2020 HINDSIGHT

Strange to reflect, as we say farewell to the past year, on how many iconic "futuristic" years I've lived through: 1984, 2001 and...

...if short-lived '70s-era Hanna-Barbera cartoon show titles count as iconic, 2020. I doubt I'll make it to The Year 2525 of which Zager and Evans so memorably sang, at least in my current incarnation.

Anyway, here's one more list for January; my books for 2020. Even granting that it doesn't count short stories, articles, blog posts, poems, comic books, shopping lists, factory warranties, skywriting, banners towed behind airplanes etc etc, it's disgracefully short; I'm a ploddingly slow reader, and there are a couple of longish ones on there, at least by my standards, like Death's End, part three of Cixin Liu's astonishing Three-Body trilogy, and David Mitchell's Utopia Avenue.

Friday the Rabbi Slept Late by Harry Kemelman

Wild Wives by Charles Willeford

The Iron Dream by Norman Spinrad

Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow

Becoming by Michelle Obama

Apropos of Nothing by Woody Allen

Barry Sonnenfeld, Call Your Mother by Barry Sonnenfeld

Death Comes as the End by Agatha Christie

Death’s End by Cixin Lui

Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott

Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell

I didn't include it on this list, because I was only about halfway through it on New Year's Eve, but in December I also finally cracked a book I've put off for a long time, Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, his 1722 chronicle of the 1665 Great Plague of London.

As you might guess, there's plenty about 1665 that's perfectly recognizable in 2020, although the response of the city's government, as described by Defoe, puts this country's federal response utterly to shame. But it's also instructive reading for anyone who thinks that 2020 was the worst possible year.

DEBUNKER MENTALITY

New this week:

Magic in the Moonlight—Colin Firth plays Stanley, an English stage magician, in this latest from Woody Allen, set in the late ‘20s. Stanley buries himself in the disguise of a stereotypical Chinese—he looks like Henry Brandon in Drums of Fu Manchu—and performs his spectacular tricks in high style, to the strains of Stravinsky or Ravel or Beethoven. But, like many of his trade, he doesn’t buy into magic in any sense beyond the theatrical. He’s a hardcore nonbeliever when it comes to the metaphysical, and he’s sneeringly contemptuous of faith in any form.

Stanley is invited to the south of France to debunk Sophie, a young American clairvoyant played by Emma Stone, who has enchanted a wealthy American family there. Sophie’s manner is corny and unconvincing, but her revelations are startling, and Stanley finds his skepticism beginning to waver.

It’s a perfectly good set-up for a romantic comedy, and, as usual with Allen’s work in this mode, there’s much to like in the movie. The period detail and settings are sumptuous, Firth and Stone are funny, and the supporting cast is full of capable types like Simon McBurney, Marcia Gay Harden, Jacki Weaver and Eileen Atkins, who’s especially good as Stanley’s doting aunt. Also memorable, as the ukulele-strumming rich kid infatuated with Sophie, is Hamish Linklater, who seems to be flawlessly channeling the young Bradford Dillman.

But Magic in the Moonlight isn’t quite magical. It starts off wonderfully, and for about a half-hour looks like it’s going to be a real gem. And Allen does come up with some inventive flourishes. But the dialogue dithers and dawdles, and the romantic connection between Firth and Stone never becomes urgent or convincing. Allen’s movies don’t always come off, but I can’t remember one, at least in the last twenty years or so, that was this uneconomical.

Guardians of the Galaxy—This is the movie with the talking raccoon you’ve been seeing TV ads for recently. It’s based on some Marvel comic series I never read, and is about a motley quintet of minor league space fugitives who band together under that rather grandiose title.

Chris Pratt, excellent in Moneyball and as the voice of the everyman hero of The Lego Movie, is the earth-born leader, a bland, less-than-brilliant ladies man with a fondness for ‘70s-era soul-funk-pop connected to a trauma he suffers in the film’s prologue. Zoe Saldana is the gorgeous and much smarter green-skinned warrior-woman, and Dave Bautista is a literal-minded strongman seeking revenge. There’s a guileless ambulatory tree voiced by Vin Diesel, and Bradley Cooper is the fast-talking raccoon. There’s a talking raccoon in this movie.

The villain is a standard, growling Darth Vader type. The McGuffin they’re all chasing, called “The Orb,” is staggeringly uninteresting, and the long, explosion-filled climactic battle is almost—but only almost—as tedious as the similar finales in the Thor and Iron Man movies and The Avengers and Captain America: The Winter Soldier and the other superhero flicks of recent years.

But I still found Guardians of the Galaxy, co-written and directed by the gifted James Gunn, very entertaining, because of its central joke: The unassuming, colloquial manner of these characters against the backdrop of all this cosmic bombast. It would be hard for me to dislike any movie in which the hero dances to “Come and Get Your Love” on the surface of a distant planet under the opening credits. Or, for that matter, a movie with a talking raccoon. Did I mention that this movie has a talking raccoon?