Category: Broken Girl Media

Film, Television, Radio, and Gaming

2021 Rewind: Music

So I don’t use Spotify, and thus don’t have any handy Wrapped images to post. (Dear Apple Music: the annual Replay playlists are fine, but you really need to work on a social-sharing component for them.) With that said, I can basically tell you what I listened to this year.

  • I didn’t listen to much new music, or rather, I didn’t listen to new music much. I fought the good fight for many years, but eventually you get old and grow tired of chasing the Hot New Sound and want to sink into the familiarity of pop culture’s vast backlog.
  • Olivia Rodrigo entered and quickly exited my consciousness. I was optimistic about her at first, until I began to notice that every song seems to be leaning pretty heavily on old riffs from classic hits, and she started to look more like a mildly talented content farmer than anything else.
  • Lorde’s “Solar Power” was fun, and I listened to it quite a bit… but I’m beginning to suspect she’s gonna follow an Adele-like arc in my mind. Meaning, I was a huge fan at first, I found her middle period pleasant, and as she settles into a career groove, it’s all gonna start sounding the same to me.
  • I hope that doesn’t happen with Billie Eilish, but it probably will. It’s the rare artist who can continually renew herself and grow into new things.
  • Over the last week, I’ve listened to The Beatles and Paul McCartney more than I have in the last decade. (Perhaps more than any other body of work, Paul’s greatest hits instantly transport me to my childhood in the ‘70s. The opening notes of every song fill my head with memories.)
  • Another rediscovery in 2021: having finally finished watching —and then watching again, again— Twin Peaks, I’ve been listening to Angelo Badalementi’s soundtrack rather obsessively, almost as much as I did back in 1990.
  • Speaking of Lynch-inspired music, how is it that in eight years on Tumblr, none of you little fucks ever turned me on to Chromatics? I’ve listened to Closer To Grey over and over, and have yet to get sick of it.
  • 2021 was also the year I remembered Silversun Pickups existed… Panic Switch continues to be one of my favorite songs of the 21st century.
  • I was still listening to Hamilton a lot, and In The Heights a little, so Lin-Manuel Miranda and Anthony Ramos held my attention pretty reliably.
  • All those TikTok memes resulted in me voluntarily listening to Rihanna’s Desperado for the first time in my life.
  • I’ve got St. Vincent and Lana Del Rey albums I should be playing… but I’m not. Maybe I’ll be in the mood in 2022.
  • Someone sent me Taylor’s I Almost Do to explain how she feels about me, which makes it the sweetest/saddest song in my playlist this year.

Get Back

Growing up, The Beatles were annoying.

Y’all will never know what it’s like for your parents’ generation to have a complete stranglehold on pop culture… the Boomers utterly dominated society for decades, and by God, they were gonna make us listen to their shit whether we wanted to or not. Half the movies and music of the ‘80s were dedicated to them looking back at their childhoods, or regurgitating their glory. Our affection for hair-metal was mostly just a way of pissing them off.

But as I got older, I softened. I embraced The Who, Pink Floyd, and The Stones, and I bought George Harrison and Paul McCartney CDs. (Cloud Nine and Flowers in the Dirt, for the record.) But I continued to reject both The Beach Boys and The Beatles, because goddammit, people wouldn’t stop telling me how perfect Pet Sounds and Abbey Road were.

It wasn’t until my late 30s that I began to appreciate The Beatles. (I still haven’t come around to the Beach Boys.) But even if I hadn’t finally surrendered on my own, I think Peter Jackson’s Get Back would have convinced me.

I mean… holy hell! First, the magic that Jackson and his team produced in sharpening up all that 16mm film footage from 1969 and turning muddy, cross-talking audio tracks into clear-as-a-bell conversations is nothing short of amazing. And the fact that he was able to extract a narrative from it is just as impressive.

But like most people watching the show, I’m mostly stunned at just how much I like those four little shits. For a group of boys who were bigger than Jesus, they come off as shockingly pleasant, compulsively polite individuals who just couldn’t figure out how to get along. These are four guys I’d have liked to hang out with… they’re goofy and funny and thoughtful.

And in those moments —already becoming rare by 1969— when Paul and John fully engaged their mind-meld… wow. It’s like watching twins finish one another’s sentences, in musical form.

Not every second of those three very long episodes is fascinating… Jackson doesn’t flinch from showing us the agonizing (and sometimes tedious) birth process behind pop music’s most famous collection of songs. But that’s part of the experience, I think. You have to sit there —like Yoko and Linda— and watch it happen, even the boring bits. Because the boring bits are part of it.

Speaking of Yoko… as with the boys themselves, Jackson has done her memory a huge favor. Yes, she’s weird and occasionally off-putting, but it becomes obvious pretty quickly that she’s only involved because John needs her there as a security blanket. If he weren’t so threatened by Paul’s ascendancy, and was more confident in providing leadership himself, she’d have been off doing something that actually interested her rather than knitting and occasionally, playfully screeching into a mic.

(It’s impossible not to notice that Linda’s daughter is far more intrusive in one day than Yoko was over the course of weeks.)

All of which means that Get Back is my favorite Peter Jackson work since The Frighteners, and I guess I kind of love The Beatles now. Didn’t see either of those coming.

Peter Scolari (1955-2021)

 I know he was just Hannah Horvath’s dad to most of you, but when I was a little kid, he was Tom Hanks’ horny, cross-dressing partner-in-retrospectively-creepy-crime on Bosom Buddies, and Julia Duffy’s nerdy husband on Newhart. He was never going to be a movie star like Hanks —Peter looked and acted a bit like the mutant offspring of Rick Moranis and David Hyde Pierce— but he had solid taste in projects, and remained relevant well into the 21st century.

Also, fuck cancer.

