TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. Our critic-at-large John Powers spends his time leapfrogging between movies, books, TV shows, music and sporting events. He didn't get to review everything he liked this year. So what he does is each year at the end of the year, he chooses a few things he didn't get to that he still wants to celebrate. This year's edition includes everything from a comic performance to a political documentary, to a great moment at the Paris Olympics.
JOHN POWERS, BYLINE: Every December, I look at my list of the things that I've read, watched and listened to during the year. And every December, I come across things that I flat out loved yet somehow never got around to talking about. Well, I want to share these pleasures now. Although they're a far cry from raindrops on roses or whiskers on kittens, these are a few of my favorite things. I gasp in surprise at "All Fours," Miranda July's hilariously unpredictable novel about a middle-aged artist who leaves her family to drive to New York from Los Angeles, but only gets to the LA suburbs before she falls for a young rental car worker, checks into a cheap motel and spends a fortune redecorating her room there.
"All Fours" is sometimes described as a book about perimenopause, the transitional stage before menopause. Yet this flattens it into sociology and self-help. July's mind is far too unruly and interesting for that. Perverse, unrepentant, sometimes dirty and often laugh-out-loud funny, I couldn't stop reading passages to my girlfriend. It's a one-of-a-kind book about a woman cannonballing into her search for a new self and a new life. You never know where it's headed.
You know exactly where things are headed in "Soundtrack To A Coup d'Etat," an inventive documentary about the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the elected prime minister of the newly independent Congo who was killed at the behest of the American and Belgian governments. This is no grimly realistic sermon, but a jaunty montage film, blending fabulous archival footage, amazing interviews, CIA machinations and oodles of Black music from the likes of Louis Armstrong and Nina Simone. Along the way, Belgian filmmaker Johan Grimonprez quotes poet Octavio Paz's line. When history sleeps, it speaks in dreams. Grimonprez' movie unfolds like one of those dreams.
Life has turned giddily surreal in the Hulu series "Interior Chinatown," based on the National Book Award-winning novel by Charles Yu. Its high point is the star-making performance by Ronny Chieng, the Malaysian comedian you may know from "The Daily Show." Chieng is uproarious as Fatty Choi, a low-ambition restaurant worker who's suddenly forced into waiting tables. He treats the customer so rudely that, ironically, he becomes a sensation. Here he approaches a white couple at a table.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "INTERIOR CHINATOWN")
RONNY CHIENG: (As Fatty Choi) What?
PATRICK QUINLAN: (As Hipster Man) Hi. Are you our waiter?
CHIENG: (As Fatty Choi) No, I'm just carrying a pad and pen for fun. I'm wearing this vest because it makes me look good.
AMBER STONEBRAKER: (As Hipster Woman) OK, I guess we'll take the orange chicken. And maybe some...
CHIENG: (As Fatty Choi) Orange chicken. Orange chicken. Why?
STONEBRAKER: (As Hipster Woman) Sorry?
CHIENG: (As Fatty Choi) Why come here if you're going to order something just covered in dipping sauce? Do you even like Chinese food?
QUINLAN: (As Hipster Man) So what should we get?
CHIENG: (As Fatty Choi) I don't know, man. It's a Chinese restaurant, so maybe you should order something Chinese people would eat. Even your pronunciation makes my ears bleed. And why do you always have to have ice in your water? It's bad for your body. Drink tea. We give you free tea. Idiots.
QUINLAN: (As Hipster Man) Oh, my God. That guy is amazing. We have to tell Kylie and Karen about this place.
STONEBRAKER: (As Hipster Woman) Karen will flip.
QUINLAN: (As Hipster Man) I mean, she can't eat anything on this menu, but, like, she needs to come here.
POWERS: The humor is slyer in my favorite mystery novel this year, "The Lover Of No Fixed Abode," by Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini, a hugely popular Italian literary team. Set in Venice, it's about a middle-aged signora, who's an art scout for big auction houses, who finds herself attracted to an enigmatic tour guide leader, Mr. Silvera, who seems to know everything and greets every situation with a different inflection of the word, ah. The mystery is, who is he? Shimmering with wit and bursting with an insider's knowledge of Venice, "The Lover Of No Fixed Abode" builds to a solution so unexpected that not one person in a million will guess it. It's a minor classic.
Two big classics are the '50s movies that got theatrical rereleases this year - Akira Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai," in which a village hires seven swordsmen to protect them from bandits, and "The Wages Of Fear," Henri-George Clouzot's excruciatingly suspenseful story of four exiles in a poor Latin American town who must transport a shipment of nitroglycerin in ramshackle trucks. Both movies are magnificent in themselves. Their action scenes are still breathtaking. But they possess a special interest because in them, you can see a Japanese director and a French one laying down the template for today's Hollywood blockbusters. And they're better than our current action pictures in one crucial way - from their white-knuckle stunts to their revelations of character, everything in them is human scale.
My favorite sports moment this year was also alive with humanity. It featured Simone Biles, whose all-around gold medal at the Paris Olympics confirmed her as the greatest woman gymnast of all time. Yet what I loved wasn't her style in winning, which was, of course, phenomenal, but her grace in losing. In the final event, the floor exercise, where she normally reigns supreme, she was bested by Rebeca Andrade, the superb Brazilian gymnast who'd spent her career losing over and over to Biles. And what did Biles do when she lost? She didn't cry, I'm still the GOAT. She didn't whine that the judges had cheated her. She didn't say that Andrade was lucky or actually no good. Instead, on the metal stand, she and teammate Jordan Chiles, who won bronze, literally bowed to Andrade. They bowed to her skill, to her bravery in overcoming multiple surgeries, to her always being a worthy opponent. It was a gesture of respect that, far from diminishing Biles, only made her greatness more incandescent, a valuable lesson as we enter the new year.
GROSS: John Powers is our critic-at-large. By the way, the first thing that he talked about at the top of his review was the novel "All Fours" by Miranda July. And coincidentally, Thursday, Miranda July will be my guest.
If you're one of over 100 million people in the U.S. on TikTok, that may end on January 19. A new law is forcing the Beijing-based company to find a non-Chinese buyer for the site or face a ban in the U.S. Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, we'll look at what this means and if the Supreme Court or Trump could intervene. I hope you'll join us.
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GROSS: To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram @nprfreshair. FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Sam Briger, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. Our co-host is Tonya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.
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