What I watched in 2021

This year I really wanted to put together a tight, tidy little Best Of the Stuff I Actually Saw list. But then I just decided fuck it, why narrow it down, who cares. I think I have like 20 new movies I really dug, and maybe 10 discoveries of older movies. As a bonus, I threw in my 10(ish) favorite TV shows. They are all in alphabetical order, because all are equal in the eyes of God.

Also, as you can see, I'm putting this up on a blog I'm experimenting with to start detaching myself from the cursed demon Social Media. I'm calling it "Cooking Through the Plague Years." Whenever I do actually post here, I will add a recipe for some shit I have cooked through our various lockdowns, quasi-lockdowns, isolations and freakouts since 2020. If you like, you can skip ahead to the end of this post for a cocktail I sort-of-created that I'm calling The Firepit.

On to the lists!

NEW RELEASES

BARB AND STAR GO TO VISTA DEL MAR
Just batshit. Kristen Wiig and Barbara Dumolo are middle aged best friends on a life-changing trip to Florida somehow running afoul of an evil James Bond-ian plot involving deadly mosquitos. MVP is Jamie Dornan who plays the whole thing perfectly straight and has a showstopping musical number involving inept shirt-ripping.

BENEDETTA
I mean, it's an overheated Paul Verhoeven movie about a real-life 17th century nun who carried on a torrid lesbian affair while claiming to have stigmatic visions of Jesus that helped her save her town from the plague, so of course it's going on this list. I saw some comment on Twitter mentioning that as soon as they saw the phallic Virgin Mary statuette in the first act of the movie, they knew it was going to come back, like a raunchy version of Checkhov's Gun. Verhoeven's Dildo?

CANDYMAN
A little all-over-the-place, but Nia DaCosta's take on the legend was original and horrifying on many levels, from the gross-out kills and body horror to the cathartic final scenes to the shadow puppet show over the end credits depicting a few hundred years of white supremacist violence. I wish this one had gotten a real theatrical release, because I think it could have started some riots.

COLECTIV
An infuriating political thriller documentary, about a group of reporters and an upstart health minister in Romania who start investigating a tragedy at a death metal show and end up unraveling a huge corruption scandal touching nearly every hospital in the country, with deadly consequences. A frightening vision of where we in the US are likely going next on our journey towards collapsing empire.

DUNE
I wasn't a fanatic for the book, but what a blast this movie was. Somehow manages to be a big time blockbuster crowd-pleaser and visually cool and deeply fucking weird. Thoroughly enjoyed following Timothee Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson and the gang fighting sandworms and civil war on Arrakis. When its 3 hours were over, I was like, yeah, I could sit here for another 3 hours, easy. Bring on more!

FEAR STREET TRILOGY
God help me I enjoyed all three of these movies, which trace a generations-long witch's curse preying on the small town of Shadyside. Each installment mimics its time period – FEAR STREET: 1994 a self-aware, gory comedy-thriller, FEAR STREET: 1978 a horny-teens-at-camp slasher, FEAR STREET: 1666 a dark and serious story of witch hunting gone mad in Puritan times – but they all hang together. 1666 earns some real, legit emotional moments. No apologies, it's fun.

THE GREEN KNIGHT
An inscrutable and beautiful-looking adaptation of the medieval  poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, with Dev Patel as a naive aspiring knight and nephew of King Arthur going on an epic quest to his own doom, with vibes of Scorsese’s LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST.  I fell asleep on first watch and thought I was missing some of the logic. But then watched it fully awake and nope, still a mystery. Good luck with it. I really liked it. Not for everyone.

THE KID DETECTIVE
What a great, darkly funny surprise this was. A top 5 of the year if I made one. Adam Brody plays a private eye who uses to be a locally famous boy detective in grade school right out of The Hardy Boys. But the years have not been kind to him or the town, and when a real-life mystery actually drops in his lap — a murdered kid from his local school — he swings into action even as his life unravels. Serious early Wes Anderson vibes. Great ending. Excellent.

MALIGNANT
A woman recovering from a tragic attack finds her life and sanity unravelling when she starts seeing visions of a monstrous serial killer's brutal murders as if she were there.  And that is just the beginning of this bananas masterpiece, which has twists so gloriously dumb they belong in a museum. Very gruesome, with every kind of horror trick in the book thrown into the blender. A co-worker of mine said, "It takes a lot of balls to turn BASKET CASE into a JOHN WICK movie." But damn if James Wan didn't figure it out!

