Welcome to Carousel Month

This blog isn't a spaceship, it's a time machine.

Over here at Even Better, we’re in the business of remembering guys and gals from every era, whether it’s finding new-to-us favorites or writing about some longstanding all-timers from decades before we were born. That’s always going to be the case, but over the next several weeks, it’s really going to be the case.

Welcome to Carousel Month.

This isn’t a Mad Men deep dive (though…someday, maybe). Instead, we’re going to zip back to a specific year in time for a series of posts. Channeling Don Draper’s classic Kodak pitch at the end of season one, we’re hopping in the time machine that’s also a carousel, bringing back media from the past for proper examination by our current selves.

Though Don Draper recounts in his signature pitch that in Greek, “nostalgia literally means ‘the pain from an old wound,’” this won’t be such a tortured exercise (or the heart-tugging memory machine he actually sells to the execs). We’ll certainly wax nostalgic for films and albums we loved back in the day, without letting it color our modern view of them too much. We’ll also dig into material we hadn’t experienced, let alone even known about, at the time. While most retrospective writing on the internet focuses on rounded anniversary years (10s, 20s, 50s), we’ll grant ourselves the freedom to reach beyond those constraints whenever we initiate Carousel Month Protocol.

But…this time we are focusing on a square anniversary year. That carousel’s going right back to 2014, a year that bred no shortage of pivotal entertainment in our lives. In the weeks ahead, we’ll look back on some of the best (or shall we say Better) that film had to offer, assess a loaded year for hip-hop, and run down some new-to-us classics from the year. Up first, we’ll have Elliott’s deep dive into the full slate of films in competition at 2014’s Cannes Film Festival.

Stay tuned for more jagged number-anniversaries and years long before our time in the Carousel Months to come.