I know, I know, it’s already March, can we please give up 2023 and memory hole it already? How dare I try to talk about last year this late in the game.
Well, truthfully, I wasn’t planning on releasing this. I did one last year and wanted to do a follow-up, but I tried writing it a few times and it just wasn’t happening and I gave up on the whole endeavor.
And then I saw Dune Part 2 and realized I wanted to include the scenes on Geidi Prime for my Best of 2024 article next year – did you see that fucking cinematography? Did you know they used IR cameras? Jesus Christ – and it felt weird to just not do one for 2023, so I bucked up, deleted all the shit I’d already written, and started again.
Here are my favorite pop culture moments of 2023, and one single terrible moment that I hated. Spoiler alerts for anything listed.
Fall Out Boy – So Much (for) Stardust
I generally don’t talk about music much here because I’m less interested in its mechanics and industry the way I am with movies, television, and video games, and also because a lot of people have a lot of capital-O Opinions on music and have a tendency to take things…hmm…oddly personal? Like tell a person you don’t like their favorite television show and they might think you’re crazy, tell a person you don’t like their favorite band and they might come at you with a dull butter knife. Further, I don’t have time for music – I can’t listen to something with lyrics when I’m writing so I spend all day listening to mixes on YouTube called shit like ‘Lofi Chill-Hop Vapors to Wave to’ or whatever. I don’t have much to add to the conversation
Which is all to say this isn’t a discussion about Fall Out Boy’s new album, or even a critique, this is pretty much me getting up on stage with a dunce cap and a megaphone and shouting ‘I LOVE FALL OUT BOY’ into it until the fire department is finally able to subdue me.
And I do. I’ve been listening to them for almost two decades. I own some of the albums on vinyl because I was That Person for a while. I wrote some kind-of sort-of almost fanfiction back in the day and no you cannot see it, mostly because it was four or five computers ago and has been lost to the sands of time. These motherfuckers even got me to leave my house and go to their concert. On a Sunday. Sheesh, I haven’t been to a concert in, like, seven years…and it was another Fall Out Boy concert.
If I had to pick a favorite moment off the entire album it would be in “What a Time to Be Alive” when Patrick Stump’s voice transitions seamlessly into Joe Trohman’s guitar.
Worst – Fall Out Boy makes a sequel to “We Didn’t Start the Fire“
I am not such a superfan of the band that I can’t face their mistakes head on, and just, like, I mean…why the floppy-haired fuck did this happen.
Okay, never mind that the original song is a joke. Never mind that Billy Joel doesn’t even like it anymore. Never mind that everyone has been saying for years that the song should be updated annually but it was a fucking joke, boys, no one needed this.
Never mind all of that, push it all away, because there’s a greater sin in this fucking sequel song.
You know how little kids, especially between like five and eleven, are absolutely weird as fuck in totally different ways? One of the ways I was a strange little kid is I became absolutely obsessed with the original “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” I would play it on repeat while reading the lyrics in the CD insert (remember those?) until I had memorized the entire thing. Why? Who cares? I was eight. Eight year olds are weird.
While I don’t remember all the lyrics anymore, you know what I do remember?
All the events Billy listed in that stupid song were listed in chronological order.
I don’t have it in front of me to prove it, but I even remember that the printed lyrics were interrupted by the years that the events Billy was listing out happened in. And that’s kind of the whole point of the song? The relentless march of time continues to bring the most insane shit that has ever happened, it’s been that way for as long as there has been humans and it will continue until the sun burns out. What else do I have to say?
This new version has no linearity, it’s just listing off shit that has happened in two decades with absolutely nothing to tie them together except the same existential dread vibes we’ve all been having anyway.
If you’re going to do something stupid, at least do it with your whole ass.
For shame. 0/10 stars, so, so many notes.
Into the Spider-Verse and Barbie, The Best Movie Experiences I’ve Had In Years
There’s always speculation that movie theaters are going to become so expensive, and so out-classed by the set-ups people have at home, that they’ll eventually evaporate like so much vapor, and I think that’s fully bullshit because yes people in general are fucking annoying, I know, I am one, but also humans are social creatures and we get lonely and yeah laughing at a funny joke in a movie feels good but Jesus H Christ laughing at a funny joke in a movie surrounded by other people who are also laughing at said funny joke is better than sex.
So that’s my hot take: movie theaters are literally never going away because the experience of sharing a movie with strangers can cure depression for roughly two hours.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was the first movie I’ve seen opening weekend since the beginning of the pandemic. There was a moment early on where something funny happened and everyone laughed and I was laughing too but I was also feeling e m o t i o n s because this important part of my life I hadn’t fully realized I still hadn’t gotten back had finally happened again. I’d been seeing movies in theaters for a while but always after it had been out for a few weeks so the theater was only half full, usually with people who weren’t really into movie but needed to kill a few hours. To see a movie the first weekend its out in a theater filled with people who are absolutely feral for what’s about to happen is the closest I’ve ever been to a religious experience.
And then Barbie. Another opening weekend. Another full theater. And this time it wasn’t just a movie. It was an entire fucking event. The summer of Barbenheimer had whisked everyone onto the hype train and I fully believe even if the movie had been terrible everyone would still have had a great time. 90% of the audience was in pink and the others were wearing suits for Oppenheimer. They had the Barbie box out in the lobby and there was a line, sometimes ten people deep, to take your picture in it. You could order pink cocktails. I’m pretty sure this showing is where I caught COVID. Was it worth it?
No, actually, I super wish I hadn’t caught COVID, especially two weeks before my sister’s wedding.
But it was close to worth it.
