With the continuing pandemic and my own reluctance to go out and get potentially exposed, there's been a lot of time to watch stuff at home. Unfortunately, it's meant that I could only watch what was available at home, so HBO Max came through for me in a big way, while Disney Plus took a little longer to share its cinematic delights. Anyway, without further ado:
Movies
I feel like it was a blah year for movies, for the reason listed above. HBO Max, as I said, came through with a number of new releases at the same time as in theaters, and because everything feeds into some IP or other, it meant my girlfriend and I caught up on a bunch of movie series. For new stuff, the standout is probably Dune, which had a nice mix of action and intellect. That is to say, it's not the kind of introspective SF that marked Interstellar or even Denis Villeneuve's earlier film Arrival, but it's a cut above most tentpole SF blockbusters because the explosions and warfare aren't the point. It was a faithful adaptation in all the best ways, and the casting was mostly good. I'm looking forward to the next one - and maybe I'll even get to see it in theaters!
HBO Max also provided access to a couple of big superhero-related movies: the Zack Snyder Cut of Justice League, and the Suicide Squad. It was interesting seeing the long-awaited Snyder Cut, since I remember JL being pretty bad; the new version wasn't Citizen Kane, but thinking back on it now, it felt like a different movie and like all the parts fit together in a way that I don't remember the previous version doing.
Suicide Squad, meanwhile, was a fun romp through the incredibly rich back catalogue of random DC characters. I don't love James Gunn's other superhero work, but it was nice to see Warners give him free rein to tell the story in as violent and sweary a way as he wanted. The result came off like DC's answer to Deadpool, and it looks like the story will continue with the new Peacemaker series.
I also caught up with Warner's Godzilla movies, several of which I'd seen, but they were better on the second go. Kong: Skull Island was particularly fun, and even Godzilla: King of the Monsters held up better than I remembered. Kong vs Godzilla was a little bit sillier than either, but was an okay romp. It was also nice to rewatch the Jurassic Park movies, and some bits of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom looked a lot better seen a second time.
The one new series that I caught was the Conjuring movies, again because HBO Max released the latest one and made the rest of the series available. The first was obviously the best, but it was fun seeing how the Nun and the Annabelle movies fit into the overall whole.
Looking at the amount of movies I watched there, it's clear that HBO Max has taken over as the streaming service to get the kinds of movies you'd actually want to watch. Netflix has some good ones, but they're mostly its own originals, as all the content holders take their stuff away to form their own streaming services.
TV
I caught up with a lot of series this year that I'd been watching previously, but the main new thing I discovered was Star Trek: Lower Decks. It took a while to warm to it, because I'm not entirely on board with the frenetic type of humor it mines from Rick and Morty, but the show improved as it based more of its humor on obscure Trek lore. I hold it up in contrast to the Orville, which tries to do the same thing (identifying the absurd parts of Trek while also getting at the meanings, morals and messages), but still got stuck too much on making Family Guy-style jokes about it all. That said, both are the continuations of TNG that I've been wanting, so I'm interested to see how their respective second seasons turn out.
Narcos was another fun one, both the original Colombia show and the Mexico sequel. I saw them out of order, catching Narcos: Mexico first, which perhaps made the original stand out better, even in the third season when the focus moves from Pablo Escobar to the Cali Cartel. Both, however, were entertaining procedurals looking at how the drug war is prosecuted, and the final season of Narcos: Mexico looks promising so far. Though I could watch another few seasons of Wagner Moura as Escobar.
Music & Podcasts
I'd love to separate these into two categories, but even with my British music listening project, it's been hard to find new music to fall in love with. The one exception, though it's not recent, is Echo and the Bunnymen, which sounds like something I'd have loved in high school and college. There's something about the soundscapes that reminds me of the Smiths and the Cure, so it's been fun exploring their back catalogue in its entirety.
In terms of podcasts, I discovered a few good history podcasts, mostly on ancient cultures. The Ancient World, the Ancients and Fall of Civilizations have all been entertaining to listen to, and feel like they could provide some good fodder for fantasy or science fiction story ideas.
Books & Comics
The one new book that I read that really caught my attention this year was Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It was a quick, compulsive read, which I found hard to put down and which felt like a spiritual successor to Stephen Baxter's Evolution, and indirectly to Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men. I'm looking forward to the sequel, Children of Ruin, and to looking at the rest of Tchaikovsky's back catalogue.
Otherwise, I just read more books in series I've been rationing out year to year (like Genevieve Cogman's super-fun Invisible Library series and Marko Kloos's also-fun Frontlines books). I've got the final Expanse novel, Leviathan Falls, queued up on my Kindle, which I'll be tackling at some point in the new year, though I don't know what I'll do with myself when I've finished the series. I also read the second and third books of Joe Abercrombie's Age of Madness trilogy, following up his First Law series. Like with Leviathan Falls, I don't quite know what to do with myself now, and while I'll be looking forward to Abercrombie's next book, I hope he revisits this setting sooner rather than later, because I want to know what comes next.
In terms of comics, I stuck with re-reading my whole collection, so I've been revisiting books I haven't read in about 10-20 years, if not more. I've also finally gotten to my Marvel books, and it's been interesting (and sometimes a little infuriating) getting acquainted with the X-Men again. I'm still leaning toward subscribing to DC and Marvel's digital comics services at some point, so that I can read... well... everything. Who knows when I'll find the time for that, of course...
Games
There hasn't been much interesting gaming this year, though I'll have some extra time for it in the coming months. I did manage to get a Switch at the end of last year, and I have a couple of Mario games, as well as FIFA 21 (a stripped down version), to play with. Other than that, I drifted away from Mario Kart Tour on iOS, and drifted into Apple Arcade, which has also led me back to Kingdom Rush - and to the nerdy world of Kingdom Rush fandom on YouTube.
As I keep saying, iOS games like Kingdom Rush are good because they don't require the time and mental investment that the latest blockbuster games for the state of the art consoles require. I've tried picking up Skyrim again recently, but it's been years and I don't exactly know what I'm doing anymore. On the other hand, I can knock out a couple levels of Kingdom Rush without keeping all kinds of backstory straight.
That said, I do sometimes think it'd be nice to grab a new console and game, like God of War or Horizon: Zero Dawn, to be up with what everyone's talking about. I might just try, though I feel like I ought to finish more of the games I already have...
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