Peter Scolari, ‘Bosom Buddies’ and ‘Girls’ Actor, Dead at 66

https://youtu.be/3UI_JwF3cnA

(NOTE: You can tell Billy Joel was in dire financial straits in 1980, ’cause otherwise they would have never gotten the rights to use My Life as a theme song.)

The Lone Man Gets A Lone Season

In the end, the kindest thing the suits could do for everyone involved was cancel Y: The Last Man. If nothing else, it saves me from wasting my time watching it.

I knew it was in trouble when set leaks and press material made it clear the producers and writers felt they needed to de-center Yorick’s privileged, white, cishet POV… despite the fact that Yorick’s POV is literally the story. There’s nothing there but the name if you make it about anything else… if you don’t love/loathe the little dickhead, it’s just a pointless exercise.

But in fairness to those producers and writers, they were in an even worse position than Weiss & Benioff & The Show Which Shall Not Be Named… unlike R.R., Vaughn & Guerra actually finished YTLM, and the ending is a ridiculous shitshow of pointless, emotionally hollow nonsense, meaning it was a narrative freight train headed for the edge of a cliff. The series would have been better off tossing out everything but the conceptual kernel, and calling it The Adventures of Agent 355 and Some White Kid She Met… I might have watched that.

Oh well. I hope Bryan Vaughn wasn’t counting on having his own Kirkman-style empire, and I hope Pia Guerra got enough from the initial deal to at least take a nice vacation.

could you tell us about a sensual/sexual scene you’ve seen in a movie/serie that especially catched your attention and why

  • BOB crawling on top of Laura in Fire Walk With Me. Why: duh.
  • The climax of Compliance. Why: duh.
  • Irreversible’s rape scene. Why: duh.
  • The home invasion in Strange Days. Why: duh, plus mindfuckery.
  • Pretty much all of Spring Breakers. Why: duh, and particularly Vanessa Hudgens.
  • Killer Joe’s multiple scenes of sexual violence and intimidation. Why: duh, and Juno Temple.
  • Pretty much all of Sucker Punch. Why: duh, and it’s easily Zack Snyder’s most watchable film. (A backhanded compliment indeed.)
  • 1969’s Age of Consent. Why: it’s not super-sexy on it’s own, unless you’ve really fetishized age gaps, but Jesus H. Christ… a 24 year old Helen Mirren playing a frequently naked teenager who becomes fascinated with an old man on an island? Seriously, she is so fucking cute in this thing.
  • Sheryl Lee tied to the bed in John Carpenter’s Vampires.
  • Sherilyn Fenn fucking a monster in Meridian: Kiss of the Beast.
  • Also Sherilyn Fenn in Two Moon Junction, which is just generic softcore porn by today’s standards, but I watched it a lot when I was a teenager.
  • Also also, Sherilyn Fenn in Boxing Helena, which is still hotter as an elevator pitch than as an actual movie… but I’ve always loved how Jennifer Lynch’s mind works.
  • Everything that happens to Jennifer Jason Leigh in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It’s all so painful and degrading, and yet completely routine and normal.
  • Emma Thompson’s princess discussing English words that sound scandalous in French, in Henry V. It’s adorably dirty, even if I don’t understand a word of it.
  • The LSD trip in Across the Universe. It’s only sort-of sexual, but as interstate drug binges that end in a bunch of good-looking kids piled on top of each other in the grass while they peer through the seams in reality and giggle, it’s at least sensual.
  • The bathing scene/credit sequence in Much Ado About Nothing. There’s just something ridiculous-yet-jubilant about an entire villa full of randy pseudo-Italians ripping off their clothes and jumping into the public baths en masse in slow-mo.
  • Everything happening with Isabella Rossellini and Kyle MacLachlan in Blue Velvet. Why: yet another duh.

Twin Peaks: The Return

It took me four years, but I finally finished The Return. And then immediately realized I should have re-watched Fire Walk With Me first. So I did, and instantly knew I needed to watch the first two seasons again. And now that I’ve done that, I need to watch The Return again, because I can suddenly see all the details I missed. At this point, I’m stuck in a bit of an out-of-order narrative loop, which I believe David Lynch would fully appreciate.

Why’d it take four years to watch a show I’d waited 25 years to see? Probably the same reason I still haven’t watched season 3 of Noah Hawley’s Legion, my favorite show of the last ten years. Once it’s done, it’s done… there will be no more, possibility will have become reality, and a thing I love will finally be over. I hate endings.

But as endings go, I am in awe of The Return. First, it is quite simply the most beautiful 18 episodes of television ever produced… the OG show could be good looking now and then —even striking, particularly for its time— but nothing compared to what Lynch produced in 2017. Case in point: I’m unlikely to ever again see something on TV as eye-popping, disturbing, or hypnotic as “Part 8”.

Second, after a lifetime of incredible, Lynch-supplied opportunities —from the grotesque, doomed majesty of Dune, to Blue Velvet, to the original Twin Peaks— Kyle MacLachlan managed to turn what is likely the last of their major collaborations into something special. Granted, Black Lodge Cooper, Dougie, and BOB aren’t much like the hyper-verbal, Sherlockian special agent we all loved in 1990, but each is a distinct character who interacts with his world in strikingly different, broken ways, and each is never less than fascinating to watch.

Is it all perfect? Of course not… it can’t be, because Lynch makes art for himself first, and no vision so personal and strange could ever be ideal for anyone else. I wanted more Audrey, even though I knew her place in the story precluded it. I wanted more Ben & Jerry Horne, even though they could never be more than brief comic relief in a world inhabited by, well, this…

I wanted lots of things, but I got what I was given, and am grateful for it. Those 18 episodes can be dissected and reinterpreted for years to come, and anything that might have fallen by the wayside was probably best left there.