Things That Impressed Me In 2024
That I haven't already written about. Lightning round!
My Old Ass
Starting off with this sweet movie that plays fast and fun with time travel, get ready to cry about transitions from one phase of life to the next and how sometimes you know it’s happening and other times you don’t until years later. It’s about grief, and a refreshingly honest take on female sexuality in the twenty-first century (though people on Twitter seemed to hate that part lol).
CDK dancing to “Somebody That I Used To Know”
This is peak choreography for me. Like, if I knew that if I kept choreographing for the next twenty years that I would someday be able to make something that feels like this, I would go for it full throttle – but there is absolutely no guarantee that I ever could. The originality! The dramatic progression! The video editing choices! Sublime.
CONCLAVE
Most recently, the muzh and I watched Conclave – a tidy, wonderful bit of storytelling about cardinals choosing a new pope. It has villains who think they’re heroes, fatal flaws in otherwise great men, and women being sidelined (that part was annoying). Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) is its beating heart as the dean of the conclave, finding out too much information about people and having more power than he ever (claims to have) wanted.
I love pointing out to the muzh aspects of a religious upbringing he might miss because, as I’ve mentioned before, you either grew up with organized religion or you didn’t. In Conclave we see how everyone is impressed with Cardinal Lawrence’s devoutness, leading to him being pushed to accept public roles. Yet inwardly he’s having a crisis of faith that he feels renders him unworthy.
Shōgun
Good golly, Miss Molly. Shōgun is such a beautiful, well-told story. A historical fiction show about Japanese politics in the 1600s, as experienced by a rogue cannonball white dude British sailor (slash pirate?), who also happens to be the show’s Fool. It has BUDGET, and period-accurate Japanese (though English is a stand in for Portuguese? lol), with real stakes, and sexy times, and silly hats.
My favorite part of the casting is that everyone is the exact level of attractiveness that they should be. They’re not all Hollywood-level hot, and their personalities are informed by the way they look. Chef’s kiss.
Garters, written by Natalie Zutter, directed by Blake Hood and performed at Otherworld Theatre
Jenny Hoppes as Hedy and Kira Nutter as Sir Yvain Who am I, a woman living in the suburbs of Chicago, to resist an onstage production billed as “an immersive queer romantasy” and promising a Tamora Pierce-inspired, feminist tale of knights and love? WHO AMONG US?
Two women sneak into knight training. One gets caught and thrown out because she was having an affair with the crown prince, the other successfully becomes a knight but realizes they’re nonbinary. The two meet again seven years later AND CAN THEY EVER TRUST EACH OTHER AGAIN!! This story was such a smart and fun take. It took a small set and made it feel like a whole world. Like nothing I’d seen before and I would gladly dive into that world again.
KAOS
I’ve heard Kaos, the show about modernized Greek gods controlling humans and then facing the consequences of their greed, compared in tone to The Magicians. I found it MUCH much darker, but I was still lowkey obsessed with the choices and the changes made to the source material. Honestly, I would use this as the golden standard for adaptations that create a new tone and message yet somehow remain faithful to the original.
Bringing Down the Duke, by Evie Dunmore
The pacing in this romance novel is exquisite. Maybe I read more fantasy than usual this year, where there’s this need to explain what characters are doing all day, so we get the minutiae of their breakfasts and what they talk about with their servants. Dunmore doesn’t dither on scenes like that. If it’s not advancing the relationships of the story, she skips it. Mention a ball in one scene, and the next might be the ball itself. It’s amazing.
And I find it so freeing! I’ve been struggling with my manuscript and interviewing journalists on how long it takes to get through the checkpoints between Jerusalem and Ramallah and what different cities in Israel smell like and those details are important, of course – for me. Thanks to Dunmore, I’m realizing now that maybe my readers don’t need to know that. Even the one sentence that took five hours of research – I can just skip to the good part! IT’S JUST THAT EASY!
BONUS ROUND:
ANTI-CHEF’s Piñata Cake
The opposite of “impress me” and it made me laugh SO HARD on a bad day. Jamie is seven years into his cooking journey and there’s something so sweet and earnest and Canadian about the way he goes about learning new skills. Let’s just say cakes are not his forté. By the time he gets to the frosting on this piñata cake, I was dyinggggggg.
HAPPY NEW YEAR!