NIGHTMARE ALLEY*
Guillermo del Toro’s super-dark tale of 1940s carnival mentalist Bradley Cooper’s reach exceeding his grasp as he takes on bigger and bigger scams with the help of crooked psychologist Care Blanchett is a remake of a fantastic old noir starring Tyrone Power that is a favorite of mine. And so I give this one an asterisk, because why does this movie exist? Well written, meticulously made, 30-minutes too long, with some great sound design, and (if you’ve never seen the original) a great story. But it feels more like really nice taxidermy than a movie.

ONE SHOT
Another year-end best-of list, another Scott Adkins action movie, ho-hum. This is a relentlessly violent siege movie where Navy SEAL Adkins has to fight his way out of a CIA black site through an army of terrorists. The trick this time is it's all filmed in a single shot, which makes for non-stop balls-out action. Frankly, this kind of B-movie funhouse is the way to use this gimmick, not on some prestige movie like BIRDMAN.

PIG
Nic Cage reins it in (for him) as a hermit who reluctantly heads to the big city of Portland, Oregon from his off-the-grid cabin to track down the assholes who stole his beloved truffle-hunting pig. At first this seems like it's going to be a fun JOHN WICK ripoff set in some mythical underground, violent gourmet restaurant world. But it just keeps going in confounding directions, never delivering what you expect. On the one hand I was disappointed it wasn't what I thought it was. On the other hand, it's really good at whatever the fuck it is doing.

RIDERS OF JUSTICE
After his wife dies in a train crash, Tightly wound Afghanistan vet Mads Mikkelson comes home and teams up with a group of nerdy hackers who are sure they have uncovered a conspiracy behind it —and together they plot bloody revenge. Tonally all over the place, but Mikkelson is a golden god. This is the wildest and most violent movie about processing trauma you’ll ever see.

SAINT MAUD
A  devout and unstable hospice care worker takes on a hedonistic former dancer dying of brain cancer as a new patient, and the clash of personalities becomes a literal battle between heaven and hell. I was on the fence on this one until the very, very end. But wow that ending. Very precisely made and with two great performances from Jennifer Ehle and Morfydd Clark. If you liked TAKE SHELTER or FRAILTY, check this out.

SPACEWALKER
The true story behind the Soviets’ first spacewalk in 1965, which was a hair-raising series of catastrophes that never seemed to let up, all while the Soviet government tried to desperately cover up how horrible the whole thing was going. It’s good enough to overlook the fact that the only version available appears to be a really shitty English dub. Essentially the Russian APOLLO 13.

SYNCHRONIC
Two paramedics in New Orleans discover that a street drug is enabling people to literally travel back in time, with increasingly insane consequences. The second half of this one roars all the way to a very cool finish. Not the deepest of movies, but Anthony Mackie figuring out the rules of time travel in his living room with his dog by his side takes up a big chunk of the middle of the movie, and is devastating and awesome. Might be my favorite sequence of any movie this year.

TENET
Look, I don't know what to tell you, this movie made no fucking sense but it was a good time. All the pretentious mumbo-jumbo about armies from the future looking to destroy our present is just an excuse to turn John David Washington into James Bond, give Kenneth Branagh a reason to do another bad accent, stage some awesome, awesome action, and somehow also construct a CASABLANCA-style beautiful friendship between Washington and the amazing Robert Pattinson.

THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH
Stark and terrifying adaptation from Ethan Coen, with Denzel being awesome as Macbeth and Frances McDormand equalling him as Lady Macbeth. Gorgeous to look at, noir and German Expressionism everywhere. And the violence is somehow both tasteful and brutal. Wasn't planning on listing it, but it stuck with me. Note to Coen Bros fans: as hats are to MILLER'S CROSSING, birds are to MACBETH.

THE TRUFFLE HUNTERS
More truffles! This documentary follows a collection of aging, traditional Italian truffle hunters and their specially trained dogs, doing their thing. The bond between these hunters and their pups is genuine and touching. And they put a GoPro on one of the dogs during a hunt!

THE VIGIL
This is the Jewish THE EXORCIST you've been clamoring for. A lapsed Orthodox Jew trying to re-enter secular society takes on a gig as a shomer for a Holocaust survivor who just died -- a shomer being a man who stays up all night with the body of the recently deceased to protect them. And of course this particular body happens to be inhabited by a demon, and he is in for a doozy of a night. A really creepy ghost tale that's also about redemption and accepting you are better than the worst thing you've ever done.

ZOLA
A tiny epic story of two strippers on a weekend trip to Tampa gone very wrong, as told in a tweetstorm by Zola herself. The story might be a little pointless but this was such a blast, with a soupçon of SPRING BREAKERS in there.  All acting is great across the board, but director Janicza Bravo draws performances out of Colman Domingo and Nicholas Braun in particular that are stellar. Super-stylish and fun.

