Watchmen (S1)
Succession (S1+2)
Fleabag (S2)
The Mandalorian (S1)
I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson (S1)
Barry (S2)
The Boys (S1)
The Righteous Gemstones (S1)
Vice Principals (S1+2)
Russian Doll (S1)
Dave Chappelle: Sticks and Stones (Stand-up)
Bob’s Burgers (S9)
Ramy (S1)
Catastrophe (S1-4)
Veep (S7)
Broad City (S5)
Love, Death & Robots (S1)
Shrill (S1)
Patriot (S1+2)
New Screenplay: LSD/88
LSD/88
Logline: At the beginning of the 1960’s, a washed up CIA agent must revisit his past for a chance at redemption, returning to the underworld he left behind to prevent a catastrophic experimental drug from spreading on the streets and altering human history forever.
I’ve been working on this script off and on for a long time and I’m very happy with how it’s turned out. I just entered it into some screenwriting competitions and will find out how it did towards the end of the year.
You can find more of my screenplays here.
My Year in TV & Movies 2017
2017 was an absolutely stacked year for entertainment. I thought it was a really strong year for both mediums, but the amount of great TV that’s coming out every single month now is staggering. There’s lots of great movies coming out too, but you just have to look a little harder for them underneath all the ‘blockbusters’ (though some of those are pretty great too). Netflix absolutely crushed it this year, with 7 TV shows on my list. Here’s what I really enjoyed this year.
TV
The Leftovers
Legion
My two favorite shows in 2017 were Legion and The Leftovers. While very different shows they both ask similar questions: Am I crazy? Or is the world around me crazy? Am I in control? Or are larger, unknown forces at work? How do we deal with grief and guilt? The two best performances I saw on TV all year came from Carrie Coon of the Leftovers and Aubrey Plaza in Legion. Everyone was superb on the Leftovers, but Carrie Coon was on another level, mining the depths of Nora Durst’s anger and grief for explosive, devastating acting. The gut-wrenching emotion displayed on her face in so many different scenes was extraordinary. Aubrey Plaza on the other hand broke out of her role as April on Parks and Rec, bursting through as the literal and figurative monster pulling the strings of David, the protagonist in Legion. I’ve always liked Plaza, but she leaves behind her apparent one-note dryness and explodes into mania, a monster in control and having fun.
The Leftovers was brutal, beautiful, emotional and gorgeous. Every performance was superb and I think it was the best season of television this year. Legion was a close personal second for me. It was off the wall fun, and you never knew what type of show you were going to get each week. It felt like Legion, along with Logan, showed what a comic book adaption could really be, which is, anything it damn well pleases. Legion isn’t a super-hero show. It’s a show about mental illness and the struggle to grasp and then control our potential, and recognizing it as both a gift and a curse. The Leftovers is one of the most powerful examinations of grief I’ve seen in art, and was also funny, unpredictable, weird, and heartbreaking. I think both of these shows might have slipped under the radar for a lot of people and I highly recommend checking them out.
Steven Universe
Adventure Time
Rick and Morty
Bojack Horseman
I wrote about these cartoons previously, and there’s nothing more to say other than it still blows my mind how deep each show can get in it’s respective world-building and pathos.
Game of Thrones
Obviously. People ragged on it a bit this year because of some iffy writing, deservedly so, but god dammit we finally got dragons fucking shit up!
Mindhunter
For as much TV as I watch, I don’t really ‘binge’, or at least as compulsively as I think that word suggests. I like to space it out a bit, even if just for a week if it’s on Netflix. But I ripped through this show and finished it in a weekend. David Fincher’s directing, the joy of seeing a show almost purely constructed on conversation between characters, and diving into the psychology of monsters and men made this show enthralling. I’m not a huge true crime/serial killer guy, but I loved this show.
Nathan For You
This show can be uncomfortable to watch, to say the least. It’s also the hardest I’ve laughed at a TV show this year and I’m amazed and horrified at how this genius/psychopath commits fully to his weird, elaborate social experiments/pranks. Completely unlike anything else on TV. So good, one of the greatest documentary filmmakers ever, Errol Morris, just wrote about how much he loved it.
