The State of the Art: Movies 2020

These days, it's typical for the amount of television I consume to far outpace the number of movies I see. Getting out to the theater is (well, was) more of An Event than ever, and it was just easier to park myself on the couch. In 2020, though, they flipped. I still watched plenty of TV, but I saw way more movies than in other recent years. It's not hard to see why. COVID made at-home streaming the only way to see anything, and with a bunch of time freed up by not being able to go out and socialize, movies rushed in to fill the gap. 

That doesn't mean I got to see a lot of 2020 movies. Output was slim this year, so it was mostly older movies I was able to catch up with. Still, I did get to a handful of new releases, and picking a favorite was pretty easy. Palm Springs was a terrific new spin on the Groundhog Day trope. I didn't think it was possible to make yet another time loop story seem fresh, but thanks to hilarious performances from Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti, I was more than happy to watch them stagger through an uncomfortable wedding again and again and again. 

Here's the full ranking of 2020 movies:

Palm Springs (A)

Hamilton (A)
Soul (A-)
The Witches (B+)
To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You (B+)
Happiest Season (B)
Onward (B)
The Taste of Pho (B-)
The Willoughbys (C+)
Wonder Woman 1984 (C)

The internet was full of recommendations for things to watch during quarantine, and between those and the films that just caught my interest as a matter of course, my pre-2020 movie list was stacked:

Parasite (2019) (A)

Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) (A)
Singin' in the Rain (1952) (A)
A Star is Born (2018) (A)
Little Women (2019) (A-)
Three Identical Strangers (2018) (B+)
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) (B+)
Begin Again (2013) (B+)
Velvet Goldmine (1998) (B+)
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) (B+)
Hello, Dolly! (1969) (B+)
Shazam! (2019) (B+)
Gypsy (1993) (B)
Toy Story 4 (2019) (B)
Dolemite is My Name (2019) (B)
Downton Abbey (2019) (B)
About Time (2013) (B)
Bathtubs Over Broadway (2018) (B)
Save the Last Dance (2001) (B)
The Five Heartbeats (1991) (B-)
Set it Up (2018) (B-)
Frozen 2 (2019) (B-)
The Harvey Girls (1946) (B-)
Klaus (2019) (B-)
I Lost My Body (2019) (B-)
Cause for Alarm! (1951) (C+)
The Invention of Lying (2009) (C+)
The Good Dinosaur (2015) (C+)
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) (C)
Yesterday (2019) (C)
F for Fake (1973) (C)
Honey (2003) (C)
Polly (1989) (C)
Carmen: A Hip Hopera (2001) (C-)
Raise Your Voice (2004) (D+)

The State of the Art: Television 2020

When it came to games and books this year, I willingly sank into deep, introspective, and outright sad material. But when the TV went on, it was time for some happy escape. The television shows I went for this year were funny or comforting or both. Well, except for BoJack Horseman. Nobody could accuse that of being cheery. The other good news is that I didn't watch anything that didn't turn out to be fairly satisfying; nothing would score below a B- on the 2020 TV list. Even in an overall good year of television, though, there's got to be a standout, and picking my favorite was simplicity itself.

I haven't yet watched the original What We Do in the Shadows movie, but started on the TV show, and immediately fell in love. Season 1 was terrific, and far from a sophomore slump, this year's Season 2 was outstanding. Individual episodes dealing with the vampire family's encounters with witches and ghosts and small town girls' volleyball budget crises were hilarious, and if that weren't enough, they managed to weave in a seasonal arc about Guillermo's slayer calling and the Council of Vampires that wants the crew dead. If I said more, it'd just be me sitting here recounting full scenes. Hopefully, we won't have to wait too long for more vampiric adventures.