Margot Robbie in Asteroid City
I’m torn on whether Robbie not getting an Oscar nom for Barbie was a snub or not. It was a very good performance but I don’t know that any of the women who were nominated deserve it less than Robbie’s Barbie.
I do think there should be a way to give her an award for her single two minute scene in Asteroid City because I have never been so moved by someone explaining what would have happened in a scene that was cut.
Asteroid City, like a lot of Wes Anderson’s movies, is about processing grief, which as all humans know can’t be done, not really. Jason Schwartzman is both the actor Jones Hall (who has lost his playwright lover Conrad Earp) and the character Hall plays, Augie Steenbeck (who has lost his wife, the character who was supposed to be played by Margot Robbie). In this scene he is both Hall listening to words written by his dead lover and Augie listening to words by his dead wife. It’s the true lynchpin, I think, pulling together both worlds of the movie.
The writing and the performance combine to make this scene work so perfectly. Every line of dialogue Robbie recites is preceded with a ‘you say’ or ‘I say.’ The lines are then rushed through so that every pause is followed with another ‘you say’ or ‘I say.’ You’re lulled in by the pattern, so that by the end, when Robbie pauses and then utters ‘I’m not coming back, Augie,’ without the dialogue tag it becomes a gut-punch and sounds like a line that has somehow broken through the layers of separation to become real. Kills me every time.
Also, this plus the scene’s beginning line of ‘It’s you, the wife who played my actress’ is the basis of my theory that the reality in this movie actually is Augie’s life in Asteroid City and the scenes of it being a documentary about a play about Asteroid City are all things he’s invented to try to process losing his wife, but that’s neither here nor there.
My Favorite Movie: Bottoms
This was a good year at the movies but literally everyone else can fuck off, Bottoms is the best movie of the year and I’m not broaching discussion on this topic.
I’m so happy for Ayo Edebiri that she is getting literally all the of the awards she possibly can for The Bear, it’s a great show and she deserves every single one of them, but she also deserves an award solely for her ‘EVERYBODY KNOW HE’S FRUITY’ monologue and also where the fuck are the awards for Rachel Sennott and Nicholas Galitzine and where’s the fucking Best Supporting Actor award for Marshawn Fucking Lynch??
This movie doesn’t exist in the real world. The football players wear their uniforms and padding all the fucking time, one is kept in a cage in the back of the classroom for reasons that are never explained, and the only cell phone in the entire movie is a flip phone from 2004. It’s sort of an exploration of existing as a woman in a man’s world but it’s more about two high school lesbians who start a fight club to get closer to their crushes.
All of you slept on Bottoms this year and I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed.
This might be my favorite comedy of all time, up there with Goon, and now I’m starting to wonder if that says something about me…
John Wick 4
Initially I was going to put up the fight scene that seems to be heavily inspired by Hotline Miami, and while that scene is incredible and should absolutely be copied by other action movies going forward, what has stuck with me all these months later is John falling down those god damned stairs.
I…am not sure if this was supposed to be funny? I honestly can’t tell. John Wick takes it as well as he gives. He gets beat up, branded, hit by cars…I mean, these aren’t even the first set of stairs he’s fallen down in this movie. So on the one hand, this isn’t exactly out of character for the man. It doesn’t come out of nowhere. On the other hand, this is funny on a basic, lizard-brain level. There can’t be a way that the people making this film tossed Keanu Reeves down a never-ending set of stairs and didn’t realize in the moment that it was extra super-duper funny, right?
But maybe it doesn’t matter, because it is absolutely the funniest thing to happen in a non-comedy all year.
Also, for people who have not watched the movie: for plot reasons, he needs to be at the top of those stairs. So after all that, he has to go back up. Comedy genius.
Alan Wake 2 – We Sing
In both Alan Wake and Alan Wake 2, titular Alan Wake is the author of a grimy, hardboiled detective series that got so popular he basically had a mini-meltdown from all the fame and went to sleepy little Bright Falls, Washington with his wife to get away from it all and fix his marriage. Anyway, it takes roughly three hours for his wife to get taken by some mysterious dark entity living at the bottom of a lake and it’s all downhill from there. Alan spends all of the first game battling dark entities and trying to find his wife, and – spoiler alert – manages to save his wife by getting himself stuck in the weird dark dimension that exists at the bottom of the lake.
Alan Wake 2 starts over a decade later, and Wake has been trapped in this mini-dimension this entire time. He’s down there with the Dark Presence, a being that also wants to escape and can do so through Wake’s writings through some interdimensional fuckery, and the two are basically battling to write the version of the story that will let one of them out and keep the other one trapped forever in this dark, dream-like universe where reality twists into nightmares over and over and over.
There is so fucking much of this I am skimming over to keep this brief. The world-building on this series and its cousin Control is so dense I literally cannot get into it all without ending up with one of those “Alan Wake EXPLAINED” articles you see all over half-assed gaming websites. I’m just trying to lay out the basics to explain what sort of game this is: a psychological survival horror game with lots of serious themes, philosophical questions, and jump scares.
And then this happens:
I’ve seen some crazy cut scenes in other video games, but the fact that this musical insanity is playable just takes everything over the top. My husband, who was actually playing, kept dying because he kept paying too much attention to the music and not enough to the dark entities trying to brain him with an axe handle.
Also, it’s very important to me that you understand that Mr. Door is not the Dark Presence and is, in fact, just some other guy that got stuck in the Dark Place and hates Alan for Reasons so he does the whole talk show song and dance just to fuck with him.
And that was 2023! Mostly movies, I know, but I can’t really talk about fantastic moments in TV because my husband and I are so far behind everything we still haven’t even finished Succession. No spoilers, please, but I have my guess: Greg, the largest family member, eats the other four and wins.
High Urban Fantasy Jazz 