Stranger Things 2
Honestly, I went into the second season not expecting much, because the first season was so good, and since the show wasn’t conceived as continuing the first season’s story, I thought this would just be a typical kind of rushed sequel job. I thought it’d be good, just not as good. And I was wrong. Somehow the second season might have been even better than the first, in part because I thought the ending was a lot stronger this time around. Now can Will Byers have one god damn day of peace?
GLOW
Maybe it’s on me for not looking more widely before, but I felt like this year there was a ton of wonderful TV shows with strong female characters and performances. The Leftovers, Legion and Godless featured some of my favorite performances of the year, all by women. And GLOW was a kick-the-door-in celebration of this fact, as almost the entire show is made up of and focused on women. This show surprised me. I really liked it and look forward to the next season, and more shows like it.
Master of None
Big Mouth
These two comedies couldn’t be more different, but they’re both hilarious and surprisingly deep. Both shows look at dating, sex, and relationships, and the volatile changes and emotions that come with it, yet each does so with vastly different formats and points of view. It’s cool to see Aziz Ansari and Nick Kroll, two good friends, come up together and each create such distinct, original shows.
Curb Your Enthusiasm
Long live Larry David. I hope he keeps making Curb until the day he dies.
Godless
Godless was the best Western of the year, a 7 episode mini-series that felt like one long, gorgeous, old-school movie. Filled with deep characters dealing with tremendous trauma and loss, there’s still bits of real humanity, history, laughter, and beauty sprinkled throughout. Every actor is perfect, but Merrit Wever’s tough as nails Maggie steals the show. Godless was written and directed by Scott Frank, who had quite the year. He wrote the first movie on the list below. You might have heard of it.
Honorable Mentions:
Billions continues to be entertaining with strong performances. The Good Place is good. The Americans keeps on chugging along in moody silence, just like Phil, but I’m very excited for their next and final season. I jumped into Preacher‘s second season without watching the first and enjoyed it. Fargo was very slow starting off but picked up nicely at the end. Broad City is still killing it. Love is an underrated comedy on Netflix that I’ve really enjoyed.
MOVIES
Logan
Logan was the best comic book movie of the year, and one of the best movies of the year, period. A brutal neo-Western properly closing out both Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart’s Wolverine and Professor X, with their best performances yet. Scott Frank wrote this as well. Both Logan and Godless are masterpieces of their form.
Get Out
A stunning, perfect debut for Jordan Peele, timely, scary, and god damn funny. It’s very cool to see this in Oscar contention, especially with how far back it was released. Can’t wait to see what he makes next.
Thor: Ragnarok
Spider-Man: Homecoming
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
The Marvel contingency. They’re ranked in the order I liked them. Thor was fun and gorgeous. I felt like this was the first time my version of Spider-Man was on the big screen. I’m pumped he’s in the Marvel fold. Guardians, while also visually stunning, was a bit of a letdown, if only because of how original and fresh the first one felt. That movie floored me in theaters and is one of my favorite Marvel movies, so a high bar to live up to. Black Panther and Infinity War next year!!!
The Big Sick
Baby Driver
Dunkirk
I want more movies like these three in the summertime. Original movies with their own unique style, viewpoint, or message, unattached to any ‘property’. And really, any summer you get new Edgar Wright and Christopher Nolan is a huge win.
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
What a fucking movie. Made by the same writer-director who gave us In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths, this movie has the pitch black humor and violence he’s known for, but with more raw emotion, grief, and pathos running throughout. There was uncomfortable laughter and audible gasps in my theater. Martin McDonagh makes you sickened by, and then empathize with, a violent racist and root for and cringe at what a grieving mother’s willing to do for justice (or revenge). I walked out wanting to immediately see it again and will do so soon. Sam Rockwell’s a god damn gift.
Honorable Mentions:
It, I Don’t Feel at Home in this World Anymore, Wind River, Logan Lucky
Best movies I watched for the first time that didn’t come out this year:
Spotlight, 20th Century Women, The Wrestler, Bone Tomahawk, Moonlight, The Lobster, Moana, Life Itself, Memories of Murder
These movies were all astounding and among my favorites of the year.
