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britesparc · 3 years

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Weekend Top Ten #461

Top Ten Good Things That Actually Happened in 2020

Well, thank God that’s over, am I right?

It feels kinda weird to be sitting here looking back over the wreckage and general weirdness of 2020, a year that pretty much defines the word “anxiety”. I have a lot to be thankful for: none of us died, for a start; we all seemed to avoid The Plague in its entirety for the whole year. We still have a house, we still have food, we always had enough toilet paper, and above all we had each other. It was hard, it was long, it sucked a great deal at times, but there are substantially worse hands to be dealt all things considered.

Anyway, amongst all the crap, there were some good things, too. And I don’t mean the end-year highs of them finding a vaccine, Biden beating Trump, and us narrowly avoiding No Deal by eating a ton of rotten mud instead of actual shit. No, throughout the year, there were actually some things that happened that were genuinely good; great, even.

And so once again, with no further ado, here are my ten favourite things. Like usual, these are, y’know, things that I watched or played or whatever. I don’t go on about my great kids being great, or the fact that I finally finished writing and formatting enough children’s books to start showing them to agents. But my kids were both elected their respective class’s reps to the school council, which is pretty badass. Here you go. Ten good things. Watch them on catch-up, or whatever.

Mega Mando: without a doubt the best “thing” that I saw was the second season of The Mandalorian. Managing to be both an event-of-the-week show (a heist! An infiltration! A siege!) as well as a long-form narrative; feeling distinct and its own thing but tying into so many aspects of Star Wars; full of absolutely excellent scenes and direction and performances; and holy crap what an ending. When you watch a few of these kinds of shared-universe genre shows, this sort of thing is a rarity to the point of my never having seen it before. Seasons that are too long? Filler episodes? Disappointing lore? A “thirteen-hour movie”? Mando swerves all of these things and – notwithstanding my love for The Last Jedi – emerges as possibly the best thing Star Wars has done since at least the classic LucasArts games of the late nineties.

Series SeXy: finally the new consoles came out, and I got an Xbox Series X. It was quite a ride for yours truly: I managed to successfully pre-order one from Microsoft directly; it turned up on the day of release, except it was late in the evening and the kids were around so I couldn’t open it; then, after briefly testing it, I shoved it back in its box till Christmas. Honestly, you wanna talk about anticipation much? It was literally in my house and I still didn’t properly set it up till the evening on Christmas Day. Anyway: it’s great. It just works, y’know? It’s a beautiful boxy delight, with its chunky green holes and its shiny edges. It makes all my games look amazing, it’s so fast and buttery-smooth. It’s like upgrading a PC, but far more successful and expansive an upgrade than I was ever able to do when I was actually upgrading a PC. Anyway, it’s great. It even runs Cyberpunk 2077.

Lockdown Crossing: Animal Crossing: New Horizons arrived at exactly the right time. Lockdown was starting, everything was darkness and fear, people were dying, we needed distractions, and here was a game about being happy and friendly and doing up your house and digging up fossils. It was perfect. It was also a great social game, with my kids loving sending presents to each other, or meeting up with their uncle (who they literally saw only once this year). A great game at just the right time.

The Stream Where it Happens: Mando might have been my TV highlight of the year, but film-wise my favourite new movie was not only not really a movie but was also several years old. Hamilton popped up almost by surprise on Disney+, and it was the first time I’d been able to experience it – and it was just as good as I’d heard. At this point you don’t need me to rhapsodise about the lyricism, performance, staging, and West Wing references; I think you either get it or you don’t, and I got it big time. Weirdly, experiencing it at home made some kind of perfect sense, and it made up for missing out on the big cinematic musicals such as In the Heights and West Side Story.

Fantabulous Harley Quinn: Harley rocked on both the big and the small screen this year. Birds of Prey, or whatever it ended up being called, was actually the last film I saw at the cinema before the Big Shutdown of 2020. It’s not perfect, sure, but it’s a hell of a lot of fun; Margot Robbie is a blast, it’s really funny, and is edgy in just the right way, rather than feeling like it’s trying too hard. I was more sceptical going into the Harley Quinn animated show (starring Penny off The Big Bang Theory, for goodness’ sake!), as “sweary adult Harley Quinn cartoon” is pretty high on my checklist of “things that are trying to be edgy”, but I’m glad I gave it a chance, because it followed a very similar line to the movie. Hilarious, violent, filthy, but also offering a subtle unpeeling of Harley’s psyche and giving her more character development than she gets in most of her comic appearances. It was a great year for Harley. Just wish they’d show the second season of her show.

