I regret to inform you that YouTube and I are spending less time together.  My feed is a neverending hyperfocus on the drama of the moment, ranging from cringe interview moments to sexual assault.  Not to entirely blame YouTube for its recommendations; I watch a lot of video essay content and at some point it stopped serving me.  I’ve got enough on my plate that consumes my mental energy and I spent this past year trying to retrain the algorithm to suggest cozy camping content to give myself a break.  As a result, this 2024 listicle is going to focus on things that brought me actual joy – media that got me through another goddamn day on this planet.  While it will contain some content available on YouTube, those videos will be among a smattering of whatever I goddamn well please.

#10 Chants of Sennaar

I didn’t know I was searching for a cozy Tower of Babel story, but I found it in Chants of Sennaar.

As an indistinct robed character, you awaken in the basement of a large tower with no understanding of the place you are in or the languages written and spoken around you.  Eager to learn what your purpose is, you trek further up the building, observing as the language and the relative priorities of the society change.  From religion, to the army, arts, and science, the segregated populations have developed their own language with a select few understanding words from previous or future areas.  You learn the writing system through context clues obtained by reading signs or interacting with the citizens, with each language having its own unique sentence structure.  When you reach the top of the tower, the nature of the building and its people’s existence is revealed and as a player you get to make the ultimate decision on how to proceed with this knowledge.

Chants of Sennaar had a bit of a learning curve – It took me a moment to figure out how to obtain the information I needed to progress, but the longer I played what seemed like an impossible task in the beginning became engaging and fun.  I’m no stranger to puzzle games, but this felt like I was using an unexercised part of my brain because I’m very poor at learning languages, regardless of how earnestly I try.  Maybe if they were presented in the way Sennaar did I might actually retain them.

#9 Typhoid Mary: An Urban Historical

When I went up to Traverse City in the offseason I tried to get a table at The Flying Noodle on a Wednesday and didn’t even consider the possibility I’d have to wait for it since everywhere I’d visited up until that point was one step above abandoned.  When I was informed it may be 40 minutes until I could sit at the bar I decided to wander down the road to a bookstore to kill some time and I didn’t plan on buying something, especially since my visit to a bookstore in Petoskey earlier that day had been lucrative.  While browsing the front racks I was somewhat shocked to discover someone named Anthony Bourdain had written a book about Typhoid Mary and had to pick up the book to read the author’s bio to confirm it was, in fact, the Anthony Bourdain who had penned it.  Once it was in my hands it was a done deal – I needed something to occupy my mind and the book was small enough to fit in my tiny purse.

I had never read Anthony Bourdain’s books, but if you’ve seen an episode of No Reservations or Parts Unknown you’ll be familiar with Bourdain’s tone.  What started as a casual read while waiting for my food quickly turned into a 2 day reading frenzy.  Perhaps it wasn’t the wisest choice to read while I was putting myself at the mercy of a line cook who didn’t feel like washing his hands after he used the bathroom, but Bourdain’s storytelling almost made me forget that fact, as strange as that may sound.  Instead of approaching the tale of Mary Mallon as if she were a diseased rat spreading plague throughout the city, he provides perspective based on his experience as a chef, trying to contextualize why she might have made the decision to seemingly disregard the safety of those around her.  While it’s not 100% historically accurate, and he’s really just guessing how Mary felt about her constant persecution by the city health department and subsequent exile, it’s a good reminder that those who tell history are the ones who win.  Mary was a person who happened to pass along a disease without exhibiting symptoms of that illness in a time where the science on such things was just emerging, and maybe she was stubborn and misguided instead of an outright callous monster.  Although I don’t want to give her too much credit since she knew about being an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid and lied about her identity to work at a maternity ward in a hospital, so… it’s a mixed bag.

#8 Ren

Each year I tend to get hyperfixated on one artist.  2019 was Billie, 2020 Ashnikko, 2021 Mothika, 2022 Scene Queen, 2023 Oliva Rodrigo and 2024… I thought it would be Chappell Roan, but then I heard “Animal Flow” back in September and I was kind of screwed.

The lead singer of The Darkness started a react channel, Justin Hawkins Rides Again, as a bit of a side project.  I dabble in every so often because Justin has great insights and is also incredibly endearing.  Usually he films in what I call “default streamer setup”, so I was particularly intrigued when I saw in my recommended videos a thumbnail of Justin in some random car talking about “The Ren Situation”.

It’s a long story and you can hear Ren talk about it himself, but essentially he licensed a sample off of BeatStars where the producer of the beat stole a sample of a Bulgarian choir and was then strong-arming Ren to get him to pay the royalties on the sample he stole.  Lawyers got involved, the producer and his girlfriend did some shadier stuff behind the scenes, and ultimately Ren decided to take his song down.  Needing a place to funnel the anger, Ren wrote a diss track against Kujo and uh… it sure is something.

I understand being angry about someone fucking with your livelihood, but where you lose me is stewing in it long enough to write and record a song where you get to cosplay as Eminem and reenact your violent fantasies over and over while filming the video.  The ‘just cause I said it doesn’t mean I’m gonna do it’ defense really irks me, and I side eye dudes who listen to songs detailing domestic abuse (or in Em’s case murder) without having some kind of negative reaction to it.  I get that it’s art and it’s cathartic, but it’s the audio equivalent of dudes that punch walls instead of women and think that won’t escalate to something else.  “KUJO BEAT DOWN” is not nearly as intense as “‘97 Bonnie and Clyde” or “Kim”, but it definitely made me sick to my stomach to watch him scream at Kujo’s girlfriend while tied up and gagged that he thought she liked it rough, like… oof, dude.  Maybe unpack that a bit.

Also, kind of silly to include a ‘I don’t condone bullying and harassment’ statement when you are literally pretending to physically hurt someone.  What do you think that kind of imagery will inspire in unhinged fans, y’know?  I wouldn’t put it out into the universe is what I’m saying.

I’m not in the camp that partaking in violent art causes violent people cause then I’d be more of a fucking hypocrite than I already am, but after I saw this response I was kinda like, eh, I think I’m good on this guy.  But I couldn’t ignore the fact Justin Hawkins was defending him, and so I decided to hunt down a copy of “Sick Boi” to see the origin story and then the lightbulb went off.  If I wrote a song where I detailed the pain of being consistently gaslit by doctors and someone else was trying to make money off of it?  I lived that shit and it fucking suuuuuuucks.  Maybe I wouldn’t have made a song where I beat the shit out of Kujo, but lord knows I would have made that shit public as hell and been as loud as I fucking possibly could be about it.

Ren’s history with chronic illness is unique, but also incredibly relatable.  His music is heavily inspired by it, and I will warn ahead of time, some of his songs can be intense – I can’t listen to a song like “Hi Ren” all that often because it’s emotionally draining.  But I kept digging and dug what I heard.  He wears his references on his sleeve, Em being the most obvious one, but I was reminded of Emilie Autumn quite a bit in the theater of addressing his mental illness.  His work is a remix of elements from Kendrick, Childish Gambino, Rage, his vocals are pure Sting…  My buddy even said Jaden Smith, and yeahhhh… That tracks.

I pretty much listened to the Sick Boi album on repeat, “Illest Of Our Time”, “Murderer”, “The Hunger”, and “Uninvited” being the tracks I gravitated to the most often.  The “Money Game” and “Love Music” series are also worth listening to.  I’m pretty sure it’s because of “Animal Flow” that I put myself in the top 2% of Ren listeners on YouTube music (which seems impossible considering I just heard about this guy in September, so I have some general questions about how that’s calculated).  What can I say?  I’m a sucker for an Animal Farm reference.

#7 Mafia Nanny

Over the years the pool of web comics I consume gets smaller and smaller (and I’ve been at this for a while).  Several years ago I pivoted to WebToon and uh… It kind of fell off, ngl.  When it recommended Mafia Nanny to me I was intrigued but I wasn’t really interested.  There are so many mafia boss romance stories out there, and this would be hosted on a platform that is very much PG rated, so I unfairly assumed it would be like its contemporaries and fail to engage me.  I was very, very wrong.  Not only do I look forward every Monday to the upload, I care deeply about these characters.

Davina works for ENA, an elite organization of trained professional nannies that go above and beyond to protect their wards from potentially violent situations.  Raised in a crime family herself, Davina understands the potential threats and wants to provide this protection to a child who similarly has a target on their back by way of their birthright.  Well, not just any child – she has a specific one in mind.  Davina suspects the Angelini family had a hand in the death of her own parents, and by being in charge of Mikey, the son of the underboss, may give her access to find out more information about her own tragic past.  What Davina didn’t expect, however, is how deeply she would grow to care about her charge Mikey and his incredibly attractive father Gabriel.

I started reading for the slow burn romance between Davina and Gabriel, but was instead captivated with Davina’s relationship with Mikey and the complicated situation of trying to separate Mikey from a path that would lead to his future life of crime.  Mikey is flippin’ adorable and it’s encouraging to watch him open up the more Davina exposes him to activities that channel his creativity and people who are uninterested in nurturing him into a mini Don.  All of the characters are well defined personalities with their own motivations, and there is a fair amount of comedy in the way they interact with each other.  The plot itself does more than provide filler between romantic encounters, and the pacing is fast enough that the comic continues to capture me. 

While Mafia Nanny doesn’t quite fill the deep hole left in my heart waiting for Purple Hyacinth to return, I am enjoying it immensely.  I want to give Mikey the world, he’s so stinkin’ cute.

Also, it’s not a 2024 recommendation since it’s been on hiatus since 2023, but read Purple Hyacinth.  It ends on a cliffhanger and it most likely won’t come back in 2025, but every moment of that comic is worth consuming, holy shit.

#6 Amelia Dimoldenberg

I’m kind of over Hot Ones.  Every once and a while you get a moment like Heidi Klum taking her shirt off or Alton Brown disregarding the premise and deciding to rate the taste of the sauces, but most of the time it’s someone like Ryan Reynolds overreacting to eating spice, being like Aw man, Sean, how did you find out about this thing I said in an interview once or this TV show cameo listed on my IMDB page? before downing a glass of milk and then hocking whatever project or product he’s selling now.

Plus I’ve tried those sauces and I’m not convinced these people aren’t acting.

The Sister City of Hot Ones is Chicken Shop Date, where Amelia Dimoldenberg takes a lucky person to the most unromantic of places in her endless quest to find true love.  Back when Billie came out with her new album, I was being recommended a ton of performances and interviews from the press cycle, and there was Amelia awkwardly telling Billie she’s captivated with her eyes before confessing she had another date planned after theirs.  Then I watched the next video of Amelia tricking Paul Mescal into telling her she’s gorgeous, or asking Cher if she believes in the Lock Ness Monster, aliens, or life after love.  Red carpet interviews, television appearances… it became the quickest obsession.

Her sense of humor is right up my alley – dry, smart, understated and disarming.  If comedy were a spectrum, with Jim Carey, Robin Williams and Mr. Bean on one end doing the absolute fucking most, she’s the exact opposite, among the likes of Flight of the Conchords and Richard Ayoade.  A lot has been said about manufactured authenticity and viewers having a hard time when the curtain has been pulled back and the movie magic is revealed.  Clearly Chicken Shop Date is a bit, but while you’re watching it you almost forget.  The Andrew Garfield episode flies so close to the sun because that man is good at being down bad for her, which led to a bit of an internet frenzy of speculation if they’re actually dating (they’re not).  Along with Ed Sheeran, Andrew tries to break the fourth wall and every plea he makes for Amelia to be earnest is immediately rebuffed, because it’s not the point, yeah?  These 10 years spent searching for love weren’t actually a plea for a relationship, but her audition into an industry that suits her well.  While she’s said in the past she’s a bit tired of the format, I can say I’ve loved the ride she’s been on up until now.

Amelia is leaps and bounds out of my league, but I can’t help but wish to have her treat me to some sad looking chicken nuggets while I try really hard to pretend I don’t find her attractive.

INTERMISSION BONUS ROUND: Top 10 ProZD Sketches

#5 Kentucky Route Zero

I think calling this a point and click adventure game isn’t quite accurate.  Kentucky Route Zero is a story rich metaphor about how a town adapts to the death of the industry driving it.  We first meet Conway delivering his last shipment of furniture before he retires, but he’s struggling to find the address written on the card.  He eventually meets Shannon, a TV repairwoman, who decides to assist him with his task after he sustains an injury.  Together they find their way onto the supernatural Route Zero, encountering several others on their own separate journeys – those who strive for more, those who are struggling to stick to the path they’ve always stuck to, and those who are studying and carrying on the legacy of those who lived before them.  It’s a surrealist experience that illustrates how addiction, poverty, capitalism and colonization have shaped the area, and how banding together helps everyone sustain.