Movies that came out this year that I still want to see:
Ladybird, Call Me By Your Name, Phantom Thread, The Disaster Artist, Downsizing, The Florida Project, Coco, The Last Jedi, The Shape of Water, I, Tonya, The Post, Molly’s Game, Mudbound
–
So, what’d I miss?
In Praise of the Cartoon
Four of my favorite TV shows currently running are “silly cartoons”. But behind their apparent silliness is some of the deepest, most complex, emotionally, philosophically powerful art I’ve seen on television, up there with any prestige drama you could name.
The first two both feature alcoholic, narcissistic anti-heroes struggling to fix their lives, or at worst, reveling in their own filth. And it’s not Don Draper sexy-filthy either. One’s a reckless, constantly belching, grandfather mad-scientist who’s known as the smartest being in the multiverse. The other is a washed up actor who also happens to be a horse. I’m speaking of Rick and Morty and BoJack Horseman of course. Rick and Morty has a cult like following and is given heaps of praise, deservedly so, but I’m honestly not sure if many people watch BoJack, probably because it’s an even harder sell. Both shows are hilarious and billed as animated comedies. But both shows also routinely remind us of the meaningless of life and the existential dread that seeps into our everyday lives and actions. Rick and Morty is certainly nihilistic, while BoJack painfully depicts what it is to be human (or horseman), struggling to try to fix ourselves when we’re already so far gone. BoJack’s most recent fourth season featured one of the most harrowing psychodramas I’ve seen in just 30 minutes, as we watch BoJack try to right his life while cutting back to the absolute horror-show of his mother’s upbringing, threading the trauma through the generations. Our trauma may be our parent’s fault, but we’re reminded that they were also traumatized as children, in even more brutal a fashion than we may have been. In the most recent episode of Rick and Morty, Rick once again espouses the meaningless of life to his daughter Beth, as she comes to realize how alike she is to her monster of a father. These seemingly silly cartoons actually grapple with the darkness we all live through, in even more creative, poignant ways than some of the best cable dramas of the last 15 years.
While those two shows are absolutely aimed at and are primarily made for adults, the next two are absolutely not, which makes them even more impressive and profound.
I’m speaking of Adventure Time and Steven Universe. Each show follows a young boy as he comes of age, trying to be the best person they can be, defending their homes from evil, facing off against aliens and cosmic entities right alongside the constant challenges adolescence throws at us. Both air on Cartoon Network (not Adult Swim) and both certainly started out as just kids’ cartoons, and can still definitely be enjoyed by kids. But as they’ve progressed, they’ve both managed to confront similar themes: the struggles of growing up, recognizing how trauma shapes us and can morph into evil, and the forces we can use to fight it, including empathy, compassion and sometimes force.
I’m lucky enough to have had my brother Sean basically force me to watch these. While I’d heard of both, and thought they looked cool and interesting, I doubt I would have ever really invested the time to give them a proper viewing. There are usually anywhere from 30 to 50 episodes in a season, but episodes of both shows are only 11 minutes long. The emotional power, the depth of narrative, the laughs that are packed into just 11 minutes is truly astounding and I still have trouble wrapping my head around how they pull it off. I could write whole essays on each of these shows, but I’ll try to just pitch what I find so enthralling about each.
Adventure Time has one of the deepest mythologies and world building I’ve ever seen in any form of storytelling. It’s set on Earth, roughly a thousand years after a nuclear explosion wiped out (almost) all of humanity. Now all sorts of messed up creatures, including slime princesses, candy people, and an evil entity named the Lich roam the Earth. And Finn the Human does his best to answer the call of adventure and protect his community from harm, and when he’s not busy doing that, he’s playing around with his best-friend/dog/shape-shifter Jake and trying to find love. It’s hilarious and heartbreaking and has some of the weirdest, off-beat little moments of strange beauty and melancholy sprinkled throughout each episode.