All This Plus Disney: yeah, I’ve already singled out Mando and Ham (great unmade detective show, there), but I’ve gotta say Disney+ in general has been a huge highlight. From getting all yer Marvels and yer Star Wars in one place, to a wealth of preschool and middle-grade shows for the kids (my youngest mainlined Vampirina this Spring), to being a home for loads of high-quality family films from years gone by (it was the prime destination for many a family movie night), to, well, the future. WandaVision launches in a couple of weeks, followed by dozens of great shows and movies; not just ones about sad superheroes, either – personally I can’t wait for the likes of Chip & Dale. I’ve gotta say, I’ve been really impressed, and once they roll out the sexier, swearier Fox stuff later this year, it’ll only get better.

A Schitt Year: we got into Schitt’s Creek rather late (like many a sitcom – I think we only discovered Brooklyn Nine-Nine and The Good Place in the last eighteen months or so), but it’s truly sublime, and it only got better and better as it built towards it joyous climax (ewww, David!). It was a great show about a family of people who were kinda arseholes, but were really very nice underneath it all, and how this town of people who were sorta idiots but kinda nice underneath it all brought out the better natures of everybody. It was, basically, a show about the all-encompassing power of being Nice. I’m so, so happy that it achieved huge success in its final season, winning literally all the Emmys. Hot Schitt.

Top Trek: 2020 was bookended by the two newest incarnations of People Boldly Going, Picard and Discovery. I was super excited to check in with Jean-Luc and pals nearly twenty years since we’d last seen them; although the show wasn’t a Best of Both Worlds-style masterpiece, it presented a believably fractured vision of the Federation, and a sadder, wearier Picard. It got a bit bogged down in Borg stuff, and I wasn’t totally sold on the ending, but I’m very, very eager to spend more time with these characters in future seasons. Discovery, meanwhile, flashed forward, with a season set about 900 years after Picard, and gave us what amounts to the closest Star Trek gets to a dystopia. It took its time settling in, but by crikey it pulled its threads together for a great run of episodes as we gear up to the finale later this week. I’ve very much enjoyed Star Trek on TV this year, and I’m really looking forward to whatever comes next.

Netflickin’ Ass: on the one hand, it was quite nice to see streaming services picking up the slack during the cinema closures, with many films winding up on Prime Video or Netflix or wherever; there were also those “Premium VOD” options, such as Trolls World Tour or Mulan, but I never quite fancied parting with so much cash for a rental (“Only if it’s Black Widow or Wonder Woman,” I said… so, yeah, see you later this month for the latter!). One trend I did notice, however, was Netflix also picking up the slack of “big Hollywood star-driven action movie”. Y’know, the stuff that had Van Damme or Seagal in it in the ‘90s, before everything became franchised (Mission: Impossible could almost fall under this banner, but Cruise became too huge and the series itself eventually was the draw, I’d argue). Anyway, these sorts of films nowadays are low-rent DTV fodder starring slumming former megastars, so fair play to Netflix for resurrecting the genre and giving it a fresh coat of paint and lease of life. Stuff like Extraction and The Old Guard weren’t exactly masterpieces, but they were solidly entertaining with great central performances and some nicely turned-out action. Looking forward to more of the same – bigger, better, and with more people getting killed with rakes!

A Summer of Anticipation: it was a weird year – well, yeah, of course it was, you know, you were there. But one of the things that was weird was that so much was going to happen. I mean, there were loads of things I was looking forward to as the year began; from the MCU and Star Wars shows to big movies, smaller movies, and – of course – new games consoles. And as the year went on, amidst the angsty real-world wait-and-see, there was also a steady drip of news and non-news as we held on to find out which films were pushed back, which were skipping the cinema, and mostly what the games would look like on the new consoles. Barely a week seemed to go by without new rumours, new stories, and new leaked videos or imagery. It was maddening and infuriating but also, weirdly, glorious. This strange ongoing sense of anticipation and wonder, even if quite often the news ended up being disappointing as more and more big hitters slipped to 2021 (everything from Bond to Halo to pretty much the whole MCU). But like an entire year made up of Christmas Eves, it felt for the longest time that anything was possible… just round the corner.

See? It wasn’t all bad. And maybe this year we’ll get to enjoy all the stuff we thought we’d enjoy in 2020! I mean, at the very least, Trump’s gonna be gone… right?

#top ten #2020 #film #tv #disney #hamilton #mandalorian #games #xbox #halo #series x

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