My 2019 in Movies

2019 was my second year of seriously tracking my movie watching and writing something about each movie I see, centered around my Letterboxd account. It was also the year of the Criterion Channel's debut, which has filled the Filmstruck-shaped hole in the hearts of cinephiles in the United States and Canada. So: would I be able to maintain the breakneck pace of viewing I had in 2018 (120), or collapse under the weight of the endeavor (so tired...)?

FRED'S 2019 YEAR IN REVIEW, VIA LETTERBOXD

I watched 17 short films, 5 comedy specials, 6 "other", and 130 feature films in 2019, and unless it was something I'd already written about on the site, I wrote a little bit about each of them. Early in the year, author and critic Gretchen Felker-Martin tweeted something that resonated with me, and that has become a touchstone when I try to think about my response to a movie:

Being a critic isn't about toeing a line, or picking a brand to stan for, or pointing out loudly what's problematic and what's Pure. It's about communicating what art makes you feel and then dissecting why it did.

It's a simple idea, but one that this amateur writer thinks about a lot.

Breakdown of my viewing:

• 26 rewatches of movies I'd seen before
• 104 movies new to me
• 32 2019 releases
• 20 theatrical viewings
• 10 new-to-me Criterion Collection features
• 19 horror movies
• 16 animated films, 7 of them in the main Disney animated line
• 12 films distributed by A24
• 7 documentaries
• Setting aside multiple voice/Star Wars/Marvel performers, I saw 4 films each featuring Keanu Reeves, Michael Keaton, or Tilda Swinton
• 2 films from around WWII that I hadn't seen in about 30 years and liked much better than I remembered (The Wizard of Oz and It's a Wonderful Life)
• Ridley Scott's best film (Alien) and one of his worst (Alien Covenant)
• A little cycle of Charles-Manson-adjacent movies: first, Bad Times at the El Royale, which features fictional characters based on the Family; then Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, which directly covers Sharon Tate and the night of the murders on Cielo Dr.; and after that I listened to the season of "You Must Remember This" about Manson, which introduced me to Joan Didion, and in turn led me to watch Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold. (Edit 1/19 late night: I realized there’s a fourth! In Her Smell, Becky Something sings Charles Manson’s song “Garbage Dump” during one of her drunken episodes.)
• One ridiculous 80s action movie that a critic I enjoy wrote 365 essays about, one per day, throughout the year.

And some of my favorites:

• My favorite new film I saw this year was Safety Last!, a silent Harold Lloyd comedy from 1923. You're likely familiar with the image of him hanging off the face of a clock on the side of a building; I know I was. What surprised me was how modern the filmmaking techniques were, and how sophisticated the special effects. I was blown away, and I recommend the superb Criterion Collection transfer of the movie to anyone. The 4 and 8 year olds even got into it a bit.
• My favorite film of 2019 was Parasite, which is a masterful class satire with many of the pleasures of a con or heist film before things take a darker turn in the back half. The less said before you see it, the better, but I highly recommend it.
• Other older movies that I loved were 25th Hour and Frances Ha. Two very different movies about very different groups of people in NYC in the opening decades of the 21st Century, one melancholy, one charming.
• Saw two movies that overtook Isle of Dogs as favorites of 2018: The Favourite, and Into the Spider-Verse. The latter was just so joyful and clever about what a comic book movie COULD be, and did some really thoughtful and creative things with the animated medium.
• Other movies that have really stuck with me: Moonlight, The Clouds of Sils Maria, The Babadook (the terror here is, as a parent, what if I don't have enough for my child?), Under the Silver Lake, Midsommar, Margaret, and Us.

The Annotated Beukemix, 2018

Life gets in the way! Anyway, better late than never. Hit me up if you want a copy.

What a moody musical year! It was hard not to be, given [arm sweep in the direction of the internet and news media], and that was absolutely reflected in the music that struck a chord with me.

(Hey, I'm writing this in the future! 2021! Donald Trump isn't president anymore but some other bad stuff happened, but you can also listen to this mix on Spotify!)

