Birdwings

These are just some of my favorite or most memorable stuff I heard and watched this year, starting with songs embedded in the stories themselves, transforming their original meaning in all manner of pleasant ways going forward.

12 Monkeys was especially good at this task, and made excellent use of incidental music throughout. 'Arms of Mine' turned into my second favorite Otis Redding song because of it, and 'Don't You Forget About Me' by Simple Minds has been granted permanent rotation in my playlist. More impressively, this show elevated songs I hadn't found more than indifferently tolerable before, like Foghat's 'Slow Ride.' I always thought of it as a dumb hard rock song - not the worst but far from the best. This year, whenever it comes on the radio, it carries the charming image of Cole in sunglasses and a bad 70s shirt. This makes a huge difference in my outlook. Even a song I utterly loathe, 'I've Had the Time of My Life' (by... no idea, and I sure ain't looking it up), has been positively affected, in that while I still think the song is annoying, the last time it came on the radio at work I got a gigantic grin on my face in memory of Ramse.

Those were songs I already knew in other contexts. Meanwhile, Hard Core Logo introduced me to the Headstones (Hugh Dillon's band), and I went cruising around YouTube discovering that I liked the film version of 'Sonic Reducer' considerably more than the Dead Boys original (sorry) and that the Headstones did a powerful rendition of 'The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald' in 2019 which is much faster than the original, and done with great passion and a beautiful music video (also, Hugh Dillon is remarkably handsome without the mohawk).



( Other stuff )

Back when I saw Hard Core Logo, I succumbed to a fit of profanity-laced whimsy and wrote the start of a deranged crossover. Being terrible with numbers and scatterbrained, 1995 became 1996 in my head, and I sent the band to Sunnydale. Since then I have discovered my mistake, and so must declare this fic idea officially dead because there is no bridging the gap year between film and show. Probably for the best.

The part I wrote does not contradict the timeline, and even if it did, I have to post these 1,070 words for my own closure, so here they now live. Being only a fragment, I don't feel this belongs on AO3.

Contains loads of profanity and the high crime of being nuts. ( Read more... )

El Camino (2019). A deserved and necessary love letter to Jesse Pinkman, who was somewhat neglected in the final episodes of Breaking Bad. Since I was very attached to Jesse, that made me the perfect audience for this tense thriller about his flight from cops and criminals alike. It also made me realize I was far more fond of Breaking Bad than I'd thought at the time, because just a few months later here I was getting honestly nostalgic at the various returning characters featured. There were flashbacks to various dead people, everyone was exactly in character, and par for the course, it also looked beautiful and had a perfectly calibrated script. This film did right by Jesse, and I was therefore completely satisfied with it.

Hard Core Logo (1996). This is probably not something I would have ever watched, except it was on YouTube and someone told me it had John Pyper-Ferguson in it, so I killed part of an afternoon and gave it a whirl. Although visually not that far removed from Brian Cullen's aesthetic, he once again sported a different accent and manner of movement, making him functionally unrecognizable (he wasn't even homicidal in this outing). All told, this makes it hard to define what I find so compelling in his characters. It also had Callum Keith Rennie, a name I vaguely recognized. Turns out he was also on Highlander, in an episode I almost never rewatch, because he was the only fun part of it. He's apparently a Big Deal in the realm of cult actors and this film is renowned and respected, and I had no idea in the world when I sat down with it.

( Spoilers, as I recap the whole thing below. )