Sabina's Best of 2023 - Books and Movies
My Hobonichi agenda has a double-page list spread called "My 100," and in 2023 I used it to log my cultural intake: books, movies, TV series, and video games. (For some reason I didn't include music? Last year I only did a music roundup and this year is the opposite. Funny!) I did not get to one hundred though! I topped out at 75, depending on how you count, including various other people's 40-hour-plus let's plays. That's not enough to fill up top 10s, though long rosters aren't my style anyway.
So--here are my top 3s for 2023, ranked by how much I want to talk about them. I also split them into two parts, just so you have more emails to open. Part 2 will contain the TV shows and video games.
Top 3 non-fiction books
The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow. This was my January longread so I have been insufferable about it all year. As a polemical attempt to shift the entire middlebrow paradigmatic understanding of civilizational development (away from, say, stratified society as an pre-requisite for urbanity, or democracy as a homegrown European ideal), it delights with mental sleight-of-hand, like a good joke. Never has the boredom of a Montreal winter sat so central to a history of Western Enlightenment. But in refuting the RETVVVVRN bullshit it also denies progress and gives chaos theory its due. I used to figure time travel would only get me burned as a witch, but I could see myself as a single mom in a stone block condo in Teotihuacan, say, with a pot of herbal tea and sensibly elected local government. I've been there and the vibes are good, even in ruin. But then the blood sacrifice priests rolled in. For that matter, there wasn't a reason Europe sent its best college club debaters (Jesuits) to the exact location occupied by North America's best college club debaters (Huron Confederation), so they could argue themselves into liberté égalité fraternité; it just happened to pan out that way. Losing is not inevitable, but neither is winning.
Anyway--maybe my takeaways are wrong and bad. Read the book and let me know!
Ducks, Kate Beaton. Ducks is the kind of book one writes in hindsight. Kate Beaton builds from macro to micro and back up, marshalling personal anecdotes (humorous to harrowing) within forces social and environmental, until her early oughts in the Oil Sands cohere into a representative Canadian experience: a Road to Avonlea or a Duddy Kravitz. One I felt I was learning about from scratch, despite having ostensibly lived through the same years in the same country. When--in 2014--I first read the Tumblr webcomic that was expanded into Ducks, I couldn't have picked out Fort McMurray on a map, and the only person I knew who had gone to work in Alberta was a Saudi mining engineer who had been in my MBA class. The trippiest realization is that all this was happening simultaneously to Fat Pony and Dude Watchin' with the Brontës on Livejournal. Who knows what other people do when they're not on the Internet? But I came away impressed--and moved--by IRL "Katie" as a character: her level head, her eye for the revealing moment, and her bedrock decency even when the respect is far from mutual.
Stay True, Hua Hsu. Pair it with The First Slam Dunk for a double bill of Asian boy bildungsroman: friendship, self-discovery, grief, and the uses of memory. All feeling, but too good to lean into turn-of-millennium nostalgia--what you have is what you brought to the table.
Honorary mention: Going Infinite, Michael Lewis. The clear fuckup here was to rush into open beta pre-criminal trial; but the DLC will fix that. Otherwise, Lewis's account is uproarious, a real-time-streaming portrait of how a stack of autistic moral toddlers in a trench coat** made a bonfire of Monopoly money. Having written of Kate Beaton's seemingly innate generosity, I think it only does credit to Lewis's that he cannot take the situation seriously enough to pillory the smug, stunted fool left holding the bag. There was emotional damage, of course: enough for the inevitable Adam McKay adaptation to eke out a supporting Oscar run or two (including, ideally, whoever plays Lewis himself, wandering bewildered and long-lensed through a deserted compound already receding into the Bahaman native vegetation... get Mark Ruffalo on the horn). But when all is said and done the money is highly recoverable, not least due to Bankman-Fried having made a good bet on the next fatuous hype cycle (generative AI), which is of course the objectively funniest coda.
** The trench coat is Stanford?
Top 3 fiction books
Nona the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir. I blazed through and greatly enjoyed the entire Locked Tomb soon-to-be-quadrology. Gideon, perhaps the first post-Metroidvania fantasy novel of the twenty-twenties; Harrow, vibrating like a Brontë at the pitch of Evangelion 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo; and finally Nona, the galactic-political Mountolive to the former's Justine and Balthazar. As a writer, Muir can only be herself: she is a goth, she likes skeletons and puns, and--I mean the Lawrence Durrell comparison seriously--she cannot convey a story as if she knows the basic facts thereof, but must lobotomize her POV to oblivion and turn the screw of plot until some hidden spring breaks loose. It's inspiring!
Heat 2, Meg Gardiner and Michael Mann. Gong Li and Tang Wei were in no wise the weak points of Miami Vice and Blackhat respectively, but I did assume their casting was influenced by the initial influx of Chinese funding into Michael Mann's films and Hollywood generally in the early '10s. Or not: I now realize Mann unironically identifies "cool-headed and scarily driven young Chinese women with STEM degrees" as the shadowy logistical backbone of both trans-national white-collar crime and crime-fighting; much like his retro Chicago cops and robbers form a single character class. The back half of Going Infinite suggests he might not be wrong. Besides, I know people like that. Don't you?
The Answers, Catherine Lacey. Read as preamble for Biography of X (which I expect to enjoy, but my library card expired before the hold came in), and surprised by how much I liked Lacey's prose for its standalone qualities: a precise and low-slung instrument, reminiscent of Louise Erdrich, or Soderbergh's camera work. A heroine of the mind traversing a New York seemingly out of one of William Gibson's near-futures, continuously unable to gauge whether her experiences are weird or just feel that way. (They are weird, but she's also weird, and anyway it's the future we're living in.)