DISCOVERIES

BLUE COLLAR (1978)
Not technically a discovery, but I've never seen it in the theater before this year when it had a run at the Film Forum. Furious, sleazy, funny agitprop about capitalism crushing workers (and society) disguised as a heist movie. Autoworkers Yaphet Kotto (RIP), Harvey Keitel and Richard Prior scheme to rob their own union, everything goes wrong, and everyone turns on each other. Which is just what the bosses want. Just the right kind of angry movie.

CASH ON DEMAND (1961)
Watched this late night on Christmas Eve while wrapping gifts and I think it has to go in the Christmas canon. Peter Cushing plays an uptight asshole bank middle manager who is forced into robbing his own bank on Christmas by a great and blustery Andre Morell.  Somehow it’s a noir and a heist movie and a real-time thriller and a retelling of A CHRISTMAS CAROL, all in one.

FAST COMPANY (1979)
For some reason, in between making SHIVERS and RABID, two awesome horror movies, and THE BROOD and SCANNERS, two equally awesome horror movies, David Cronenberg made this low-class canuxploitation car-racing movie. It’s got a who’s who of b-movie stars, including William Smith (RIP), Claudia Jennings and John Saxon. The car racing scenes are awesome, the ending is surprisingly epic and violent, the rest is….not great.

GUNS AT BATASI (1964)
Richard Attenborough gives probably the best performance of his I’ve ever seen as a ridiculous, over-the-top, laughably uptight British sergeant major in a recently-liberated African country who has to snap into action in one night during a violent coup and show his mettle under fire, and Errol John matches him as leader of the mutiny. Truly a towering performance by Attenborough in a movie that just keeps ratcheting up the tension, and gives some surprisingly complex takes on race relations and colonial liberation.

THE KILLERS (1964)
Not the Burt Lancaster one, which is also great. But the Don Siegel-directed two-fisted version, with Lee Marvin (taciturn and angry) and Clu Gulager (who improv-ed his whole part) as the killers, John Cassevetes as the victim, Angie Dickinson as the femme fatale, and Ronald Reagan as the giant flaming asshole at the center of it all. A really awesome, no-nonsense, surprisingly funny movie with the added pleasure of seeing Reagan get what he deserves in the end.

LOS TALLOS AMARGOS (1956)
A long lost classic noir from Peron-era Argentina about a frustrated journalist and a Hungarian emigre whose swindling get-rich-quick scheme spirals out of hand, and in echoes of TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE, neither man is going to let the other get away with the loot. Smashingly stylish cinematography from Ricardo Younis, a disciple of legendary CITIZEN KANE DP Gregg Toland, who gives the master a real run for his money. Dark dark dark dark dark, but a real find.

NEAR DARK (1987)
A sort of modern vampire western, where a newly-bitten victim is taken in by a band of anarchic outlaw van-driving bloodsuckers, who teach him the ropes of his new existence. Not sure how I possibly made it through life without seeing Katherine Bigelow's vampire masterpiece. Sexy, violent, incredibly cool, and people like Lance Henriksen and Bill Paxton (RIP) at the very top of their game. A ton of fun.

ROLLING THUNDER (1977)
William Devane and very young Tommy Lee Jones are Vietnam War POWs who come home from 6 years of torture to a world they no longer belong in. And when Devane's family is brutally murdered, he finds a purpose — revenge. Just a great, violent sleaze epic written by Paul Schrader.

SHIN GODZILLA (2016)
Last movie we watched in 2021, on New Year's Eve, and it was awesome. What would really happen when Godzilla attacks Tokyo? The government would hold meetings, form sub-committees, change into matching emergency uniforms, and generally do nothing helpful. They eventually get their shit together, but it is a particularly hilarious kind of horror to watch. The monster in its first mutation is honestly ridiculous -- it has googly eyes, people. But once Godzilla truly emerges and starts spraying lasers everywhere, it is fantastic. Highest recommendation.

STRONGROOM (1962)
Super, super tight little B-movie thriller about a trio of bank robbers who get away with the money, but then have a moral dilemma deciding if they should go back to save the slowly dying people they locked in the vault during their escape. Not a wasted moment in it's tidy 75-minute, and a great last act.

THAT SINKING FEELING (1979)
All thanks to Matt Wall for this discovery — Bill Forsyth’s first movie, the world’s lowest stakes heist movie. A bunch of out-of-work Glasgow youths scheme to rip off, you guessed it, a stainless steel sink warehouse. All the Forsyth touches are here from the jump — the absurdist, gentle humor, the low-key ingenious plot, the hilarious dialogue. He truly is the poet laureate of humanist comedy.

