2020: The 16 Best Films I Saw for the First Time; The 27 Books I Read, graded; and the 12 Best Albums I Heard for the First Time
Scott Pfeiffer Thursday, December 31, 2020 at 02:53PM 
It’d be tough to argue that 2020 wasn’t a washout of catastrophic proportions, and it’d be callous as well. Still, quarantine had one advantage, at least for those of us of a certain disposition: suddenly we had an excuse for social distancing, and there was all the time in the world for films, books and music. This was just what we’d always wanted, wasn’t it? For a time, it was. Still, as the toll of days in confinement mounted, one found the brain befogged, the spirit flagging.
What buoyed me up under these conditions? I found the musicals of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers never failed to provide the needed pick-me-up. I started with Swing Time and Top Hat and moved on from there, getting five I’d never seen under my belt: The Barkleys of Broadway, Shall We Dance, Roberta, The Gay Divorcee, and Flying Down to Rio. (Watched a corker of an Astaire/Charisse picture, too—Silk Stockings). I was also greatly bucked up by Beatles features, starting with A Hard Day’s Night and moving on to Yellow Submarine, Help, and Magical Mystery Tour. (Even that last, which would be kindly described as a curio, offered certain pleasures.) To escape into the whimsical, shape-shifting, endlessly imaginative world of Hayao Miyazaki was a great pleasure, specifically Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro.
Musically, what helped? Lots and lots of Chuck Berry and B.B. King, for one thing. Leonard Cohen, of course—he always pulls me through. Also, in a strange way, Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. I found it reflected both my inner state, as well as what was going on out in the streets—not to mention in the highest offices of the land.
As far as reading goes, P.G. Wodehouse, as ever, was my spirit balm. For the majority of my life now, I've found it's impossible to be down when you're reading Wodehouse. 2020 was perhaps the ultimate test: would his stuff still work? It did...and it does.
In the end, the finest and most heartbreaking (because most violated) epitaph for 2020 may have come in a lyric from a pop song, sung along to by a grieving father in the Romanian film Collective: “We are how we treat each other, and nothing more.”
In any event, it feels like any listmaking must reflect a year that was as much about a time-out spent catching up with works of the past as it was about experiencing new work.
The 16 Best Films I Saw for the First Time in 2020, in Alphabetical Order
1. Baraka (Ron Fricke, 1992). The worst part of 2020 was being unable to travel. Baraka is not a travelogue, but there's a spirit to it that somehow embodies our philosophy of travel. Our wings were clipped this year (and rightly so), but so long as I watched this mind-expanding film, I flew. You may read my writeup here, by scrolling all the way down to "Additional Online Recommendations.”
2. City Hall (Frederick Wiseman, 2020). 2020 was the year that should have finally taught us that none of us is the chain—that we’re all just a link. (Hey, it was one of those years when clichés are invested with real power.) 90-year-old master filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, who has been making roughly a film a year examining American institutions for over 50 years now, gave us this four-and-a-half hour look at municipal government in Boston, and its vision of good government felt like a renewal of faith in democracy. Wiseman wouldn’t be vulgar enough to give the film an explicit message, but we can say it has an attitude: it gives government a good name. After four years of living under a kakistocracy devoted to shredding the social contract from top to bottom, we're reminded by this film that the individual exists only in relation to society, and that government is the expression of the collective social fabric in countless ways. City Hall is just the latest chapter in Wiseman's ongoing body of work, which the NYT Magazine rightly proposed amounts to the Great American Novel. It just happens to be on film.
3. Collective (Alexander Nanau, 2019). In the wake of a devastating club fire in Bucharest, this riveting, moving documentary follows a team of journalists—whose usual beat, it seems, is sports!—blowing the lid off a Pharma scandal. (There's an astonishing photo session with a badly-burned survivor, which reimagines her as a phoenix rising from the ashes.) Their investigation blows up to contemplate an entire system of mobbed-up corruption, comprising the entire hospital system. (In fiction, if a scandal were to go "all the way to the top," we might cry cliché.) Next, we follow the new health minister, Vlad, a reformer who regards his own efforts to get to the truth with a certain gallows humor. He's knows he's caught up in the spinning lies of the country's populists, as well its rather Kafkaesque legal framework. At times he can only laugh at the tragedy and absurdity of it all.
4. Dick Johson is Dead (Kirsten Johnson, 2020). For personal reasons, this moved me more than anything else I saw in 2020. Death, the very nature of it, was brought to the forefronts of our mind due to COVID-19. Documentarian Kirsten Johnson (Cameraperson) made this darkly comic, irreverent film as a tribute to her father upon learning he must succumb to Alzheimer’s within the next few years (as her mother did). Johnson uses special effects to stage her father’s grisly death in a series of comically grotesque ways (and he's game as all get-out to participate, still gregarous and lively, at first): falling down the stairs, getting smacked by a swinging girder so that a blood vessel spurts grotesquely, getting creamed by a falling air conditioner. You could call the picture Brechtian, I guess, in the sense that every time we get caught up, Johnson pulls back the curtain to show how it’s all make-believe, all an illusion—until, heartbreakingly, she can't. In other words, she can no longer stop reality overtaking fiction. Or can she? In an audacious code, just maybe she can.