1. Drive - REM
I finally got Automatic for the People at the end of 2017, and early in the new year, I was on a late-evening errand, driving the dark, wooded back roads of a Minneapolis suburb, locked into this song's atmosphere. I'd heard it dozens of times on the radio over the years, but this time it kicked my ass. The layering of elements, starting with Peter Buck's spare ostinato guitar, adding sequentially the bass, the vocals, the drums, and piece-by-piece, the string section, before the bottom drops out and we're left with the core group, gives the whole thing a dark, Southern Gothic feel. The lyrics, meanwhile, are preaching self-motivation and participation; reportedly Stipe was inspired to write it by his involvement encouraging youth voting in the early 90s. So we're kicking off the year with grim, politically tinged determination. FEELS ABOUT RIGHT.

2. Finesse (Remix) - Bruno Mars ft. Cardi B
New Jack Swing was the style of pop music when I began listening to current pop music, and I love the textures of the beat programming, the characteristic sampled orchestra hits. Two of my favorite cassettes of the day were Rhythm Nation and the Ghostbusters II soundtrack. So this song was a tidy little pile of catnip. That the video pays tribute to In Living Color, which I spent years sneakily watching in the basement on Sunday nights, is a cherry on top.

3. Modern Love - David Bowie
Another familiar song that grabbed me anew, this time while watching a trailer for Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig's "Frances Ha" during a Letterboxd crawl. One of the most danceable Bowie tracks.

4. An Insult to the Fact Checkers - They Might Be Giants
TMBG have been so prolific in the teens that they've been hard to keep up with. This was my favorite track off the first of three (!) albums they released last year.

5. The Joke - Brandi Carlile
Absolute stunner of a song, my favorite of the year. Play it loud. Carlile has described this as a response to the 2016 election, and the sense of shock and defeat that so many of us felt. It's beautifully hopeful at a time when signs of hope are scarce. Writing this in September of 2019, I can say: Congressional Dem leadership, you are letting this song down! Get your head in the game!

6. Maria Tambien - Khruangbin
The spacey, reverb-heavy, mideast-inflected instrumental funk I didn't know I needed. (See also this fun video on youtube of them playing through a dozen hip-hop hooks and other influences.)

7. Make Me Feel - Janelle Monáe
2018's horniest summer jam continues Monáe's streak of excellence. There were several excellent tracks on Dirty Computer, but I gotta go with this one for its clear Prince influence and tick-tock tongue-clucking.

8. Under the Wheels - Calexico
Saw a reference describing Calexico as "desert noir," which I like. This song is a mood piece of fear and anxiety in a threatening, unstable society, set to a reggae beat that reminds me of the first Gorillaz record.

9. Keep Yourself Alive - Queen
This jumped out at me during a rewatch of Freaks & Geeks, in the scene in which a terrified Sam climbs a pyramid of cheerleaders. It was an excellent non-literal use of what I sort of considered a backbench Queen song. (This was months before Bohemian Rhapsody used the song for the band's first gig with Mercury.)

10. Nothing Compares 2 U - Prince
Given Prince's reticence to open his vaults for public consumption, I have mixed feelings about his estate's mining of same. BUT! There is so much good stuff in there, and I love being able to hear his original demo for this song. This means that the Sinéad O'Connor version we almost all heard first was chronologically the third significant recording, after this one and the obscure album version by The Family. I still think O'Connor's is the best, but it's interesting hearing these different interpretations and what they choose to emphasize. Not surprisingly, the demo bears a lot of resemblance to the live version Prince released as a duet with Rosie Gaines a few years after the big hit.

11. Over and Over and Over - Jack White
Jack White can keep releasing bottom heavy, fuzzy, guitar-hook driven songs, and I'll keep enjoying 'em.

12. Lash Out - Alice Merton
Merton's got a hell of a voice, similar in range and power to Florence Welch, and here it's well-suited to belt out an anthem of frustration and anger. Again, something to which I responded strongly 2018.