Steven Universe, as Sean pitches is it, can be described as “3 lesbian aliens raising a half- human, half-alien boy”. Steven Universe was created by Rebecca Sugar, formerly a writer on Adventure Time, and the composer of the best songs done on that show. She brings her gift for music (and more) to Steven Universe. The way she ties songs into the emotional arc of the story is sublime. This show primarily focuses on the power, transcendence and toxicity relationships can bring into our lives. What also makes this show so beautiful to me is how Steven deals with people (and aliens), whether they’re friend or foe. Apparent threats, who state their malicious intent, are usually turned by Steven into allies. Not through manipulation or force, but with empathy and kindness. He asks them questions and his charm and compassion shines through. This is another show that deals deeply with trauma and how that trauma infects our entire worldview. Yet grand speeches, demands, and threats are never how you actually change a person. You change them by your own example, by asking questions, and listening with an open mind to the answers.
I’ve teared up more times than I can count while watching episodes of Adventure Time and Steven Universe, and I wonder how they are able to get to me in such deep ways, in such short amounts of time. I know it’s because of the strong emotional depth they explore with each character and the long standing narrative arcs they continue to return to. But why are they so god damn affecting? Pixar movies certainly deserve a mention here, as they’re the prime example of complex animated storytelling pulling at your heartstrings. I still remember seeing Toy Story in theaters, absolutely crushed when Woody and Buzz just miss getting on the moving van. Or, of course, the first 15 minutes of Up. For some reason, I think it’s easier for us to let our guard down and empathize when we’re watching animation. Whether it’s a child, an alcoholic grandpa, or a narcissistic horseman, as we watch them struggle, overcome, and struggle again, through joy and pain, victory and defeat, the story is removed just enough from reality that we allow ourselves to become fully absorbed by it. As we grow older we may scoff at the idea of sitting down to watch a cartoon to be moved, but it may be the best thing we could do to maintain that relationship with our inner-child, to maintain a sense of awe and curiosity towards the world. And it only takes 11 to 22 minutes an episode to get that shot of wonder, joy, and catharsis we so rarely get elsewhere.
TV Bits 8/3/17
Preacher S2
A lot of great minds advocate skipping around in books, picking them up and putting them down as you please, jumping ahead to a chapter that interests you. I recently applied this to TV. A lot of the time, what keeps me from jumping in to a show is the sheer time commitment it demands. I watched the 1st episode of Preacher when it premiered but skipped the rest of a somewhat mixed bag of a first season. When I read they’d learned from some of their initial missteps and were expanding the scope a bit, I decided to jump right in to the second season.
And it was a great fucking decision. The second season is fun dude. The main trio is funny and have great chemistry, and they’re each specifically fucked up individuals dealing with their own shit. There’s lots of over-the-top violence and crazy bad guys ranging from soul-sucking Japanese businessmen, to unkillable, former Civil War solider demons from Hell. Oh, and Hitler is a character, also in Hell. The latest episode properly introduced another big bad, Herr Star, and this episode, titled “Pig”, is the third in a row of maniacal excellence. The first episode of the season starts off with an absolute bang, and while the next couple are good, they’re building towards the momentum we’re currently in. And I’m diggin’ it.
Don’t be afraid to jump in with the second season. Here’s a couple recaps if you want to be somewhat aware of what’s going on in this shitshow.
Game of Thrones S7
Damn I loved that last episode. The scenes with Jon and Dany and co. were some of the most enjoyable talking scenes the show’s had in quite awhile.
And on a random note, I love how Sam just has a family, despite being a member of the Night’s Watch and training to be a maester. Fuck the rules man, Whitewalkers are coming. I’m gonna live how I wanna live!
Rick and Morty S3
I was kind of underwhelmed with the 2nd episode, possibly because the season 2 finale and 3 opener were just that amazing, possibly because I watched it right before GoT. I’m not complaining though. It’s back. Wubba lubba dub dub!
Wet Hot America Summer: Ten Years Later
This drops tomorrow on Netflix. I recently rewatched the first series which takes place before the movie, despite being released 15 years after it. This one takes place 10 years after the original movie. If that sounds overly confusing, don’t worry about it. The show is fucking hilarious, and features everyone from Amy Poehler and Paul Rudd to Jon Hamm and Bradley Cooper. It’s unlike any comedy going right now, and while it may not be for everybody, I love it.