Best Of.
The months leading up to this past new years it seemed everywhere you went people were compiling best of lists from the year & the decade. I always discover a bunch of new music & movies (book lists are not so good) trawling through these but rarely feel compelled to offer one of my own. Perhaps this is because in any given year my favourite bits of media weren’t released in that year or I find it difficult to apply any sort of hierarchy of devotion to the things I was absorbed by through a calendar year.
The other night we were at home watching Where The Wild Things Are and a little way in we realised that one of the central beastie characters was being voiced by James Gandolfini (Tony Soprano). Not only that, but the hairy big headed Wild Thing (called Carol) was acting exactly like a slightly more childish version of Tony and the Soprano element was the best thing in a fairly ordinary film.
Later browsing through best of cinema lists from the 2000s I realised that none of these films had the impact of the TV series I’d watched over past decade, particularly the past five years. Nothing had the power, humour or pure narrative immersion of shows like The Sopranos, Deadwood, 30 Rock, The Wire, Mad Men, Love My Way, The West Wing or Breaking Bad. For me no cinema of this period came close.
Partly this is because these series watched the way we and a lot of others watch them (as box sets or file collections) are in some ways a new form. Thirty sometimes forty hour feature films. Usually with multiple episodes watched back to back, disc after disc devoured in a sitting. Aside from epic theatre (Wagner’s Ring Cycle for instance or the Mahabharata) or the experience you can sometimes have with a novel this isn’t a common media consumption experience. Although it is becoming more common with gaming as games become larger and more fictionally immersive.
It took us six months to watch the Sopranos on DVD during the first half of this past year and nothing is as effective (or affective for that matter) as getting to know characters over that timespan in building narrative immersion. One of the other things that makes these story worlds so compulsively watchable is that unlike most cinema I can’t predict what is going to happen next. Partly this is the effect of the episodes being written in real time as production happens, but also the passage of time in world events and the simple fact that actors, writers, directors change, move on and in some cases die while a series is being made.
All of this is not to say that there weren’t great movies made during the past decade (I have a list of 30 or so I loved) but that it seemed increasingly less vital as a form. Some of my favourite cinema experiences from this time were so because they were large scale immersive spectacle blockbusters (Avatar being the most recent example) and massive size and seat shaking sound is one thing my loungeroom can’t do.