I’m a fan of pixel/minimalistic art style (although Last Door was really pushing it with their depiction of Porriage, London).  The characters are faceless and a lot of the time only lit in shadow.  That doesn’t mean the style’s not impactful – if anything it makes it easier to connect with Conway and Shannon as you can place yourself in their shoes.  The color palette helps set the mood with its muted and muddy colors, along with the lighting; From the fluorescent bulbs brightly flooding the gas station in an otherwise pitch black area, to the flashlight sparingly guiding you down a river surrounded by bats, the setting feels unfamiliar and therefore uneasy.  Everything is slightly offkilter, where you’re only allowed to see that which is illuminated while the darkness obscures the actions happening in the background.  It’s like floating around in a dream.

The music is incredibly good; The atmospheric white-noise hypnotic nature of the scored parts integrate seamlessly with the overall tone of the game.  The songs performed by the characters in-game grinded my play to a halt as I sat to listen to them, and I’ve repeatedly listened to them multiple times since.  This past year I wanted to immerse myself in Appalachian-style folk music, which is probably why I listened to the Songbirds and Snakes soundtrack several times this year without actually enjoying the movie.  

I don’t want to give much of the plot away, but the story made me incredibly emotional.  I unfortunately streamed this game which forced me to hold myself together and pretend I didn’t want to sob my little heart out at the end.  I wanted to rescue these characters and provide them the happy ending they deserved, because although they might have not been saints, they persevered even when given very little options to move forward, or god forbid retire.  And Conway… he broke my heart in pieces.  We need to go back and save Conway.

#4 Lisa Frankenstein

I’ve had a hard time getting excited about any movies lately.  Back when I was a kid I would watch something and endlessly quote it – Wayne’s World, Austin Powers, Billy Madison, Vegas Vacation… they had lines that got stuck in your head.  But since Hot Rod I haven’t found a comedy I’ve been excited about on a level where I’ve remembered any of the dialogue or berated everyone I knew into watching it.  I thought maybe it was because I was old and incapable of absorbing new information, but then I watched Lisa Frankenstein and realized it wasn’t a brain problem, I was just watching the wrong stuff.

Lisa is a high school senior who, two years prior, watched an axe-wielding burglar murder her mother.  Now relocated to a new town, new school, and her father remarried to a tightly-wound woman named Janet, Lisa struggles to relate to anybody around her, least of all her cheerleader step-sister Taffy.  Finding comfort in a local abandoned cemetery, Lisa can escape to someplace peaceful and share her life with one gravestone in particular, that of an unmarried young man.  This proves to be awkward later when this young man is serendipitously resurrected and wanders over to Lisa’s house in order to be with her, which simultaneously horrifies and intrigues her.  Finally having a friend who listens without judgement and is physically incapable of telling her how she should feel, Lisa begins to open up again, empowered by the support The Creature gives her, until she begins to get carried away with this new found confidence by exploiting the means at which The Creature will go to win her affection and uh… hijinks ensue.

Everyone in this movie is amazing.  Kathrine Newton makes Lisa so relatable and endearing, even when she’s making incredibly questionable decisions.  My only real exposure to Cole Sprouse is tangentially through Alex Meyers’ Riverdale recaps and the endless search to find the people who won the Danimals sweepstakes, but he does an amazing job as an Ichabod Crane-looking silent Creature who has to express without words how much he adores Lisa.  I really loved Taffy, played by Liza Soberano, who is the type of character that would be a popular, snotty villain in other movies, but instead is an optimism bomb that allows Lisa to wave her freak flag and is constantly defending or protecting her because she’s family.  The movie is about a romance between a teenage girl and an undead boy, but the real love story was between the two sisters, leading to a very unhinged, but also incredibly sweet moment near the end of the movie where it’s like they finally understand each other for the first time.

Some people find Diablo Cody’s dialogue exasperating, but as a Juno and Jennifer’s Body defender, I find it charming.  My Top 5 favorite non-spoiler-y quotes:

“I’m really sorry you got electrocuted, Lisa,” delivered in the same tone as Lane Meyer consoling Ricky after his mom blew up.

“Your hair feels like easter grass.”

“I can always count on her to work on Saturdays cause she can’t get a date. It’s probably ‘cause she’s so flat chested.”

“You know, there’s this really attractive guy on Days of our Lives who has to wear an eyepatch.  He’s a very popular character and his patch doesn’t define him.  What’s his name?  Patch.  …His name is Patch.”

“When you cry it smells like a hot toilet at a carnival!”

Lisa Frankenstein is silly, campy, and colorful, carrying on the best parts of the 80s teen movies.  I initially checked it out from the library, watched it twice in 2 days, bought it on bluray, then watched it on repeat several times since then.  Please, please, watch it.  They don’t make comedies like this one anymore.

#3 Interview with the Vampire

AMC makes the best television about the worst people and I am living for it.  Not since Mad Men have I been so excited to see the next episode that I watch it on cable.

During summer vacation between my junior and senior year of college I read Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice and was intrigued by Louis and deeply, deeply hated Lestat.  My boyfriend at the time had the subsequent Vampire Chronicles novels, so the next summer after graduation I read The Vampire Lestat in the hope that Louis would return and instead watched as Anne Rice tried to rehabilitate a character that had absolutely no redeeming qualities in the previous novel.  This was also true of Queen of the Damned and I was so tired and gave up on the series.  Several years later when I bought my house I was looking for an audio book to entertain me while I spent copious amounts of time in my backyard pulling ivy.  I remembered loving Interview with the Vampire and decided to then revisit the previous novels and continue on through to the rest of The Vampire Chronicles since there was a lot of meat there and I was doomed to weed a seemingly endless amount of unkempt flower beds until my fingers were nubs.

This, in retrospect, was a mistake.  I white knuckled it up until Blackwood Farm until I finally said oh fuck this shit and swore off the rest of the series.  In the 1970s I think incest romance like Flowers in the Attic might have been a popular, taboo trope, but this book was written in 2002 and it was not my thing.  Paired with the strange way Anne Rice wrote about promiscuous underage girls who get abortions as weak wombed… I was done, thanks for all the fish.

When I heard AMC was working on a television series based on Interview I was suuuuuper ambivalent.  I still had fond memories of that novel because it was way before I was forced to read about Goblin jerking off Quinn in the shower, but I was confused how it would be adapted into a series, when, y’know, Louis and Lestat were slave owners that killed their workers and tortured a 5-year-old by turning her into a vampire.  I cautiously tuned in and was pleasantly surprised by the updates they made.

In present day, Daniel Molloy, now sober, older, and with decades of journalistic experience under his belt, is lured to Dubai to reconduct his interview of the vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac and chronicle what is essentially his and Lestat’s love story.  The time period was post slavery, Louis was a creole black man, and the story explicitly stated the relationship between Louis and Lestat was romantic.  It added a ton of layers to a story that admittedly was pretty one-sided and flat.  The cassette tapes of the first interview performed in the 1970s, the story we’re all familiar with, are literally thrown into the garbage during the third episode – a somewhat corny but symbolic gesture to note this is not your mother’s Interview, allow yourself to experience it as its own thing.  And as someone with complicated feelings with the source material, I was all in.

Mr. Molloy has more of a personality in this story, giving off BBE – Big Bourdain Energy, a former junkie who is now coasting on his journalistic reputation and after writing a memoir, making money by peddling online classes.  With more time to tell the story, everybody gets the opportunity to have a personality in this adaptation.  But the series doesn’t suffer from High Fidelity syndrome where you feel like it’s spinning its wheels to justify its existence; every story tells the tale of these 3 vampires, coping with creation and struggling to coexist with each other when they all have wildly different views of life and the purpose of The Dark Gift.  The show also doesn’t use the extra time to bolster up Lestat like Anne Rice did in her subsequent novels, thank Christ.

The side effect of this robust backstory, however, was pivoting my mindset for how I perceived these characters.  Louis is no longer a lonely, lamenting sad boy, who tells this particular story and is graciously sent off into the night ushering in Lestat as the primary narrator for the series going forward.  He is burdened by responsibility in the beginning, having to keep his family afloat after his father dies, pivoting to less… honorable means of income to keep them in a cushy house.  He is already living in the world as a minority, but additionally he’s tasked with keeping his sexual predilections under wraps as being gay isn’t acceptable during the time period either.  

Lestat remains a fucking bastard, hunting down Louis, separating him from his support system and turning him into a vampire when he was the most vulnerable, understanding Louis only wants to be loved, understood, and accepted.  He thought he saw something inside Louis that would make him a great killer, someone who would be willing to cut his brother just to keep his business going, but that assumption was completely misguided.  Louis rebelled against the need to feed on humans which caused Lestat to continually judge and torture him for not living up to his violent standards.  He refuses to allow Louis to grieve anything for any reason and continually parades him around like a lap dog while trying to distract him from contemplating anything except how good he now has it being blessed with Lestat and The Dark Gift.  Lestat is the sun, cruelly blinding and burning all around him for any offence or petty reason because he’s petrified of being left alone.  While Louis is selfish, angry and vengeful, I have much kinder views on the frustrating decisions he makes. At least hating Lestat is fun now since Sam Reid is so charming and we’re not burdened by Lestat’s constant self-aggrandizing inner monologue (yet, that is).  

Approaching Claudia’s creation like a baby to save the marriage was a genius addition.  A perpetually 14-year-old uncontrollable force of nature born out of a misguided attempt at redemption, forever stunted and used as a pawn.  Every adaptation of Interview has aged up Claudia because her age in the book is so fucking abhorant.  I understand making the choice of turning Claudia so young was Anne Rice’s way of processing her own daughter’s death and what must have been the uncontrollable urge to prevent that loss regardless of the consequences.  However, having the novel versions of Lestat and Louis do this was very, very strange, and Claudia’s young age limits her ability to have her own story separate from the two of them.  Claudia has much more agency in the show, and I love how they used her diaries as a point-of-view narrative device to understand her messy experience as a young vampire.

Claudia’s creation is the catalyst of the end of Lestat and Louis, and watching her pivot from acting out in response for being so sheltered to starting to gain her own independence and focus on trying to find belonging and purpose is a captivating story to follow.  The second season of Interview with the Vampire focuses on Louis and Claudia’s trip to Europe sans Lestat to find other vampires and encountering Armand and the rest of the Théâtre des Vampires in Paris.  The translation of the coven to the show is a master class – the aesthetic of the plays and how Claudia tries to fit in with the misfit bunch is pure theater kid drama, but ramped up to 11 since they’re, y’know, vampires pretending to be humans pretending to be vampires that kill audience members on stage.  If you’ve read the books you know how it ends, but I encourage you to experience the show for yourself to see how it all goes down.  It’s somehow even more heartbreaking, I can’t even get into it, you guys.

I’m curious how the tone of the show changes in the 3rd season where it looks like we’re time jumping to The Queen of the Damned.  Lestat is such a fucking narsisist so it makes all the sense in the world his arrogant ass would become a rock star.  I’m a little confused why we’re sticking with 70s rock since the timeline has been updated and the revival of glam rock died in the 2000s after nobody could do it better than “I Believe in a Thing Called Love”.  The series does have its moments of humor, surprisingly, and Lestat’s quippy comebacks are as entertaining as they are egregious, so I’m bracing myself for a lot more of that.  At least we can all agree he’s better than Armand.

#2 Staged Reading of The Prequel Trilogy

This rabbit hole starts with a series of eulogies and ends in a trilogy.

Back in 2015 I was mindlessly flipping channels searching for something to distract myself and stumbled upon a call-in show where participants could ask a panel of comedians to predict their future, and even in my state of dissociation I was pretty sure Amy Poehler happened to be there operating an 8 Ball.  I stuck around, perplexed as to what I was watching, and pieced together it was The Chris Gethard Show – a public access talk show hosted by Gethard where he would invite comedians to come on and participate in the thinnest of premises while taking calls from the audience.  Fusion was going to be the home of its transition to cable, and in preparation they were airing a bunch of older episodes to lure in viewers I guess?  Well, it worked on me and suddenly I was mildly obsessed with the weirdest fucking thing I’d seen on television.  It had a Pee Wee’s Playhouse vibe where Chris and his co-host Shannon would invite a guest onto their wacky little set and a series of characters would drop in to contribute to the chaos.  There was a human fish who was a dude wearing a swimsuit, flippers and goggles that would ask a random question of the guest, some lady hula hooping the entire time, Vacation Jason wandering in wearing a lei and sunscreen indoors to chastise Chris and talk about how he’s always on vacation… just bits on bits on bits.  And the theme of each show was loose as it was unhinged.  They once recreated Duck Hunt in real life so callers could shoot plastic balls at Gethard and Wyatt Cenac.  Vacation Jason once kidnapped the human fish and Gethard’s crew had to wrestle Jon Hamm in a sumo suit to win him back (although Hamm didn’t put up much of a fight, to be fair).  The best episode of TCGS, maybe the best episode ever on television, was when Paul Sheer and Jason Mantzoukas dropped by to guess what was in a random dumpster.  It doesn’t sound like anything exciting, but I promise you it is a captivating 43 minutes that ends in a truly shocking way.  TCGS ran for two seasons on Fusion, then one season on TruTV before the show was ultimately cancelled.  I was pretty sad because there wasn’t anything like it then or since – just a bunch of weird comedians hanging out and asking viewers to contribute to their nonsense.  The community felt very cozy and even parasocially it felt nice to be a part of it.