13. Street Fighter Mas - Kamasi Washington
I enjoy that saxophonist Kamasi Washington is crossing jazz over into the pop world, and especially dig the cinematic sweep of this track. Washington describes this as his personal theme song for his hypothetical career as a professional arcade gamer. Check out the video, which is absurd and funny, and while you're at it, check out Washington's statement about his background with Street Fighter.

14. I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You) - Aretha Franklin
Wasn't super familiar with this one prior to Franklin's passing in August, but a college classmate posted it on Twitter. I'm very grateful for that, because it's tremendous.

15. Curtains - Elton John
The end credits of "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" tend to be anachronistic for the show's 1950's setting, which is fine, as it introduced me to this song that feels like it's all a grand, slow-building intro for four and a half minutes, and then feels like a grand outro for two and a half minutes.

16. A Better Son/Daughter - Rilo Kiley
Hannah Gadsby's "Nanette" special drew my attention to this moving, anthemic march about finding the strength to go on through highs and lows.

17. A Pearl - Mitski
Mitski's sound on this track seems to have stepped out of a time machine from 1995 and hooked up with a horn section, and I love it.

18. Suspirium - Thom Yorke
Gentle and creepy. I didn't see the movie until earlier this year. It was ok. Honestly, the opening credits sequence, set to this song, was one of my favorite bits.

19. Humility - Gorillaz ft. George Benson
A sunny, summery track about loneliness. There are hints of a political subtext, given that writer/singer Damon Albarn has spoken out against the isolationist strain of recent western politics. Despite adoring the Gorillaz first album, each subsequent one kind of has to sneak into my attention. This time around, that came via Matthew Perpetua's characteristically fine writeup of the song.

20. Love It If We Made It - The 1975
And we end with this song's observation on our troubled times, structured a bit like a narrowly-focused "We Didn't Start The Fire," though less on-the-nose. It strikes a hopeful, if not exactly certain tone for the future, and I cannot think of a better way to finish this mix of my musical 2018.

(Bonus track: Into The Trap - John Williams / London Symphony Orchestra
I don't usually list out all the also-rans that I cut from the mix, but I did want to note a song that I had on for most of the year but finally cut when I was finalizing the playlist. Both kids got into Star Wars this past year, and this is one of my favorite pieces of music from the original trilogy. As such, I listened to it A LOT.)

My 2018 in Movies

Early in January last year, I started my account on Letterboxd.com tracking my movie viewing and keeping my to-watch list. This was one of several factors (also including the opportunity to share in a friend's Filmstruck account -- RIP -- and the replacement of my ailing Blu-Ray player) that led to what I'm quite certain was a personal record year for film.

Letterboxd compiles a year-end statistics page, and here's mine:
FRED'S 2018 YEAR IN REVIEW.

In addition to 6 short films, 9 stand-up specials, and 6 miscellaneous shows (making-of features or tv documentary miniseries) contained in the Letterboxd database, I watched 120 feature films last year. I'm pretty sure this blows away the only other possible contender: 1998, when I spent my summer watching much of the AFI Top 100 American films list and various other movies that viewing suggested.

I also tried to write a little something on everything I saw. This was almost entirely for my own benefit, to try to work out verbally what I do or don't like and why. So for all 120 of those, and a few others, I wrote between a sentence and several paragraphs on each. You can see that writing if you click on any of the poster images at the bottom of the stats page. I've enjoyed seeing what friends and other Letterboxd users have to say about a lot of these, and the social aspect of the site has suggested a lot of viewing as well.

