Hey, everyone, sorry I haven’t been around for a couple months. After early November Darkness took me and I strayed out of thought and time, yada yada yada, still freaking out and will probably be mid-key anxious for the rest of my fucking life anyway let’s talk about the stuff I actually liked in 2024.
Spoilers for The Acolyte. Every other topic is safe.
The Giedi Prime Scenes in Dune: Part Two
If you were around last year you’d know that I was absolutely going to be a lazy asshole and not do a year end review for 2023, but then I saw the second Dune movie and immediately knew I wanted to include Giedi Prime in my 2024 list and I thought leaving 2023 out would be the weirder thing to do. So here we are.
In the World of Dune (coming to Universal Studios Epic Universe Park in Orlando, Florida in 2028 (probably)), Giedi Prime is the home planet of House Harkonnen, a group of people genetically modified by space witches over hundreds of generations to be criminally insane feet. The planet orbits that black hole sun I’ve been hearing about my entire life so the color schema of the planet is super fucked in the best way possible.
The coolest thing about these scenes is that in a world of CGI slop, these visuals were achieved with the camera filming in black and white and using infrared lighting and filters. I’m not usually much of a camera and lens nerd, but I do appreciate when film makers use literally any technique besides overworked-underpaid computer lackies to make their movies look cool.
The Oscars Actually Mostly Worked This Year
I’ve got two theories on this:
- I’ve aged into the demographic that finds this collection of quickly written banters performed by half-drunk and half-over it actors reading it for the first time actually funny, OR
- You, as an attendee and nominee of the Oscars, literally cannot spend the entire night being as stuffy, intense, and extremely invested in the ‘aht of the crahft’ as you usually are at these things when you have the threat of an “I’m Just Ken” performance breaking out at literally any moment. You’ve heard the announcement, you know it’s going to happen, but you don’t know when. What if you’re tagged to present something, and you go up there, and you’re very serious, and you’re very stiff, and you did a fine enough job even if it wasn’t great, and the very second you are off the stage Ryan Gosling is lowered down from the ceiling in tiny pink underwear? Do you really want to be known as ‘oh, yeah, didn’t she make a really stilted speech about the history of gaffers in Hollywood right before Simu Liu high-kicked her in the face?”
Everyone seemed to be a little more relaxed than usual at these shows. I watch The Oscars every year because I love pretty dresses and cringe in equal measure but this is the first year there were multiple clips I was sending to my friends and family who don’t watch because they were actually funny instead of just ‘wtf’ funny. Other clips I think still hold up are Arnold and Danny DeVito, John Mulaney Vamping about Field of Dreams, and The Streaking Bit.
What the Fuck is Happening With Movies??
I don’t know if the kids even have this anymore – I’m guessing ‘no’ because this feels like a very cable-specific phenomenon – but back in the days of broadcast television everyone had a handful of movies that they wouldn’t actively seek out but if they were flipping through stations at one in the afternoon on a Sunday and found it, they had to watch it. Seriously, if you’re too young to remember life before streaming, find an older family member who watches a lot of TV and ask them if they had a movie like that and I can almost guarantee you they’re going to make a short list and furthermore Con Air is going to be on that list.
One of my movies was Twister, the 1996 weather action romp starring Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt. I don’t have a firm number on how many times I’ve seen this movie but I can assure you it’s in the double digits. I even have a stuffed cow named Bill Paxton I purchased at “Twister…Ride it Out” at Universal Studios Orlando when I was eighteen. So when I heard they were making a sequel and calling it Twisters I Was Seated.
So, like, I can recognize that this was way too much hype for an okay movie from almost thirty years ago and figured if I saw the sequel in theaters it was just going to be me and the thirty or so other people who also had Twisters on their Must Watch on Cable list. Imagine my surprise when I went with a friend to a four-thirty showing on a Tuesday two weeks after the movie had released and the theater was almost sold out. According to Box Office Mojo it ended up making $370 million dollars worldwide, like, fucking damn, man, I honestly did not think there was that much demand for tornadoes and Glen Powell and so, so, so much country music oh my gahhhhd I’m so glad my husband didn’t come or fifteen minutes in he would have walked out of the theater and directly into traffic. The first movie did not have country music. It barely had music at all. It had some Tori Amos on the radio and that was fucking it.
I don’t have a thesis on what it says about what audiences want these days, I was just astounded at how many people not only showed up to this weird sequel but also seemed to be having a good time. If I had to guess I think a major part of it was this was a movie that didn’t exactly require homework. Sure, it’s a sequel, but there’s no lore. It’s not like you had to remember the name of Bill Paxton’s character. I certainly don’t, and I have seen that movie at least two dozen times!
Long series are great but I’m starting to think the average movie goer is yearning for an experience that lasts two hours and then fucking ends.
The Sith Reveal in The Acolyte
Still bummed this one got cancelled because while it wasn’t great I still think it was better than The Book of Boba Fett or even the later seasons of The Mandalorian and Mando is still going and I don’t think we’ll ever get more of that Boba Fett show but it wasn’t ever officially cancelled and while I don’t think the only reason the show got cancelled is because of the culture war chuds on the internet whining about black women and lesbians it’s really hard to think that didn’t have an impact.
ANYWAY, enough about that.
I’d heard Manny Jacinto, aka Jason from The Good Place, was cast in one of the earliest announcements, and I was very excited because I wanted to see what Jacinto could do besides Jason. Imagine my disappointment when he’s introduced on the show as Qimir, drunken shopkeeper friend of one of our main protagonists Mae. While he’s not doing Jason exactly, Qimir has a lighthearted, nervous energy that’s not not like Jason. He is once again a sort of bumbling sidekick, doing his best to keep up with a situation that is clearly out of his grasp.
