Seen / read / heard 2021
— January
— February
— March
— April
— May
— June
— July
— August
— September
— October
— November
— December
— All caps, bold: MOVIE
— All caps, bold, asterisk: SHORT* or ONLINE VIDEO* or TV*
— All caps, Italics: ART / LIVE EVENT / THEATRE
— Italics, bold: Book or Short Story
— Quotation marks: “Audio”
— Italics: Article ^^
The wheels fell off…
December 2021 #
- 27/12 — “Harsh Reality” podcast ( < 20/11)
November 2021 #
28/11 — A SIMPLE PLAN
22/11 — RED NOTICE
October 2021 #
22/10 — FOUR HOURS AT THE CAPITOL*
22/10 — IMPEACHMENT: AMERICAN CRIME STORY*
September 2021 #
15/09 — SCHUMACHER
10/09 — “Time Machine: The Score”
06/09 — TURNING POINT: 9/11* ( < 05/09)
August 2021 #
15/08 — UNTOLD*
14/08 — I CARE A LOT
13/08 — NOBODY
13/08 — MONEYBALL
July 2021 #
( < 19/07) — “Lolita Podcast”
( < 18/07) — MONEY HEIST*
15/07 — DINNER IN AMERICA
( < 13/07) — EXTERMINATE ALL THE BRUTES*
( < 12/07) — “Toxic: The Britney Spears Story”
10/07 — AMORES PERROS
09/07 — LUCE
06/07 — The Referendum
“The Referendum can subtly poison formerly close and uncomplicated relationships, creating tensions between the married and the single, the childless and parents, careerists and the stay-at-home. It’s exacerbated by the far greater diversity of options available to us now than a few decades ago, when everyone had to follow the same drill. We’re all anxiously sizing up how everyone else’s decisions have worked out to reassure ourselves that our own are vindicated — that we are, in some sense, winning.”
05/07 — GHISLAINE MAXWELL: EPSTEIN’S SHADOW*
from Popbitch
“Obviously we can appreciate how tricky it would be to get anyone who knew Ghislaine Maxwell to talk about it on camera now. Even though she helpfully compiled all their names and contact details into a little black book, it’s no surprise the people listed in it aren’t lining up to tell their stories.
Maybe that’s why Sky’s new documentary “Epstein’s Shadow” relies so heavily on accounts from talking head Anna Pasternak, who gets described in the doc as an “Oxford Contemporary”.
That’ll be the 54 year old journalist, Anna Pasternak, who started at Oxford (Christ Church) in October 1985, will it? Talking about her 59 year old contemporary, Ghislaine Maxwell, who left Oxford (Balliol) the previous summer?
04/07 — THE TOMORROW WAR
04/07 — PETER RABBIT 2
01/07 — “Why is bestiality so disgusting?”
“Jonathan Haidt, in his book The Righteous Mind, talks about a phenomenon called “moral dumbfounding”. That is: when something is disgusting, and you want to say that it’s immoral, but you can’t think of a reason why it’s immoral. So you end up simply saying it just is. One example he gives is of a man going to the shops and buying an oven-ready chicken. That evening, before cooking it, he has sex with it. Then he cooks it and eats it. Is that immoral? Apologies if you’re having chicken for dinner, by the way.”
June 2021 #
28/06 — THE HITMAN’S BODYGUARD
27/06 — JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH
( < 23/06) — We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent by Nesrine Malik
20/06 — QUEEN & SLIM
( < 16/06) — GODFATHER OF HARLEM*
16/06 — TIME* ( < 12/06)
( < 12/06) — BO BURNHAM INSIDE*
11/06 — SAVE ME* ( < 25/05)
( < 02/06) Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him By David Henry and Joe Henry
May 2021 #
30/05 — A QUIET PLACE
30/05 — MARE OF EASTTOWN* ( < 27/04)
( < 21/05) — DEFENDING JACOB*
20/05 — Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It by Chris Voss ( < 03/05)
20/05 — THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD* ( < 14/05)
‘The Underground Railroad’ Is Not a History Lesson. It’s a Mirror.
Mr. Jenkins released a powerful 52-minute wordless video of those actors in costume, “The Gaze,” scored by the show’s composer, Nicholas Britell, a few days before the release of “The Underground Railroad.” In it, the viewer is regarded by actor after actor silently representing the “Black gaze,” or as Mr. Jenkins puts it, “the gaze distilled.”
