But what I do know is Frances Ha is the most exceptional and relatable film I’ve seen in theaters in a long, long time.  Relatable, not just to myself, but to a generation.

Frances Ha may not be a movie for every single person between the ages of 21-35, but it certainly is for anyone who has ever felt the urge to create something, the need to be something, with no real idea of how.  Particularly if you live in New York City, and especially particularly if you live in Brooklyn.

Directed by Brooklyn art movement’s patron saint of film Noah Baumbach (Squid and Whale) and starring his girlfriend, Greta Gerwig (Lola Vs.), Frances Ha has been compared many times over to Lena Dunham’s HBO hit show, Girls.  The two are similar in many ways, ripe with sarcastic humor, awkward moments, and youthful energy but Frances Ha surpasses Girls with its sincerity.  Where Girls disenchants some with it’s perceived pretentiousness, Frances Ha endears its audience with its sweetness.  It is fitting that Frances Ha be a black and white film, reminiscent of the timeless quality of Woody Allen’s classics Manhattan and Broadway Danny Rose that turns the city of New York itself into a character.

 

Excellently paced and just under an hour and a half, one of the most disappointing things I might say about Frances Ha is that it is over all too quickly.  The efficiency in story telling is quite possibly the most envious dimension of the stellar script written by Baumbach and Gerwig.

The story is filled with magnificently written characters that you would swear you know in your own life, even if they only populate the screen for a single scene.  One of the great guilty pleasures of watching the film comes from these characters and the secret comfort that at least your life isn’t this much of a mess.  But then, you have to ask yourself, “Wait, it isn’t right?”

The story begins with the protagonist, Frances, drifting through life in the city, dreaming big and living small.  She’s a free spirit but a lost soul.  A vibrant but silly girl, that you’re drawn to in the same way you’re drawn to a train wreck.  The inciting incident comes when her best friend moves out of her apartment forcing Frances to go out and actually make something of her life.  It becomes sink or swim.  She struggles at first, but the message of Frances Ha is hope; learning never to lose enthusiasm for the things you love no matter where you end up.

You watch Frances Ha and it does more than entertain you, it inspires you to do the things you love.  That’s why it is a great movie, and my Movie of the Year.

2013 Year in Review: Yeezus is Not the Album of the Year

When I first heard Kanye West’s latest album I was marginally underwhelmed.  It wasn’t as catchy, the rhymes weren’t as clever, and he didn’t produce it himself.  Even Kanye himself stated (many times) that music isn’t the main focal point in his career anymore.  But that was before I was told how great it was by every music critic on the planet. 

Everyone seemed to love Yeezus.  Even Noel Gallagher had to talk about how avant-garde it was (he called it “punk rock”).  Yeezus wasn’t just expertly produced and smartly written.  It was daring.

I remained unmoved.  Regardless of what I was reading, what I was hearing from Yeezus simply didn’t draw me in like other albums this year, or even past Kanye tracks.  The laughably bad (possibly trolling) video for Bound 2 didn’t help anything.  To make matter immeasurably worse for Kanye, the experts – aka people I’m friends with who listen to more rap than me – labeled Yeezus as a little tired and lackluster.  Kanye didn’t care as much about this album and it showed.

Still, I couldn’t choose an album of the year in good faith and not give Yeezus a few dedicated listens, so I bit the bullet and downloaded what Spin, Stereogum, EW, The A.V. Club, and Time all were calling the Album of the Year. 

Yeezus is certainly a good album.  The first four songs are about as strong as any opening four from an album this year.  “Black Skinhead” is the strongest all around track, but I have a personal affinity for “I Am a God”.  Kanye gauges his own ego (which has grown to comic proportions) perfectly and lays out his persona with some of the best rhymes on the album.  “New Slaves” has an incredible beat and sets the stage for an interesting commentary but Kanye fails to deliver with the lyrics, instead descending into safer, duller, “diss track” territory.  His intensity saves the track but you wish he could’ve thought of something a little more profound and little less petulant to say, “There’s leaders and there’s followers, but I’d rather be a dick than a swallower”… I hope that goes on your tombstone, Yeezy.

From there the album starts to drop off.  Most of it feels too subdued or uninspired only sparking quality moments, like flashes of good songs hidden within longer uneven ones.  “Bound 2” has a nice throwback feel to it for Kanye, but I fear it may be ruined for me after that ridiculous video.   Then there’s “Blood On the Leaves”.  Kanye samples heavily from the Nina Simone version of the classic song which just might be the most important song dealing with racism in America ever recorded and turns it into a break up song.  Now, I’m not an anthropologist, but I feel pretty strongly that there is many a paper that could be written about how the mere existence of this song demonstrates the differences in mentality of race and civil rights between generations in America (not to mention Kanye’s own messiah complex).

