On This, The Final Day Of The... Oh Dang, Sorry

So as predicted, I managed to let the Thursday self-imposed deadline slip. I wish I could say it was because I was surrounded by friends and family ringing in the new year, but I'm not a practicing bioterrorist, so that definitively did not happen. If you're curious, I spent my New Years Eve here with just one of my three children, the one to whom I am still legally obliged due to his age, and he in turn spent most of the day in his room online with friends and mostly strangers, playing Rocket League and powering through a pack and a half of La Croix seltzers. So you see, I was busy.

I do realize that I never got around to summing up for you the Best Things I Read/Saw/Heard In 2020 in a handy list format. Let me do that for you right now!

Films of the Year

OK, so obviously we weren't allowed to see any movies. It took me until September to realize they meant we were allowed to watch movies at home, just not in theaters. It was a pandemic. I was being careful.

As a result, the usual raft of Oscar-bait films that come out after the Toronto Film Festival all got swallowed up (the ones that even got made) in the swirling, nonstop wash of streaming releases that were not award-worthy prestige films, most of which I skipped because my god, there's just too many things to sort through. Also they had to compete with YouTube for my sitting-in-front-of-my-smart-TV attention during those times I chose to sit entirely still for like 4-to-11 hours at a time. So I could watch a prestige release like Nomadland or Bacurau or something, but if I sit here instead and watch a fourteen-part series of some guy in Poland playing through a full game of Civilization VI, it's sure going to ask me to feel a lot less. Which is how 2020 worked best for me, I found.

So instead of "best," here are some films I actually recently saw:

Wonder Woman 1984. It was fine! Yes, it seemed like the plot creation started with "how do we get Chris Pine back in this Wonder Woman movie?" and then worked backward from there, but you know what? Chris Pine. I'm good with it. There are like three movies in one, none of which really touch the other at any point, so it's a jumbled mish-mash. And the plot thread with Pedro Pascal is the worst one. He's wasted on being given nothing to do, except in the end shout "Alistair!" over and over again which was annoying as it made me think about how annoying it was to listen to Michael on Lost scream "Waaaaalt!" over and over again. The Cheetah parts were cool! And there's a bit where Wonder Woman learns to sort of fly that legit made me cry. Don't judge me.

Tenet. If you think of every non-Batman Christopher Nolan film there is (Memento, Inception, Interstallar, even Dunkirk), they all go out of their way to fuck with the perception of time. Well, this just all of that again, but really mostly only that. It's pretty good until the clunky-ass end with a bunch of lazy, out-of-nowhere exposition designed specifically to set up a sequel. But it was fun to look at! And for $20, it was a lot cheaper than taking myself and three other adults to the theater to see it, which was the original plan. So: also fine!

New Mutants: Watched this literally yesterday. It was 95 minutes. And $6. But the end sequence with the Demon Bear is fucking dope, you guys. Just kinda fast-forward to that.

And that's more or less it. Sorry, the list idea for this piece kind of went out the window, but this is easily the least traumatic thing you've had to adapt to recently, I'm sure. I've watched a lot of TV, some of which I've covered here. The Mandalorian was pretty good, if you're into that sort of thing. I am into that sort of thing.

The biggest thing I can say about music is that I started paying for Spotify this year instead of enduring the ads. The main reason is I figured out if you closed the app on your phone and reopened it, it would skip the ads. But that got to be actively dangerous while driving, so $10 a month seems like a bargain vs. the prospect of a head-on collision with a furniture truck. The thing about Spotify is I don't know when anything came out anymore because it all just... plays. So I can't tell what a good thing from 2020 might have been. I listened to a lot of a band called Bad Bad Hats, I guess. Look them up maybe, if you like mid-tempo indie-pop! The main takeaway I guess is I'm 46 and not every single thing I listen to is from the 1990s. Sometimes it's current stuff made by babies who grew up listening to 1990s music, so it sounds exactly like it could be from the 1990s. But I choose to read that as me being culturally current. Even if my actually culturally current late-teens-early-20s children have never heard of the bands I'm listening to.

In closing I'm supposed to say how much 2020 sucked and how I hope 2021 is going to be better. And if I was a total hack I'd say "how it could it really be worse?!?!?!?!?!" or something, but if there's a lesson in all of this, we know there's always a "worse."

I lost people this past year. If you're a human reading this, you likely have as well, or at least seen people you know suffer. I don't really want to trivialize it all by closing with either a bromide or a joke. The good news is that by waiting an extra day to January 1st instead of December 31st, I'm officially off the hook in the Reflect And Contextualize obligation and can skip to the Looking Ahead mode. To that end: keep your fucking head down. Let's just get to inauguration and then reassess. In the meantime, there's plenty of YouTube to keep us going.