As we have finally escaped 2020, it's time to look back at the best and the worst of books and movies I tried using to stave off the bad vibes. We're skipping video games again, because the only game I really played this year was Chrono Trigger on the DS.
Books
20 books total this year, split almost exactly between non-fiction (11) and fiction (9). Most of the fiction is John Dos Passos, with the other three books being Don Quixote, Lords and Ladies, and Caves of Steel. So clearly I'm not into contemporary fiction.
Lords and Ladies is probably at the top, and then probably One Man's Initiation: 1917. The latter isn't as polished as some of Dos Passos' later stuff, but it also avoids the stylistic approaches I didn't love in those later works. Don Quixote could be in the running, it was definitely better than I expected. But it's also incredibly long, and that starts to wear after awhile.
The Big Money would probably be my least favorite. Not because it was terrible, but it's just very depressing watching the characters make the exact same mistakes, and since it's the longest of Dos Passos' books, there's lots of time for them to repeat those mistakes, again and again.
Of the non-fiction, my favorite was The Beak of the Finch. I loved reading about all the selection pressure on the birds, the way they've adapted to the specific habitats of each island. After that, Desert Solitaire. Abbey's crankiness about people can get a little trying at times, but his descriptions of the landscape and the wildlife, and his float trip down the river with his friend, were really engaging and interesting.
Worst was the two volumes of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway I read. There's some letters in there that over a real glimpse into Hemingway's mindset, like watching him get frustrated with his mother's insistence he's got to financially carry everyone, but there's a lot more that's just not very interesting.
Movies
67 movies this year, and so much crap in there. What else is new. But it's not all bad. I got around to watching John Wick Chapter 3. The Weather Forecast was kind of odd, and pretty sad, but it was a solid movie. The Death of Stalin was hilarious, even allowing that all these idiots are going to keep backstabbing each other because they don't know any other way of doing things. Train to Busan was a fun little zombie apocalypse movie.
But my two favorite movies of the year were The Mad Miss Manton, which managed to have a decent mystery, while also having zany hijinks and a lot of funny bits in it. Maybe that's a matter of me having lower expectations for it than some of those others (although I didn't have any expectations for The Weather Forecast or Train to Busan I can recall.) And the other is. . . Armour of God.
Does this Jackie Chan movie make any sense whatsoever? Not really. But when you've got Jackie Chan fighting four dominatrices in a spooky cave, or trying not to get run over by a bunch of stereotypical guys on dirtbikes, concerns like story logic or consistent characterization, all just fall away. I'm too busy going "Holy shit, did he just do that?!"
Worst movies? Session 9 felt like it couldn't decide what kind of horror film it wanted to be. Lockout was undercut by Guy Pearce's inability to convey any emotional depth or feeling beyond a smirk. The Cheap Detective did what I think they set out to do, but felt incredibly lazy. Likewise, Hamburger Hill was the most generic-ass Vietnam War movie I've ever seen. Again, I think it did what it set out to do, but what it set out to do had already been done better in plenty of other movies. Stranger than Fiction was just a letdown.
Tempting as it is to put Hamburger Hill as one of the two worst, I'm going with Hurricane Heist and Ghosts of War. The latter was going pretty good until the last twenty minutes, when the big surprise twist completely tanked the movie. Hurricane Heist was just dumb, but not in a fun way, like those Jackie Chan movies, where the story is just trying to get you to the next ridiculous action sequence. Hurricane Heist is just so aggressively stupid with some of the decisions it makes, and it feels like it's trying to take everything seriously, while doing things to absurd to take seriously.
Music
I actually got a lot of CDs this year (you can't be surprised that I still purchase physical media), so we can have this category. Granted, most of the CDs I got were things from my mom's collection, because she figures she's got the stuff she wants ripped and saved elsewhere, but that's OK.
I tried use it as an opportunity to branch out slightly. She had a couple of country CDs, and I reaffirmed that I don't have much use for country music. I bought a BB King album to see if I could get into the blues. That was a mixed bag. Also found out I'm apparently not much of a Bruce Springsteen guy. I thought he'd be a little more hard rock, but most of his stuff seems very, mournful? For the amount of songs on the 3-disc set she let me have, I didn't like many of them.
Best of the year was naturally Alex' album, The Electronomicon LP. It's only six songs, but he did each one in a different style. So if one song doesn't work for you, maybe the others will. Other than that, maybe the Best of David Bowie, or Big Boi and Dre Present. . .Outkast. All I can really go off is the number of songs I liked relative to the total number of songs on the albums, and I think those two did pretty well by that measure, so there you go.
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