Few days later than normal, but it's just how things worked out this time. I did not play any new video games in 2021. Really, I didn't even play the ones I have already, so nothing doing on that front.
BOOKS
All told, I read 24 books this year. Perfectly split between fiction and non-fiction, 12 apiece, although almost all of the non-fiction was in the first half of the year, and most of the fiction in the second half. Don't know why it worked out that way exactly, other than I took fewer trips to bookstores later in the year.
So let's dispense with the bad first. For fiction, my least favorite book was, as you probably guessed, The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel-Garcia Marquez. Real bummer, but any book I abandon after 40 pages has to take that title, even over Edmund Cooper's The Tenth Planet, which started strong but ran aground on some dodgy characterization choices.
For fiction, I think it has to be Haunted Observatory by Richard Baum. It's probably not bad for what it was trying to be, but unlike the books I read on lost or misidentified islands last year, it's not terribly helpful on figuring what the misidentified celestial objects really were, and it goes too far into the weeds on the technical aspects of astronomy. The two books on the possible "death star", Nemesis, weren't exactly what I was looking for either, but I did still learn a few new things, and it was interesting to see the time period when notions that are fairly widely accepted now where just coming into being.
On the good side, I'd pick either Kraken by China Mieville or Marquez' In Evil Hour. For the former, even if I did think Mieville went for one surprise reveal too many, I enjoyed the different approaches to magic, the creative, but oddly literal way it could work, and just how bizarre that could end up being. With the latter, Marquez is almost always good at creating a sense of the setting as a real place, with history and relationships, grudges or whatever that run way back and mix in ways outsiders only see parts of. Non Pratt's Giant Days would probably come in third, since I was pleasantly surprised how well she captured the characters and their quirks, plus the sort of odd situations Allison tended to throw them into.
Raymond H. Marsey's No Longer on the Map would be my favorite non-fiction work this year. It isn't solely interested in islands that vanished, moved, or never existed, but Marsey does a good job laying out as much of the history of the place as he can, trying to pinpoint where the confusion might emerge (if not always why), but in a way that's entertaining. Other than that, I think the next contender would be Michael J. Benton's When Life Nearly Died, about the Permian mass extinction. Granted, it takes him 300 pages to get around to actually discussing said mass extinction, because he wants to lay a lot of groundwork about how much resistance there was to even the notion of something like "mass extinction" and why, but all that was actually very intriguing to me. And frustrating, since a fair amount of the blame is on Darwin's lawyer buddy turned amateur scientist Charles Lyell. Lawyers always fuck everything up.
MOVIES
76 movies this year. Granted, not all of them were ones I had never seen before. Actually, I spent a fair amount of time re-watching stuff from the '90s. Low Down Dirty Shame, Batman Returns, Congo, Airplane 2, The Mummy, Terminator 2. But I hadn't reviewed them before, so they still count.
Speaking bluntly, I watched a lot of shitty movies this year, or just movies that irritated me or left me feeling shitty. Most of them in the first half of the year, though. Not sure why. Maybe I was depressed? I guess I ought to judge them on their merits and what they were going after. So, as much as I disliked Divorce the Italian Way, it was showing exactly what it intended. I wasn't supposed to like seeing this ridiculous double-standard and gender politics bullshit. I guess you could make a similar excuse for Operation Petticoat, that it was what it intended to be, but it didn't do it nearly as well.
But Breach was just cheap, poorly-made, nonsensical shit. Which, I knew going in because Alex warned me when he asked me to watch it, but I was not prepared for how bad it got. I didn't have high expectations for Dead Again in Tombstone, or Return to House on Haunted Hill, but neither even cleared that low bar. Throw The Devil Below and Bleeding Steel into that category as well. I actually had some hopes for Ghosts of Mars, but no luck there, either. I can't remember if I thought Into the Grizzly Maze would be, well, not good, I knew that wasn't happening, but enjoyable.
Still, as in the book category, I gotta go with the movie I couldn't even make myself finish. Let's hear it for Cool World, the shittiest thing I watched in 2021!
My single favorite movie of the year was Mask of Dimitrios. You wouldn't think a movie largely told through flashbacks would work for me. Ghosts of Mars was 95% flashback and it didn't work. But here, the flashbacks are neat, not because they show different facets, but because they keep establishing the same point in different ways, so that when we finally meet Dimitrios at the end, we share Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet's gut revulsion at him.
Outside that, I enjoyed The Night Eats the World's display of how a person tries to adapt to the endless isolation, the struggle to break out of a comfortable but ultimately unsustainable shell someone can build around themselves. Cold Skin was in that same vein, albeit with an element of fish-person sex I didn't particularly need. But it was beautifully shot and the tension of only having one person you can rely on, and that person being unstable adds an extra element of tension to everything. Going In Style is another movie that knows what it wants to be, and does it well, but I don't end up infuriated watching it. It's not great, not trying to be, but it's funny. Sometimes that's enough. The Mexican dragged on about 15 minutes too long, but I liked the unusual way it played out, and there were some funny parts in there as well. I certainly have never liked a Julia Roberts' character more than I liked her in this movie.
Police Story gets a mention because that whole concluding fight scene in the mall was just fucking bonkers and I loved every minute of it. Sometimes I just want to laugh. Sometimes I just want to see horrible people get murdered, sometimes I want to see Jackie Chan throw people through windows.
MUSIC
I only picked up five CDs this year, and most of those are from over a decade ago, but what the heck. We've got Nina Simone's I Put a Spell on You, Ozomatli's Street Signs, La Roux' Supervision, Estelle's Shine, and Madvillain's Madvillainy. Other than Supervision, I think all of those fell under my, "I liked this one song by this artist, I'll probably like some of their other work, too.
I wouldn't say any of them were "worst", they all have at least a half-dozen songs I can listen to. I was maybe a little disappointed with Supervision. There were a few songs where I kept expecting the beat to shift to something faster, and it didn't, and it threw me. But maybe it was supposed to be a more low-key album, and it was the only one I bought strictly because of the artist, so that's a risk you take. I think I liked Street Signs the best. Couldn't tell you why. Really like the music, and the lyrics to a few of the songs are fun, and that's usually enough for me.
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