2020 in media

[beer_good_foamy]

During lockdown, while many other artists are doing mini-concerts from their homes, I thought I’d do you all a favour and not.

— James Blunt (@JamesBlunt) March 25, 2020

My 2020 in media. The good thing was, we all had a lot of time to watch and read. The bad thing was, it was hard to do anything but just rewatch and reread old favourites. But still, here goes.

10 new movies I really liked this year:
First Cow
Bacurau
Dick Johnson Is Dead
Never Rarely Sometimes Always
Possessor
Wolfwalkers
Babyteeth
Relic
Ema
Deerskin

5 TV series that did really good things this year:
She-Ra And The Princesses of Power: A final season that has Chekov's guns firing every 30 seconds. This and The Good Place shows what you can do when you write towards an ending.

The Queen's Gambit: It's not about chess, it's about obsession. And also chess. I've yet to see Anya Taylor-Joy not impress in anything. The ending has some issues, but up until then, wow.

Tales From the Loop: Brilliant adaptation of Simon Stålenhag's books of retro small-town sci-fi to an American setting; takes the look and then expands it into a slowly unfolding, character-driven story.

What We Do In The Shadows: Season 2 was a huge improvement on a season 1 that was already really good. I mean, the open stage episode alone...

The Good Place: TGP ended in January 2020?!? It feels like five years ago! It was a good ending, whichever decade it happened.


5 TV series that occasionally did worthwhile things this year:
Warrior Nun 
The Haunting of Bly Manor
Rick and Morty
Lovecraft Country
Wynonna Earp

10 songs I loved this year:
Zombie Girl - Adrienne Lenker
Under the Spell of Joy - Death Valley Girls
Pulling the Pin - Run the Jewels feat. Mavis Staples & Josh Homme
For You - Laura Marling
The Prettiest Song in the World - Man Man
Told You Once In August - Dion (who, at 81 freaking years old, is sounding way too good)
A Hero's Death - Fontaines DC
r(E)volution - Sa-Roc
Murder Most Foul - Bob Dylan
I Know the End - Phoebe Bridgers

Five new-ish books I loved this year:
The Mirror and the Light, Hilary Mantel
Taking Izmail, Mikhail Shishkin
Lost Children Archive, Valeria Luiselli
The City We Became, NK Jemisin
Harrow the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir

Five old-ish books I loved this year
The Emperor of Portugalia, Selma Lagerlöf
The Dispossessed, Ursula LeGuin
The Exploits of Moominpappa, Tove Jansson
Babel-17, Samuel R Delany
Invisible Man; Ralph Ellison

Comments

[yourlibrarian]

I agree that the end of Good Place already seems quite long ago.

[beer_good_foamy]

I mean, it's a standard joke by now, "2020 felt like ten years and it's been March for 11 months running" haha. But I was honestly surprised when I looked it up. But I guess that means it's been long enough to do a full rewatch!

[yourlibrarian]

It's interesting to consider how Good Place might have been affected had, say, S2 or S3 been made during the pandemic. Because even by the time it aired, things were only just starting to happen. So I don't mean it in the sense of the filming being affected but the writing and philosophy.

[beer_good_foamy]

Oh, definitely. And I would have loved to see what they would have done with it - I'm not saying TGP was this great profound work of philosophy, but in a storytelling tradition where philosophical questions are almost always formulated negatively ("Let's come up with a hypothetical situation where it becomes morally right to do something absolutely despicable!"), I love that TGP a) actively made fun of that, and b) always went into it with the idea that people can be better than they think they are. I think that's a story we really needed over the last few years, and definitely need now.

[trepkos]

James Blunt is hilarious.

[beer_good_foamy]

Oh yes. Gotta love someone who's not afraid to have fun with his public image.

[wendelah1]

I read The Dispossessed for the first time this year. Thought it was brilliant, maybe the best political novel I've ever read.

[beer_good_foamy]

Oh yeah. There's been this weird debate in SF circles in recent years about why everything is suddenly sooooo political, and it's like... dude, Ursula was right there since the 60s.

[wendelah1]

There's been this weird debate in SF circles in recent years about why everything is suddenly sooooo political, and it's like... dude, Ursula was right there since the 60s.

Well. That is weird. Science fiction has always addressed political concerns. (That's kind of the point.) 1984 was written in 1949. Maybe the objections are about particular ideas that certain readers find offensive?

[beer_good_foamy]

Maaaaybe. (Just saw on twitter that some of the loudest complainers about Teh Awful Political Sci-Fi are currently ranting about how the people who attacked the Capitol were in the right, so... maaaaybe indeed.)

[lirazel]

I've never even heard of Tales From the Loop! I find Peak Television exhausting because I always know there's something great I'm not aware/finding time to watch.

[beer_good_foamy]

Oh, it's so good. It builds off Simon Stålenhag's paintings of odd alien machines in everyday 80s Sweden and puts it in an ordinary midwest-US small town in the 1980s, which just so happens to be home to some weird research facility that occasionally throws out machines that are very useful but may do... weird things to reality. Not unlike Twin Peaks except without an obvious villain.

Also, it has Jonathan Pryce in one of the lead roles, which rarely fails to make me watch.

[thenewbuzwuzz]

I loved "The Dispossessed"! I think about it a lot. Been toying with the idea of rereading it sometime.

[beer_good_foamy]

It's well worth a re-read. I'm looking to dig into the Earthsea series next, haven't read those in decades.

[thenewbuzwuzz]

Heck yeah.