Somewhat belated happy New Year!
At the end of 2023, as usual, I posted about my best movies, music, etc, of that year. I mentioned there my uncertainty about whether Nitai Herszhkovits’ Call on the old wise should have made my top five jazz/folk/other CDs. For what it’s worth, I’m still undecided about that (should it take precedence over the Bobo Stenson Trio’s Sphere? does that matter?); all I can say is that I do think it is a wonderful album. Is it jazz? Certainly, but it also makes me think of Debussy, Ravel and other ‘classical’ composers just as much. Who cares? Give it a try if you can.
While we’re on the subject, there are a few highly praised 2023 movies I had hoped to catch before the year’s end, which I’ve now managed to see. Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things I found disappointing – as I did most of this talented, imaginative director’s work since Dogtooth (still, for me, his best film); it seems to me he tries so hard to be weird and wacky he forgets about substance, other than to offer pretentious overstatement. (Discuss!) But Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers really delivered for me; don’t let the customarily unappealing trailer put you off. Slow-burn but finally fulfilling; potentially cliché-ridden but strangely fresh; full of subtlety, emotional, pyschological and social insight, resonant images and sounds, superb performances. Fine script, unflashy direction. What more can one ask for? This, I think, is not what we get from Poor Things, great performances and impressive technicology apart. Horses for courses, I guess, but for me Payne (who, I should confess, I met once and didn’t even like that much) wins by a mile or more. He is surely one of the most rewarding north American filmmakers of recent years.
For what it’s worth. in case you’ve missed it, I’ve been listening to the superb Continuing album by the great Tyshawn Sorey several times a week recently. It’s that good.
Finally, a belated recommendation for the Tate Modern’s Philip Guston exhibition: uneven, given his career, but mostly great. It’s on till mid-February. Enough said…
notes and observations by Geoff Andrew 