Meanwhile, the show was clearly making a mystery out of the identity of Mae’s ‘Master,’ obviously building up to a big reveal, and around episode three I jokingly said to my husband, ‘what’s if it’s Qimir?’ And we laugh and laughed and laughed.
And then episode five happened.
As far as I’m concerned, everything about his reveal works. I am now completely convinced they cast Manny Jacinto banking on the fact that people would think he got cast as Qimir because of his role as Jason Mendoza, and I fucking love it when movies and television use our preconceived notions of an actor and their roles against us.
Furthermore, the whole scene fucks hard. I’ve seen people point to this scene in derision because yes, at one point there are like ten Jedi and they all get their lightsabers out and it looks like a European EDM festival. But these people are missing the part where, immediately after, Mr. Sith Qimir Stranger Arms kills all but one of them. He’s introduced not like a villain in a Star War, but like a monster in a horror movie. He comes up behind them, floating down from the trees with those plucky violins horror soundtracks love to use. One of the Jedi breathlessly asks, “What is that?” And even when they figure out it’s just a dude in a FUCKED UP mask with a lightsaber they’re still terrified because at this point in the Star Wars timeline the Jedi have become so ensconced in their own bureaucratic bullshit they don’t even know what Sith are anymore.
The editing of the scenes leads you to believe that the two Jedi we’ve met previously and are obviously important to the show will survive but fucking PSYCH. Now they’re dead, too. The mask gets knocked off and we finally get introduced to the real version of this dude and for half a second he switches back to Qimir and you get to see how different the performances are and then he uses that half a second as a distraction and it’s all great. It’s fucking great.
AND THEN the entire show turns into a fucked up Wuthering Heights-esque “we can make each other worse” romance where Qimir, who previously had only expressed polite, professional interest in Mae, is immediately down bad for her identical twin sister Osha and is determined to have her as his Sith Padawan or whatever but also to just have her and invites her to be evil while slanging dong in a tide pool and somehow she manages to turn that down but later when he presents her with the option of killing her previous Jedi Master who’s also mostly responsible for killing her real family she flips the fuck out and her rage and hatred turn her kyber crystal red in front of our eyes and I know this show has its flaws but God Fucking Damn It this is some of the best Star Wars shit I’ve seen in years.
Gojira at the Olympics Opening Ceremonies
Based on what I’ve seen on the internet since it looks like I’m in the minority in generally not liking the opening ceremony. Okay, I’m in the minority because I didn’t like and it wasn’t because I was superficially offended by some sort of Drag Last Supper which – surprise – wasn’t supposed to be the Last Supper at all.
I didn’t like the opening ceremonies because it felt all over the place. Literally. Scattering all the performances across Paris is interesting in theory but in practice the only thing I really felt was the loss of focus. I also hated the countries coming in on boats. I don’t know, maybe I don’t like change.
The only section of the Opening Ceremonies I actually loved was fucking Gojira.
We were having a Watch Party and spent most of it going back and forth between making fun of it and not really paying attention, and as soon as the guitars started my brother in law, who had been paying, like, 15% attention the entire time, immediately perked up and went, “Holy shit, is that Gojira?” and then stood entranced at the back room for the entire three minutes until it was over, at which point he stopped caring again.
Dirt Man
Dirt Man
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
I don’t usually include books on this list because I’m usually not reading new releases and also books don’t feel like pop culture moments unless they’re fucking huge like Harry Potter or Twilight.
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar is the best book I read all year and it’s not even close. It was chosen for my book club back in, like, July, and we never actually had the book club meeting about it (we are a bad book club) which is a shame because I want to talk to literally everyone I meet about this book. It’s so far removed from any of my own life experiences but so compelling I felt every memory and emotion. Everything from the story to the prose to the ending is a genuine delight and I can’t believe it’s a debut novel. I’m going to be keeping an eye on Kaveh Akbar in the future. Please check this one out.
Count Orlok’s voice in Nosferatu
This one should probably be in next year’s list but it came out Christmas Day 2024 and I want to talk about it right the hell now so fuck it.
I know people talk about actors disappearing into roles but my sister and brother in law went into this movie completely blind and didn’t know Bill Skarsgard was Count Orlok until the end credits. Obviously this has much to do with the amount of prosthetics and mustache he’s in, but also that fucking voice. I’m no musical type person but to my ear it sounded an entire octave lower than how Skarsgard usually talks, and is completely unrecognizable as him. Like, he put on a different voice for Pennywise for the IT movies, but you can still hear him in there. For Orlok I was questioning whether they had someone else dub him, Darth Vader style.
Nope! And it wasn’t done in post either. Apparently the man trained with an opera singer to be able to achieve that deep growl, and then had to do twenty minutes of warm ups every day and do vocal exercises like Mongolian throat singing between takes to keep his vocal cords where they needed to be.
This is directly related to something I was bitching about to my husband recently. We rewatched Little Shop of Horrors and then I went to the IMDB trivia page and there were dozens of little tidbits of how they worked the Audrey II puppet and, like, not to be an Old Man Yelling at Clouds, but with movies nowadays, the answer to ‘Wow, how did they do that?’ is almost always computers and that just fucking sucks. It’s so boring.
So to find out Skarsgard’s voice was not modulated in post and he, in fact, just worked his ass off to achieve the effect is exactly the sort of movie making I’m here for.
Between Dune Part Two and Nosferatu, I guess my Favorite Thing from 2024 was “Movies Made by People Who Actually Want to Make Movies.”
High Urban Fantasy Jazz 