There were a handful of other outstanding shows as well. Both Los Espookys (Season 1) and A Black Lady Sketch Show (Season 1) would have had real shots at being favorite of the year, had they not come out in 2019. Curse me for getting to them late. As to 2020 shows of the year, Never Have I Ever (Season 1) had a very strong inaugural season, and likely would have gotten more attention were it not for, well, *gestures at the entire world*. There were some emotional and powerful ending seasons, too, as BoJack Horseman (Season 6) and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (Season 5) nailed their final bows.

The rest of 2020 shows was a mix of farcical comedy, a couple of spooky mysteries, and as ever, the warmth and familiarity of everyone's favorite baking show. The ranked list:

Brooklyn Nine Nine (Season 7)
The Good Place (Season 4)
The Great British Baking Show (Season 8 (US), Season 11 (UK)
Superstore (Season 5)
The Haunting of Bly Manor (Season 1)
The Goes Wrong Show (Season 1)
The Great American Baking Show (Season 5)
Aunty Donna's Big Ol' House of Fun (Season 1)
Locke & Key (Season 1)
Indian Matchmaking (Season 1)
100 Humans (Season 1)

And then there were the catch-up shows, from 2019 and before that I finally had the time to get to. Here's the ranking:

What We Do in the Shadows (Season 1) (2019)
Dollface (Season 1) (2019)
She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (Season 4) (2019)
iZombie (Season 1) (2015)
Always a Witch (Siempre Bruja) (Season 1) (2019)
Marvel Rising (standalones) (2018-2019)
Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories (Season 2) (2019)
Avatar: The Last Airbender (Season 1-3) (2005-2008)
Toast of London (Seasons 1-3) (2012-2015)
Nailed It! Holiday! (Season 2) (2019)

The State of the Art: Books 2020

Hey, guess what? It turns out when you're essentially confined to home for the better part of a year, you wind up having more time to read. Who'd have thunk it? In 2018, I had a lot going on, and only read 12 books. Pitiful. I did much better in 2019, putting away 24 books. And in 2020, it's bumped up again to 34. There usually seems to be a guiding theme for each year's books, and as with the games I played this year, the theme for 2020 appears to be "Dealing With Loss".

A lot of the books I read this year bear witness to their characters looking inward to explore a tangled web of painful memories, or grimly going about their business as the world falls to pieces around them. Some make peace with their demons, be they literal or metaphorical, and some are subsumed. 2020 has forced us all to ask some probing questions about the human condition, and to look for answers about just how the hell we're supposed to react when the invisible bonds of society fray and snap.

Not everything I read this year was a bummer, but even among the books that did have a melancholy bent, there were plenty of wonderful finds. Let's get to the ranking!

 

The Book of Speculation - Erika Swyler (2015) (A)

Atonement - Ian McEwan (2001) (A)

To Say Nothing of the Dog - Connie Willis (1998) (A)

Circe - Madeline Miller (2018) (A-)

The Just City - Jo Walton (2014) (A-)

The Last Policeman - Ben Winters (2012) (A-)

The Starless Sea - Erin Morgenstern (2019) (B+)

Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine - Sarah Lohman (2016) (B+)

My Sister, The Serial Killer - Oyinkan Braithwaite (2017) (B+)

Gods of Jade and Shadow - Silvia Moreno-Garcia (2019) (B+)

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore - Robin Sloan (2012) (B+)

The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow (2019) (B)

Sea of Rust - C. Robert Cargill (2017) (B)

XL - Scott Brown (2019) (B)

The Party - Elizabeth Day (2017) (B)

The Dreamers - Karen Thompson Walker (2019) (B)

Then She Was Gone - Lisa Jewell (2017) (B)

The Warehouse - Rob Hart (2019) (B)

The Dirge of Reason - Graeme Davis (2018) (B)

Did You Ever Have a Family - Bill Clegg (2015) (B-)

253 - Geoff Ryman (1998) (B-)

Becoming - Michelle Obama (2018) (B-)

Annihilation (Southern Reach #1) - Jeff VanderMeer (2014) (B-)