The Chris Gethard Show used to host a sandwich night the day before Thanksgiving, where people could experience some community if they didn’t have someplace else to be.  Even after TCGS dissolved in 2018, sandwich night continued its legacy, hosted remotely during Covid.  See, back in 2020 the UCB theater closed, and clearly there weren’t other spaces open for comedians to perform, which, y’know, cut into a lot of people’s livelihood.  Since streaming was really the only way to garner a live audience, Chris Gethard decided to rebrand Chris Gethard Presents to Planet Scum, a twitch channel that hosted a different show each night.  Sandwich night 2020 was the first time I tuned in, and digging the vibe I continued to tune in multiple nights a week to have some place to hang out when most of us weren’t leaving our houses.

The flagship show, What’s in the Box?, was hosted by Gethard, a few of his buds, and random guests that decided to pop by.  I can’t even begin to unpack What’s in the Box? mythos because it would take up thousands of words (AND I DON’T HAVE TO since it turns out that Erik Germ just created a video about the history of the show, god bless him), but I will say this – There initially was a singular box that held one item you could call into the show and guess what it was, similar to the legendary dumpster episode of TCGS.  If you guessed what was in the box, you won it, along with a cash prize.  This simple concept snowballed to a substantial amount of prize money funded by a secret benefactor, 70+ items spread amongst multiple boxes homed by Christi Chiello, Improv God Will Hines, and Jason Mantzoukas, a committee to approve/reject new rules to the game that sometimes an Australian man wearing a full green body suit named Gorb The Destroyer would run, AND an anthropomorphic Pickle (hello baybeeee), a Canadian legend who kept a google document of all the guessed box items.  This new version of the game lasted 15 months before anybody won, and it just so happened that The Pickle was the one to guess all the items and win the ultimate What’s in the Box? prize.

Turns out Geth didn’t consider the fact that having a Canadian win this prize money would mean he’d have to pay taxes on the winnings, making Planet Scum, a channel already running on fumes, to now be hideously unprofitable.  That was when it was announced that on May 25th, 2022, Planet Scum would make its last broadcast.  There were a litany of previous guests to help send the channel off, but the most earth shattering moment was when The Pickle revealed they’ve been using their winnings to travel to the US to eat at Olive Garden and that, oh by the way, they had edited the google doc to put wrong answers in it so The Pickle could be the only one with the real answers to all the items making it impossible for anybody else to win.  That is some long con 3D chess bullshit right there.

One of What’s in the Box?’s frequent guests was producer Patrick Cotnoir, who additionally appeared on The George Lucas Talk Show, a UCB staple that was also forced to migrate online.  I had seen the main Star Wars movies but I had little opinion on them other than Carrie Fisher was a badass and being generally disappointed in myself because my desire to fuck Adam Driver directly influenced my opinion on Kylo Ren.  But I cannot stress to you enough how little you need to know about Star Wars to enjoy watching GLTS.  At the beginning of each show, in THE SAFEST OF SPACES, “Watto” asks a random audience member who has no experience with GLTS what they think the evening has in store and there are NO wrong answers.  In the razorist thin of premises GLTS is exactly what it promises to be – George Lucas in all his personable charisma hosts his own talk show.  Producer Patrick, “Watto” and “George Lucas” invite guests on to be interviewed by a CGI slave owner and a retired filmmaker, and everyone is on board and doesn’t really question it.  It is, without exaggeration, the most bizarre and simultaneously best thing I’ve ever seen. 

During the pandemic they would stream GLTS once a week, most of the time for an Irishman+, unless it was a charity stream, then they’d go for like… anywhere from 12 to 36 hours.  They would watch every Star Wars movie, or every Air Bud movie, or an entire series of television while inviting guests on, meeting ridiculous stretch goals like throwing a sandwich out a window, all while raising money for a good cause.  I don’t want to pick favorite guests (I totally do), but Rachel Zegler, D’Arcy Carden, Paul F. Thompkins, X Mayo, and Rich Sommer Steven Charleston have had truly iconic moments on the show.  But independently George kicks down the door and this OUT OF POCKET GLTS moment might be my two favorites, hooooly shit.

The amount of canon they’ve built up in that time (they joke it’s somewhere close to 500 hours, but like.. it’s probably not that far off) is just absolutely massive.  Watching the show is like hearing people speak a foreign language at first, but the longer you immerse yourself the easier it gets to speak it.  You’ll know when you’ve become a Gerogie Porgie when you understand that grabbing an item close to you for show and tell is called a Little Ricci, that the butter bell announces new Butter Boy and Butter Girl (and tangentially Butterbear) items, that you’re not allowed to make fan art of Gizmo, or Grogu, or god forbid Grogizmo and sell it on a T-shirt, and you mourn the Bumper Factory’s closure.  When the world opened back up a few years ago they stopped streaming online at any amount of regularity, but they have the occasional live events to carry on the show.  They’re broadcast on YouTube afterward so you can experience them in all their glory.

SO YEAH, in summary, The Chris Gethard Show lead me to Planet Scum, What’s in the Box?, The George Lucas Talk Show and finally to this list item – the staged readings of the Star Wars prequel trilogy.  The most random group of actors and comedians gathered over 3 glorious nights to chaotically reenact the movies.  Haley Joel Osment plays Anakin and Vic Michaelis plays Obi-Wan and it’s honestly perfect casting.  The character choices by everyone is unexpected and hilarious, with several cameos from people/things you may recognize but do not expect to be in the Star Wars universe.  I guarantee watching these will cure whatever ails you.

#1 Pat Finnerty

Every app on the planet does a yearly wrapped except YouTube, which is a kindness I don’t deserve because I think I would die knowing how many hours I spent on that site.  The only thing I’d be curious about is the percentage of watch time spent in the Pat Finnerty What Makes This Song Stink universe, because good god, I’m embarrassed to even admit how many times I’ve rewatched those videos.

Pat didn’t make the cut for last year’s list by one day – Todd in the Shadows tweeted about finally watching the WMTSS of “Try That in a Small Town”, and curious as to what that possibly could be about, I clicked on through and opened myself up to a very, very niche part of the internet.  It seems like Pat takes egregious songs personally, breaking apart (in detail, sometimes with Beato Burners) what makes them the absolute worst.  In the case of Train the video addressed a long standing feud, or in the case of Lenny Kravitz, an earnest attempt to identify if “American Woman” or “Fly Away” is worse since they’re terrible in completely different ways.  Zach was the one who fucked him by bringing “Try That in a Small Town” to Pat’s attention, but we all benefitted from the resulting odyssey.

Pat doesn’t just rip on these songs, but is a masterful storyteller, walking us through his thoughts on music, life, and why people sit in front of the board for no reason during documentary interviews.  His video on Weezer’s “Beverly Hills” starts by analyzing the musical trajectory of a once critically acclaimed band, and leads us into a retrospective on youth, what was actually good or what is good by nature of being connected to a simpler time (AKA The Weezer Conversation).  I got strangely emotional watching him and his cousin Mike listening to an album they loved in high school as they drove to B-Mart to pick up some dry-ass chickens.

While Pat only has a handful of videos, seemingly inconsequential tangents become integral parts of the vast and expansive lore.  I now know more about Kid Rock, Pat Moynihan and Nickelback than I ever wanted to, but if it means I get to hear the origin story of Tommy Turtle I’m in.  I’m taking all my musical and culinary opinions from the Blinds To Go Guy.  Lloyd the Landlord might not have great takes on the feasibility of taking a bath as a tall dude, but he’s got some really interesting opinions on how MGK snagged Megan Fox.  

Similar to Planet Scum, the viewers became a somewhat integral part of the WMTSS canon – whether they attend a Stop The Train rally, can hit a perfect Deez Nuts only seconds after waking to prove Jason Aldeen can’t sing, or be the one to tell Pat he just needs to put something in the Dunkin cup so the pedal mobile can operate while displaying The Thing.  Game for anything, they’ll champion any random cause, like buying guitars signed by Pat Moynihan and Brad Arnold or Pat’s dream to sell out and buy a hot tub.  As someone whose happy place is sitting on a deck in an HT downing several cans of moonshine cocktail, I appreciate the quest, but it was what was created to meet the end goal that was truly special.

Justin Hawkins is tangentially involved in two things on my list this year, which speaks to how great his taste is.  

I cannot possibly recommend watching Pat’s channel enough.  The uploads aren’t frequent, but they’re bangers every time they drop.  I suggest starting from the beginning with 3 Doors Down’s “Kryptonite” and watching the format evolve and the universe expand, but if you only want to invest time in one video, it’s “Try That in a Small Town”.  WMTSS #8 is the culmination of every single song Pat’s ripped on, reminiscing on his back catalog of videos to prove definitively that this rage bait masquerading as a country hit is the worst thing any of us have ever listened to.

Honorable Mentions:

I can’t believe I thought covering traditional media this year would make this post shorter.  Jesus Christ.

Merry Christmas!  Since 2024 was and continues to be an absolute clusterfuck by every measurable standard, I’m going off-book and covering something short, sweet, and uncomplicated – a Muppet TV special from 1977 that is based on a children’s book written by Russell and Lillian Hoban that is basically a singing woodland critter reskin of O Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi”.

I read the book and I… I don’t know what is supposed to be happening in the second picture.

Emmet Otter transports you to a cozy and adorable world, with the performers utilizing and pioneering a number of different puppeting techniques in order to tell the story.  A full model of Frogtown Hollow, the town where Emmet and Ma Otter lived, was built for overhead pan shots, along with a working set that was designed to hide the performers and present the puppets as fully autonomous creatures.  For wide shots the puppets were built and controlled like marionettes, editing out the strings later to make them appear as if they were walking by themselves.  Emmet Otter could even appear to row a boat on a real (set) river in part to newly-developed radio controlled animatronics.  This is also how the team achieved one of their most show stopping special effects (perfected later for The Muppet Movie and The Great Muppet Caper), Kermit riding a bicycle.

Emmet and Ma are down-on-their-luck otters struggling to make ends meet after Pa Otter’s death.  Ma runs a laundry business by washing other people’s clothes in her washtub and Emmet does odd jobs around town using his Pa’s old tools to repair things like broken-down steps and fences.  With Christmas soon approaching, they prepare for yet another disappointing holiday season devoid of presents and feasts of food.  They instead make-do with what they have, decorating a sole Christmas branch that gives the Charlie Brown tree a run for its money.

With Emmet’s Frogtown Hollow Jubilee Jug Band all set to play Barbecue, and Ma Otter’s costume all sewn up, the pair, ignorant of each other’s plans, head to Waterville to win money in order to have the Best. Christmas. Ever. And also to, y’know, repurchase a washtub and tools so they don’t have to starve to death.

Ma Otter sings the most Carpenters-ass song, which shouldn’t surprise me since Paul Williams contributed to a few of those as well.  Emmet and his buddies are thrown for a loop when someone else decides to butcher BBQ before them, so they quickly pivot to a stinkin’ cute song about brothers.  Pleased with their odds, Emmet and Ma think they have the competition in the bag… That is until The Riverbottom Nightmare Band performs and blows both their songs out of the water.

I mean, come on.  They have what I think is a dancing catfish on stage just for vibes.  How could you possibly beat that?  Also, more rock songs should feature organs, can we bring that back??

Now without $50, a washtub or a box of tools, the gang heads home on the frozen river feeling pleased as punch with their poorly made decisions.  While moseying back humming their respective songs, Ma realizes their musical numbers, written independently of each other, would sound really well performed together.  They mashup their songs, and Doc Bullfrog, the well-to-do owner of Riverside Rest overhears them and is like, hey, you guys sound great, come work for me!

So the risks paid off!  Emmet and Ma no longer need to replace the things they hocked, they get to make regular money pursuing their real passion of playing music, AND THEY GET FREE MASHED POTATOES FROM RIVERSIDE REST WHICH IS THE REAL DREAM.  To thank Pa Otter for his guidance from beyond the grave, the newly formed group reprise his favorite song after their first shift.

“When the River Meets the Sea” nestles nicely among the peaceful afterlife songs that are comforting and simultaneously make me cry like a little baby.  It’s perfect, no notes.  The End.

