Best of 2019

Ok, time for my low effort summary of the best things in 2019.

 

Movies

I only saw 59 films this year, and I only though one of them was above average, which was Promare, the colourful sci-fi, fire-fighting, anime extravaganza

 

Music

I saw two really fantastic live shows this year, and both bands put out excellent albums: Bring Me The Horizon (at Victoria Park) and Ghost (at Wembley Area).

 

Sports Anime

My fave anime shows this year were Tsurune and Run with the Wind. But I also really liked two western comics adopting the same style: Fence, and Check Please

 

DC Rebirth

Catching up with Peter J Tomasi’s Superman and James Tynion IV’s Detective Comics from the start of DC Rebirth has been a treat.

 

Chip Zdarsky

Zdarsky’s work is currently the highlight at Marvel. Spider-Man Life Story and Marvel Two In One were my favourite things I read in TPB this year. Zdarsky also writes a very funny weekly news letter, which has been great.

 

Best of 2017

Here are some of my fave things in 2017:

 

Anime

• Yuri on Ice to start the year
• My Hero Academia to end the year (pictured)

Games

• Finishing Final Fantasy XV and playing Final Fantasy XII for the first time
• Finally playing Suikoden

Comics

• • Catching up with stuff from a few years ago: Harbinger Wars; Batman & Robin (N52)
  • Wayward keeping up with my 2017 anime aesthetic
  • Gwenpool being so much fun

Music

• You’re Not You Anymore, the new album by Counterparts
• Linkin Park, Live at Brixton Academy
• Madeon & Porter Robinson, Live at the Forum

Movies

• Seeing Interstellar in 70mm
• Call Me By Your Name, Lady Bird, and Saturday Church at LFF
• Thor Ragnarok being awesome
• Silence and The Beguiled being underrated

Best of 2016

This year’s Best Of is more like a bullet point list than a review, but here are the things I liked the most in 2016:

Films:

 Your Name

A young adult anime as outlandish as it is beautiful and moving. Clever uses of time travel and fantasy

Love and Friendship

So much wit and sass in this fantastic Jane Austin adaptation

Creed

There is something about boxing on film. But more than that, there is something about the lead performances and the journeys they take the characters on

High Rise

This seems uniquely suited to my tastes. An audacious dystopian JG Ballard adaptation as purveyed by Ben Wheatley and Tom Hiddleston

Julieta

At once epic and personal. As Almodovar as they come

TV:

Stranger Things

The 80s setting, the loveable bunch of kids. A nice combo of sci-fi, D&D, and Spielberg tropes

Albums:

FM-84, Atlas

Super cool retrowave. Listen to Running In The Night

Carly Rae Jepson, Emotion Side B

More 80s nostalgia. A pure homage that sounds like peak Madonna

Svalbard, One Day All This Will End

This was a 2015 album, but hit me in 2016. Fast and heavy, with impressive riffs

Casey, Love is Not Enough

Late 2016 find, Casey were the opening act on Being As An Ocean’s tour. Haunting melodic hardcore

Live Music:

Counterparts, Underworld

A tight, heavy, sweaty set in my favourite basement

Being As An Ocean, Tufnell Park Dome

There’s nothing quite like hanging out with this band and their excellent fans for an intense 50 minute celebration of love, understanding, and hardcore

Chvrches, Royal Albert Hall

Big time pop performance in a big time venue

Comics:

Patsy Walker, A.K.A. Hellcat! / The Unbelievable Gwenpool / Howard the Duck / The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl

Marvel’s oddball characters have really come into their own. Hellcat is the gayest thing Marvel currently puts out; all four are a lot of fun

Lumberjanes

Friendship and monsters at girls summer camp, with a loveable young adult cast

Vision

The critically acclaimed superhero thing of this year. It’s fantastic

Games:

 

Firewatch / Life is Strange

Two indie narrative experiences that really defined gaming in 2016 for me. Both beautiful in their own ways

Final Fantasy XV

I really ship Promptis. I’m about halfway through this game and it’s just the kind of epic JRPG I was looking for

The Best of 2015

A little late this year, but here are my favourite media things of 2015.

UK Cinema Releases

Foxcatcher & Selma

These were the two Oscar contenders that stood out for me. Foxcatcher was tense, creepy, and excellently performed. Selma was a flawlessly directed, stirring epic of inequality and minor triumph.

The Boy Next Door

Bizzare Jenifer Lopez erotic thriller. How this film got made in 2015 I don’t know. It’s completely insane (at one point the romantic interest buys JLo a ‘first edition’ of the Illiad. What?). I was just pleased with its existence really, and pleased to indulge its trashy sensibilities.