“This is an act of seeing,” Mr. Jenkins wrote in a note accompanying “The Gaze.” “Of seeing them. And maybe, in a softheaded way, of opening a portal where THEY may see US, the benefactors of their efforts, of the lives they LIVED.”
19/05 — THE LONG SHOT
16/05 — THE BOYS IN THE BAND
( < 15/05) — Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe
15/05 — “The Herd”
Particularly “The Elephant in the Zoom”
David Kestenbaum follows one person as they try to find something—a set of words, some facts, a story—to convince Trump Republicans to get themselves vaccinated.15/05 — “The People in the Neighborhood” — Still Processing
A powerful — and revealing — aspect of the Derek Chauvin trial was the community it created out of strangers.
09/05 — THE STOWAWAY
( < 06/05) — Summer by Ali Smith
( < 05/05) — SUPERSTORE*
( < 03/05) — THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA*
02/05 — Louis Heren
“ When a politician tells you something in confidence, always ask yourself ‘Why is this lying bastard lying to me?'”
02/05 — “Why Conversations Go Wrong” — Hidden Brain
02/05 — Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam ( < 12/04)
April 2021 #
30/04 — NOMADLAND
21/04 — PALM SPRINGS
21/04 — MAN LIKE MOBEEN* ( < 24/03)
18/04 — “Sideways: Mental Athletics”
17/04 — WHITE TIGER
16/04 — PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN
How “Promising Young Woman” Refigures the Rape-Revenge Movie
13/04 — SOUND OF METAL
05/04 — FATAL ATTRACTION
05/04 — SEASPIRACY
04/04 — THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT* ( < 01/04)
March 2021 #
28/03 — SAINT MAUD
28/03 — Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle with Coronavirus by Jonathan Calvert & George Arbuthnott ( < 18/03)
27/03 — THE DAWN WALL
26/03 — THE MULE
Pete Davidson & John Mulaney Review Clint Eastwood’s The Mule - SNL As Clint Eastwood gets weirder & weirder in his old age (or maybe he always was), a clip that explains everything and to be rewatched.
25/03 — WIDOWS
24/03 — OPERATION VARSITY BLUES: THE COLLEGE ADMISSIONS SCANDAL*
22/03 — ALLEN V. FARROW* ( < 21/03)
20/03 — FINDING THE WAY BACK
14/03 — Coming Up For Air by George Orwell ( < 16/02)
14/03 — YOUR HONOR* ( < 02/03)
14/03 — MESSAGE FROM THE KING
09/03 — ESCAPE FROM PRETORIA
February 2021 #
21/02 — SNATCH
20/02 — PROSPECT
19/02 — WAYNE* ( < 15/02)
19/02 — The New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World by Kehinde Andrews ( < 05/02)
18/02 — CALL MY AGENT* ( < 24/01)
17/02 — “Trump Emerges From Impeachment Trial With Sturdy Backing From GOP Voters
Compared with the Jan. 6-7 survey, the share of Republicans who said Trump is very or somewhat responsible for the events fell 14 points, to 27 percent. Over the same time period, the share of GOP voters who blamed President Joe Biden for the riot increased 4 points (to 46 percent) while the share who blamed congressional Democrats increased 10 points (to 58 percent).
14/02 — “Siding with the Enemy” — Sideways podcast
14/02 — HER
13/02 — ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI
13/02 — “1 in 73 Million” — Sideways podcast
12/02 — THE VAST OF NIGHT
10/02 — World’s top 15 hedge fund managers made $23.2bn in total last year
That is the equivalent of more than six Marks & Spencers or more than the gross domestic product of
theIceland or Zambia (population: 18 million).07/02 — GREENLAND
04/02 — THE NEW AGE OF EMPIRE: IN CONVERSATION WITH KEHINDE ANDREWS
03/02 — BILL & TED FACE THE MUSIC
02/02 — “Rousseau on Inequality | Discourse on Inequality, 1755”
01/01 — Lace the air with LSD
At one of the apartments in Bedford Street, White would serve his guests drinks surreptitiously laced with drugs, while in the other Gottlieb’s men filmed the effects through a mirror. Two years later, in Operation Midnight Climax (subproject 42), White set up another safehouse in San Francisco, this time as a brothel, so that Gottlieb could gather evidence of ‘how people behave during and after sex’.
