Zeit bites: the end of an era
There’s a meme doing the rounds at the moment, which you might have seen. It’s a picture of a fallingdown building, with wooden props straining to hold it up. Beneath the building, a little white car is abandoned. If the building falls, the car will be gone.
The building is labelled ‘‘anxiety and depression’’, the car is labelled ‘‘me’’.
And the struts? They’re labelled ‘‘Baby Yoda’’. I know . . . that got dark real fast. But it seems, to me, like that meme might be the most perfect summation of 2019, a year when we retreated into our pop-culture safe houses more completely, maybe, than we ever have.
I hate to sully the simple, graphic accuracy of that meme by adding my 20 cents worth, but my editor won’t let me just fill my whole section with pictures of Baby Yoda, so here goes.
This is the year that was:
Thank goodness for sidekick.
The seas can boil straight off the face of the planet – and who knows, they probably will – but we’ll always have The Child and his giant, bright, innocent eyes reminding us that right down deep under all the stress and fear, we still have a soul.
Detractors can’t even say the wee angel is a blatant cash grab on the part of Disney, as there aren’t even any Baby Yoda toys available, because they were so keen to keep his appearance in the show secret that they didn’t make any.
Seriously though, among the approximately 7.9 million think pieces, anecdotes and articles written about him in the past month, my favourite appeared in Vanity Fair, in the aptly titled article,
diminutive
Apparently, when director Werner Herzog, who has an extended cameo in the first couple of episodes of the show, discovered creators
Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni swapping the puppet version of The Child for CGI shots (the character is created with a blend of puppetry and CGI), he tore a strip off them.
‘‘You cowards,’’ he said. ‘‘Leave it.’’
Here is my list of top 10 films from 2019:
and
(That’s only nine, but I’m holding a place for
or Obviously, A Charming Prince is the hot favourite to take the coveted spot.)
I’m still coming to terms with my Endgame feelings.
I spent about 906,575 hours arguing online about almost every one of those films (including having a serious falling out with an old chum over Endgame), so I’m not going to write another word about any of them. Rocket Man is really great, though.
ended after eight seasons.
It still hurts to write those words.
Luckily, the streaming giants proved more than willing to fight it out to fill the hole.
Amazon Prime was an early leader with antisuperhero series and steampunk-fantasy mash-up both of which I enjoyed tremendously.
Not to be outdone, Netflix dished up . . . nothing. Actually, it seemed happier to leave the genre to others, and focus on serious cinema such as Martin Scorsese’s yawn-fest and Sasha Baron Cohen’s limited series,
In the end, the only real contenders in the battle for the gaping void where once there were dragons, were Disney with The Mandalorian and, bizarrely, Neon with a TV show far better than we deserve,