Yeah, it's two days late...(The Best of 2023)

Hey, welcome to The Five’s best of 2023 list…that probably should have come OUT in 2023. But alas, travel and holiday schedules prevented that from happening, so here are the best movies, books, songs, TV shows and podcasts…from the year that ended two days ago.

[movies] (that I actually saw)

Well, I started a business this year, and had two pre-school age kids…so rather than a top five list, here are the four movies I saw this year, plus one guest submission (I’m not kidding…I also didn’t re-watch any old movies. It’s hard to find two hours).

In this stage of my life, I cover more pop culture than I consume…

• It’s not obvious at first, but the John Wick franchise is heavily influenced by Lord of the Rings. It’s not JUST the “Gun-Fu” martial-arts-meet-shoot-em-up that makes these movies work, its the high-fantasy mythos. Creator/director Chad Stahelski (an ex-kickboxer turned Matrix stunt man, turned director) has openly shared that several elements of LOTR were baked into the script (such as the Blood Oath Marker Coins, secret societies, ancient warrior clans).
  
  The fourth film concludes a near-perfect Quadrilogy. Hopefully, Hollywood can leave well enough alone with this one…the story is perfect as it’s been told.

• Yes, John Wick was a heavy influence on Extraction 2, the Chris Hemsworth (Thor, Rush) for shooting one’s way out of an Eastern European prison, only to be chased by….more or less…the same Eastern European gangsters chasing Mr. Wick.
  
  But here’s what the casual viewer may miss: the grief. When the pacing finally slows, Hemsworth’s subtle performance as a man who reveals the unfathomable pain that’s led him to the mercenary life is the best on-screen work the Australian has ever done.

• Dungeons and Dragons is a slightly painful watch, only because it’s TBD if this excellent first outing will turn into a franchise. Chris Pine (Star Trek, Wonder Woman) and Michelle Rodriguez (Fast & Furious films, Avatar 1 & 2) lead a cast that deliver gut-busting comedy AND deep fantasy/sci-fi lore.
  
  It’s REALLY good, but didn’t find much of an audience. If you have any interest in the scale of Lord of the Rings/Game of Thrones with a large helping of comedy (that doesn’t mock the source material), D&D is worth a spin.
  
  Oh yeah, and the combat scenes…top shelf.

This is the first movie I saw in theaters with my oldest daughter, and despite the negative initial reactions to the voice work of Chris Pratt (Parks & Rec, The Terminal List) not attempting to replicate the Italian accent of the original NES games…this is pitch perfect, front to back that clocks in at a crisp 90 minutes.

Plus, in a refreshing change (for 2023), it’s not trying to set up a universe worth of spinoffs and streaming TV IP…crazy how rare a self-contained story on the big screen is these days.

• GUEST SUBMISSION: Craig from Second Drafts. Because, sadly, I couldn’t find time to see a 5th movie in 2023…

  
  Based on the 2017 non-fiction account by David Grann, director Martin Scorsese adaptation of Killers of the Flower Moon (now streaming on Paramount) is the rare movie that is arguably better than the book.
  
  This isn't to say Grann's writing is lacking (it's not), but his non-fiction bites off more than it chews in trying to tell the story of the Osage Indian Nation as well as the formation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the latter of which Scorsese downplays in the film.
  
  This single directorial decision is as important as any Scorsese makes (another being the casting of Golden Globes-nominated Lily Gladstone as Mollie Burkhart) and brings sharper focus to the inspiring real-life Osage characters and so many of their heartbreaking storylines emanating from Pawhuska, Oklahoma (75 minutes northwest of Tulsa), where the 1920s travesties took place. Do yourself a favor and let this one punch you in the gut.

[shows]

Like movies…I didn’t take it all in this year. I didn’t see Succession (any of it), or Daisy Jones and the Six, or The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon or half a dozen other shows that were high on my list. Blame it on a new business & young kids.

