As my best albums list is the “Best Albums I Listened To” as opposed to just the “Best Albums,” it is more pointedly subjective than my other best of lists. I usually do not listen to enough albums each year to really be able to definitively say which are the absolute greatest. Thus, instead of focusing on objective critical analysis, I am concentrating more on my own personal experiences with each of these entries.
1. Tame Impala, Currents – The Australian psychedelic rockers’ latest gets my top spot because it is one of those vaunted albums in which I wanted to listen to every track over and over, both as a whole and individually. Tame Impala’s previous release, Lonerism, is one of my favorite albums of all-time; I am counting my blessings that its follow-up is now in the same category.
1. Rad Cunningham (Will Forte), Moonbeam City – On an underseen show, Will Forte worked his indelible powers of empathy and open-mindedness to birth another one of his beautifully pathetic creations. In the patently ridiculous Moonbeam City PD, Rad is the most ridiculous, and the most childish, but also the most profoundly human.
“We’re not ugly people,” Carol Aird pleadingly, but assuredly, insists to her husband during a custody fight that threatens to turn nasty. Carol is a thoroughly humanistic examination of the affair between a shopgirl and a housewife in 1952 New York, and the men in their life who struggle to understand them. It is about identity: the internal challenges to find your own and the external challenges to live it out. It mostly keeps it cool, in a manner that viewers who are not already fully attuned to director Todd Haynes’ restrained style might struggle to fully embrace. But when Cate Blanchett delivers the “ugly people” emphasis, Carol finds the winner’s circle.
If a film is about a decades-long marriage rocked by the revelation of long-held secrets, the natural expectation is that the marriage will fall apart. 45 Years is a little more complicated than that. Kate (Charlotte Rampling) is initially fine when the dead body of her husband Jeff’s (Tom Courtenay) ex-lover Katya is discovered. But tensions rise as the extent of Jeff and Katya’s relationship is revealed. It is never fully clear if Jeff has kept these secrets due to selfishness, embarrassment, deviousness, forgetfulness, or some combination of the above. Similarly, it is left ambiguous whether or not Kate can remain satisfied with their marriage amidst the dishonesty. Ergo, 45 Years works best as a showcase for the complications that Rampling can convey with gasps, furrowed brows, and heavy cheeks.
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