Mommy

I’m a sucker for Xavier Dolan’s knitwear and existentialism. Mommy is one of his best to date, taking characters who in most realities should be unlikeable and turning them into a loveable leads with a believable dysfunctional family dynamic.

Mad Max: Fury Road & John Wick

Action cinema was back in 2015. And in both of these examples it was flawlessly taught and expertly executed. Mad Max gets extra points for new cinema icon Furiosa, but both films are a joy of simple storytelling and adrenaline.

The Last Five Years

My first experience with a Jason Robert Brown musical, and oh my god I loved it. Full of both optimism and melancholy, it deals with the highs and lows of a relationship as melodramatic opera.

Listen Up Philip

While I very much also enjoyed Noah Baumbach’s While We’re Young and Mistress America, Alex Ross Perry took Baumbach-style cynical hipster snark to a whole new levels with Listen Up Philip.

Clouds of Sils Maria

The kind of film that sweeps you up and surrounds you with all kinds of feelings. At once both subtle and extravagent. Juliette Binoche is an ageing actress and Kristen Stewart her youthful, contemplative assistant, both actresses at the top of their game.

 Magic Mike XXL

A love letter to the joys of escapism. Sustained brilliance and constantly surprising. My film of the year. I have written more about MMXXL elsewhere on this blog.

 We Are Your Friends & Paper Towns

I saw these back to back. The first is pure romance – arguably flawed, but full of the joys of youthful love, music, and friendship. The second is throwaway young adult fiction, but its characters and scenarios stuck with me more than it’s critically acclaimed YA competitors (Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, and The Diary of a Teenage Girl)

Carol

Gorgeous 16mm photography. Perfect 1950s production design. A deep relationship portrayed elegantly by two of the finest leading actresses around. Superb.

 

Home Viewing

TV

On TV, Netflix have been knocking it out of the park with Daredevil and Jessica Jones – both are wonderfully realised comicbook adaptations. Also on TV,  the constantly brilliant, subsersive sitcom, Broad City has become my favourite comedy show in a long time,

Masters of Cinema

I’ve really engaged with the Masters of Cinema blu-ray line this year, who put out fantastic transfers of fantastic films. I was mightily impressed by Man of the West (1958), Faust (1926), Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), and Lifeboat (1944).

The Epic of Everest

Perhaps the finest film I watched all year though was seen on iPlayer. The Epic of Everest (1924) offers a beautifully haunting look into the lost world of early 20th century adventure and exploration.

 

Music

I haven’t attended much live music this year. The most notable though would be The Decemberists at Brixton Academy, who put on a fantastic evening of wistful-hipster-folk-rock.

In terms of music releases, Being as an Ocean, August Burns Red, and While She Sleeps all put out top tier metal/hardcore albums, As It Is brought back emo, and I’ve been listening to a fair amount of alt-electro-pop (much of which is 80s influenced) – ODESZA, CHVRCHES, Dive In, Paperwhite, and Madeon stand out.

Convenient playlist of my fave songs of 2015.

 

Comics and Books

This year I once again read a load of Marvel and Image comics.

Special mention for Image goes to Greg Rucka and Michael Lark for introducing a great new female lead and detailed universe in Lazarus, the gorgeous painted art and tense sci-fi storytelling of Descender by Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen, and the the ongoing brilliance that is Saga.

As for Marvel, my favourites of the year go to Warren Ellis and Declan Shalvey’s superb collab on Moon Knight, the pure joy of Ryan North and Erica Henderson’s Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, and the first three flawless issues of Cyclops, written by Greg Rucka with stunning artwork by Russel Daugterman.

Outside of comics, My Lunches with Orson by Henry Jaglom / Peter Biskind and Silver Screen Fiend by Patton Oswalt scratched my movie itch, while Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey introduced me to an exciting new sci-fi universe via a perfectly paced action romp.

My favourite things of 2014

It’s that time of the year when I start making lists. Here is some of the pop culture I’ve enjoyed in 2014.

Movies

2014 started wonderfully for film with Only Lovers Left Alive, Her and Inside LLewyn Davis remaining three of my favourite flicks throughout the year.

However, there were two films that massively stood out for me. Those are Richard Linklater’s wonderfully absorbing indie marvel Boyhood, and Hayao Miyazaki absolutely beautiful melancholy animation, The Wind Rises. Both, I feel, have become instant classics.

Meanwhile, Marvel once again proved they’re the studio that knows how to do contemporary blockbusters with Winter Soldier and Guardians of the Galaxy. Their main challenger for action movie of the year was the exciting and satisfying Tom Cruise sci-fi film Edge of Tomorrow.