But even on the songs that don’t work you can still find the two things about Yeezus that work the whole way through: Kanye’s visceral intensity and the incredible production.  Kanye approaches the lyrics with a raw energy that most other artists would think unsustainable for an entire album.  It not only works for Yeezus, but it saves the album from sinking into monotony.  Praise of the production is a little more of a complicated affair. 

In the past, Kanye had been the primary producer on his albums.  It was one of the biggest reasons people routinely placed him among the best recording artists today.  In rap, the production credit is nearly as important as the name on the album cover.  So much of each track is shaped and built in studio.  A producer can turn great rhymes into garbage and mediocre rhymes into a great track.

Kanye wasn’t completely absent from the production process, but compared to his past albums it seems like he might as well have been.  Twenty Five.  That is how many producers Yeezus had working on it.  That’s not even accounting for producers billed as a group (Daft Punk, for example, was billed as one producer).  That’s more than two different producers for every track on the album!

Kanye and other producers described the process as something of a workshop setting.  A group of them would meet and go over different ideas they had for a track, many of them would be assigned a certain aspect of the track to focus on by Kanye.  Ironically, much of there work was reportedly undone late in production by Rick Rubin, who stripped down and reworked many of the tracks.

 This image perfectly captures either what Kanye actually sees when he looks in the mirror, or what he wants you to think he sees. But thats a whole 'nother blog post.

Yeezus is an interesting album.  To me it is study in what comes from jamming a room with expert musicians, songwriters, and technicians and forcing them all to make an album together.  The finished product is something that hadn’t really crossed over into mainstream music before.  It took influences from techno, rock, dupstep and hip-hop and assembled them in such a way that was radio friendly while still having an identity.  It wasn't wholly original but it was the first time it had been constructed as pop (which is not and should not be thought of as a dirty word in music).

It’s very impressive what Yeezus was, but I don’t know how daring an album can be when it has more producers than tracks.  It certainly isn’t “punk rock”.

Kanye and his band of producers made a solid album (and it is Kanye’s album) but it’s not his best and it’s not the best of the year.

2013 Year in Review: Game of Thrones and HBO

Before this year, it was probably still open to debate what the biggest show on TV was.  Mad Men had a lot of capital built on recognition, Breaking Bad had the awards, Game of Thrones had the cult-like fan-base.  Game of Thrones may not have been able to snatch the crown from Walter White, but with Breaking Bad belonging to the ages, any other show would simply be a pretender.

The King is dead, long live the king.

Ever since the second season and the battle of Blackwater no one could dispute Game of Thrones title for being the most ambitious spectacle of a show on television.  With beautiful locations, incredible sets, and beyond dense story, there truly is no other show on television that exists in a world like Game of Thrones.  In season three, the show took the next step when storylines began to payoff and one of the most shocking scenes ever in a television show happened (for those who hadn’t read the books) and nearly broke social media.

SPOILERS (sort of)

Thrones isn’t perfect.  The sprawling story makes it difficult to follow at times.  The numerous characters and storylines in the source material force the show runners to pick and choose which stories to flesh out and which to gloss over.  Sometimes they choose poorly.  But even with these flaws, Thrones is still one of the most enjoyable and rewarding dramas on television.

The supposed word floating around these days is that Game of Thrones will begin to deviate from the books more and more now that the story is three seasons in.  While most of the more drastic changes thus far have been met with disappointing results by fans (swapping out Jeyne Westerling for some boring nurse and the inclusion of Theon’s torture at the hands of the Boltons to name a few) Thrones has built up enough good will that the worst case scenario should have it enjoying TV relevance for at least two more seasons.

The rest of HBO’s programming is not in quite as comfortable a situation.

Long gone are the days of The Sopranos ruling television and award shows with an iron fist.  Would be flagship, Boardwalk Empire, was promising at the start.  But four years later, the show seems much less inspiring with viewership as low as 1.87 million in its most recent season (compared to 4.81 million for its series premiere).

Is this a villain you could learn to love?

Former crowd pleaser True Blood finally announced it was going away after one more season, two seasons after Alan Ball left and five seasons after the show was still any good.

Shows like Girls and Newsroom go on with most viewers and critics either loving them or hating them, while Treme dutifully trudges along for its final shortened season after enduring three years of horrifically bad ratings.

Even shows that have been roundly praised by both viewers and critics like Curb Your Enthusiasm and Veep only garner moderate ratings and attention.

HBO’s new series have faired even worse. 

Comedies like Hello Ladies and Family Tree are pleasant enough but far too forgettable.  Enlightened was able to get the critics but couldn’t find the ratings.  Would be tent-pole, Luck, couldn’t manage either and got a hefty lashing from animal rights groups for their troubles.

 

HBO doesn’t need to panic yet.  They still attract the best of the best and in January a new show, True Detective, is coming starring Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey.  But with AMC breathing down its neck and the near misses beginning to pile up, HBO needs to get a big hit and soon.

Dragons may be enough to conquer a realm, but singlehandedly conquering all of cable TV may prove a more challenging feat.