It's Christmas, so the year is basically in the can. I'm going to do a more comprehensive post later on how my year went, but here I wanted to consider books and movies and TV and all kinds of other art I experienced this year. Because the pandemic is influencing my decisions less and less (though I still take certain precautions), it meant I could also start experiencing movies in theaters again, as I wrote in an earlier blog this summer.
I also indulged my geeky/obsessive side more this year by keeping a spreadsheet not only of books I read, which I do every year, but also one each for movies and TV shows. I've always been curious about how much TV I watched, and because I was still quite locked down in 2022 I was watching more movies than usual, so I wanted to see just how much I was watching, and where I was watching them.
The short answer is that HBO Max, and subsequently Max, was where I watched the overwhelming majority of my movies in 2023, and I suspect it's also where I watched most movies in 2022. This is partly skewed by all the DC-related movies I watched, which accounted for almost half of everything I watched on that streamer. But Max also remains one of the best places to see older movies, including from before the 1960s, as well as generally decent films from the past decade or so. At the start of the year I was getting it from a friend, but when he decided to cancel his subscription it was a no-brainer for me to set up my own subscription (and I shared my credential with him, since that seemed only fair).
Overall I watched a decent number of 2023 movies, including some finally back in theaters. Realistically I could have gone back earlier, but it always felt like a hassle to pay $20 to watch a movie with a mask on and having to share a bathroom. Still, it was nice to see something when it came out, rather than waiting months for it to come to Max or Peacock.
Some favorites that I saw this year were Barbie, Oppenheimer, Asteroid City and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, with special honorable mentions for Maestro, Super Mario Bros and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. There's not much to say about Barbenheimer that hasn't already been said, apart from marveling at this cultural moment where the two biggest films of the year were a feminist deconstruction of a children's toy, scheduled against a dense, dour biopic of a mid-century physicist. Without pretending either is high-brow, it's heartening to see that people still enjoy smart movies.
Asteroid City is probably the movie that haunted me the most in 2023. I'll have to do a blog about Wes Anderson at some point, but this movie showed how he's much more than just the meticulously designed camera tableaux that everybody imitated for their generative AI pastiches of his work. I'm not entirely sure I understood it all, and I had to watch a couple of YouTube discussions to get a better sense of it, but it certainly worked as a meditation on the pandemic and its dislocations. It doesn't rank as highly for me in his oeuvre as Grand Budapest Hotel, Rushmore or Royal Tenenbaums, but it's a worthy addition.
Super Mario Bros and D&D were both surprisingly better than I'd expected. To put it another way, I had higher hopes for D&D, which it met, and lower hopes for Mario, which it exceeded. Chris Pratt remains my least favorite Hollywood Chris (and coincidentally, Pine is probably my favorite), but Mario was entertaining enough and made enough cute references to impress me that I was finally seeing a beloved character onscreen. Maestro, meanwhile, was anchored by Bradley Cooper's great performance and also his clear love of both cinematic language and Bernstein's music.
TV was more of a mixed bag, especially the shows that came out this year. First off, there wasn't a single streaming service that dominated like in my movie watching. Disney Plus probably accounted for more TV shows than any other streamer, but it was fairly close. I don't buy into the doom and gloom surrounding the MCU at the moment, but it was notable that Secret Invasion was a pretty spectacular misfire. On the Star Wars side, season 3 of the Mandalorian and season 1 of Ahsoka were okay but never scaled the heights of last year's Andor.
Some favorites were the latest seasons of Picard, Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks, which all traded in varying degrees on heavy nostalgia and in-universe references. Picard was so good that it almost made me mad, considering how inessential it made the previous two seasons, but it was good to see the old gang back together. SNW and Lower Decks, meanwhile, just went from strength to strength, with SNW in particular showcasing a range of genres that you really never get in Trek.
Succession's final season was pretty compelling too. For me the high point (SPOILERS!) was the episode where Logan died, and it was fascinating seeing how that event shone new light on certain characters. For instance, when Kerry showed up at the memorial and was kicked out by Marcia, it was oddly illuminating that Roman was the one who comforted Kerry and treated her kindly. The finale was a bit of a letdown for me, though.