• 1923 dares to go where few in Hollywood dare to tread—looking at the last stage of life. The Yellowstone prequel picks up the Dutton family saga with Jacob (Harrison Ford of Star Wars and Indiana Jones fame) and Cara (Hellen Mirren—RED, The Queen) as a pair of Octogenarians holding on to their land and old way of life as new technology and big money try to push them off their Montana ranch.
  
  It’s only slightly annoying that a subplot involving a nephew wandering Africa as a professional hunter, post WWI, steals so much from The Ghost and the Darkness and Legends of the Fall—two movies I love a lot, but it did feel like a bit too much copy/paste from the source material.
  
  Other than that…perfection. This is my favorite Yellowstone poject to date.*
  
  *Note, I’m potentially biased, as my youngest daughter, Emery, is named after my great-grandfather, who cowboyed in Montana during this era).

• I had pretty much thrown Star Wars in the trash bin after a bad sequel trilogy and string of mediocre shows, so I don’t even know why I threw Ahsoka on during a treadmill run, but the series gets back to what made Star Wars so much fun in the first place…combining the Western Ethos with Samurai elements.
  
  Ahsoka has real stakes. It’s not concerned with setting up other shows or a bunch of jokes that don’t land. It has themes and sticks within them (friendship, impulsive risk, the temptation of evil), which makes the action (quite well done) a part of a narrative and not just visual noise.
  
  The only downside here is that Ahsoka essentially jumps to live action from an animated series called Star Wars: Rebels, which I’ve never seen…so some googling may be required to understand the setup. If you’re OK with that…proceed. You’ll have a great time.

• With only three episodes released, Reacher broke the record for the most watched Amazon show of 2023.
  
  Plot wise, its’ murder/mystery/espionage stuff…but Alan Ritchen’s nuanced acting to bring the title character to life helps this one stand out from the crowd (and smash records).

• Netflix deserves plenty of criticism for turning on a firehose of mediocre shows…but The Night Agent aint one of them. The setup may be quite unique (a low level FBI agent mans a phone in the White House that never rings…and then it rings), but but plot you’ve seen before (bad guys in government threaten democracy).
  
  But the execution…flawless. A sustained thrill ride to the final moments.

• Critics be damned…this is a great show. I’ve been waiting for a Bass Reeves story on the screen since I became a fan of the legendary lawman back in high school (I read a lot).
  
  This one takes a minute to get going, but covers a heck of a lot of history, from Reeves’ real life escape from slavery to his status as the real life Lone Ranger (the character was based on Reeves). British actor David Oyewolo (Selma, Lincoln) turns in a top notch performance that does justice to one of the greatest Americans in this nation’s history.

[albums]

(artist, album and song of the year)

In 2023, West Virginia native Charles Wesley Godwin took his mountain sound from a relative obscurity to stadiums (well, technically while opening for Zach Bryan, but still), the Grand Old Opry, and into sold out venues around the country.

"All Again” is the best song off the year’s best album, a raucous ode to home, marriage, family, fidelity…and purpose. Godwin is the most important musical moment for the Appalachian state since John Denver Wrote “Country Roads, Take Me Home.”

Ah, the joy of The Gaslight Anthem making music again. The Jersey Quartet returned after nearly a decade off, forged a new sound and got help from The Boss himself—Bruce Springsteen.

Three decades after they formed, Foo Fighters returned with one of their very best—an album almost exclusively about grief as singer/songwriter Dave Grohl unpacks the loss of his mother and the death of longtime Foo drummer Taylor Hawkins.

In 2013, Jason Isbell reigned supreme in the Americana world with Southeastern. While the album that followed were good…the Alabama native never matched his previous output until this year, when Weathervanes knocked the socks off his longtime listeners and new converts alike.

Killer Mike found mainstream success with Run the Jewels, an Atlanta-meets-New-York sonic mashup with rapper/producer El-P. After a decade in the group, Mike stepped out for his first solo project since 2013. The result is both personal and profound, with the Georgia native diving deep into his own narrative for cultural reflections on adversity, success…and the legacy of his grandparents. If that doesn’t sound very “hip hop” then you need to branch out beyond the pop radio hits the genre is most known for.