Breakdown of my viewing:

• 33 rewatches of movies I'd seen before
• 87 movies new to me
• 14 new Criterion Collection feature films (and 3 shorts)
• 13 features on Filmstruck (and 4 shorts)
• 13 theatrical viewings
• All 11 Star Wars theatrical feature films, all of them with Max, plus additional viewings of The Last Jedi and Solo, and two making-of-Star Wars features
• 5 Spielberg films (3 new). If you expand the year to include New Year's Day 2019, you get a 6th.
• 5 Scorsese films (4 new)
• 6 films written or directed by Lawrence Kasdan
• The list of performers is kind of overwhelmed by actors who were in those Star Wars movies, but there were also 4 Kevin Costner performances and 6 by Jeff Goldblum. Expand to 1/1/19, and you get 4 Richard E Grant performances.
• Two films featuring improv guru Del Close.
• A five-film cycle of Berlin-set films, spanning from the late Weimar Republic (Cabaret) to just post-war (Phoenix) to beginning of the Berlin Wall (Bridge of Spies) to late in the Cold War (Wings of Desire) to the fall of the Wall (Atomic Blonde).
• Several movies that had been on a little handwritten watch list I kept in my wallet for years starting in 1998
• One Polish mermaid horror sex musical.

And some of my favorites:

• My favorite film I saw this year was Phoenix, a 2014 German thriller in a Hitchcockian mode about a death camp survivor who, following extensive facial reconstructive surgery, returns to the ruins of Berlin to find her husband. The twists and turns and the knowledge of which characters know what information at what times makes it very satisfying.
• I fell absolutely in love with both Wings of Desire and The Age of Innocence. The latter I tried to watch in college, and just couldn't get into it. The former I knew was supposed to be wonderful, but I worried would bore me. Both knocked me on my ass. Both are romantic, and subtle, and reward patience.
• Also in my top 4 this year was It Follows, one of the scariest movies I want to watch again in the future. Its premise is tailor made to frighten me, personally, as it taps into a recurrent childhood nightmare. Its production design seems intended to be as disorienting as possible. And its use of the film frame is brilliant.
• My favorite 2018 film was Isle of Dogs. Wes Anderson has his limitations, but he's also got my number.
• Other standouts that are still occupying space in my brain long after watching them, even if they weren't my highest rated: Locke, Chungking Express, Annihilation, War of the Worlds, Speed Racer, The Witch, and Blade Runner 2049.

I don't know that I'll get anywhere near 120 films again this year, but I hope to continue writing as I watch, and if you're interested, I hope you'll follow along, join Letterboxd, sign up for The Criterion Channel when they start it up again, and let me know what you're watching!

The Annotated Beukemix, 2017

Liner notes!

If I know you and you'd like a copy of the mix, hit me up however you might normally do so.

Listen to (most of) the mix on Spotify!

1. Soothing - Laura Marling
A sultry, string-rich song in which Marling wrestles with the choice of letting an ex-lover (apparently Marcus Mumford of Mumford & Sons) back into her life, or not.

2. Heaven - Talking Heads
Appeared in the season two finale of "Halt & Catch Fire," a criminally-underseen cable drama that finished its run with its fourth season this year. It's an amazing show and uses music really well: songs chosen never pull you out of the moment by either being too obvious a choice or too out-of-place.

3. Come - Jain
Jain is a French singer who spent musically formative years of her childhood in the Middle East & Africa. I went back & forth on whether to go with the airy bounce of "Come" or the bass-heavy "Makeba." Both are fun.

4. Many Moons - Janelle Monáe
This is from Monáe's debut EP "Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase)," though I didn't stumble upon it until hearing it on The Current this year. It's terrific, which is no surprise considering how much I loved her two full-length albums. The vocal hook at the beginning felt very familiar -- it's the Pointer Sisters' "Number Pinball" melody ("1-2-3 4! 5! 6-7-8 9! 10! 11-12.") from Sesame Street.

(Incidentally, I still really want a sci-fi RPG set in Monáe's Metropolis -- her world building on her albums and in her videos is amazing.)

5. Demon in Profile - The Afghan Whigs
There are moments where I feel like I'm settling into the dad rock stereotype. But when there's a straight-ahead rock tune with some horns and a few strings and lots of ride cymbal and a sweet little guitar solo backing up the chorus, and that great major-key shift near the end, how can one resist?