Happy Thanksgiving!  We’re finally doing it; Over a year after my friend requested it, we’re finally digging into The Wiz.  Directed by Sidney Lumet with a screenplay by Joel Schumacher (yes, that Joel Schumacher), this reimagining of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” has been reimagined, again, to take place in a post-apocalyptic New York City where we’re meant to believe that sentient trash cans will attack you, monkeys can ride Harleys and Diana Ross is 24-years-old.

I originally was going to post this on Halloween because of the costumes, but postponed it until today because this movie has wedged itself firmly in the Thanksgiving holiday canon.  And why not?  The beginning of The Wiz does a terrific job making us feel that cozy togetherness of a family gathering – arriving in a warm townhouse when it’s uncomfortably cold outside, placing your coat in a pile on the bed, playing pass the newborn baby, watching the game on TV, and tightly cramming yourself around a table in a dining room that isn’t designed to hold that many people.  It instantly brought me back to family Christmases of the past and filled me with that wistful nostalgia for that place and people you can never return to.  Although I almost had a coronary when I watched someone cut onions on the countertop without a cutting board LADY WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!

Let’s start with the massive elephant in the room.  Why oh why was Dorothy aged up to 24 to only be played by a 33-year-old woman?  It’s… Well, it’s bizarre.  Dorothy is elementary school-aged in the novel, and teenaged in the stage production of The Wiz, which informs a lot of the decisions she makes.  Watching a “twenty-something” kindergarten teacher constantly complain about how scared she is reads more cowardly than the lion.  And not to mention wanting to go home to an Aunt Em who minutes before was trying to kick her out of the house… what is she returning to?  She’s a grown-ass woman; she can live on her own.  But I’m getting ahead of myself… Stephanie Mills, who was the original stage Dorothy, wasn’t given the role because Diana went over Berry Gordy’s head (Motown Records owned the rights to the movie) and convinced the producer Robert Cohen to cast her.  Universal agreed to the proposal because she’s a big star, so, y’know, butts in seats and all that.  The director that had signed on, John Badham, quit the project after her casting.

Diana Ross is a powerhouse; an absolutely unshakeable talent.  I feel the need to state this lest y’all think this is a condemnation of her abilities as a performer, because even though her singing makes me cry, I’m not going to shy away from the fact she was an incredibly odd choice for Dorothy.  She looks like she should have learned these lessons already.

Even surrounded by family, Dorothy is not feeling the love.  She places herself on the outside of this gathering for some reason, and then is chastised by her Aunt for her arrested development.  Em suggests Dorothy, a kindergarten teacher, would be a great candidate for a position at the high school, but Dorothy is afraid to pursue it, perhaps because it requires a completely different skill set.  She only has a minute to process getting kicked out of the house before her dog Toto flees out an open apartment AND building door into an unprecedented snowstorm, and honestly if my dog did that I’d just let it die cause clearly we have different priorities.  Dorothy is kinder than me, however, runs after the pup and gets swept up in a snow cyclone and transported to OZ.

Look, I’ve lived in Michigan my entire life and not once have I encountered or even heard about a snow cyclone.  A snowclone, if you will.  This is one of the goofy things that had to be inserted into the script when the story was wholesale transplanted to New York City from Kansas.  This is a fantasy story, however, so I’ll let it slide, but I’m not going to overlook how clunky it feels.

Dorothy is launched like a missile into a kiddie pool filled with sawdust and surrounded by the creepiest sentient paper dolls I’ve ever seen.  The OZ sign she crashed through, cause, y’know, she couldn’t be in a flying brownstone, fell on the wicked witch of the east, Evermean, and killed her good and dead.  The good witch of the north, Miss One, congratulates Dorothy on her murder and gives Dorothy the wicked witch’s silver shoes (because the shoes in the book are silver, not red, which I’m sure you already know because that’s Oz 101, but I’d be remiss not to add it here).  Dorothy is like, oh no, I have to get home to the life I don’t like and Miss One is like, ok, cool, The Wiz can help with that and points her in the direction of the yellow brick road that will lead her and Toto to The Emerald City.

Dorothy begrudgingly accepts this quest, but not before she sings another sad song talking about how she’s sad and blah blah blahhhh.

Diana Ross suffers from what I call “Hopelessly Devoted Syndrome” in this movie.  For some reason they added like 3 songs for her to sing, but they’re all the kind of songs where, if you were watching at home, you’d take the moment to get up and use the bathroom or grab a snack.  “Soon As I Get Home” originates with the stage show, but compiled with “Can I Go On?” and “Is This What Feeling Gets?” makes Dorothy look like a Debbie Downer Sad Sack.  Legit, Dorothy sings 6 solos in this movie and they’re all slow and grind the plot to a halt.  Not that Diana Ross doesn’t sell it – her vocal performance really is the only saving grace for her character – but all this to say The Wiz has a massive pacing problem.

After wandering around a severely blighted NYC, Dorothy runs into a… scarecrow?  These crows give me Dumbo vibes and immediately I’m on edge.  But oh my god, Michael Jackson as The Scarecrow is easily my favorite performance of this film.

The tiled pillars breaking free from their concrete prison to surround the travelers is inspired, but I cannot stop laughing at these actors pretending the trash cans with teeth hot glued to them are eating their arms. 

Thankfully with all their limbs intact and hot off his first victory against sentient garbage, the Lion leads Dorothy through a sea of strippers/drug dealers only to get knocked out by their potent “perfume”.

~tickle~

The poppies in the book are a danger to The Lion, Dorothy and Toto because they are living beings that are susceptible to the effects of opium, not because The Lion was dumb and led them into a trap.  When the Scarecrow and Tin Man come to their rescue in The Wiz, the Lion is ashamed his hubris lead Dorothy and Toto into danger, but Dorothy comforts him with yet another slow song to motivate him to nut the fuck up and keep on going while he licks her like he’s been cast in 2019’s Cats.

This song made more sense in context if The Lion didn’t already show he could be brave by fighting off enchanted demon puppets, ‘cause he’s capable of being a Lion in a very Lion-like way.  Regardless, “Be a Lion” is a very sweet song, and it shows how Dorothy is kind and nurturing to her friends, reminding the Lion that even though he may make mistakes, he can persevere.  It’s just weird they chose to place it after the ‘we got drugged by prostitutes’ scene.  Also, not to be ‘that guy’, but this is supposed to be a kids movie, right?

ANYWAY, Dorothy and her friends finally make it to Oz and holy shit, this is so vogue coded, I love it so much.

The Wiz, instead of forcing his citizens to wear green-tinted glasses, changes the color story of his city based on his own whims, clearly illustrating his curation of colors directly influencing the trends.  The Emerald City sequence, filmed in the shadow of the World Trade Center, is fucking massive, and unless you can find me another example otherwise, may be the most dancers used at once in an American-made movie.  The set designer had to accommodate 22 different playback speakers in order to avoid the dancers in the back from experiencing an audio delay.

This one musical number required 1200 different costumes, three for each of their 400 dancers, one in each color The Wiz transitioned to, and everyone looks so chic!  I can’t get over how the costume department could possibly operate at that level considering the scale.  The makeup and costuming in The Wiz in general has been a standout in the world of musical movies – I especially appreciate the Tin Man being compiled of old coffee cans and the Lion having beautiful hair styled to look like a mane – but man, it really makes you wish they took a second pass at the Lion’s dusty bath mat coat.

After the party has concluded, the Wiz requests to see witch-killer Dorothy sans her eclectic sidekicks.  This is a change from the original story that allows Dorothy the opportunity to show some agency by sticking up for her friends while painting The Wiz as someone who is accustomed to convince powerful people to do his bidding for him and discarding those who he considers useless.  The fearsome foursome make their requests to the all-powerful fire-breathing glitterball, and we’re deprived of this jaunty song because the Wiz indignantly hides in his big-ass head the whole time.  When Dorothy refuses to give him her shoes in exchange for their wishes, The Wiz sends her on a murder quest to whack the Wicked Witch of the West, which Dorothy is as pleased with as you’d think she’d be.  But realizing she has no choice she rallies the troops and they travel west to knock off some owner of a sweatshop.

Mabel King originated Evillene on Broadway and her vibes are perfect.  The gravelly way she addresses everyone around her, the confident way she looms over everyone despite being shorter, the ruthless way she harms Dorothy’s friends to get what she wants – she’s so delicious to hate.  The obvious and obnoxious display of wealth on her dress is the cherry on top of the exploitation sundae.  When the gang is ultimately captured, Evillene begins to torture everyone close to Dorothy to incentivize her to give up her silver shoes, but she holds strong until Evillene threatens to literally burn Toto alive.

I dunno why Evillene installed water-based safety measures when she clearly doesn’t care about saving her workers if something lit itself on fire, nevertheless one that will kill her instantly, but the Scarecrow immediately notices it and pantomimes to Dorothy to pull the fire alarm and diffuse the situation before she relinquishes her slippers.  Evillene doesn’t really melt as much as she’s slowly flushed down a rhinestoned toilet, but her death inspires her former workers to peel off their skin and celebrate.

Congrats on your second murder, Dorothy!  Now it’s a pattern!

Sincerely, props to these dancers, because “Brand New Day” looks like the most exhausting choreography I’ve ever seen.  I’d be lobbying to be one of the lucky ones who gets to stand inert in the rafters.

After liberating the workers, the flying… Hells Angels return Dorothy and company to Emerald City, only for them to immediately realize they were duped by The Wiz into committing a pretty heinous crime.  See, The Wiz isn’t all powerful, he’s an aspiring politician from Atlantic City that happened to float into Oz on a rogue hot air balloon.  His sniveling, pathetic butt comes clean to Dorothy as he pleads with Dorothy not to abandon him.  While Dorothy is furious, her friends’ disappointment at not obtaining their wishes diverts her attention.  She convinces them they don’t need brains, a heart, or courage from The Wiz because each of them had the power within them all along.  Awwww.

With Dorothy’s friends now self-actualized, an ethereal Lena Horne, the good witch of the south, magically appears.  “Me and these awkward floating babies need to remind you to treat yourself like you’d treat your friends.  If we know ourselves we’re always home, anywhere.” 

I went on a not-so-brief side quest this summer to read all about Kay Thompson, prolific nightclub singer and brief vocal coach for MGM back in the 40s.  We’ll learn all about her when I finally finish my post on Funny Face, but listening to Lena absolutely knock “If You Believe” out of the park reminded me of this passage from Sam Irvin’s biography on Kay:

“Home” being an abstract concept is a nice theory and all, except Dorothy does go back to New York, doesn’t she?  But not before telling Richard Pryor, who is deprived of yet another song, he can suck it.  Stripped of his title of The Wiz, Dorothy reminds Herman Smith he won’t find out his true self holed up in an attic somewhere – he needs to adventure out like she did.  And with that, Dorothy says goodbye to the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Lion and clicks her heels 3 times to return to her aunt’s house.

Look, I’ve had a really shitty year, and the last 15 minutes of this movie made me a weepy mess.

I approached The Wiz not really knowing what to expect, and I was both surprised and frustrated with myself that I couldn’t initially watch it without a critical eye, comparing it to the book and the stage show.  Sidney Lumet was attempting to make the largest musical movie ever, and when you have dozens upon dozens of dancers on the set, unless you’re the kind of hyper focused government who will rehearse this kind of thing to perfection for an Olympic ceremony in 2008, you’re going to have a hard time maintaining the polish and crispness of the choreography.  In framing the shots to show your fantastically grand set, you’re going to lose some of the connection with the characters.  The pacing of the movie is also going to suffer if you need to add more screen time for your leading lady, which will simultaneously give her friends less to do.  And maybe casting a child would have been a better way to get kids to connect to Dorothy?  But like… do any of my criticisms really matter?

Once I took a deep breath, got out of my head and let myself just experience The Wiz, I found it incredibly charming despite its flaws.  The creativity on display – from the music, the sets, the outfits, the performance of its cast – is truly dazzling.  However, the message of the story is what feels incredibly important to me.  The characters establish camaraderie and support each other’s goals, learning to not let their deficiencies define them while giving themselves the space to make mistakes and learn from them.  It’s incredibly important for children to not fear trying new things, and feeling supported regardless of the outcome is what will allow them to move forward and be brave.  It’s what made me so emotional at the end of the movie; picturing a kid hearing they should believe in the strength they already have inside.  The Wiz should be required watching for any 6-year-old – they’ll be too young to understand wtf is going on with the poppies, it’s fine.

Honestly, it’s pretty criminal this didn’t make the Rotten Tomatoes list.  Hold your chosen family close today and maybe take a detour and watch this silly movie.

Guys, uh, I found something bizarre on YouTube yesterday and I have to talk about it. I can’t let myself focus on this for more than a few hours, so enjoy this new thing called Movie Minute where I word vomit out a bunch of stuff in an attempt to purge the subject from my mind.