January 2021 #
31/01 — THE ASSISTANT
30/01 — THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME
30/01 — IT’S A SIN* ( < 29/01)
29/01 — *
28/01 — Who will we be after GameStop?
But if we view the GameStop pump through the lens of other internet-led populist movements, the first big one usually isn’t the biggest one. For instance, if this is the election of Donald Trump, we’ve still got Charlottesville and the Capitol Insurrection ahead of us. Gangnam Styles sets the stage for Baby Sharks, and so forth.
26/01 — BACK* ( < 23/01)
22/01 — SEDUCED: INSIDE THE NXIVM CULT* ( < 20/10)
20/01 — DICK JOHNSON IS DEAD
20/01 — THE HILL WE CLIMB*
( < 18/01) — I AM A KILLER*
18/01 — PRETEND IT’S A CITY* (< 17/10)
From there, Scorsese cuts to the dramatic 2015 sale of Pablo Picasso’s Les femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’) at Christie’s New York. Archival footage shows the house’s veteran auctioneer Jussi Pylkannen calling out the hammer price of $160 million, which at the time marked a world auction record. What fascinates Lebowitz is the fanfare surrounding that sale. When the painting was trotted out, there was little reaction, but as soon as the canvas sold, the crowd clapped profusely. “We live in a world where they applaud the price, not the Picasso,” Lebowitz says. 1
17/01 — TENET
17/01 — LUPIN* ( < 16/01)
15/01 — TENET
14/01 — THE 25 BEST FILMS OF 2020: A VIDEO COUNTDOWN*
The full list:
1— Time, 2— Minari, 3— World of Tomorrow episode 3, 4— Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always,5— I’m Thinking of Ending Things, 6— Bacurau,7— Nomadland, 8— David Byrne’s American Utopia, 9— Bad Education, 10— Swallow,11— Borat, 12— Babyteeth,13— Dick Johnson is Dead,14— Lovers Rock, 15— Shirley, 16— Vitalina Varella, 17— Ema, 18— Another Round, 19— Ms. Americana, 20— Beanpole,21— I’m Your Woman, 22— Wolfwalkers, 23— First Cow, 24— Many, 25— EmmaThe leftovers from 2019
8— Synonyms, 14— Midsommar, 16— Varda par Agnès, 17— Diamantino, 18— Transit, 19— Atlantics, 21— I Lost My Body, 23— The Hottest August,
The leftovers of the 20 must-see documentaries to explain the world in 2020
3— The Last Dance, 4– Spaceship Earth, 5— On the Record, 6—Welcome to Chechnya, 8— Our Planet, 10— Seahorse, 12— For Sama 13— Honeyland 14— Miss Americana, 16— Hail Satan?, 18— Midnight Traveler
13/01 — A HIDDEN LIFE
13/01 — The American Abyss
One group of Republicans is concerned above all with gaming the system to maintain power, taking full advantage of constitutional obscurities, gerrymandering and dark money to win elections with a minority of motivated voters. They have no interest in the collapse of the peculiar form of representation that allows their minority party disproportionate control of government. The most important among them, Mitch McConnell, indulged Trump’s lie while making no comment on its consequences. Yet other Republicans saw the situation differently: They might actually break the system and have power without democracy.
13/01 — 'Rent-a-person who does nothing’ in Tokyo receives endless requests, gratitude
Morimoto commits to “doing nothing” and basically just gives back-channel feedback when someone speaks to him. “I myself don’t like to be cheered on by others. I get upset when people simply tell me keep on trying. When someone is trying to do something, I think the best thing to do is to help lower the bar for them by staying at their side,” he explains.
( < 10/01) — Milkman by Anna Burns
10/01 — LITTLE WOMEN
10/01 — THE SERPENT* ( < 06/01)
07/01 — How to do Nothing by Jenny Odell ( < 25/12)
Diogenes thought every “sane” person in the world was actually insane for heeding any of the customs upholding a world full of greed, corruption, and ignorance. Exhibiting something like an aesthetics of reversal, he would walk backward down the street and enter a theater only when people were leaving.
05/01 — CLEMENCY
04/01 — THE RIPPER* ( < 21/12)
05/01 — HIGH FIDELITY* ( < 01/01)
“Delicious Vinyl” — Still Processing
01/01 — I’M YOUR WOMAN
01/01 — LIVE DIE REPEAT: EDGE OF TOMORROW