I don't know what I expected from the video, but it wasn't a starring role for Har Mar Superstar.

6. Rain in Soho - The Mountain Goats
Doom. And. Gloom. And sideways references to Smiths lyrics. I love it. The referenced "Batcave" is a seminal London goth club (so that answers the question of which Soho we're talking about).

7. Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards - Billy Bragg
And now the clouds part for a very sunny anthem about socialism, capitalism, and Bragg considering his own politics and music career. I saw Bragg perform at my college my junior (?) year, and it was a great show (I probably saw him perform this song), but I haven't really dug into his music. I should.

8. Track Suit - Minor Mishap Marching Band
The third season of Fargo was not as immediately pleasurable as the second. It seemed to be dealing with stickier themes that happened to resonate with our present political moment: corporate rule, extreme inequality, Russia... And where the second featured about a dozen covers of songs used in Coen Brothers movies, this one used styles and moods connected to each major character, even winking at this by using the music from Peter and the Wolf in an episode. Nikki Swango, the good-hearted grifter played by Elizabeth Winstead, generally gets music with a lot of swagger, like this.

9. Let The Mystery Be - Iris DeMent
This was the opening credits music to most of Season Two and one episode of Season Three of "The Leftovers," which ended its phenomenal run this year. After the emotional wringer of the first season, the song feels at first like a joke, and then like a lifeline. And it fits better as the series goes on and gets more comfortable being weird and funny in addition to heartbreaking.

10. Junk Bond Trader - Elliott Smith
I didn't listen to Smith's last album released in his lifetime until a couple years later, during the semester of grad school that remains the most stressful time in my life. I would listen to it when I would stay up until 2 in the morning correcting 60 Linear Structural Analysis problem sets or working on my own heavy load of homework. Around the same time that I discovered the record, we went to Washington DC for my grandmother's 80th birthday. My grandfather was not himself: his chronic pain had sapped his outgoing nature. I don't know if I expected it would be the last time I saw him, but the lush arrangements of Smith's songs paired well with the emotional melange of that time. (We lost my grandfather four months later, and I miss him a lot. Coincidentally, the world lost Smith another eight months after that.)

Anyway, one day in 2017 I was riding the bus home after work and this song in particular struck me as beautiful, so here it is.

11. The Morning Papers - Prince & The New Power Generation
Had one of those SIRE (Sudden Instantaneous Recall Effect) moments hearing this on the radio during the Current's top 89 Prince songs marathon, and realized that I'd heard it as a single on KDWB back in junior high. The song is apparently about when Prince fell in love with Mayte Garcia, who he would eventually marry. The Revolution remain my favorite Prince backing band, but they didn't have the NPG's horn section, so nobody's perfect.

12. Snake Eyes - Trouble
13. No Stars - Rebekah Del Rio
With a David Lynch project, you know you're going to get some combination of the following in the soundtrack:
a. 1950s throwbacks (bonus points for guitar arpeggios)
b. Spaced-out singing
c. Emotional ballads, potentially involving Roy Orbison
d. Heavy, aggressive, and/or sleazy instrumentals
e. Saxophone freakouts
So, here are two songs that were performed in the 2017 revival of Twin Peaks. The first, by David Lynch's son Riley's band, Trouble, is (d) & (e). The second, a beautiful song by Rebekah Del Rio touches on (a) and (c), but unlike her jaw-dropping Spanish performance of "Crying" in Mulholland Drive, this one does not involve Roy Orbison, though it does feature Moby on the guitar arpeggios.

14. Riding (Night) - Manaka Kataoka & Yasuaki Iwata
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild contains a lot of references to the previous games in the Zelda series, including in its music, but the score is very stripped-down, stepping away from orchestral bombast in favor of small, pointilist arrangements led by a piano. This piece, which plays if you're riding a horse at night in the game, includes one of the few statements of the original musical theme of the series. Given the scarcity of the melody, it gave me goosebumps the first time I heard it.

