Year-End Entertainment Rundown

It's time for the Annual Excellence in Time-Consumption Awards! Oh, we've got a full ballot and lots of categories, so all victory speeches should refrain from lengthy digressions. Unless they're funny.

BOOKS

Quite a banner year for books, 36 in total, which is more than I've read at least since I started my current job. In a change from recent years, where I've run close to even between fiction and non-fiction, this year was tilted hard towards fiction, 25 books to 11.

A lot of the fiction, to be fair, were "what the hell, why not?" buys, and that's reflected in the fact that a lot of them were not very enjoyable. No shortage of candidates I'd be pleased to assign the label of worst. Still, as much as I might like to stamp the agonizing experience that was Shibumi with that tag, it has to go to Black Hat and The Beast God Forgot to Invent. If even my usual dogged insistence on seeing a book through to the end can't carry the day, then the book must have been lousy.

As far as best, the authors I either had past experience with or directly sought out didn't really come through for me. Mieville's The City & The City, or Marquez' Innocent Erendira weren't either author's strongest work. Fuentes The Death of Artemio Cruz was interesting to read for some of the stylistic flourishes, but I don't know I really liked the book, exactly. Riding the Rap was my first taste of Elmore Leonard, and was no really what I was expecting.

David Handler's The Runaway Man wasn't a bad little detective mystery. The mystery itself is nothing superb, but I enjoyed the style of the writing, so that carries a fair amount of water. Lower expectations playing a part, no doubt. But that seems like the fiction selections in general. Genre stuff executed to various degrees of competency. I really liked Pat Barker's Regeneration, however. Enough I asked for the second book as a Christmas gift (currently sitting second from the top in a stack I haven't yet touched.) I might add John Brummer's Total Eclipse to the list, if I wanted a third book.

With only 11 non-fiction books, it's a much easier field to narrow down. Worst is True Tales of the Prairies and Plains. The information provided is often surface level, the entries to short for any depth, and the writing style is like something from a composition textbook. Very blah. For a second choice, The Cardinals Way, as I knew most of the information already, and the subject matter was already a bit dated at the time of writing, and is only more so now.

As for best, it's a biographical year, apparently. Audie Murphy's To Hell and Back, first and foremost. It's very well-written; straightforward where it needs to be, but clever or funny when the situation calls for it. Nicholas Dawidoff's The Catcher was a Spy does an excellent job trying to tease apart the truth from the fictions Moe Berg threw up around himself, the love of of secrecy combined with the love of attention for his secrecy. And while I prefer Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey's Beyond the Wall contains plenty of his trademark humor, irascibility, and affection for the American Southwest.

MOVIES

49 movies this year. A couple of those I probably watched late in '22, but they got reviewed in '23, so what the hell. Didn't watch as many things at my dad's this year, so fewer movies from before I was born than usual. More recent selections from Amazon or Netflix.

This is always tricky. I may have liked a movie, say Cocaine Bear. But did I like it enough for it to be a favorite, or did it merely exceed low expectations? If a low-scoring direct to Amazon horror movie that I expected very little from was bad, should that make it one of the worst films I saw, or should that go to something I expected better from?

No, Cocaine Bear is not one of my favorite films of the year.

There's a fair amount of stuff that just rolled off me without making an impact. I'd basically forgotten I'll Sleep When I'm Dead until I was scrolling through the reviews, and that was two months ago. Could say the same for The Passage or The Mule. Things where I see the title and a few things flash by, but out of sight, out of mind. Anyway, worst films.

Eden Log felt like it was better suited to be a game, where you could have the fun of guiding your amnesiac character through the challenges, rather than a passive viewing experience. Accident Man was a perfectly forgettable action flick that pissed me off with its conclusion, where the lead character experiences exactly what he's been doing to his victims for years and simply decides to continue doing it in a different town. One False Move felt like it wanted to be about something, but didn't pick a lane and go with it. Troll and The Black Demon were both the low-rated crap that couldn't even exceed my minimal expectations. At least I don't watch as many movies like that as I used to. The Hoodlum Saint's the opposite. I had hopes for it to be good, but it was a frustrating mess that let me down. I don't think it's in any way worse than Troll, but the fact it was bad bothers me more.

I'll go with Accident Man, for that ending, and The Black Demon. Troll at least had some sort of memorable set pieces.