Honestly, I don’t want to focus too deeply on the similarities between this and Who Framed Roger Rabbit because that is an entertaining movie and Cool World is teenage spank bank slop. It tries to be more than that, but after the 30th scene of cartoon Kim Basinger doing this exact thing, I think it lost the plot.

First of all, the slang they created in this movie in an attempt to build out Cool World is :chefs kiss: amount of cringe. The animated creatures are called “Doodles” and the humans are “Noids”. The antagonist, aptly named Holli Would (“Holli would if she could… And she will” EYEROLL) wants to become a Noid and travel to the real world where powerful woman have agency because Marilyn Monroe seemed to have all her shit together. The only way Holli can do that, however, is to have sex with a real-life Noid because Noid sperm turns Doodles into Noids, I guess.

This turns her into a Noid, cause again, magic Noid sperm will do that. Jack and Holli somehow travel back to the Real World and Holli immediately tries to stage fuck Frank Sinatra Jr. in an attempt to get famous. I’m not kidding. I’m not kidding about any of this.

Except the effect of the sperm starts to wear off, threatening to turn Holli back into a Doodle. Jack also starts morphing into a Doodle because cross contamination, I guess? This makes him nervous but he’s generally inept and can’t think of a way to fix it. Holli decides the best course of action is to hunt down the “spike” to give her power, which she thinks is at the top of the Union Plaza hotel in downtown Las Vegas because of a rumor about a Doodle named Vegas Vinnie who crossed over years before and guys, the last 30 minutes of this movie come at you fast, please try to stay with me here.

See, Vegas Vinnie is based on the scientist from the beginning of the movie. He was afraid of someone exploiting the rift he created, so he used the “spike” to plug the tunnel between Cool World and Real World lest they bleed into each other. This rift just happens to be at the top of a massive casino, so Holli ditches Jack and attempts to climb up there herself to grab the spike. Frank figures out the plan, relieves the trauma of losing his mother to travel back to the real world, and goes to the site of the spike with intentions to arrest Holli. She Doodle shifts to shove Frank off the building, unsheathes the “spike” like it were Excalibur, and inadvertently triggers the merging of the two worlds.

I’m having Super Mario Bros. flashbacks and this movie came out a year before that.

Jack witnesses Holli murder Frank and only then decides to embrace his inner Doodle and stop this catastrophe from happening. He transforms into a super hero, smashes his way through the Doodle ghouls, bypasses Holli and returns the spike to its home.

The Doodles (including Doodle Jack and Frank’s Noid corpse) are returned back to Cool World. I think we’re supposed to feel bad Frank died from a 50 story fall, but actually it’s fine because when a Doodle murders a Noid the Noid turns into a Doodle somehow. These rules are just… whatever, it doesn’t matter, they are what they are.

After the complicated dance I did trying to balance out the strengths and weaknesses of La La Land (someone had to do it since nobody in that movie was), I really wanted to focus on something surprisingly wholesome and uncomplicated.  Going My Way is a Bing Crosby feature that received all the acclaim, changed the rules on Academy Award nominations and subsequently disappeared from public consciousness.  In contrast with the holiday juggernaut White Christmas that rises from the grave and is paraded around every holiday season, I didn’t even know this movie existed until I saw it nestled at #74 on this list.  I found a DVD copy at the library to watch, but not among other movie musicals, but hidden in the classic movies section with Frankenstein and Gone with the Wind as its neighbors.  For Christ’s sake, I had to create my own gifs this time because there’s only one gif set of this movie on Tumblr… It really fell off.

While age naturally buries even good motion pictures, I think Going My Way’s subject matter in general is what relegated it to Church Basement bargain sales.  Bing Crosby plays Charles Francis Patrick O’Malley, a Catholic priest sent to New York with aims to “assist” Father Fitzgibbon (Barry Fitzgerald) in turning his dwindling parish around.  He succeeds in this by getting involved in the community, forming alliances with those who are not free of sin, and providing activities for wayward youths heading down the wrong path.

If all the alarm bells are ringing in your head right now, you are not alone.  Movies today about Catholic priests touching boys focus less on the figurative feel-good sense and more on literal crimes like Spotlight, By the Grace of God, or Primal Fear.  This, of course, is not without merit considering the vast, disgusting history of the Catholic church preying on young children while praying for forgiveness.  But try (if you can) to put this grim reality out of your mind, along with Bing Crosby’s own pockmarked record of how well he raised his own children.  Chuck O’Malley is a progressive (for his time) cool priest, not a regular priest.  He is casual in dress, leaves the church frequently to mingle with its patrons, and doesn’t speak down to or laud himself higher than those he interacts with.  This is Catholic fan fiction of what kind of support the Catholic church wants to portray it provides to its members.

Father O’Malley’s introduction to the audience immediately sets the tone of his character, wandering the streets sporting a casual boater hat and lugging around a plain suitcase.  In attempting to locate his new church in NYC, Chuck instead gets harassed by a busybody, takes the blame for a kid breaking an atheist’s window with a baseball, and gets sprayed by a street cleaner.  Adorning his East St. Louis sweats, he meets Father Fitzgibbon for the first time, giving the Father the impression this new recruit is less than committed to the professionalism needed for the job.  Not only that, but Chuck takes a personal call from his old schoolmate Father Timmy (Frank McHugh) in the middle of their conversation, who is not only a jovial loudmouth, but loves golf (which everyone knows is just a pool hall moved outdoors).

It’s not just youth that makes Father Fitzgibbon hesitant to trust his new partner with his parish; It’s his grand attachment to St. Dominic’s, a church he raised the funds to build over forty years ago.  Father O’Malley tries to alleviate Fitzgibbon’s concerns by immediately making connections with its parishioners, with his first gracious act assuming ownership of a bunch of unwanted puppies and their mother.  He’s then sent on another side quest to prevent the eviction of the same mouthy lady who gave him lip the day before, Mrs. Quimp (Anita Sharp-Bolster), since she’s not paid her rent in over 6 months.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the real villain of this movie (and in rl) is capitalism.  Knickerbocker Savings and Loan are the mortgage holders of St. Dominic’s and after 5 months of missed payments warn Father Fitzgibbon they’ll need to take “necessary action” on the church if it doesn’t cough up some funds.  Mr. Ted Haines Sr. (Gene Lockhart) bemoans they’ve made a “bad loan” and want to get their money back, but like, they gave it to a church?  It’s not like we’re talking Mormon or Scientology money here – this is 1944 toward the end of a second World War.  If they were dumb enough to make this bad investment that’s their own issue.  Not to mention the optics of foreclosing on a church is really, really bad.

Mr. Ted Haines Jr. (James L. Brown) is more than aware of this.  Training to take over his father’s business, he’s a toothless dog in charge of distributing bad news.  When Father O’Malley finds him lingering outside of Mrs. Quimp’s apartment lobbing threats at a fixed income woman, Chuck assures Teddy Jr. she’ll pay back the money next month, and that’s a St. Dominic’s promise.  This does little to impress Sonny Boy since St. Dominic’s is also on the road to defaulting and his dad is already fantasizing paving paradise to put up a parking lot.  But he takes Chuck’s word for it and leaves the unpleasant woman alone.   Mrs. Quimp extends no grace to Father O’Malley for his kind deed, however, since she is the type to find fault with anyone, especially outsiders.

On the way home from saving the day again, Father O’Malley witnesses the same miscreant street baseball playing boys stealing turkeys from a truck.  When Father Fitzgibbon runs into them outside of the church, the kids, particularly their ring leader Tony, say they won the turkey in a theater raffle and like, holy shit, was it a common thing to raffle feathered poultry at your local movie theater during the 1940s?!  Figuring they needed to avoid the heat from the constable, they give the bird to Father Fitzgibbon, which bemuses Father O’Malley when he returns home to find their housekeeper, Mrs. Carmody, has cooked up donated hot turkey for dinner.  When the constable returns two turkey-free children to Father O’Malley later in the night, the Father doesn’t outright threaten to rat them out to the cops, but instead offers them tickets to a baseball game to earn their trust.

Again, must reiterate, nothing bad happens to these children during the runtime of this movie.  OK? OK.

With his youth rehabilitation plan now in motion, Father O’Malley is also asked to deal with the city’s rampant prostitution issue.  The ‘Ol Biddy Mrs. Quimp saw an unmarried, unaccompanied woman and immediately called the cops because clearly she’s an undesirable element.  The cop lets this young runaway stay in his house overnight and delivers her to the church in the morning since she clearly needs Jesus.  Shit, she’d probably be safer on the street.

Carol James may look older, but she’s an 18-year-old who decided to strike it off on her own since her parents don’t let her date and are not supportive of her dream of becoming a singer.  Instead of sending her on her way since she’s a fucking adult, Father O’Malley decides to conduct a mini audition in order to workshop her act, revealing that Chuck is a talented musician that gave up his career to instead work for the lord.  He believes Carol has potential to succeed, but her presentation may need some work.

After Father O’Malley suggests to Carol maybe flapping around like a bird is more distracting than illustrative, Father Fitzgibbon wanders in the room seemingly perplexed that this church instrument is actually being played.  His own advice to Carol is to go home to her parents and wait around until the right man comes to marry her off so she can pop out some children and fulfill her true purpose.  Oh, the 1940s… please change.  Sooner rather than later.  I find this attitude particularly perplexing during the war when millions of women were stepping up and performing non-traditional jobs while the men were overseas… but maybe less surprised that this instruction is coming from a priest.  Shit, NFL kickers are emboldened to share these regressive views today, so not a whole lot has evolved from the Faith and Family people.

Carol leaves on her own recognizance and Father O’Malley returns his focus back on the youth.  Tony is O’Malley’s biggest cheerleader and vouches for the father to the other lost boys.  He keeps secrets for us!  He took us to a baseball game!  He bought us hot dogs!  He said he’s gonna show us movies!  It’s a relieving notion that the only aim of Father O’Malley’s affection is to get the boys involved in a productive character building activity – a church choir.

Father Fitzgibbon, being a man who clearly doesn’t feel the same way about “Three Blind Mice” that Pat Finnerty does, decides to rat out Father O’Malley’s activities to the Bishop.  Unfortunately the interaction doesn’t go according to Father Fitzgibbon’s plan when it is insinuated that Father O’Malley isn’t there to help him out, but is actually in charge of running the church and was too polite and kind to kick Father Fitzgibbon to the curb.  Father Fitzgibbon reacts to this news in a totally reasonable and not at all dramatic way – by packing a suitcase and running off in the middle of a rainstorm without telling anybody where he was going.

When Mrs. Carmody discovers Fitzgibbon’s absence when she ventures upstairs to ask him to join Father O’Malley for dinner, the two alert the one constable who works in New York City and when they finally fish him out and return him, Mrs. Carmody and the Father wring him out and put him to bed.

Facing retirement, Father Fitzgibbon begins to reminisce to Father O’Malley of his time in the church, realizing he dedicated his life to a cause that would unceremoniously strip him of his parish and hand it over to some young whippersnapper with wild ideas.  He traveled to America 45 years ago from Ireland leaving his mother behind and has not once returned for a visit because of his commitment to his congregation.  Surprisingly his 90-year-old mother awaits his return, sending a bottle of whiskey every year around Christmas that the father uses as a calendar to mark yet another spin around the sun.

“I get a little behind during Lent, but it comes out even during Christmas.”

Barry Fitzgerald was nominated for both Best Actor AND Best Supporting Actor for his role as Father Fitzgibbon.  He ultimately won Best Supporting Actor (and later decapitated his plaster Oscar in a golf-related accident), but this confusing ballot led the Academy to change the rules to prevent the same role from being nominated in multiple categories. Mr. Fitzgerald does a great job at playing a curmudgeonly old man set in his ways, but flexible enough to acknowledge change isn’t necessarily bad.  Ultimately he cares about his parish, and if the Bishop believes Father O’Malley is the one to help strengthen the community and raise the funds to keep the church, Father Fitzgibbon will go along for the ride.  Chuck also assures Father Fitzgibbon he has no intentions of displacing him and convinces him to stay so they can work together to Damn the Man and Save the Empire.

In the ever growing list of Father O’Malley’s allies, the next day he literally runs into an old flame, Jenny, on the street.  Played by real life opera singer Risë Stevens (an opera singer who can actually sing in a movie musical, and one whose voice was once insured for 1 million dollars?!  Unheard of!), Jenny (now rebranded as Genevieve) is on her way to The Met to prepare for her performance in Carmen. Quite the non-traditional woman, Chuck and Jenny used to exchange letters while she was on her European tour, and when the letters stopped Jenny wondered what had happened to her childhood friend.  Turns out the message with important context was lost, leading to this touching reveal.

