Giulia Figueiredo

The 20 Best Things of 2017

stokan

A few caveats: there is so much culture out there these days that it’s impossible to consume even half of it in a given year. There are so many movies, TV shows, songs, performances, and cultural ephemera that I’m sure would have made this list if only I had had the time to encounter them. Also, the actual most important and most positive “things” of 2017 were either too strictly political (the election of Doug Jones) strictly personal (#MeToo) or both (The Women’s March) to comfortably fit on this list. This list is just limited to things from the world of entertainment, sports, and pop culture.

With that out of the way: My top 20 favorite things of 2017 in no particular order.

1. Pod Save America

Here’s how long 2017 was: this podcast didn’t exist when it started. And here’s how hard 2017 was: it would have been impossible to get through it without this podcast. I’m constantly amazed by how smart and funny and insightful everyone involved with Pod Save America is. Listening feels like both doing my civic duty and hanging out with my best friends. Also, I’m totally a Dan.

(I know I said this list wasn’t going to be explicitly political, but it’s my list, I can bend the rules however I want.)

2. Meryl Streep’s Golden Globes speech

Has anyone ever won an Oscar for an awards show speech? An Emmy maybe? Meryl welcomed us to the next four years in the most beautiful way possible, by showing us humanity at its very best. And to anyone who says Beyonce is our queen: never forget Meryl Streep is still alive.

3. Sturgill Simpson on SNL

NOW That’s What I Call Music!

Wikipedia should delete their entry for “music” and just replace it with links to these two performances. This is music at its peak. So thanks for music-ing everyone else who makes music, but Sturgill Simpson did the best at music, so you can all pack it up and go home now.

4. Melissa McCarthy as Sean Spicer

The best impressions forever change how you see the person being impersonated. But this was more than that; this impression was the beginning of the end of Sean Spicer’s career. Comedy actually got a member of the White House fired. It’s probably SNL’s greatest achievement.

5. Jimmy Kimmel’s health care plea

Along those same lines, there’s a real case to made that in these 13 minutes Jimmy Kimmel saved health care in America.

Television ultimately created this mess of presidency; maybe television is also the thing ultimately saves us.

6. Eminem’s cypher

As someone who fervently believes two of the greatest works of protest art ever are “Dear Mister President” by Pink and American Idiot by Green Day, I am a big supporter of the idea that what matters in protest art is less the art but the artist (see also: the previous item on this list). An artist who can reach people who might actually disagree with them has the ability to do so much more than those who are only preaching to the converted no matter how great their art or their intentions. And you know who might actually be able to reach Trump voters? An angry white man from a dying industrial city in the middle of the country. Eminem had a chance to use his popularity with his specific audience to make a real difference in the world and he owned it, he didn’t let it go. He didn’t miss his chance to blow.

7. Girls - “Goodbye Tour”

For me Girls was never about “girls”, it was about the massive changes urban dwelling creatives go through in their mid 20s, and how those changes are best reflected to us through our friendships. And the de-facto series finale of Girls captured an essential aspect of that growth better than anything I’ve ever seen: the way friendships run their course. It’s a painful, bittersweet, yet somehow life-affirming part of life that is almost never portrayed on screen. So it was almost shocking to see the series end the only way it could have: by acknowledging that things end.

8. Sam Rockwell in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri

My favorite acting performances are usually performances so specific and idiosyncratic thats it’s impossible to imagine another human being ever giving a performance that’s remotely the same. And performances like that are sort of Sam Rockwell’s whole “thing”. You literally never know what his best characters will do in any situation. Every moment is alive with possibility. And his work in Three Billboards is full of the finest moments of his career.

9. Lady Bird

Types of movies I like:

-slice of life movies

-coming of age movies

-movies with great writing

-movies about weirdo, disaffected, wise-beyond-their-years theater kids

-movies that feel lived in and real where even the smallest character seems like they have a backstory and full inner life

-movies about the relationship between parents and children

-movies with strong female protagonists

-movies about wanting to leave your stifling hometown for New York City

-movies featuring Alanis Morissette songs un-ironically

-Saoirse Ronan movies

Lady Bird was everything I could ever want from a movie. It could have been 10 times as long and it still would have been too short.

10. HAIM - “You Never Knew”

Speaking of everything I could ever want: it’s 2017’s best Fleetwood Mac song!

I could hear this another 10,000 times and I still wouldn’t be sick of it.