Nearing his 50th birthday, the Grammy-nominated Georgia native sounds more urgent and relevant on the mic than in his 20’s.

Even if you haven’t previously counted yourself as a fan of Blink-182, it’s worth checking out the San Diego trio’s latest, which pulls more sonic inspiration from The Ramones, Misfits and Fugazi than their earlier work…and manages to wrestle with tragedy and loss without being a total downer of a record.

If there are three guys who can make looking at the darker side of life…kinda joyous, it’s Tom, Mark and Travis.

Great job guys…now, try not to break up again and hate each other…mmm kay?

[songs]

I wasn’t a Luke Combs fan until this year, when the latter half this Growin’ Up & Gettin’ Old album series dropped. While Luke’s cover of “Fast Car” got the most attention, it’s “Where the Wild Things Are” that’s the crown jewel of the album.

There are too many country songs that hit shallow emotional beats just to cash in on radio play (hence the stereotypes of country music being about a guy that loses his girl, his truck, his dog), but this one goes far deeper.

A novella played out over four minutes, we see the narrator say goodbye to his older brother, who heads out to LA to chase his dream. The narrator visits for a summer, but determines the Tinseltown life isn’t for him, and he must return to North Carolina. And then…well, you’ll need to hit play, I don’t want to ruin the whole song, but suffice it to say the final stanza is as good as anything Springsteen has ever written.

“Strangers, from strangers into brothers
From brothers into strangers once again
We saw the whole world
But I couldn't see the meaning
I couldn't even recognize my friends.”

For Millennials, it was the verse that spawned a million text messages, reconnecting old friends, putting to bed too-long held feuds. Blink, the might-as-well-be-official band of an entire generation, infamously broke up through lawyers due to the extreme discord of the members.

I took a near-death plane crash for drummer Travis Barker and Mark Hoppus enduring a brutal cancer diagnosis and treatment plan for the trio to reunite.

“One More Time” proves the axiom that what’s the most personal is the most universal…the song is directly about the band’s troubles and reunification…but my friends and I all transposed our own lives over those verses.

The best cut from a best album of 2023 Killer Mike’s reflections on grief over losing his mother and grandmother felt like an instant classic at first spin. But it weas the remix of “Motherless,” which features gorgeous piano and vocals that sound like they’re straight out of a funeral service, that elevate this as one of the top songs of 2023. In the world of hip-hop, “Motherless” hits a note in the genre in a way no one has since Tupac’s “Dear Mama” back in the 90’s.

TIE: Taylor Bickett’s breakout hit “Quarter Life Crisis” and Kimberly Perry’s “If I Die Young Pt. 2” look at aging (and mortality) from the lens of the 20’s (former) and late 30’s (latter). They play pretty dang well back-to-back, telling adjacent chapters of a life story.

TIE: Turnpike Troubadour’s “Brought Me” and “The Rut.”

”Brought Me” leans heavily on the fiddle sounds that make up so much of the Oklahoma Sextet’s sound, and borrows the title from the phrase “dance with who brought you,” which singer/songwriter Evan Felker uses as a metaphor for the fans who stuck by him through his downfall to alcoholism, and new (sober) musical chapter.

”The Rut” also deals with Felker’s alcoholism, telling the tale of how Elk hunting helped the artist find (and maintain) sobriety from alcohol.

BONUS—BEST RE-RELEASES

Before Zach Bryan, Childers, Stapleton…there was the Drive-By Truckers. The independent country/rock band out of northern Alabama was able to build a passionate fanbase in the pre-social-media era, off of a robust email list and 4 hour live shows (I’ve seen more than one).

The Complete Dirty South expands and brings new vocals to some tracks on one of their most groundbreaking albums.

Now the only (surviving) vocalist of Linkin Park, Mike Shinoda hasn’t stepped back into the recording studio with his main band since the 2017 suicide of Chester Bennington, but that doesn’t mean the rapper/producer hasn’t been active with solo and side projects, as well as working with other artists.

This year, Shinoda dusted off his 2005 solo debut The Rising Tied and packed it full of additional sonic goodies.