5. Honeyland (Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov, 2019). You may read my review of the film here. It's an unforgettable documentary about Macedonian beekeepers. Scroll down to "Also Recommended."
6. I’m Thinking of Ending Things (Charlie Kaufman, 2020). I somehow related to just about everything in writer/director Charlie Kaufman's latest. It conveyed an atmosphere of surreal dread having to do with a kind of painful wishful thinking and loneliness. Let's just say it explores a psyche to which I can relate. It's a sad but humanistic vision of aging and memory. There's also plenty of in-jokes for those of us who've had our identities forged to some extent by film criticism, so I guess you could say this was made for me. Jessie Buckley was spot-on as the woman thinking of ending it with her boyfriend (Jesse Plemons), but who first must endure a meeting with his strange, grotesque parents (Toni Collette and David Thewlis). Those scenes made me want to stand up and cheer with glee.
7. Leon Morin, Priest (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1961). In a small French town under Nazi occupation, a young man and a young woman (Jean-Paul Belmondo and Emmanuelle Riva!)—a nondogmatic priest and a thoughtful non-believer, respectively—meet and debate, and the intellectual and sexual tensions are equally electric.
8. Love Streams (John Cassavetes, 1984). Instantly became one of more favorite films. Whatever it is I love about cinema, this has got it. It’s about a brother and sister (Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands) who don’t march to anyone’s drummer but their own—who in fact might be considered mad by the rest of the world. This strikes me this is the only way to live. Hilarious and heartbreaking.
9. Lovers Rock (Steve McQueen, 2020). It immerses us in a temporary oasis from the racism which defines the rest of Steve McQueen’s terrific five-film series Small Axe, which chronicles life for the West Indian community in Britain. This one is an exhilarating, celebratory story of a reggae house party where Martha (Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn) meets Franklyn (Micheal Ward). McQueen gives us a joyous slice of life, spiked with only a moment or three of life's intrusions, such as the vile racism always on the periphery. There's some astonishing bits, such as the moment when the music drops out and the revelers sing the verses of "Silly Games" a cappella. Love the "Kung Fu Fighting” dance as well. Connect to a good set of speakers and crank it up.
10. The Only Son (Yasujiro Ozu, 1936). Any year is a good one to catch up with holes in your experience of the oeurvre of the great storyteller, Ozu. You may read my review here, under "New Reviews." Just scroll down.
12. Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985). The towering nine-and-a-half hour documentary on the Holocaust.
16. The Uprising (Peter Snowdon, 2013). You may read my review here of this creative documentary on the Arab Spring, composed entirely of remixed videos posted to the Internet.
The 27 books I read in 2020, with a letter grade for each.
These were almost all good. Fun to have time to catch up with "the classics," isn't it? I only saw fit to dole out one A+, though. That’s for a book that represented a fateful conflation of subject, metaphor and social conditions that added up to a rare reading experience. (See below!)
1. Grown-Up Anger: The Connected Mysteries of Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and the Calumet Massacre of 1913 (Daniel Wolff, 2017) (A)
2. Idle Passion: Chess and the Dance of Death (Alexander Cockburn, 1975) (B+)
3. Sugarcane Academy: How a New Orleans Teacher and His Storm-Struck Students Created a School to Remember (Michael Tisserand, 2007) (A-)
4. Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and American Song (Larry David Smith, 2002) (B-)
5. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë, 1847) (A)
6. Selected Stories (Alice Munro, 1996) (A)
7. Rick Steves Portugal (Rick Steves, 2019) (A)
8. Any Old Way You Choose It: Rock and Other Pop Music, 1967-1973 (Robert Christgau, 1973 [expanded 2000 edition]) (B+)
9. We’ll Always Have Casablanca: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood’s Most Beloved Movie (Noah Isenberg, 2017) (A-)
10. Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: The Work of a Legendary Critic: Rock 'n' Roll as Literature and Literature as Rock 'n' Roll (Lester Bangs, 1987 [edited by Greil Marcus]) (re-read) (A)
11. Uneasy Money (P.G. Wodehouse, 1916) (A-)
12. Racing in the Street: The Bruce Springsteen Reader (June Skinner Sawyers, editor, 2004) (A)
13. I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran and Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa (Charles Brandt, 2004 [expanded 2016 edition]) (A)
14. The Indiscretions of Archie (P.G. Wodehouse, 1921) (A-)
15. Between the World and Me (Ta-Nehisi Coates, 2015) (A-)
16. The Plague (Albert Camus, 1947) (A+)
17. Blues People (Amiri Baraka, 1963) (A-)
18. Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë, 1847) (A)
19. Jill the Reckless (P. G. Wodehouse, 1920) (A)
20. Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion (Robert Gordon, 2013) (A)
21. Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston, 1937) (A)
22. The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon (Sei Shōnagon, 1002) (A)
23. On the Road with Bob Dylan (Larry “Ratso” Sloman, 1978) (A)
24. How to Watch a Movie (David Thomson, 2015) (A-)
25. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving, 1989) (A)
26. The Nickel Boys (Colson Whitehead, 2019) (A-)
27. The Girl on the Boat (P. G. Wodehouse, 1922) (B+)
The 12 Best Albums I Heard for the First Time in 2020
1. Rough and Rowdy Ways by Bob Dylan (2020). In a conversation with some good friends when this beautiful album came out, I described it as “a Joycean web” of historical and fictional characters, of the kind he’s been spinning at least since ‘Desolation Row.’ If this is his last record, it’s a magnificent drawing of the circle, wistful and ornery. It's a gossamer lattice of tender, tough, violent, shimmering singing and playing. In 1968, Jon Landau said that, if you listen between the lines, John Wesley Harding was about the Vietnam War—in mood, in tone. Upon first listens, I thought Rough and Rowdy Ways similarly an oblique comment on our own tragic, glorious days. With more listens, I thought its strength was the opposite: in how stubbornly personal it all was, in its timelessness, its going-one's-own-way, and damn the times. Later still, I thought it was something else altogether, or all of these. It's most important message is to always live in the moment—but never to be too sure about when, or even what, that moment is. All that is solid melts into the air; everything is in flux. This is history, but it's the present, too—and let's not make the mistake of thinking those are two seperate things. (This makes it all sound quite abstract, when really it's as immediate and concrete as a Jimmy Reed number.) On the one hand this is comforting: our times may feel like the apocalypse, yet this too shall pass. On the other hand, there's real stakes, and a fight is at hand. In The New Yorker, Amanda Petrusich made my favorite comment about Rough and Rowdy Ways: “[Dylan] seems to understand instinctively that American history is not a series of fixed points but an unmoored and constantly evolving idea that needs to be reëstablished each day—things don’t happen once and then stop happening. In this sense, linear time becomes an invention; every moment is this moment.”
2. Letter to You by Bruce Springsteen (2020). One of my favorite Springsteen eras is represented on the bootleg Fire on the Fingertips, circa ’72-’73—this music is so wild and loose. On the other hand, the streamlined, punchy sound the band evolved by the time of The River is also one of my favorite eras. The album brought together both those sounds. On the one hand, it featured his newest material—about mortality facing off against rock ’n’ roll—or, to put it another way, death versus the life force. On the other, the album took pages from the wild ’n’ loose songbook of his youth. Oft-bootlegged efforts from 50 years ago like Song for Orphans finally got committed to record. It's a tribute to his original childhood comrades in music, now departed—to Walter and Ray Cichon of the local band Motifs, his "first heroes" who died as teenagers in Vietnam; to the guys in his first band, the Castiles, all of whom are gone now, including Bart Haynes, the drummer, who died in Vietnam as well. The album brings a virtually unparelled career full circle. One thing I'm looking forward more than anything else, when this plague, is over is hearing him bring this music to a live audience.
3. Hey Clockface by Elvis Costello (2020). The latest from my old favorite is by turns abrasive, jaunty and exquisitely tender. “Byline” brought tears to my eyes. Costello also dropped his epic Spotify playlist 50 Songs for 50 Days, which made quite clear that there's little fresh about the hell we’ve been going through these last four years.
4. RTJ4 by Run the Jewels (2020). Urgent as all hell, and cathartic.
5. Kate & Anna McGarrigle by Kate & Anna McGarrigle (1976). Rousing and beautiful songs, joyous and sad. Love the French-Canadian atmosphere, which took me straight to our beloved Montreal.
6. Dancer with Bruised Knee by Kate & Anna McGarrigle (1977). See above.
7. The Cry of Love by Jimi Hendrix (1971). I thought I knew Hendrix, but somehow I'd never heard this one. Blazing stuff. "Freedom" is a personal statement, but it also could be a BLM anthem.
8. Budapest Concert by Keith Jarrett (2020). So beautiful I could cry. Makes me think of my dad, who's always been a great Jarrett fan. It was through him, growing up, that I hearrd Jarrett's music.
9. Agharta by Miles Davis (1975). Loud, fierce, fiery. Pete Cosey’s guitar is incendiary. Every time I re-read Lester Bangs I find new music to discover, and this was as true re-reading Psychotic Reactions this year. Lester used to go around with a boombox on his shoulder blasting this album, as well as Miles's Get Up With It. Its “electronic firestorms” (Robert Palmer) were a bit influence on punk.
10. Fetch the Bolt Cutters by Fiona Apple (2020). Startling, fierce and funny. She also played the piano on Bob Dylan's epic "Murder Most Foul"—a pretty goddamn fine year, I'd say.
11. Burnin' by the Wailers (1973). I'd heard almost all these songs in different contexts in various compilations over the years, but somehow I'd never heard them in the context of this album. On a great album, programming and flow is all, and this album amounts to a cohesive, cogent statement of rebellion from Bob Marley and the band. It couldn't have felt more appropriate to 2020. Also, it includes "Small Axe," resonating with Steve McQueen's groundbreaking series this year.
12. Blonde on the Tracks by Emma Swift (2020). Lovely and sometimes revelatory Dylan covers.
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