15. Fatal Gift - Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton
Great multi-part rumination on success and its trappings by Emily Haines of Metric in her solo side project The Soft Skeleton. I already liked the simple piano-driven opening, but smiled broadly when the electronics kicked in halfway through.

16. Can I Sit Next To You - Spoon
If this had just been another fine Spoon song in the same vein as some of my earlier favorites, like "I Turn My Camera On," it would have been lovely. But! Then we get these amazing string bits in the bridge and the outro, with these fantastic, long, sustained notes that *slowly* bend into a resolution.

17. Bellbottoms - Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
Before I'd seen Baby Driver, I was listening to Matthew Perpetua's Fluxblog 1990s Survey Mixes. This Jon Spencer cut appeared 1994 mix, and was a standout among the songs I didn't already know. Then, it was the basis for the fun-as-hell opening robbery and chase scene of Edgar Wright's movie. Wright has said in interviews that he fully conceived of the scene the first time he heard the song, shortly after its original release.

18. Dear Life - Beck
Perpetua also hipped me to this great new song from Beck. I'm glad he did, because I've otherwise been having a hard time with how, as Perpetua put it, "the surface of Beck’s Colors is glossy and upbeat, as though Beck and his collaborator Greg Kurstin went out of their way to make a record that would sound mainstream and contemporary." The vibe of songs like "Wow," and "Up All Night" just don't compute in my brain with the idea of listening to a Beck song. My problem, not Beck's, I suppose.

Perpetua also said something on Twitter (I'm having a hard time finding it to link to now) to the effect of how this song's piano and guitar make it sound like Beck stole it from the Scissor Sisters. Works for me.

19. Anyone Who Had A Heart - Tim Curry
My brother let me steal this from his 2017 mix CD, having selected a different song from his 1978 debut album, Read My Lips. We all knew Curry could sing -- we're all familiar with Rocky Horror and The Worst Witch, after all -- but this Bacharach and David interpretation kind of knocked me on my ass. (I was unsurprised to learn that Pink Floyd's The Wall collaborators Bob Ezrin and Michael Kamen produced Curry's album, given his turn as the Crown prosecutor in the 1990 performance of the album in Berlin.)

Coen Brother Ephemera Remixed in Fargo Season Three - Episode 4

If the first two seasons of Fargo are any indication, series creator Noah Hawley and his writers and directors will have littered the scripts and the corners of the frame with references to the Coen Brothers' entire catalog. As with last year, I will be taking notes on these connections during each episode and sharing them here.

If you see that I've overlooked one, please let me know in the comments (but please wait until after I've added a given week's episode, as I watch with a day or two of delay, and would like to see it fresh. By the same token, spoiler alert!).

Episode 4: "The Narrow Escape Problem" (5/10/17)

A relatively light week on references: good thing, since I've fallen behind!

• To begin with, we get Billy Bob Thornton (The Man Who Wasn't There, Intolerable Cruelty, Fargo Season One) narrating the introduction to Peter and The Wolf.
• Once again, as in the movie Fargo, we get a Gophers name drop.
  The bag (receptacle? vessel?) in Emmit's safe deposit box is labeled Luverne, also the MN town in which Season Two was set.
• The Luverne bag is, of course, filled with cremains, which Ray gets more willingly close to than The Dude with Donny's in The Big Lebowski.
• "Preferred nomenclature": "cremains" here, but not "Chinamen" in Lebowski.
• And speaking of Lebowski, New Chief seems just as eager to shoehorn in an Iraq War story about his compatriots "face down in the dirt" as Walter is to make everything about Vietnam and his friends "face down in the muck."
• In his interview with Gloria, Ray seems to be Jerry Lundegaarding it up (Fargo), but he is ably out-Lundegaarded by Sy in his encounter with Officer Winnie Lopez.
• "Dingus," again a Hudsucker Proxy word choice, but this time in its anatomical use.

To be continued...

