By: Jordan Sarver-Bontrager
Media Writer
2023 has been a very interesting year for pop culture. Many good pieces of media have come out this year, and I want to celebrate those works and the people who made them.
Best album: Sufjan Stevens- “Javelin”
As I talked about in my review of this album, this was a beautiful work of art. Sufjan Stevens released this album as a tribute to his late partner, Evans Richardson IV. The album is full of haunting folk tracks about love lost, grief and trying to move on from grief. It all culminates on the stunning “Shit Talk”, a beautiful declaration of love and wanting to move past the conflict of that love. It’s a beautiful album, and it’s the best of 2023, in my opinion.
Best movie: “Killers of the Flower Moon”
Martin Scorsese (“Goodfellas”, “The Departed”) returns with a haunting film about the Native American Osage tribe murders that took place in the 1920s. At three hours and 26 minutes, the movie certainly feels its length, but I get the impression that Scorsese wanted to carefully tell this story with the grace and care it deserves.
I loved just about everything with this movie. The writing was incredible, and the performances were also good with the best performance coming from Lily Gladstone as Mollie Kyle. The only performance I couldn’t get behind was Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance, which was good, but it felt as if he was being outacted by everyone around him, especially Robert De Niro. This wouldn’t be so glaring if Leo wasn’t the leading actor. However, his performance was still good.
“Killers of the Flower Moon” tells a very important story that deserves a lot more attention than it gets. Now, I say this is the best movie of the year, but there is a movie that isn’t out yet that I’ve been excited to see. “Iron Claw” still isn’t out yet, and I think once I see that, it will become my favorite of the year. I’ll update in my next article.
Best TV show: “The Last of Us”/“Attack on Titan”
“The Last of Us” is based on the video game by Neil Druckmann. It tells the story of a post-apocalyptic world, a world ravaged by zombies who were once humans, but became possessed by cordyceps after the cordyceps found their way into the food supply.
It also tells the story of Joel and Ellie. Joel starts off the series as an everyman from Texas, but after a tragedy strikes on the night the pandemic begins, he becomes hardened and deeply traumatized. Ellie is a girl who was bitten by a zombie, but doesn’t get her brain taken over by the cordyceps. Across nine episodes, we watch their relationship grow from Joel treating her like cargo and nothing more to Joel seeing Ellie as a daughter who he will protect at all costs.
There are other characters who get their own episodes dedicated to their stories, the best of which comes in episode three, “Long, Long Time” with the characters of Bill and Frank, played by Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett, respectively. In this episode, we see a post-apocalyptic “Brokeback Mountain” type of story as we watch these two men fall in love in this horrible world. Their story is harrowing, beautiful, heartbreaking – all of it. I don’t want to say too much about it, so I’d encourage everyone to watch the whole series based on this episode alone.
“The Last of Us” stars Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey, two actors I absolutely love, and they steal the show in this series. The series is on HBO. Go watch it, seriously. It’s incredible.
Originally, I only wanted to include “The Last of Us”, but it just didn’t feel right, so I’m going to include “Attack on Titan”. Despite airing only two episodes (two big episodes at that), “Attack on Titan” was better than pretty much everything else that came out this year. The two episodes that came out concluded the story of “Attack on Titan”, and the conclusion was stunning. I already talked about the ending of “Attack on Titan” in a previous article, so I won’t go on another four-page diatribe on why the ending was peak fiction, but the ending was just so incredible. It is my belief that Attack on Titan has taken over as the greatest show of all time, let alone the greatest anime of all time.
This year was full of some of the best media I’ve ever seen. I’m incredibly grateful to all the wonderful artists who made this possible.