WENT THE DAY WELL (1942)
At the height of WW2, a bucolic British town is infiltrated with Nazi paratroopers and the kindly townsfolk have to fight back. This was made in 1942 as a straight-up war propaganda film, but it turns out to be a really well-written thriller, and a shockingly violent action film by the end that was way ahead of its time. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen an old British biddy unceremoniously dispatch a Nazi in her kitchen with a pepper shaker and a sharp axe.

TELEVISION

THE BOYS
There are a lot of "superheros are real and they are total assholes" shows around, but the second season of this one really cracked the code. Violent and profane, a giant fuck-you to capitalism. The addition of literal fascist hero Stormfront was great.

THE GOOD LORD BIRD
The basic facts of the John Brown story alone would be enough for a show. But the darkly comic tone of this show, the sly cameos from people like Daveed Diggs as an exasperated Frederick Douglass, and the absolutely unhinged performance from Ethan Hawke portraying Brown as a righteous maniac make it next-level good.

GANGS OF LONDON
After the death of London's biggest crime lord, his hothead son Joe Cole vies for the throne, while mysterious young soldier Sope Dirisu moves up the ranks. Exec produced by Gareth Evans, the man behind THE RAID franchise, the action is the best and most violent I have ever seen on TV.

THE GREAT
Huzzah! Gloriously satirical, dirty take on Catherine the Great (Elle Fanning) overthrowing her hot idiot husband Peter (Nicholas Hault) to rule Russia. If you've seen DEATH OF STALIN and love it as I do, then this show is for you.

HARLEY QUINN
A cheat because it came out end of 2020, but I watched it in 2021, and this  show is too good not to include. Harley Quinn and friend/lover Poison Ivy, along with fellow second-tier villains Clayface, Doctor Psycho, King Shark, and a giant carnivorous, weed-smoking plant voiced by JB Smoove fight to destroy the rest of the criminal underworld of Gotham, mostly for being a bunch of dicks. The depiction of Bane in this series is one of the funniest things I saw all year.

THE INVESTIGATION
This Norwegian show takes the most lurid of true crimes – the dismembering of a journalist by an inventor on his homemade submarine – and strips away all artifice to make a simmering, low-key police procedural. I liked the similar MARE OF EASTTOWN a lot, but this was even more intense and well-written. I mean, shit, there is a whole episode just about them trying to teach search dogs how to find bodies in the ocean. Not just a scene, an entire episode.

LOWER DECKS
Animated show telling the stories of the unnamed red-shirts working in the bowels of a Star Trek Federation starship. If you are a Trek fan, this is by far the best Trek show in literally decades. If you aren't you will totally still enjoy. It's hilarious and great, and this latest season is a big leap forward.

THE OTHER TWO
Just funny, funny stuff. The second episode of season 2, where a gay couple pretends to be a son coming out to his father to win money on Molly Shannon's daytime talk show, was comedy gold. If that sounds like your kind of thing, watch it.

RESERVATION DOGS
This comedy-drama series about young Native American kids trying to get off the reservation and get over the death of their best friend might have been my favorite series of the year, starting right from the opening moments during a heist of a Flamin' Hot Cheetos truck.  

SUCCESSION
The trick SUCCESSION pulls is that it never tries to get you to root for any of its despicable characters. They are all horrible and pathetic,  they all deserve to be endlessly screwed and humiliated by each other, and the show knows it. This latest season was just as strong as the others.

WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS
This show about inept vampire roommates trying to take over the Staten Island vampire community (and then the world) can do no wrong. I'm only going to embed one video in this entire post, the moment when energy vampire Colin Robinson explains the universe to 759-year-old Nandor the Relentless:

YELLOWJACKETS
We meet the members of a high school girls' soccer team who survived a horrific plane crash that stranded them in the Canadian Rockies for a year and a half, both as kids and as adults managing PTSD based on what happened out there (lots of hints of cult rituals and cannibalism). Melanie Lynskey, Juliette Lewis, Christina Ricci and Tawny Cypress kill it as the grownup versions. The pilot, directed by Karyn Kusama, is one of the best I've seen. And the show keeps up the momentum.

This Week's Recipe

THE FIREPIT COCKTAIL
2 ounces of cask-strength bourbon or some kind of strong, smoky scotch
1 ounce of apple cider (or a teaspoon of cider syrup if you have it)
1 teaspoon maple syrup
A couple dashes of bitters

Mix all ingredients in a shaker with ice. Serve it in a chilled glass. It might remind you of all those desperate firepit get-togethers you had during the dark Fall/Winter of 2020-21.