Erstwhile:
Season 3 Episode 3
Season 3 Episode 2
Season 3 Intro and Episode 1
Season 2

Coen Brother Ephemera Remixed in Fargo Season Three - Episode 3

If the first two seasons of Fargo are any indication, series creator Noah Hawley and his writers and directors will have littered the scripts and the corners of the frame with references to the Coen Brothers' entire catalog. As with last year, I will be taking notes on these connections during each episode and sharing them here.

If you see that I've overlooked one, please let me know in the comments (but please wait until after I've added a given week's episode, as I watch with a day or two of delay, and would like to see it fresh. By the same token, spoiler alert!).

Episode 3: "The Law of Non-Contradiction" (5/3/17)

Gloria's trip to Los Angeles means we're in for a lot of Barton Fink, and The Big Lebowski, with a a little Hail, Caesar for good measure.

• Barton Fink:
• This episode's themes of writer's block and of artistic promise curdling into frustration and failure have appeared a couple times in the Coen's work, most relatedly in Barton Fink, in which a young writer comes to LA, lives out of a hotel, and tries and fails to make it writing for the pictures.
• The bell on the counter at the WGA rings without attenuation until stopped by hand. I wonder if the WGA lady inherited it from Chet (Steve Buscemi) at the Hotel Earle in Fink.
• Similarly, the long down-the-corridor shots at the WGA are reminiscent of Fink's hotel.
• The Big Lebowski:
• "Moon Shadows on the Trail" echoes the use of cowboy song "Tumblin' Tumbleweeds" in the opening of Lebowski.
• The LAPD cop responding to the theft of Gloria's bag is about as optimistic about its recovery as his departmental colleagues were about the the tape deck (or the Creedence) from The Dude's car.
• Gloria telling Donnie to tell New Chief that she saw the ocean and it was wet has a similar folksiness to The Stranger's "I can't say I've seen London, and I ain't never been to France. And I ain't never seen no queen in her damned undies, so the feller says."
• As a function of being set in postwar LA, there's a lot of Googie architecture around. In Lebowski, this is exemplified by the bowling alley. Here, we get the diner where Vivian works, and the motel.
• Hail, Caesar:
• The date that Thaddeus and Vivian go to is set in a very similarly-arranged restaurant (Boardner's) to the one where Hobie Doyle and Carlotta Valdez go on theirs.
• The aforementioned cowboy song also recalls Doyle's song in his movie that he and Carlotta attend.

There's also a lot of A Serious Man this week:

• ...with the casting of Fred Melamed, who brings the same mellifluous tones to smoothing out his betrayal here as he did as Sy Ableman in A Serious Man. 
• The montage of Thaddeus' fall from grace is set to Santana. Not SantanaAbraxas, but Santana nonetheless.
• Ray Wise quips that ancient soldiers and their wives spent the war simultaneously in a state of married and not, a twist on Schrödinger's Cat Paradox, previously taught by Larry Gopnik to Clive and his classmates.

And some other miscellaneous connections:

• "Hold up the dingus!": Extruded plastic dingus. (The Hudsucker Proxy)
• UFO imagery returns to the Coen universe. (The Man Who Wasn't There)
• Gloria almost has a Brad-Pitt-hiding-in-the-closet moment in her motel room. (Burn After Reading)
• The giant poster of a raven suggests Howard Zimmerman is a fan of Poe, though perhaps not as much as Goldthwaite Higginson Dorr, Ph. D. (The Ladykillers)
• The quantum mechanics talk comes back in the same scene with the elderly Zimmerman, this time more in tune with Freddy Reimenschneider's discussion of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in The Man Who Wasn't There.
• Something about Gloria's floral shirt strikes me as being just as out of place in her terrible date with the LAPD cop as Marge's maternity blouse in Fargo.
• And, like Marge or any other good Minnesotan cop, she can appreciate some hard-earned Arby's.
• The poster for THEY CAME on Howard's office wall seems to depict a scene from Fargo Season 2 as a UFO descends on a 2-story motel courtyard.

To be continued...

