September Top Ten

1. Travis Baldree: Legends & Lattes (Tor, 2022). I'm stunned myself. This fantasy novel begins like countless others. An orc named Viv violently vanquishes her enemy. But that takes up only a two-page prologue. Viv puts down her sword and travels far to open a coffee shop. Instead of over-narrativizing with dreary world building, Baldree traces the everyday challenges of Viv's endeavor - introducing the townsfolk to coffee in the first place; expanding the menu; going easy on the freebees; figuring out how to deal with customers who stay for hours nursing one cup; rigging a primitive form of air conditioning; booking entertainment; etc. As more Lord of the Rings types become invested in the success of the shop, the story takes on a Mickey and Judy "let's put on a show" feel. For narrative tension, some of the landed gentry demand taxation. But overall, it reminded me of nothing so much as the delightful processual thrust of James M. Cain's Mildred Pierce. Low-stakes fantasy this subgenre is called and I was completely disarmed by Baldree's ability to hold the reader's attention by portraying people simply working together. As one critic put it, "it's sweet, beautiful, and, most of all, kind." And yes, I have the prequel, Bookshops & Bonedust, on my iPad right now.

2.  Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution (PBS series). Episode One - "Rock the Boat" is a fabulously insightful meditation on the origins of disco. Episode Two - "Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now" marks disco's mainstream popularity and, predictably, hits all the beats of a Wikipedia article. Episode Three - "Stayin' Alive" is abject nonsense about disco's supposed comeback with nary of mention of where it's been for the last 45 years. Caveat saltator.

3. Jungle: "Let's Go Back" (Caiola). You all keep sleeping on this nu-disco combo. But you're missing yet another copper-plated dreamscape of the Stylistics, doo-wop, and shaky memories of dancefloors past.

4. The Bear Season 3. The most frustrating show on television today. Even though the first episode came off like an extended previously-on segment, I admired its drifty pointlessness. And Tina's (Liza Colón-Zayas) backstory was welcome and moving. But Donna's (Jamie Lee Curtis) presence always promises torture porn. Her Actors Studio scene with Natalie (Abby Elliott) had more give to it than last season's preposterous, feel-bad Christmas Eve episode. But it provides no narrative air ducts for the tension to pass through. And the final episode was a storytelling disaster making it impossible to determine Chef Andrea Terry's (Olivia Colman) relationship to half of the cast. Maybe the series' architects will put it all together in Season 4. Or maybe they'll figure out whether or not they're making a comedy.

5. Maria (Pablo Larraín). At lunch before the New York Film Festival screening, my friend Jody and I were discussing various forms of amateurism as a means of maintaining good mental hygiene - cleaning, baking, attending Lady Gaga dance classes, walking, working out for sanity rather than weight loss per se, Nailed It!, etc. During the Q&A after the screening, Angelina Jolie discussed her months-long preparation to become Maria Callas and explained that she broke down in tears the first time she sang. Singing is way to let out all that we hold in, Jolie noted, and she encouraged everyone in attendance to try singing for that very benefit. Both moments deepened what has now become Larraín biopic boilerplate. It's not much different from previous outings such as Jackie (2016) and Spencer (2021), spiraling out from one concentrated event, here the last week of Callas' life. She hasn't sung live in three years and is testing a comeback. But what she truly wants is simply to sing for herself and the tragedy here is that no one (sometimes including herself) will allow the diva to do so. Larraín gives us a glimpse of Callas as an amateur and the film constitutes a testament to what Christopher Small calls "musicking," the act of creating music free from recordings, command performances, and divadom, music as method to potentially save your life.