Risë Stevens just sparkles on screen – you really can’t help but smile along with her.

With all the cards all out on the table, Jenny regroups and gets ready for her performance by acknowledging the conductor’s own prayer.

“I want to ask you just a small favor.  Tonight, would you be so good as to glance occasionally at my baton?  Tonight, let’s not race.  Let’s try just for once to finish together?”

Jenny isn’t only just a friend, but now a valuable networking connection.  Father Timmy had the great idea to try and sell Chuck’s original song “Going My Way” to a publisher in order to raise funds for the church.  When Jenny drops by to hear O’Malley’s boys choir in action and overhears the unfortunate news that the music industry thinks the song is too schmaltzy, she decides to recruit the The Met orchestra to play the song for the musical bigwigs in order to convince them to reconsider.

With the backing of an entire orchestra, a boys choir, and a real life opera singer, the record industry executives decide to… give O’Malley the dignity of rejecting his song in person.  It’s not sexy enough, and everyone knows church songs need to be sexy.

Disappointed, the boys ask Father O’Malley if they can sing the mule song to cheer him up, and while the record industry wasn’t interested in run-of-the-mill ballads, kids songs apparently are all the rage.  They eavesdrop on their performance, decide it’s a home run, and offer Father O’Malley some coin for the silly song about how animals lack morality.

I would much rather be a pig than a human, confirmed.

Instead of accepting the money outright, Father Timmy convinces the executives to instead go to the church, hear Father Fitzgibbon’s sermon, and then donate as much as their heart inspires them to.  This not only restores Father Fitzgibbon’s faith that he is still a valuable asset of the church that can compel an exorbitant amount of money of his congregation, it assures the funds are donated directly to the church, y’know, tax free.

Father O’Malley’s other parish side quests serendipitously collide when he receives yet another call from fucking Mrs. Quimp who is unhappy that Carol is seemingly fucking Ted Haines Jr. for rent money, and presumeably Mrs. Quimp is annoyed that format of payment isn’t available for her.  Chuck shows up at Carol’s surprisingly well-furnished and piano-housed apartment and is sold the line that Teddy Jr. is funding Carol’s lifestyle out of the goodness of his own heart and conviction in her talent, and definitely for no other reason.  Chuck side-eyes the young couple, tells them a story about finding proper purpose in life, and leaves letting that thinly-veiled guilt trip permeate their pore-free skin.

Not long afterward, Teddy Sr. is surprised to discover that his son has not only been shacking up with a young woman, but he eventually put a ring on her finger a few weeks ago, yet again proving that the church’s solution to promiscuous women is to marry them off.  This news would have landed like a ton of bricks if Teddy Jr. didn’t follow it up by informing his father of his enlistment in the United States Air Force.  I definitely didn’t cry when this flighty dude put on his uniform and left his wife and father in the apartment to go off to war – You can’t get the granddaughter of an air force veteran with that one, no sir, made of steel, I am.

Anyway, with Carol married, Teddy gone, and the mortgage company now firmly off their backs, Father O’Malley and Father Timmy shift their focus on ushering Father Fitzgibbon into retirement by encouraging him to pick up a few hobbies, like golf, and potentially returning to the old country to visit his elderly mother.

Father O’Malley’s interest in golf, and sports in general, is just another way to make him more worldly and of-the-people.  It sticks out in Going My Way so significantly that it is cribbed on later in Dogma with Cardinal Glick, a man that is also desperately trying to get the youth back into the church by making Jesus more approachable.

“Keep your head down Father – Watch your language.”

While the plan is initially successful, it is immediately derailed when THE CHURCH LITERALLY BURNS DOWN WITH NO APPARENT CAUSE.  Shit, I wonder how much God actually loves Father Fitzgibbon or his mother cause it sure seems like he never wants them to be reunited.

The established support team is now fully focused on fundraising, again, to rebuild the church.  Father Timmy, Jenny, and the boys choir leave for the summer on a concert tour to raise money while Father Fitzgibbon is pounding the payment and essentially panhandling for a few coins.  This gives them enough money to start rebuilding, but not enough to finish.  Mr. Haines Sr., touched by Father O’Malley’s influence on his son (and seemingly relieved Teddy Jr. returned from Africa alive but wounded because one of his buddies ironically ran him over with a Jeep?!) decides to help the church with the mortgage so they can reestablish.  Hopefully this time he won’t eventually get frustrated with their slow payments and threaten eviction again.

With the church’s financials in order, Father Fitzgibbon revitalized, and the parish productively engaged in their community, the bishop decides to reassign Father O’Malley to a new struggling parish and appoint Father Timmy as Father Fitzgibbon’s new curate.  Like a Catholic Mary Poppins, Father O’Malley passes the baton to Tony to run the choir, flew Father Fitzgibbon’s mother in for a visit which definitely didn’t make me cry again, and floated off into the night.  The end.

A Catholic himself, Bing Crosby, having attended Jesuit schools during his education, was also invested in portraying the relaxed “Americanization” of Catholicism, depicting the church as open to new ideas.  Leo McCarey allowed and encouraged his actors to provide input and improvise, and while that annoyed performers like Cary Grant, it was a good fit for Bing.  Crosby and Bob Hope had just filmed several “road movies” and thrived on the push and pull of on-the-spot comedy.

The original Hot Priest (although in the beginning of his film career he was encouraged to tape his ears back because studio execs are dumb as fuck), Father O’Malley was a departure from Crosby’s typical romantic crooner “always gets the girl” type roles.  Bing’s rise to the public consciousness coincided with improvements in audio recording, allowing singers to eat the mic and give more subtle and intimate vocal performances.  Not every Catholic was incredibly happy with Mr. Crosby’s portrayal of a priest wearing street clothes and talking about baseball, but the general public wanted some feel-good optimism in a time of fear and uncertainty, leading them to be incredibly charitable to the performance of a well-loved swoony-voiced radio star.  It was refreshing to see a priest portrayed as a cheerleader for the working class, demystifying the stuffy, sometimes sinister image of an unmoving and uncaring religious organization.  There are no secrets here – the basement isn’t a dungeon, but a joyous place where children sing the praises of Jesus!

Bing Crosby himself was a bit like Father O’Malley with his willingness to buck tradition and embrace changes.  Understanding the importance of the technology that launched his career, he was an entrepreneur that funded innovation in audio and video recording as well as seeking out and promoting new generations of talent that used it like Frank Sinatra.  His last Christmas special even included a duet with rocker David Bowie.  He died the next year from a heart attack after playing 18 holes on the golf course.  Father O’Malley’s love of the sport wasn’t just a random character trait – it was a large part of Bing Crosby’s personality.  He truly did what he loved up until the very end.

Going My Way and its sequel, The Bells of St. Mary’s, won the Academy Award for Best Picture (also was the first sequel to win the award), and went on to inspire a 1960s TV series starring Gene Kelly as Father O’Malley and Leo G. Carroll as Father Fitzgibbon.  I could only find one episode of it online and I’m going to be honest, I was bored out of my mind and skimmed it after like 20 minutes.  If that sample is indicative of the tone of the rest of the show, it’s incredibly overdramatic and humorless.  I’m not sure how anybody watched the film Going My Way and thought it would be successful as an hour-long drama, so if anybody has any information about how this came about almost 20 years after the movie was made, let me know.

While the film inspired the revitalization of the cushy, approachable Catholic church, the lasting legacy of Going My Way is somewhat mixed due to its creator’s shenanigans.  This wholesome movie was written and directed by famed Preserver of American Ideals Leo McCarey.  Previously known for his role in the creation of slapstick comedy duo Laurel and Hardy, this epic king testified to the House Un-American Activities Committee that the communists who worked as his writers were trying to put secret messages in his films, but they were getting harder and harder to find because the writers were so crafty, NOT because he was inventing the entire conspiracy and had no evidence to back his claims.  My Son John (1952), McCarey’s own anti-communist propaganda movie, further cemented his ideals that Good Christians not only rejected godless communism, but ratted out those who espoused those beliefs, even if they came from their own child.  His last film, Satan Never Sleeps (1962), further demonizes Chinese communists as untrustworthy and violent heathens that are only redeemed by eventually converting to Christianity.

While Going My Way is clearly Catholic propaganda not incredibly dissimilar from an episode of 7th Heaven, I choose to view it at face value.  Its story and cast are both charming, and the acts of kindness featured in the film, while some of them being corny and maybe slightly regressive by today’s standards, did elicit an emotional reaction out of me.  Sometimes you just want to see a bunch of people being nice to each other and pretend that the Catholic church operates out of acts of love like Jesus intended instead of being a breeding ground for nightmarish conservative evangelicalism.  Let the few catchy songs lull you into a false sense of security, because reality is depressing enough.

I’ve been writing movie summaries/reviews here for 4 years now, and by far the most fun part of this project has been falling in love with films I never would have sought out if not for the list.  For example, The Court Jester, 42nd Street, and Yankee Doodle Dandy were movies I had no interest in at face value, but each one of them elicited unhinged giggling out of me.  I hadn’t even heard of The Young Girls of Rochefort, but every day since watching that movie I’ll get the melody of “Chanson des jumelles” randomly stuck in my head.  My favorite side effect, however, is being so bowled over by a scene in a film that I replay it in my head for years after I see it.  Balancing the bottles in Fiddler on the Roof, Ann Miller tap dancing in “Shakin’ the Blues Away”, Stubby Kaye confessing his vices in “Sit Down You’re Rockin’ the Boat”, watching Taron Egerton begin “Rocket Man” at the bottom of a pool and end it playing to a stadium full of people being literally shot off like a firework…  I haven’t written about it here, but the first time I saw “Naatu Naatu” I could feel myself light up from the inside out of excitement.  There’s a reason so many people were compelled to learn the choreography because Ram Charan and N. T. Rama Rao Jr. looked so flippin’ cool when they performed it.  I can’t sit still when I listen to it – Obsessed.  I’m obsessed.

The director of La La Land, Damien Chazelle, also loves musicals, which I’m sure was refreshing to see in 2016 after the world had been blessed with Into the Woods.  You can tell by the sheer amount of references to other, some would say better, musicals in La La Land.  This presumption was confirmed by listening to the director’s commentary where Mr. Chazelle name-dropped like 18 different movies without even touching on the ones I’ll reference later.  Watching La La Land was an exercise in “Hey, I remember that thing!” over, and over, and over… 

And starting with our first crib, this story is framed like Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

Winter

It may be cold and snowy in other parts of the country, but it’s always sunny in LA!

This is a chaotic carpool karaoke fever dream.  It wants to be Fame so badly but in my opinion fails to garner the same amount of excitement experienced by high school kids holding up NYC traffic.  I hope they at least gave their performers hazard pay to dance on top of those cars.

Moviewise does a great job breaking down why this number feels so haphazard, from the strange focus pulling to the awkward scene framing.  One of their criticisms lobbed at “Another Day of Sun” is the skill of the choreography in general, and I’ll push back a little on this point.  You can have low-skill choreography in a musical movie and have it succeed in communicating the atmosphere of the scene.  I mean, look at Ella Hunt and Malcolm Cumming in Anna and the Apocalypse.  They’re “organically” dancing in a graveyard but it works because these kids have rizz and sell it perfectly.  You will never again see two teenagers so gleefully walking to school.  We also know these characters a good amount by the time this scene rolls around so the juxtaposition of Anna and Josh incorrectly thinking their problems are on the way to being solved and dancing in celebration while the world is literally ending around them is both sad and hilarious.  Nobody in “Another Day of Sun” matters, to be frank, so why are we watching them stumble around on a freeway?  According to the director there were several people on the crew taking bets on whether or not this number would make the cut because it felt like they were “settling” which… oof.  Trust your instincts.

What a time to be alive, what a time to BE a-live… Shit, now I just want to watch Anna and the Apocalypse.  That movie is also incredibly depressing at the end, but I’d watch it a million times more than La La Land.

Back in traffic on the freeway, Mia (Emma Stone) and Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) have their first meet cute – Sebastian, after compulsively destroying a cassette tape, honks at Mia’s car while she flips him off.  I’m fairly certain all of Ryan Gosling’s on-screen romances start slightly antagonistic.

Let me get this out of the way – I like Ryan and Emma as actors both separately and as romantic partners.  HBO used to play Murder By Numbers on repeat when I was in high school for what felt like a year and I had a sick fascination with Ryan and Michael Pitt’s relationship in that movie.  Easy A is a classic 2010s teen comedy and I reference Emma singing along to “Pocketful of Sunshine” more than I think is healthy for someone in their 30s.  Crazy, Stupid, Love. is messy and fantastic, and the strange and dorky way Ryan and Emma play off each other is so fucking funny and charming.  Their relationship in La La Land, though, um… well, it’s something.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

We discover Mia is an aspiring actress that works at a coffee shop on the Warner Brothers lot that tries to give away free coffee to famous millionaires.  In her free time she heads to a series of truly heinous-looking auditions, but not before running into someone and getting coffee spilled down the front of her shirt in a moment that is inches away from being added to the Jaime French Female Protagonist Fall Compilation.  That night, Mia would like nothing more than to wallow in her latest failure, but her 3 friends (one of them might be her agent?) convince her to dress up in some JCPenny-esque dresses and go out to a party on the chance she might catch the eye of someone that’ll benefit her career.