Honorary mention: Y/N, Esther Yi. At heart, the fable of a woman who disdains the basic b*tch-itude of fandom so absolutely that when she becomes a fan she can't be normal about it. How you feel about her might well depend on how you feel about it too. Content warning for magical realism.
Top 3 movies released in 2023
The First Slam Dunk. Inoue Takehito, directing from his own seminal work, interweaves the last arc of the manga--famously a multi-volume play-by-play of a single, pivotal tournament game--with a net new character POV and backstory. An exhilarating tear-jerker; a nec plus ultra of sports movies. I watched it for the first time at Fantasia Film Festival, and the crowd whooped and hollered like we were court-side in real life. Easily a top 3 in the Letterboxd list of 2020s remakes of iconic 90s IPs bettered not only by technical and budgetary advances, but by the creator's matured perspective. (With all the past discourse over race, cultural appropriation, and Inoue's NBA fetishism--to which pitfalls GKids paid close attention in its subtitles--it felt some way to realize Ryouta... could and perhaps should be read as biracial here? And maybe all along?)
The Boy and the Heron. My personal definition of "auteur" is a filmmaker whose output is most usefully ranked against itself. What would be the point of comparing Miyazaki Hayao to, say, Ridley Scott? Todd Haynes? Bong Joon-ho? The way he clears the vision is sui generis. One feels the involuntary saccades take on a different pattern, like looking out the window, not at a screen. But the auto-fictional beauty is imbued with death, drenched like cake in syrup; everyone is dead or disappeared or wordlessly haunted. A hair divides the pregnant and the unborn from non-existence. The demiurge's sub-creation crumbles with him, being inherently evil in the gnostic view. Willing or not, its inhabitants scatter to the winds. Nothing is to survive the final frame. Only a fascist-capitalist would try to exploit a humble animation studio beyond its natural lifespan; not vultures, exactly, but all birds shit. No subtlety here!
Killers of the Flower Moon. Can't complain about the running time of a Schoonmaker edit, only about Scorsese making me spend 3.5 intimate hours with the worst human beings ever portrayed onscreen by Leo and Bob; in itself stiff competition. The older I get the more I grok Dante's rankings in my gut, you know? This is cold betrayal, Ninth Circle shit, frozen lake up to the armpits and may a demon wear your skin for a Stetson. An abhorrent business. But it's also Scorsese slicing into history along his proprietary mafia-sin-narrative bias. Someone else, an indigenous woman perhaps, might have made the movie from behind Mollie's eyes, or recounted the FBI's Jungian origin myth once more (the wending fresh-air drive into each and every heart of darkness: "Diane, 11:30am, February 24..."). But every tailor cuts their own way. There he stands before you onstage, the old craftsman with his shears, a maker of fakeries and popular entertainments. He will show you life too, that which persists.
Honorary mentions: Poor Things. Yorgos Lanthimos dares to ask: what if... Emmanuelle... was autistic? Also the best-inked skies this side of Miyazaki. Raging Grace. Alternately terrifying-as-a-mom and a darkly hilarious roast (see what I did there) of the English masters of the universe, who deserve it. Anno Hideaki's Kamen Rider. See: auteurs being extremely themselves. A shot of some people standing around in a train yard is as signature as a Spike Lee double dolly.
Top 3 movies first watched in 2023
The Rocky/Creed series. Counted as one item because the eternal return is more than each individual turn of the wheel, and because I want to be clear that I hadn't seen any of these movies before, and I assume they hit different because of that. A rare gift and document, for Stallone to be this dude, live a whole life, four decades and change--who else you got? Shatner and Nimoy? Linklater feels different, because his characters don't break containment. Realism is still art. Meanwhile, Rocky takes place in the alternate universe of the moving pictures. The backdrop ticks from the 70s to the 80s, but not like where we live: it's the platonically gritty New Hollywood 70s, the platonically Neo-Expressionist MTV 80s. In the 50s they shot Rocky on a studio lot in Technicolor, in the 20s they exhibited him with a piano player and intertitle cards. A century later... well, Rocky IV was a fever dream of the USSR; that was before the Curtain fell; no one really knew what it looked like on the inside. But here comes Creed II with--did you guess?-- that Platonic "ex-Soviet" grey-blue colour grade. Movie magic!
Stop Making Sense (re-release). In the matinee screening: just me, Jack Reacher (kidding), two boomers who looked like the kind of guys who read Christgau in the Village Voice then wrote back, and the lint on David Byrne's grey flannel pant leg. Why does no one mention how the entire band had mad drip on this tour? Every 4K frame could illustrate a Menswear Guy spiel on how they just don't make'em like they used to. Lynn Mabry and Ednah Holt's shimmery lids and athleisure are a jumbo edition of Blackbird Spyplane unto themselves.
The Love Witch. I follow a "random aesthetic lol" Tumblr that posted screenshots from this movie on a weekly basis, for years. It's singular and totalizing: the only break in the Rider-Waite-meets-Technicolor illusion is that Anna Biller didn't have the budget (I assume) to rope off external shots from post-1980 motor vehicles. Sometime later I found her on Twitter/X getting mad at being called camp, the inevitability of which when one's polymathic savant-hood is both high-femme and deadly serious does seem iffy (ref. also Todd Haynes).
Honorary mentions: Margin Call. Other than the Matt-Levine-newsletter of it all, an underrated entry in the Letterboxd list of movies where the protagonist runs a gauntlet of ever-gnarlier bosses, each of which is a Surprise Face. Blade II. Is it not wild that a film exists to prove Norman Reedus and Kris Kristofferson could occupy the same room--and it has Donnie Yen in a mesh shirt? No? Just me?
Cheers,
Sabina