6. Miséricorde (Alain Guiraudie). Avoid the Wikipedia synopsis since it gives the entire film away. I'll keep it vague here. Jérémie (a terrifically blank performance by Félix Kysyl) returns to his small hometown to attend a funeral. But shiftless and pretty, he decides to stick around to both the annoyance and delight of various villagers. Awkwardness soon shades into violence and a hideous crime has to be covered up. Guiraudie keeps things tense by utilizing the narrative lacunae of art cinema. But he also resorts to some tired devices such as Jérémie frequently overhearing story-forwarding information as if he were a character hiding in a corner of Downton Abbey. And he has a priest deliver the film's big message in a fit of collegiate existentialism at the edge of a tall hill overlooking humanity below. Then again, Guiraudie isn't after any tight connections. He's a master of wielding Hitchcockian guilt such that the last third of the film becomes lighter as delight eclipses annoyance and we grow itchy over the attraction certain characters (and perhaps we the viewers) feel to an evil protagonist. Alfred would be proud.  

7. Melissa Kirsch, "At Capacity" The New York Times, September 28, 2024; Miranda Lambert: Postcards from Texas (Vanner/Republic/Big Loud). Kirsch asks a question that keeps nagging me as I age and my internal hard drive becomes overamped and lossy: "If we can’t remember the things we’ve read and watched and even loved, do they still 'count'?" Fortunately, she calls on Maryanne Wolf, a neuroscientist, to put us somewhat at ease: "The information you get from a book is stored in networks. We have an extraordinary capacity for storage, and much more is there than you realize. It is in some way working on you even though you aren’t thinking about it." Still, I gravitate towards pop and song doctors in particular whose job is to keep pressing our random recall buttons. Thanks to such architects, I can hum every damn song off one of my favorite country albums of the year. Lambert's latest has been accused of lacking the spunk. But to my cheap ears, I hear "Looking Back on Luckenbach" as a classic wedding song in the making, "Alimony" a classic karaoke song in the making, and "Way Too Good at Breaking My Heart" a classic ripoff of Foreigner's "Waiting for a Girl Like You" in the making. Granted, as one of the premier album artists of our era, Lambert's settling into a ho-hum eminence akin to, oh, Sleater-Kinney, sure to forever entertain but doomed to never risk a surprise. But I remain grateful for the meta "Dammit Randy" about a loser who broke up with a pre-fame Lambert and is now relegated to turning her up on the radio. As she sings most memorably and thematically, "I've got your attention." And authenticity fans take note: Lambert wrote the best song, "Run," all by herself. 

8.  Mark Harris, "How Bad Can It Get For Hollywood?" The New York Times, March 1, 2024.  Finally - the rejoinder I've been looking for when superhero movie fans call me a snob for hyping art cinema and the avant-garde. Discussing forthcoming non-franchise titles such as Hamnet and Novocaine, Harris zings, "These are self-contained films that don’t demand moviegoers have a Ph.D. in previous installments or extended universes."

9. LL Cool J: The FORCE (LL Cool J, Inc./Def Jam/VMG). His first album in eleven years and, since you didn't know, fourteenth overall, The FORCE may improbably be LL Cool J's best ever. Produced by Q-Tip, it moves like trillions of microorganisms in your guts with Can and Gary Numan samples and an unexpected and affectionate evocation of Black family life in "Black Code Special." But there's a tree-falling-in-the-woods quality to its supernova appearance. It's an old man's hip-hop album so on the cranky "30 Decembers," he worries about who this album is for. "These kids don't even know who I am," he admits right after castigating them for being on their phones and computers instead of "readin' the papers." He brags about being postmodern on one track and calls another track "Post Modern" as if he finally downed all those late 1980s John Leland Singles columns in Spin. Even though The FORCE sounds more alive than most hip-hop has in years, is this youth music? And does it matter?

10. Criterion 24/7.  I should be all Old Man Yells at Cloud about this. For years before Karagarga, I would trade VHS tapes with people in Estonia and Japan for a chance to see an obscure art film in hideous quality. Or I'd have to wait literally months if not years for The End (Christopher Maclaine, 1953) to download on eMule (never happened). Now there's a gotdang spigot showering all manner of obscurities and classics into your living room. But as a film democratist, I love it. As I'm writing this, a film/director I've never heard of is streaming - Fisting: Never Tear Us Apart (Whammy Alcazaren, 2022) and yeah, that kind of fisting, of all things. Part of the fun is trying to guess a title. If you give up, then check out Criterion's What's On Now page for the answer.