I've also talked about how much I loved Slow Horses, and that's inspired me to start reading the full book series. But some MVPs that held my attention this year were Fargo and the Expanse. I started watching Fargo via Netflix's DVD.com, RIP, and just adored the first two seasons in particular. Season 3 had some high points but wasn't quite as successful, though still better than a lot of other stuff. I have yet to watch the fourth season, as that wasn't available on DVD.com, but I'm hoping to catch that and season 5 in the near future.
Meanwhile, the Expanse got better with each season. I originally watched the first two seasons on Netflix, pre-pandemic, back when SyFy was airing it; they were faithful recreations of the books, but the interest was more in seeing characters and plot lines foreshadowed or appearing earlier than in the books; it suffered a little from the same syndrome as the first season of Game of Thrones, where the world was well-realized but thinly populated. However, the show really came to life in season 4, when they went to Ilus, and I'm now midway through season 5. I'm preemptively a little sad about season 6, because it's a short one and it's clear they won't be able to fully tackle the Laconian invasion from the last few books.
Another honorable mention was the Last of Us. I had the great pleasure of watching the show at the same time that I was playing the game, so that an hour or two per week let me keep up with the show. I also thought the show was paced brilliantly, giving us digressions like Bill and Frank or Ellie's backstory at the exact right times. It also did a great job of conveying the same emotions in certain scenes as in the game, like when Ellie sees the wild giraffes toward the end. I've never played Part II, but I'll be interested to see how the second season of the show goes.
Speaking of games, Last of Us dominated the early part of my game-playing in 2023, but when I finished that I started up another one that I hadn't touched since I got it, Dragon Age: Inquisition. It's been fun to play that and to look at all the resources on the web that have sprung up over the ten years since it came out. It's a very complex game, though, and sometimes I'm in more of a mood for something easy, that I can boot up and start without worrying about updates and cutscenes.
Super Mario Wonder, on the Switch, filled that niche for me. The learning curve is simple if you've ever played a Mario game before, but it also does a nice job of adding new elements. Whereas The Last of Us or Dragon Age are sprawling games with lots of areas to explore, it's easy to get through a lot of Super Mario Wonder's levels quickly and soon you find yourself ready to beat the game. I'm hoping to finish Inquisition this coming year and also Wonder, and to take on more of my immense backlog of Switch games.
In terms of books, I didn't read a lot of recent stuff, but I did enjoy Annalee Newitz's The Terraformers - even if it's not quite as mind bending as Autonomous was, their books are always reliably entertaining. I also bade farewell to Genevieve Colman's Invisible Library series, which came to a satisfying end, and in the new year I'll be starting on her next book, Scarlet, featuring vampires during the French Revolution. Wes Chu's War Arts Saga also made its way onto my Kindle app, and I'm looking forward to continuing that one as well.
Special mention also goes to Richard Osman's Thursday Murder Club. I ran out of books to read while in Munich, so I found it at an English-language bookshop near the university, and tore through it (luckily I finished it after I got home). I'd been hearing about it for a while, because I follow Osman's agent on Twitter, so I got to see for myself how enjoyable it is. It's an odd, but pleasing, counterpoint to Mick Herron's Slow Horses books, and I'm finishing the rest of the series soon. Just a shame Osman didn't start his series back in 2010, like Herron did, because I'd love to have a big backlog to catch up with.
In terms of listening, I continued my British bands project, and quite enjoyed Erasure's back catalog. In new stuff, I discovered Olivia Rodrigo because I go to the gym again, and Get Him Back! is a fun companion song to Kelly Clarkson's Since U Been Gone.
And finishing up with comics, I already mentioned my new subscription to Marvel Unlimited in my last post. It was prompted by my discovery of Comics Conspiracy in Sunnyvale, and my subsequent spending of crap tons of money on old Excalibur, X-Factor and Vertigo collections. I'm still in the early phases of the Uncanny X-Men, but as the year goes on I hope to branch out into more recent books, though for this year I'm probably not going to focus on Spider-Man or the Avengers yet.
For 2024, I haven't decided if I'm going to keep tracking movies and TV shows, or if I'll add music, podcasts or video games to my spreadsheet, but overall, I've been taking in a lot of stories and stuff for the past two years. In the coming year, I want to spend less time consuming art and more time making it - but I'll have more to say in my final summing-up post.
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