Erstwhile:
Season 3 Episode 2
Season 3 Intro and Episode 1
Season 2

Coen Brother Ephemera Remixed in Fargo Season Three - Episode 2

If the first two seasons of Fargo are any indication, series creator Noah Hawley and his writers and directors will have littered the scripts and the corners of the frame with references to the Coen Brothers' entire catalog. As with last year, I will be taking notes on these connections during each episode and sharing them here.

If you see that I've overlooked one, please let me know in the comments (but please wait until after I've added a given week's episode, as I watch with a day or two of delay, and would like to see it fresh. By the same token, spoiler alert!).

Episode 2: "The Principle of Restricted Choice" (4/26/17)

• A lot of Big Lebowski DNA in this episode:
• Eden Valley's number-two cop shares a name, and a general befuddlement, with The Dude's bowling pal Donnie. I pray Hawley named him that just to set up a "shut the fuck up, Donnie" down the road.
• In his overly-loquacious greeting to the parking lot attendant, VM Varga says "guten tag, if German's your thing." Since brevity is clearly not Varga's thing, I guess he'd call The Dude "El Duderino."
• Things "micturated" upon: The Dude's rug, Ray's boots.
• Nikki Swango seems to have the same gifts for strategy, tactics, and jumping to an over-reactionary conclusion, that Walter Sobchak does.
• That said, Walter tends to underestimate his opponents ("these fucking amateurs!"), and Nikki to overestimate hers ("oh, he's good!").
• Her... gambit... with the tampon... reminds me of Jackie Treehorn's thug Wu peeing on The Dude's rug in the first place. Same sort of instinct.
• The conversation in the funeral home recalls The Dude and Walter's encounter with the mortician after Donnie's death. Hawley doesn't put too fine a point on it, though: the urn is a "vessel," instead of a "receptacle."
• Sy Feltz taking out his anger on Ray's red Corvette echoes Walter's crowbar beating of little Larry Sellers' red Corvette.
• Red Corvettes! Another connection!
• And Sy's anger ends up damaging a bystander's car, as the Corvette wasn't really Larry's but his neighbor's.
• And several connections to Fargo (the movie):
• More overhead parking shots this week.
• Stan Grossman! Jerry Lundegaard's father-in-law's lieutenant (his Sy Feltz) Stan Grossman is still apparently bouncing around the commercial real estate game in the Minneapolis-St. Paul Metropolitan Area 23 years after the events of the movie.
• The gas station clerk watching the Gophers is, I suppose, only as much of a connection as any other marks of Minnesota life. But it's there.
• Ray's boss Scottie shares a name with Jerry and Jean Lundegaard's kid. Head canon: the nerdy accordion-and-hockey-playing kid turned into this douchey parole officer.
• Gloria's interview of the gas station clerk comes from a line of awkward convenience store proprietor encounters, stretching back to Raising Arizona and including the station owner's near miss with Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men.

Not Coen connections, but some stray observations:

• Random signs that we are in Alberta, and not central Minnesota:
• The UFA (United Farmers of Alberta) gas station.
• The google.ca URL when Irv Blumkin ill-advisedly tries to lookup VM Varga online.
• Wherever the Oak Bridge lot (ground lot, under the highway) is supposedly located (St. Cloud?), it seems to have an elevated commuter train nearby.
•  Miscellaneous thoughts:
• There appears to be one of Emmit Stussy's parking ramps right out the window of Ray's boss Scotty's office. Can't be fun for Ray.
• Goran Bogdan (pictured above, on the left), who plays the violent Cossack Yuri Gurka (which is the same name as the missing East German murder suspect in the season's opening scene -- can't be the same kid, right? He'd be too old in 2010, right?), is listed in the credits as a series regular, like Ewan McGregor and Carrie Coon, as opposed to a guest star, like Michael Stuhlbarg. Seems to suggest he'll be a major presence this season. Maybe he's the unstoppable force of evil this year.

To be continued...

Erstwhile:
Season 3 Intro and Episode 1
Season 2