John Powers
Appearances
Fresh Air
Billie Eilish & Finneas
Every December, I look at my list of the things that I've read, watched, and listened to during the year. And every December, I come across things that I flat-out loved yet somehow never got around to talking about. Well, I want to share these pleasures now. Although they're a far cry from raindrops on roses or whiskers on kittens, these are a few of my favorite things.
Fresh Air
Billie Eilish & Finneas
I gasp in surprise at all fours. Miranda July's hilariously unpredictable novel about a middle-aged artist who leaves her family to drive to New York from Los Angeles, but only gets to the L.A. suburbs before she falls for a young rental car worker, checks into a cheap motel, and spends a fortune redecorating her room there.
Fresh Air
Billie Eilish & Finneas
All Fours is sometimes described as a book about perimenopause, the transitional stage before menopause. Yet this flattens it into sociology and self-help. July's Mind is far too unruly and interesting for that. Perverse, unrepentant, sometimes dirty, and often laugh-out-loud funny. I couldn't stop reading passages to my girlfriend.
Fresh Air
Billie Eilish & Finneas
It's a one-of-a-kind book about a woman cannonballing into her search for a new self and a new life. you never know where it's headed.
Fresh Air
Billie Eilish & Finneas
You know exactly where things are headed in Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat, an inventive documentary about the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the elected prime minister of the newly independent Congo, who was killed at the behest of the American and Belgian governments.
Fresh Air
Billie Eilish & Finneas
This is no grimly realistic sermon, but a jaunty montage film, blending fabulous archival footage, amazing interviews, CIA machinations, and oodles of black music from the likes of Louis Armstrong and Nina Simone. Along the way, Belgian filmmaker Johan Grimenprez quotes poet Octavio Paz's line, When history sleeps, it speaks in dreams. Grimenprez's movie unfolds like one of those dreams.
Fresh Air
Billie Eilish & Finneas
Life has turned giddily surreal in the Hulu series Interior Chinatown, based on the National Book Award-winning novel by Charles Yu. Its high point is the star-making performance by Ronnie Chiang, the Malaysian comedian you may know from The Daily Show. Chiang is uproarious as Fatty Choi, a low-ambition restaurant worker who's suddenly forced into waiting tables.
Fresh Air
Billie Eilish & Finneas
He treats the customers so rudely that, ironically, he becomes a sensation. Here, he approaches a white couple at a table. What?
Fresh Air
Billie Eilish & Finneas
The humor is slyer in my favorite mystery novel this year, The Lover of No Fixed Abode, by Carlo Frutero and Franco Lucentini, a hugely popular Italian literary team.
Fresh Air
Billie Eilish & Finneas
Set in Venice, it's about a middle-aged signora who's an art scout for big auction houses, who finds herself attracted to an enigmatic tour guide leader, Mr. Silvera, who seems to know everything and greets every situation with a different inflection of the word ah. The mystery is, who is he?
Fresh Air
Billie Eilish & Finneas
Shimmering with wit and bursting with an insider's knowledge of Venice, The Lover of No Fixed Abode builds to a solution so unexpected that not one person in a million will guess it. It's a minor classic. Two big classics are the 50s movies that got theatrical re-releases this year.
Fresh Air
Billie Eilish & Finneas
Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, in which a village hires seven swordsmen to protect them from bandits, and The Wages of Fear, Henri-Georges Clouseau's excruciatingly suspenseful story of four exiles in a poor Latin American town who must transport a shipment of nitroglycerin in ramshackle trucks. Both movies are magnificent in themselves. Their action scenes are still breathtaking.
Fresh Air
Billie Eilish & Finneas
But they possess a special interest because in them you can see a Japanese director and a French one laying down the template for today's Hollywood blockbusters. And they're better than our current action pictures in one crucial way. From their white-knuckle stunts to their revelations of character, everything in them is human scale.
Fresh Air
Billie Eilish & Finneas
My favorite sports movement this year was also Alive with Humanity. It featured Simone Biles, whose all-around gold medal at the Paris Olympics confirmed her as the greatest woman gymnast of all time. Yet what I loved wasn't her style in winning, which was, of course, phenomenal, but her grace in losing.
Fresh Air
Billie Eilish & Finneas
In the final event, the floor exercise, where she normally reigns supreme, she was bested by Rebecca Andrade, the superb Brazilian gymnast who'd spent her career losing over and over to Biles. And what did Biles do when she lost? She didn't cry, I'm still the GOAT. She didn't whine that the judges had cheated her. She didn't say that Andrade was lucky or actually no good.
Fresh Air
Billie Eilish & Finneas
Instead, on the medal stand, she and teammate Jordan Childs, who won bronze, literally bowed to Andrade. They bowed to her skill, to her bravery in overcoming multiple surgeries, to her always being a worthy opponent. It was a gesture of respect that, far from diminishing Biles, only made her greatness more incandescent. A valuable lesson as we entered the new year.