[books]

• John K. Lauk—The Good Country: A History of the Midwest.
  
  Another excellent recommendation from my friend Craig at Second Drafts, The Good Country will forever change the way you see the Midwest.
  
  From the region’s staunch commitment to anti-slavery and Civil Rights (the Midwest essentially started the Civil War) to the Heartland’s commitment to classical philosophy (Jacksonville, IL had a club for the everyday citizen to study Plato), you’ll learn so much about “flyover country” that the Costal Elite probably won’t want you to know.

• Patrick J. Deenan—Regime Change
  This one takes some focus and time to get through, but Regime Change is one of the most important (and surprising) books of 2023, considering that it comes from a tenured Prof at an elite University (Notre Dame).
  
  Vox’s harsh criticism of the book…somehow aligns perfectly with my endorsement:
  

  Deneen compares this new elite unfavorably to medieval aristocrats, and even the wealthy of Gilded Age America because of their disconnection from place and tradition. Unlike aristocrats, who ruled over specific land and a specific group of peasants, the modern elite is transient and cut off from the working people who surround them. The nature of this elite, he argues, reflects “the culminating realization of liberalism”: a system that theoretically opposes hierarchy but actually has given rise to new and veiled forms of stratification.
  

  Today’s elite care about “inequality” and “oppression,” he concedes — but only in theory. Their definitions are so airy, so focused on insular discourses surrounding race and gender, that they foster a disconnect between urban elites and their Uber drivers — let alone the working class in the countryside with whom the laptop class barely interacts.
  
  Or, TL:DR…the Coastal Elite hate the working class because they think they’re stupid, an incorrect theory the Coastal Elite never test because they never leave NYC’s Upper West Side or Newberry, CT to see the rest of the nation (or it’s people).

• Jack Carr—Only the Dead

  
  Carr is best known as the guy who wrote The Terminal List, which Chris Pratt’s star power turned into a huge show for Amazaon’s Prime Video. The 5th book in the series is the best since Carr’s debut.

• Peter Zeihan —The End of the World is Just the Beginning
  
  Zeihan should probably be a much bigger name, but political commentator’s don’t generate nearly as much buzz when they’re talking about complex international relations as the Ann Coulter/Van Jones types do for screaming for/against Trump/Biden/take your pick.
  
  What’s crazy about this book is that it’s ALREADY coming true. Zeihan predicts the return of piracy on the high seas, which just re-emerged in the Middle East following the Hamas attack on Israel.
  

• Clay Martin—Wrath of the Wendigo
  
  This one gets an asterisk on the endorsement, because while I enjoyed Martin’s fictional portrayal of a fractured America in open conflict, the lead character’s moral ambiguity towards civillian deaths of his enemies.
  
  It’s on the list, because Wendigo is the first time I’ve seen the political right endorse new-age beliefs in fiction (the main character essentially follows a mix of Norse mythology and new age crystal crap).
  
  It’s an excellent and engaging book as fiction, but it also captures a culture headed furhter into paganism, which I’m not a fan of.
  

[podcasts]

• The Old Gods of Appalachia dives deep into the lore of the Eastern Mountains, and will absolutely freak you out on late night drives or while doing laundry in the dark corner of your basement.

• Honestly is one of the best products from former NY Times Editor Bari Weiss, who left the paper to create a more reliable, less biased journalism outlet. From Presidential candidates to first-hand accounts of the Israel/Hamar War, this one dives deep.

• Hands down my favorite podcast of 2023, Haunted Cosmos is a look at the paranormal through a theologically conservative Christian lens. It’s a heck of a ride, and one I anticipate every other Wednesday.

• In 2023, The Rewatchables reigned supreme as the most essential pop culture show on the internet. If you love movies and aren’t listening…fix that!

• Even if you’re not a fan of the right-wing outlet The Daily Wire, you may love Morning Wire for filling the void NPR vacated due to…the latter’s consistently poor journalism. Straightforward news each morning. 15 minutes a day, and you know what’s happening.

Until the next one,

-sth