50 Wonderful Things From 2017
Standard caveats: I don't watch everything! I am behind on many things. That's just the way the world is. So if something you loved isn't here, it is not a rebuke.
And: These are cultural — mostly pop-cultural — things. These are not the best things in the world. Like yours, my actual list of wonderful things from the year, if I wrote it in a journal instead of for work, would be a list of people and moments spent with them, of days when it was unexpectedly sunny and of the times when things suddenly felt better. But whatever journey you're on at any given moment, you can always use more good things. So here we go.
1. Jake Gyllenhaal's work in Stronger. Stronger is about Jeff Bauman, whose lower legs were amputated after the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. A film like this — a biopic, an apparent hero story, a story involving disability, a story about the aftereffects of terrorism — has a hundred hackneyed traps to avoid falling into, and the trailer unfortunately suggested that it would tumble headfirst into every one. But Gyllenhaal imbues Jeff with an ordinary temperament and ordinary problems that are not solved, to say the least, by sudden public attention. He, along with Tatiana Maslany as Jeff's girlfriend and Miranda Richardson as Jeff's mother, under the direction of David Gordon Green, make a far more complicated film than I expected. It is about the effects of personal rather than national tragedies, and the ways families adapt, compromise by sometimes-grueling compromise.
2. Holly Hunter brings her steeliest self to the parts of in which she plays Beth, the