Going the other direction, The Big Steal's one long chase scene, but it has some funny parts to it (mostly involving William Bendix), and some of the driving stunts were impressive, given the era. While all the rules of society were frustrating, watching the characters alternately use or attempt to navigate those rules in The Duelist was more engaging than I thought it would be. Let's Kill Ward's Wife was just funny. Of all the various big budget, big name stuff from the last few years I watched (like the last Bond flick or Bumblebee) the Dungeons and Dragons movie was easily my favorite. 

Waiting for the Barbarians was not a funny movie, or particularly uplifting, depending on how excited the audience was to see the British get slaughtered. But I kind of like how confined the movie is to the garrison, while all these people speak confidently about what they're going to do, or what they know about the nomads in the hills. The reality is not really a surprise, but it's more satisfying. I didn't have high hopes for Black Phone, given Alex's past success in picking horror films, but it turned out to be very tense, and I thought it used the weird phone in clever ways, while not making it too powerful.

Given the options, I'm going with The Duelist and Black Phone. A couple of very different period pieces, where in both cases I was hoping the main character would succeed, but dreading the worst.

MUSIC

To be clear, none of the music I got this year is new. I'd be surprised if any of these albums came out in the last 10 years. But the same is true for the majority of things in all these lists, so we roll with it.

What do we got? The Best of Count Basie's Big Band, and The Best of Duke Ellington. I continue to try and find some jazz or jazz-adjacent music I like as much as I think I should. Throw The Complete Greatest Hits - America into the compilation album category.

DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince's Homebase album. Apparently, when Will Smith says he don't got to cuss in his raps to sell records, he forgot about "You Saw My Blinker." The Chemical Brothers' Dig Your Own Hole. If every song were 2 minutes shorter, I'd like it better.

Under the "what the hell" category we have Fall Out Boy's From Under the Cork Tree and Avril Lavinge's Let It Go. The two CDs, purchased at the same library book sale where I picked up The Mule, cost $1 combined, so no harm, no foul. Although I saw a fanfic titled "Of All the Gin Joints" which they said was named after the Fall Out Boy song (as opposed to the line from Casablanca), and I about wept. Wayman Tisdale's In the Zone could go in the jazz appreciation category, but I bought it while visiting my friend in Florida because I was curious what sort of jazz a former NBA player would make.

The other 3 were albums purchased because of a particular song contained on it. I figure if you like one song on the album, you'll probably like others. M.I.A.'s Kala, Tech N9ne's Special Effects, and Spiral Beach (which is also the title of the album.)

Least favorite? Probably From Under the Cork Tree. It's the album with the fewest songs that made it into my MP3 player. Favorite? Special Effects. A lot of songs in the mix, but the thing that impressed me was it felt like they were trying to do something different with almost every song. Some felt a little country, some were kind of alternative rock, some were rapping as fast as humanly possible. They didn't all work for me, but respect for the attempt.

VIDEO GAMES

Welly, welly, well, look who's back? It's been five years since I included a video games section in this post, but with a new (to me) console comes new (to me) game reviews. So we've got Flow, Journey, Flower, Maneater, South Park: The Fractured But Whole, Rime, and Dishonored 2. I guess I can throw 7 Days to Die in there as something I tried then immediately discarded. Apparently resource management survival horror is not my genre.

Which makes it the easy choice for worst game! Nice how that works out. Maybe I can get a couple of bucks in store credit when I trade it in soon.

Well, best game then. Maneater is enjoyable, but quickly repetitive if played for more than an hour or so at a time. The controls on Flower were not always the best. Ditto Flow. I'd rather just use the joystick than be tilting the controller one way or the other. Rime was a pretty enough game, but the puzzles were a bit lacking for something that's gameplay seemed based on puzzles. Dishonored 2 had it's moments, but I probably got too frustrated with my inability to successfully play the way I wanted.

Which leaves Journey and South Park. It's juvenile, but South Park made me laugh the hardest I have all year, several times. And it did a better job incorporating the farting "super-powers" into the gameplay, compared to how Stick of Truth did with its "fart magic." So they actually improved things from the earlier game to the later one! As for Journey, it's a lovely game, and I think it knows exactly the experience it wants to be, and manages it. It feels like you're supposed to enjoy the scenery and enjoy flying and when it strays from those (as during the icy ascent of the mountain), it's a deliberate story choice that works.