11. Chance the Rapper’s Grammys performance

It says everything you need to know that in 2017 the Grammys still dont allow videos of the performances from their ceremony to be posted online. It says clearly that they represent a music world stuck in a past that never even really existed in the first place. And the greatest irony of the Grammys not letting me share content from their shows is that it means that I can’t show you what the future looks like.

Back in my day music was about being cool, and tortured, and mysterious. The voice of my generation was an anti-social drug addict who killed himself. But the prospective voice of this generation is an emotionally open, hyper-earnest, over-sharer who is excitedly expressing his joy and his love for God during his Grammys performance. It’s impossible to watch this performance and not feel hopeful about the world. It’s also now impossible to watch this performance at all.

Two steps forward to steps back forever into eternity.

12. Charly Bliss - Guppy

If, like me, you’ve been going through Rilo Kiley withdrawals, then might I recommend Guppy by Charly Bliss. Charlie Bliss is like Rilo Kiley if Rilo Kiley were going through a Queens of the Stone Age phase; and yes it’s exactly as great as it sounds. I defy you not to like this album; it’s impossible.

13. Master of None - “Thanksgiving”

When you let people who don’t usually get to tell their stories finally tell their stories, you get stories that feel particularly alive and powerful and new. Because of this commitment to underrepresented voices, most episodes of Master of None felt refreshingly like nothing else on TV. But for me, “Thanksgiving” was the very best of the lot. It stayed with me more than anything else I saw this year. More television like this in 2018 please.

14. Oscars Best Picture Mix-Up

They say that heroin addicts are always just chasing how good their first high felt. This year’s Best Picture mix-up will be that for the Oscars from now until the end of time. Every year they’ll keep trying to manufacture drama and shock, but nothing will ever be as truly thrilling, inexplicable, and chaotic as announcing the wrong Best Picture winner. We all witnessed history this year -it’s the live awards show moment that will never, ever, be topped.

15. LORDE - Melodrama

If I was 18 years old my entire dorm room would just be pictures of Lorde and I would have this album tattooed on my face.

As a 35 year old it reminds me of exactly what it feels like to want those things to be so.

The fact this album wasn’t a massive hit makes me think we should just blow up the whole music industry and start again from scratch. Maybe we still will, and if so, I hope this is the dynamite that starts the explosion.

16. Black Thought’s Freestyle

Serious question: How is this even humanly possible?

17. Chris Evans and Jenny Slate getting back together

To quote the greatest poet of our age, Christina Aguilera: They say if you love something let it go / if it comes back it’s yours, that’s how you know / it’s for keeps, yeah, it’s for sure / and you’re ready and willing to give me more

Shakespeare couldn’t have said it better himself.

18. Elisabeth Moss in The Handmaid’s Tale

Hot take, or maybe just regular take: Elisabeth Moss is the greatest television actress of her generation. How she has gone from The West Wing where I thought she was the weakest member of the entire cast, to The Handmaid’s Tale where she gave the best performance on all of television this year, I have no idea. But between this, Mad Men, and Top of the Lake there’s no other actress in her age range who has delivered a body of television acting work as strong as she has. And to be on two top 10 all-time shows (West Wing, Mad Men) and now the best new show of 2017 (Handmaid’s Tale) it’s not just her work that sets her apart, but her taste in projects. Just give her all the Emmys now, or as they will be known in the future, the Mosses.

19. Harry Styles - “Sign of the Times”

Believe me I’m, the last person in the world who would have thought my favorite song of the year would be a Harry Styles single I discovered through an America’s Got Talent performance, but, what can I say, 2017 was full of surprises.

20. World Series Game 5

I’m obviously DEEPLY biased here as The Houston Astros are my favorite sports team, but by far the greatest drama I saw in 2017 was a baseball game. But of course it wasn’t just a game. It was an event. It was a life experience. It was a spiritual happening. Over the course of nearly six hours (the highlights alone are 14 minutes long!) I got to experience every possible human emotion. At one point I was literally lying down face-first on the carpet, trying simply to focus on my breathing, and honestly contemplating whether death might be preferable to this game lasting even one pitch longer. Suffice it to say nothing else I will watch on television in my lifetime will ever make me feel anything close to that. Games like this aren’t just why we watch sports, they’re why we’re alive at all. So if your favorite sports team wins their first ever championship, I would strongly recommend they go through a game like this in the process. It’s like nothing else on earth.

Viste? É para isso mesmo que a aplicação é perfeita.

Outras coisas de que podes gostar