From the cheapness of these dresses, to the elementary school box of crayons palette that was especially disgusting in the opening number, what is the costuming department even doing for these extras?  Mia’s roommates are selling this 100x more than she is.  I particularly love the face the girl in the green dress makes to mask Emma stumbling off course and bumping into her.  Absolute gold: 10/10.  Would have loved to see more of them in the rest of this film, but they’re unceremoniously shuffled out of the narrative after this.

Also, how dare this movie, with all the references to other musicals, omit one for Busby Berkeley in the pool scene.

Leaving the swanky party early and abandoning her friends, Mia discovers her car has been towed.  Walking back to her apartment she passes a restaurant with live piano music, and like a siren’s call she’s sucked inside to listen to the wistful theme in person.

We then time travel backward to get Mr. Road Rage’s perspective and an exposition dump from an impromptu visit from his sister we never hear speak again after this even though she eventually gets engaged, married, and has a child.  Seb loves jazz, he was going to open a club but he got swindled out of his money, and he’s single (to his sister’s chagrin).  When he’s not being outwardly hostile to everyone around him he plays the piano in a restaurant for money until the owner (J. K. Simmons!) fires him for playing off the book.  Mia witnesses this exchange, and when she goes up to tell Sebastian she likes his song, he completely blows her off.

Spring

Chester French, don’t implicate A-ha in this.

Seb is placed in another humiliating scenario when Mia encounters him at a house party while dressed like an extra from Back to the Future and playing covers of 80s synth hits.  Mia basically says, “Dance monkey, dance!” which causes Seb to approach her afterward and somehow smugly apologize for his behavior.  She continues to cut him down a notch while causally admitting to be a failed actress who spends most of her time making coffee for employed actors.  This, I guess, piques Seb’s interest enough that when she accosts him later to ask him to grab her car keys from the valet he goes out of his way to escort her to her Prius.

For as much as this backdrop looks like it’s filmed on a lot, this was actually a live action scene that the actors only had 30 minutes to shoot before the sun went down.  I’m not going to shit on the set – it’s stunning and deserving of its place on the movie poster.  I am going to shit on everything else, though, because it turns out I’m petty AF.

You may be wondering (you’re probably not) why it took me so long to watch this movie.  I like the actors, I like musicals, and this movie got serious Oscar buzz.  This, my friends, is the dumb reason why:

I just knew, I could just SMELL it all over this movie poster that the musical numbers were going to make my eye twitch.  Why are their arms held at different angles?  Which one of them screwed up the choreography?  There’s no way this is intentional, and it ended up on the poster of the movie.  If it was intentional, I have so many other questions because it just looks wrong.

They’re… fine.  Ryan can sing, but the number starts outside of his vocal range and he does this thing where he cuts his lines short instead of that Astaire-esque sort of crooning I think he was trying to do.  The dance itself is very Fred-and-Ginger as it starts with opposing and combative moves and ends with them in sync, but Mia first complains about her heels and changes into dancing shoes which sparked this thought:

The dance is sloppy and it takes me totally out of it.  At the end Emma’s a little too fast and Ryan’s a little too slow with pivoting their bodies and I can just HEAR the choreographer shouting the counts at them because it seems like their feet hitting the ground are the only things matching the music (until the beat cuts out) cause their bodies aren’t aligned at all.  Mandy Moore had 2 months to train two non-dancers to perform like Broadway vets (and had previously worked on Dancing with the Stars, which honestly sounds like the best credentials for a project like this), but I think they needed a bit more time for polish.  Or at least give them the flexibility to fuck up a bit sometimes by not making this a long shot.  For context, Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman were in dance rehearsals for 3 months before Moulin Rouge and they barely danced in that movie, but the director thought it was important to train his actors and it reflected on their performances.

I did enjoy the adorable little slide at the end that Ryan ad-libbed which the director contributed as a Gene Kelly-ism, but that is 100% a James Cagney thing.

OK, now that I’ve been sufficiently bitchy, let me confess I loved the scenes where Seb and Mia are learning more about each other’s passions and falling in love.  Walking through the Warner Brothers lot hearing Mia reminisce about her Aunt, Seb opining over jazz being a form of communication… it’s less like the Bro Explaining meme and more like two geeks geeking-out over geeky things.

When they go on their first date to watch Rebel Without a Cause and they’re about to hold hands for the first time in the movie theater I was internally cheering and felt butterflies in my own stomach when they finally connected.  When the movie ends abruptly they decide to silently migrate to the planetarium, the location of the most famous scene in Rebel (which is tonally strange considering what happens at the end of that movie).  The two of them dancing through the planetarium is a gorgeous fantasy montage that launches them literally into space twirling among the stars.  

The director said he was inspired by 2001, The Tree of Life, the fairies in Sleeping Beauty, and surprisingly, the fire extinguisher scene in Wall-E (I also appreciate a movie that features scenes from Hello Dolly).  I was instead reminded of Moulin Rouge because I’ll never forget the exact moment I fell in love with Ewan McGregor while he sang, “…and this one’s for you.”.  And once I connected those dots I was pretty underwhelmed at the back-in-reality kiss at the end.  If you’re gonna flirt with the Elephant Love Medley at least have fireworks go off when their lips touch, or have your actors centered in the frame, I dunno.

Summer

Mia and Seb are now dating.  Hooray.  You almost want to root for these kids until you’re immediately confronted with the fact Sebastian doesn’t give Mia the dignity of getting out of his car to pick her up and obnoxiously honks the horn outside of her apartment instead.  She finds this charming, though, so they’re well-suited, I guess.

Both Mia and Keith (John Legend), a musician friend of Seb’s, give Seb some shit for being a jazz purist and instead suggest he should compromise his vision and evolve to gain a wider audience.  Seb begrudgingly takes a gig in Keith’s new band to make some money while Mia works at writing a screenplay for a one-woman show she’s paying to put on at a small local theater with the hope someone important will see it.

See, this movie can be adorable when it’s catering to the actor’s actual range and making things casual.

While they’re separately working on their careers Mia and Seb’s relationship begins to suffer.  Sebastian’s band begins to gain some traction and when Mia attends one of their performances she seems to disregard how absolutely elated Seb is to be on stage and instead looks insecure and strangely threatened by his success.

Fall

Mia is prepping for her big performance while Seb is touring with The Messengers.

How dare she not BCC these people – this is a recipe for a reply-all disaster thread.

Seb comes home to surprise Mia and they get in a fight when Mia tries to play off her feelings of abandonment as concern that Seb is giving up on his dream of opening a jazz club to instead be a successful musician?  He bites back at her and tries to blame her for accepting the gig in the first place since she wanted him to have a steady job, and the fight ends when Seb starts acting like the whole movie was set up to be A Star is Born or Funny Girl.  The final nail in the coffin is Seb’s choice to stay for a photoshoot with his band instead of attending Mia’s show.  When nobody else except Mia’s former roommates and like 10 people show up, she tucks her tail between her legs and runs away to her parent’s house in Boulder City.

But surprise!  A casting director was there and loved it!  She calls Seb’s phone for some reason, and instead of calling Mia like a normal person to relay the message, he drives to Boulder City to berate her into attending a magical audition where they have no script but will film in Paris for 4 months.  If Mia gets the part Seb asserts they should break up so she can focus on her career in Paris, as if Mia is shipping off to war and they’re unable to facetime or fly in planes or something.

The reason I love musicals so much is because of the wonder it inspires in me; the awe of seeing someone at the top of their game belting out a song.  Jennifer Hudson in Dreamgirls, Judy Garland in A Star is Born, shit, even Eddie Redmayne in Les Misérables.  They’re stealing the air out of me while I fight back tears.  This is Emma Stone’s big moment and I found myself wanting to scroll on my phone because I was so bored.  The song is tedious, and it was particularly egregious how Emma screamed, “and that’s why they need us!” because she can’t belt it.  The more intimate moments in the movie were sung live (goddamn it Tom Hooper), and man… Emma didn’t need to be hung out to dry like that.  This performance wouldn’t make it past auditions in American Idol.

Eddie Redmayne was also not a professionally trained singer before he made Les Mis.  You stack him up against a talent like Michael Ball and he’s not going to measure up, but he made me feel something during “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables”.  Ella Hunt has more subtle moments of emotion in “I Will Believe” than Eddie does and it still kills me.  Just the simple act of closing her eyes to feel the snow on her face in a hopeless moment is enough to get me choked up.  Every time Emma makes her eyes wide and cries in this I think of Annie Edison in Community.

Damien Chazelle did not want to hire musical theater veterans because he feared the audience wouldn’t believe it when they randomly started singing, but like… We watched these two fly in an observatory for 4 minutes.  There’s a 30 second mannequin challenge during “Someone in the Crowd” while Mia slowly walks around the party.  Not to mention the extreme realism of everyone leaving their cars and wandering down what I can only assume is supposed to be the 405 during a traffic jam.  Why are you worried about a great vocal performance alienating the audience?!  But apparently this tactic has worked successfully on non-musical movie-goers and Emma Stone won an Oscar, so honestly and sincerely, what the fuck do I know?

Winter, 5 years later…

Mia is now a famous actress picking up coffee from the Warner Brothers lot.  If that wasn’t a surprise enough, she has a daughter and is MARRIED TO TOM EVERETT SCOTT.  Fuckin’ SHADES from That Thing You Do!  His cameo was the most exciting thing in the whole movie.

Mama Mia and Tom Everett Scott leave their baby at home to go on a date, and when they run into traffic they divert their plans to visit a random jazz club off the highway exit.  Turns out it’s Seb’s club and upon seeing Mia he takes the mood down several notches by playing their love melody on the piano.  This causes Mia to dream ballet à la An American in Paris an alternate scenario where Sebastian spent his time supporting Mia’s career instead of his own, and honestly kudos, more films need to end in abstract 20 minute dance pieces.

Seb doesn’t snub Mia at the restaurant, doesn’t take the job with Keith, and is physically there to cheer in a crowded audience as Mia’s play is a resounding success.  They go to Paris to film her movie, get married, and have a kid, concluding the fantasy by going on the same date to Seb’s jazz club, but it’s owned by someone else.  It’s kinda messed up to be fantasizing about your ex replacing your current husband, eh?  Especially Tom Everett Scott.  The absolute disrespect.

For all the comparisons of La La Land to Umbrellas of Cherbourg, I think the similarities are purely superficial.  The framing of the story, the use of color, the Rochefort stroll through the WB lot, the repeating love theme, Guy’s auto shop in the backdrop of the dream ballet, the fact Mia’s character in the play is named Geneviève…  There’s a lot of clues here that Damien Chazelle and the composer, Justin Hurwitz, love Jacques Demy, but I don’t believe the thesis of this film has anything to do with romantic love.  When Mia tells Seb she’ll always love him while they were breaking up I was sort of taken aback since I don’t think either of them said it before this moment, nevertheless declared it over and over like Geneviève and Guy did.  The only thing Mia loved about Seb was his constant cheerleading of her talent, and that fact was only confirmed later in the dream ballet.

Instead, La La Land’s main message is the self-satisfaction of pursuing true art at the cost of everything.  Mia becomes a famous actress but has to leave Seb behind because he has other ambitions.  Seb insists he has to open his jazz club in the same building as a famous previous jazz club with an inside-baseball sort of name.  He wants to play “pure” jazz like the greats before him.  He’s replicating previous musical styles by literally replaying them over and over, constantly references famous musicians, and lauds artifacts of the past while preventing people in the present from altering them.  He eventually compromises and opens his club in another location under his own name.  This is what La La Land does; it DJ re-re-re-REmixes references to movies and, in some cases, sloppily recreates them.  For Keith’s assertion that art needs to evolve otherwise the form will die… I’m not entirely convinced, but I’m also not blind to the fact I’m clearly in the minority.

I’m just tired of directors prioritizing the acting in a movie musical, as if acting is more important because of the medium.  Both Ryan and Emma are terrific actors in this, and the most captivating parts of La La Land were the scenes where they were playfully quipping, or fighting, or pushing each other to aim higher with their goals.  The director crafted these beautiful scenes for them to dance in and I was so distracted by the execution of the performers that I got completely divested in what was going on.

