Welcome to the second of three LWON end-of-2023 lists. This time, we look back at the film, video, and television that has moved us this year.
For further view-spiration (viewspo?) here are the lists from four previous years:
Ann: Britbox’s Desperate Romantics: it’s a series that knits into a single feature about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood who are, if the series is to be believed, every one of them a goof or a nitwit or a prig or a cheery predator or John Ruskin, all flintily ambitious, all obsessed by art and sex, plus their sad or bouncy objects of worship. They’re very funny and are pretty much what you’d think of them if you look hard at their art.
Sally: Are you feeling so anxious that prestige TV can’t keep your attention from drifting to your problems? May I suggest Made In Heaven and Jee Karda, two shows that will wrestle your focus to the ground with sheer sensory overstimulation. Made in Heaven is about two friends who launch an Indian wedding planning company – a tough-as-nails lady-who-lunches and a gay man coming to terms with being out in a complicated family. Come for the absolutely dazzling fabric and beauty porn, stay for the investigations into class divisions that show Americans are not the only people with problems. This show has everything: lavish, luscious Indian weddings, attractive people with big problems, and didactic Afterschool Special-style episodic storylines whose over-the-top absurdities weave into far more serious, heartrending and genuinely nail-biting series arcs. These are complicated characters who you will love and root for even when they are at their most objectionable. Jee Karda is about a group of childhood friends who are given a narrow premonition of their futures – and the 30th birthday party at which they are finally allowed to understand the full picture. Like Made in Heaven, it’s an affecting drama in a shiny, frilly soap opera costume. Neither show will leave any bandwidth in your brain for critical analysis, or for your own problems. Just sit back and let the sequins, music and drama blast your brains out of your skull.
Cameron: I am always way behind the times, so I will recommend something that Helen recommended last year–Only Murders in the Building. Selena Gomez, Steve Martin, and Martin Short are unlikely crime-solving buddies and podcasters, and the guest list of actors is spectacular. (Should I say their names, or should I let you be surprised? Maybe being surprised is better.) In another late-to-the-party moment, I also fell in love with The Bear this year, and the second season is even better (I think) than the first. But here is maybe one you haven’t heard about: Candice Renoir. It’s about a mom who returns to the police force in the south of France after years spent raising her four kids. She uses her quirky intuition, she wears pink rain boots, she solves crimes, and handsome French men keep falling in love with her. What’s not to like?
Jessa: Whereas I track my reading on Goodreads and tend to give good books away as presents, my viewing history across all of the streamers seems lost to time. However, it did stick with me that I belatedly watched Call Me By Your Name this year and it hit me like a brick – the more so because I had dismissed it when it first came out as just another gay coming-of-age film riding the trend. I was high from the resonance of that artwork for the rest of the night. It reminded me what the medium of film is really for.
Eric W: I went to a penguin conference last September, which meant I listened to a lot of talks about penguins. On the second day, one of those talks was by Ursula Ellenberg, a researcher from the University of Otago in New Zealand. Her talk was about seeing the sea through the eyes of Humboldt penguins. (I think that may have been its title.) In it, she described her and Thomas Mattern’s work designing and building special cameras one could affix to penguins to get a sense of their underwater behaviors, and so on. All well and good. Then she showed a video from the first time such a camera had ever been deployed on a Humboldt penguin. She talked a little bit about the novel behaviors revealed–Humboldt penguins weren’t thought to forage near the ocean floor, for instance. None of us were listening, so transfixed were we by the footage. I won’t try to describe it except to say that the bit near the end, when all the penguins are rising to the surface, was the closest I’ve come to having a religious experience in a long time.
Helen: Instead of telling you “what to watch” I’m going to tell you “how to watch.” People, libraries are great. Do you want to stream Die Hard? I did. But I didn’t want to pay money for it. And so I put the DVD on hold at the library. And it was FREE. My usual library doesn’t have a lot on the shelves, but today I was at a different library and they had everything! The Detectorists! Jeeves and Wooster! Better Call Saul! Station Eleven! Gosh darn it, they had Stranger Things! I didn’t even know you could get that on DVD! So if you’re feeling annoyed by how much it costs to stream stuff, let me tell you: the library. (This probably works better if you live somewhere with well funded libraries. But I do, so. Yay.)
Image: DALL-E
and don’t forget, public libraries also have streaming options open to card holders! Acorn TV is through Hoopla and Kanopy has a lot of stuff as well.