Long Way Down - Jason Reynolds (2017) (B-)

Ire of the Void - Richard Lee Byers (2017) (B-)

Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts - Kate Racculia (2019) (C+)

The Deep Gate - Chris A. Jackson (2017) (C+)

Dark Revelations - Amanda Downum (2020) (C+)

Blood of Baalshandor - Richard Lee Byers (2020) (C+)

Murder in the Crooked House - Soji Shimada (2016) (C+)

To Fight the Black Wind - Jennifer Brozek (2018) (C+)

The Arrangement - Sarah Dunn (2017) (C)

You Know You Want This - Kristen Roupenian (2019) (C-)

American Panda - Gloria Chao (2018) (C-)

The State of the Art: Games 2020

It can be strange to describe myself as a "gamer", because that word carries connotations that don't apply to me. The general public hears "gamer", and assume I'm downing fifteen energy drinks and loading the latest shoot 'em up to murderize as many pixels as I can. And you know, some days I do feel like doing that.

Games can be so much more than that, though, and for 2020 in particular, the themes of this year's favorites are depth, thoughtfulness, regret, and sadness. The games I enjoyed the most this year are all about looking back, and trying to summon the strength to put the pieces of broken lives back together in order to move forward. And at the top of that bittersweet pile is... Spiritfarer.

 

In Spiritfarer, you play as Stella, who is accompanied by her cat Daffodil. Stella has taken over duties from Charon, and is now in charge of accomplishing the last wishes of her passengers before dropping their souls off in the Great Beyond. Charon managed his duties with cold efficiency, but that is not how Stella treats her charges. For Stella, her job is about compassion and empathy. The game itself is about resource management, as Stella cooks and gardens and runs errands and builds new rooms on her ship, all in service of making the souls she's accompanying feel more comfortable and ultimately, more understood. Inevitably, it is time to say goodbye, and this game left me in tears more than once. It's got beautiful visuals, beautiful music, and a beautiful message, and was exactly the game I needed this year.

 

The clear runner-up is similarly melancholy. Tell Me Why is a three-chapter game in which twins Tyler and Alyson meet again after many years apart to sell their childhood home. Tragedy in their childhood separated them, breaking the close bond they shared, and plunging them each into their own separate problems: Tyler going to a troubled youth facility as he deals with not only the complications of his transgender transition, but being blamed for the death of his mother, and Alyson remaining in their hometown and never breaking out of her shell. When the twins reunite, they begin to discover that there was much more to their troubled mother's story, and begin to dig up truths that the rest of the town would rather leave buried.

 

 

This game was extremely well-written and well-acted, and far from just being a point-and-click novel, included branching story decisions and fun puzzles. Clearly, 2020 game designers have as much on their minds as the rest of us. 

It wasn't all tears, though. The other big hit of the year was Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?! which is no surprise, given how much I liked Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2. Time management games appeal to me for some reason, especially if they're food-themed, and this one is not only fun, but has amazing food art, and incredible music. One of the songs wound up legitimately being one of the year's biggest jams for me.

On the tabletop front, Tiddy and I continue to enjoy our horrific journeys through Arkham Horror, even taking part in an Ironman in which we played through the entire "The Circle Undone" campaign, which took literally all day. We've explored the Marvel Champions and Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth tabletop games as well, though we always seem to find our way back to Arkham.

As for the rest of the games I finished, am still playing, or at least tried out during 2020, here's a list, in the order they made the biggest impact on me:

Dungeons & Dragons (I'm so happy we've been able to keep this up virtually, but am looking forward to getting back to playing in person)
Zero Time Dilemma (Nonary Games #3)
Greedfall
Hidden Through Time
Disco Elysium
Overwatch
Dragon Quest 11
A Normal Lost Phone
Max Gentleman Sexy Business
Eliza
Octopath Traveler
Aviary Attorney
Your Royal Gayness
Dragonfire
Final Fantasy XIV