While I was researching the rehearsal process for this movie (specifically curious if a vocal coach was involved) I ran into a comment of someone frustrated with people bitching about how the movie should have cast big name musical stars like Gene Kelly or Judy Garland when that would have been impossible because this generation has no triple threats.  I found this argument incredibly short sighted because there’s a WHOLE FUCKING INDUSTRY filled with triples threats – these “mythical creatures” work in musical theater.  The Hollywood Industrial Complex doesn’t churn out 10 Fred and Ginger-esque movies a year because there is a talent drought – the thousands of qualified people that could rise to their level of fame aren’t given the chance because Hollywood isn’t convinced people want to see musicals.  …Sometimes I think Broadway doesn’t think people want to see musicals either because how else are you going to justify Hugh Jackman’s casting in The Music Man or the 7000 translations of popular movies into stage musicals (and then sometimes back to movie musicals).  But that’s a whole other tangent.

In the last few months look at how they marketed Mean Girls, Wonka, and The Color Purple.  Those movies are making money by tricking people into watching a musical because the general public thinks musical numbers are only appropriate for children’s cartoons or performed on stage in a biopic.  Hollywood’s previous solution to this problem was to cast big name actors and train the shit out of them to perform and since it worked for Moulin Rogue and Chicago we’ve been burdened with James Corden ever since.  (Actually, we might be able to blame Evita for this since Madonna won a Golden Globe, but I won’t let myself because she made her money singing first and that movie is a mess.)  When Star Power stopped working they started with the bait and switch, and they’re going to continue with it because it’s working.  I wish In the Heights performed better, but that one I think suffered because of Lin-Manuel Miranda overexposure.

You’re probably thinking if it gets people to see a musical, so what if the musical numbers aren’t great?  It may be their gateway drug into the genre!  And I hear and acknowledge that you’re right.  If La La Land can encourage fans to watch Umbrellas of Cherbourg or a Gene Kelly movie it’s a net positive.  I know it encouraged me to purchase Anna and the Apocalypse on Blu-ray.  But I also posit that the classic musical movies are really fucking good and I don’t know why we have to keep dumbing down the genre to make it more appealing when a good product should speak for itself.  I mean, I know why, it’s money, but harrumph to that.  We all grew up loving Julie Andrews!  WE COULD HAVE MORE PEOPLE LIKE JULIE ANDREWS IF WE STOPPED BEING EMBARRASSED BY THIS FUCKING GENRE.

This is the Kirkland Signature-brand musical.  It’s the musical movie we have at home catered to people who do not like musicals.  Clearly there is an audience for that, but man, watching La La Land made me feel like Seb listening to jazz get watered down until it becomes unrecognizable.  This, right here, is my “old man yells at cloud” moment.

If The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is the shot, Les demoiselles de Rochefort (The Young Girls of Rochefort) is the lighthearted chaser.  After Umbrellas, Jacques Demy wanted to pivot to musical comedies uncommonly filmed in France and diametrically opposed to his previous film.  Umbrellas was sung from start to finish; there was only one song that could barely live free of its source material.  It also did not include choreographed dance numbers typical to the genre.  Most importantly, it focused on the pain inherent in love.  The Young Girls of Rochefort is chock full of joy and seemingly everyone is boogieing down.  Even the simple act of walking down the street is met with fanfare.  The plot is the fluffiest I’ve encountered, filled with silly misunderstandings and coincidences that are more enjoyable than they are tedious.  But as Jacques Demy said himself, the plot doesn’t really matter.  It’s all about the vibes.

The film focuses on twin sisters Solange (Françoise Dorléac) and Delphine (Catherine Deneuve).  Frustrated with their lack of romantic prospects they put into motion a plan to move to Paris to pursue their dreams to dance, write music, and fall in love.  Françoise and Catherine were real-life sisters (although not twins), and the chemistry between the two is off the charts.  Their beguiling demeanor has not gone unnoticed by two men they have little interest in – Guillaume (Jacques Riberolles), an art gallery owner that peppers Delphine with marriage proposals she continually rebuffs and Simon Dame (Michel Piccoli), a lonely music store owner that believes Solange will be a great composer. 

“We’re just two little girls from Little Rock…”

While Françoise had danced before, this film was Catherine’s first foray into it, diving head first into the deep end of the pool by portraying a ballet instructor.  Although Gene Kelly was asked to choreograph the film he turned down the offer in order to stay in the US and spend time with his children.  Norman Maen, an English choreographer was hired instead.  The sisters spent several weeks in London for rehearsals leading up to filming, with Catherine in 3 months of dance classes before that.  She found it difficult to lip sync and dance at the same time.  You would never know based on what showed on film in Rochefort, but you see echoes of this insecurity in 8 Femmes later.

A small excitement is added to the girls’ lives when a traveling boat show/faire arrives in Rochefort.  Their mother Yvonne (Danielle Darrieux) owns a café in the town square and quickly makes friends with Etienne (George Chakiris) and Bill (Grover Dale), two men who arrive with the troupe.  Yvonne trusts them immediately for whatever reason, enough to ask them to pick up her son Bouboo from school.  In pursuit of their task they run into Delphine who happened to also be there to pick up her little brother.  She quickly decides visiting her art gallery friend is more important than ensuring her little brother’s safety and similarly leaves Bouboo in the care of two strange men that do not stay in one place too long.

You may recognize George Chakiris as the ill-fated Bernardo from West Side Story, but he’s been in the background of a few other films on this list.  He steals every scene that he’s in – every other dancer could be spinning plates on sticks while their costumes are on fire and I’d still be fixated on George.

Etienne and Bill aren’t the only attractive young men hanging out in Yvonne’s café – Maxence (Jacques Perrin) is a young soldier and artist who longs to find a very specific woman he dreamed up and painted, as if it wasn’t hard enough to find someone to love without such stringent qualifications.  Guillaume hung this painting in his gallery, and when Delphine finally stumbles upon it and notices it looks exactly like her, she realizes that the man she’s been dreaming about actually exists and she needs to go to Paris to find him.  How convenient…  It’s also bonkers this guy is a regular at her mom’s café and they haven’t encountered each other once.

Solange is similarly hunting for a specific man, except she already knows his name – Andrew Miller, a famous American composer.  She convinces her music store owning-friend Simon to write to him on her behalf since they were old schoolmates, but little does she know that in a few minutes she would run straight into him while dragging Bouboo away from two strange carnies sent to school to pick up her brother again.

The way I screamed in surprise when I saw Gene Kelly, you guys.  Truly the American who never left Paris.  Except this one time, right now, because he’s in Rochefort.

One of my favorite things in this movie is all the actors badly pretending to play several instruments.  Solange has a great moment where she even gets the sound of a flute to come out of her recorder, which is only more hilarious later when you discover she is also hoarding a flute in this apartment.

It’s the next day and there’s been a murder!  A former showgirl was cut up and placed in a wicker basket outside of her house.  Everyone is curious about who committed this heinous act and have gathered by the crime scene to gawk at the people hosing the blood off the street.  But this hard left turn hasn’t halted fair preparations or Andy trying to track down Simon.

Similar to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, all the actors (except Danielle Darrieux) were dubbed over with another singer, several of them repeating talents from Umbrellas of Cherbourg.  Even Gene Kelly’s vocals were dubbed which surprised me since there’s a vast catalog of movies that definitively prove he can sing.  Apparently his singing range wasn’t “good enough” to carry this role so they did it anyway.  Some of his dialogue was similarly dubbed even though Gene spoke French fairly well, which was incredibly distracting since the person they hired (and apparently didn’t pay to record the English dub) sounds almost 20 years younger than Gene should.  In the cases where dubbing was necessary, George Chakiris and Grover Dale didn’t speak any French going into the film and had to learn their lines phonetically, which apparently amused Catherine when she would hear them practice.  Dale was also a last minute replacement for Nino Castelnuovo, who had a schedule conflict for Rochefort.  This is why Bill’s backstory is similar to Guy’s character in Umbrellas – it was intended to be an easter egg to Demy’s previous film but turned into a random nod instead.

There is a mythologized English version of this film where the actors lip-synced the songs in English while the dialogue remained in French.  Aside from these clips I found on YouTube and footage of the songs being filmed in the anniversary documentary there is very little information about this other than it theoretically didn’t do well in US theaters so they didn’t bother to release it on home video or consider it for restoration it when they restored the original French version in both 1998 and 2011.  I’m also curious how much the French dialogue deterred the movie’s success if the intention was to court the ‘I won’t read subtitles’ crowd.

When Andy finally discovers Simon he regales his encounter with a beautiful local composer.  Simon finds this entertaining until Andy starts to play Solange’s calling card and Simon vaguely recognizes it.  Simon’s wistful confession of his own love for Solange is also super creepy because he doesn’t know he’s kind of her stepdad?  Yeah, surprise!  Simon is Bouboo’s real father and he doesn’t know it because after telling Simon she was pregnant, Yvonne had a friend tell Simon she married a random rich dude and moved to Mexico because she couldn’t bear to be named Madame Dame.  This is why it’s better to date within your age range if you know there’s a kid of yours floating around out there.

Day of the fair arrives and the sister’s students are set to perform.  On another stage Delphine and Solange put on their own show to advertise motorcycles, I guess.  Their performance goes so well Etienne and Bill proposition them for sex afterward, which neither of them are amused with.

This is very Gentlemen Prefer Blondes coded, down to the costumes.

The next morning it is discovered that the old-man side character, Yvonne’s father’s old buddy Dutrouz, is the mysterious murderer, which is shocking since he doesn’t even know how to properly slice a cake.  This strange revelation is blown off pretty quickly because this movie likes to hint at a dark underbelly but doesn’t choose to immerse itself in it.  I believe it’s to showcase how love can completely envelope and blind one to the ills of the world around them, but it also might be an example of the kind of thing that happens when love goes wrong.  This dude held a grudge for 40 years and one painting of Delphine was enough to remind him of his jilted love and plunge a knife into her.

The girls are running late to meet their carnies to head into Paris.  Simon drops by to tell Solange that Andy is waiting for her in his shop, and in the long tradition of passing the responsibility of handling Bouboo on someone else, Solange asks Mr. Dame to go pick him up in return.  When Delphine mentions to her mother Solange’s weird older friend with the amusing name was headed to unknownlingy meet his son for the first time, Yvonne bolts from the cafe to meet him and rekindle their romance. 

Maxence, although he has not encountered his dream woman, is on cloud nine after his conscription has finally run its course.  He heads to the café to wish Yvonne well since he is also planning on leaving Rochefort that afternoon in pursuit of Paris and a career painting strange women that appear in his dreams.  After another frustrating miss of a chance encounter between Delphine and Maxence at the café, we begin to believe they’ll never be together.

Conversely, Solange and Andy are delighted to discover they are each other’s random love encounters.

Abandoned by Solange to pursue a life with Gene Kelly, which like, who fucking wouldn’t, Delphine leaves with the weirdly forward carnies.  Maxence, hitchhiking on the side of the road for some reason, jumps in one of the carnival cars giving us a little glimmer of hope that he and Delphine got their happy ending after all.

The city of Rochefort has really embraced this film, noting The Young Girls of Rochefort made the area a tourist destination in the subsequent years.  In The Young Girls Turn 25, a documentary about the city’s anniversary celebration for Rochefort, several citizens who participated in the film as extras talked about how the filming experience was akin to a 4-month party.  The city of Rochefort was chosen because of Colbert Square, giving a centralized location for the majority of the film to take place in.  Inspired by the paintings of Raoul Dufy, the buildings around the city that would show up on camera were painted white with their window shutters accented in bright, beautiful colors by the crew.  The shooting also brought in a lot of new business – Yvonne’s glass café is still open with a statue of the sisters in their “Chanson de Jumelles” costumes placed out front.  Jacques Demy passed away in 1990, and Françoise tragically died in a car accident a few months after this film was released.  The city dedicated street names in their memories – Jacques Demy Ave. leads to the famous Pont Transbordeur from the beginning of the film, and Pl. Françoise Dorléac runs outside of the city’s bus station.

The Young Girls of Rochefort continues to impact movie aesthetics today.  Just in the past few years Jacques Demy’s films have been name-dropped as direct influences for Past Lives, Barbie and La La Land, which I will unfortunately be watching next on the list while Mr. Demy is still fresh in my mind… God help me.  I’m sure it can’t compare to Umbrellas of Cherbourg or Young Girls of Rochefort – these films are escapism at its finest.  Jacques Demy himself said he used movies as a way to escape the trauma he experienced as a boy during World War II – a fantasy land to visit after discovering your own is imperfect and full of pain.  While Umbrellas operated like time travel, transporting me to a past when I was young and haven’t experienced heartbreak, Rochefort is a world I would like to live in the present.  It’s a place where problems are superficial and solvable through song and dance numbers.  Where people are one street corner away from meeting their one true love.