January / February’s Oscar contenders were also solid this year, particularly Dallas Buyers Club and 12 Years A Slave.

Music

This is the year in which I turned Spotify full time, and the number of artists I’ve listened to as a result is both large and varied.

There were two albums that I played more than any other though: Being As An Ocean‘s Dear G-D, an existential post-hardcore riff on faith, fate and relationships, and Body Clocks by Climates, and up and coming British metal/hardcore band with a killer opening track ‘Leaves of Legacy‘.

In terms of pop music, the year really revolved around Chvrches’ electro-indie The Bones of What You Believe and adorable YouTube twink Troye Sivan‘s debut EP TRXYE for me.

I saw some great gigs too, the pinnacle of which was probably country/folk band Old Crow Medicine Show from Nashville, Tennessee putting on one hell of a show in Camden’s beautiful Roundhouse.

Comics

I’m pretty sure my comics collection has tripled in the last year.

My favourite moment was reading the whole of Young Avengers Volume 3: Mic-Drop at the Edge of Time and Space in one sitting when it released in April (I love those characters so much, and Gillen/McKelvie are a great creative team). And then there were those few months where I got really obsessed with Jonathan Hickman’s entire Fantastic Four run from a few years back.

Image were consistently great in 2014, with Saga still going strong, plus Deadly Class and East of West particular favourites.

June to December 2013 in review

I had recently been feeling like this year has been a lacklustre one for movies and that there hadn’t been much that truly grabbed me. Then, as I did back in June, I looked back at the list of films I had watched over the last 6 months. To my surprise, I’d actually seen a ton of good and great films. So what’s a sporadic film blogger to do other than categorize them?

Tier 1 (the great stuff)

• Much Ado About Nothing – Shakespeare gets the Joss Whedon treatment. I laughed out loud. Lots.
• Something In The Air – wonderful French coming of age drama.
• A Field In England – bleak and intelligent, I’m itching for another viewing.
• Wadjda – a touching film about a young girl just wanting to ride a bicycle and the impact of institutionalised sexism.
• Frances Ha – Greta Gerwig is great as a lost 20-something.
• The Way Way Back – ‘the feel good comedy of the summer’.
• Blue Jasmine – Woody Allen at his finest.
• Drinking Buddies – mumblecore goodness set in a brewery. Awkward romance ensues.

Tier 2 (good or very good)

• Gravity – I’ve never felt as tense during a film or as elated afterwards. Slips into Tier 2 simply because I can’t stomach a re-watch.
• The World’s End & Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa – grouped together for filling my summer with brit-com excellence.
• The Grandmaster – Great martial arts film, sub-par Wong Kar-wai film. I’ll take it.
• Ender’s Game – surprisingly my favourite blockbuster of the year.
• Computer Chess – mumblecore goodness set at a computer chess tournament in the 80s. Awkward ensues.
• Metallica Through the Never – refreshing concert film which works brilliantly by adding in narrative elements. Dane DeHaan ❤

Excellent stuff I’ve watched at home

• Harakiri – masterful samurai drama.
• The Others Guys & This is the End – two comedies I really enjoyed whilst consuming alcohol on a Friday night.
• Fast and the Furious 1-4 – this series is just so full of fun. The cast feel like a family. RIP Paul Walker.

Fuck my life

• The Counselor – just one entry here. Ridley Scott and the entire cast of top actors completely mishandle Cormac McCarthy’s screenplay.

 

Half a year of movie viewing in review

Because I keep a spreadsheet of these things, I’m aware that I’ve watched 81 films so far this year across both home and cinema viewings. That’s not a bad statistic for the half way point, but considering I watched 200 in total last year, it could be better.

I have however managed to see them in 12 different cinemas, which is more impressive. And they take in wonderful venues like the Phoenix in East Finchley, the cosy Everyman Baker Street and the luxurious Screen on the Green, alongside the shabby Cineworld Haymarket and the downright terrible Cineworld Wood Green – which, with 9 returns, in my most visited cinema this year.

Despite seeing 81 films, the majority were pretty forgettable, let’s do some ranking:

Likely to be near my top ten come December

• Hors Satan – arty French miserablist may or may not be evil.
• Cloud Atlas – a symphonic cacophony of shiny pop philosophy.
• No – outstanding Chilean political campaign drama.
• Spring Breakers – a postmodern dismantling of the American dream.

Pretty entertaining cinema releases

• Les Miserables – over the top melodrama.
• Django Unchained – over the top violence.
• Stoker – stylised black comedy.
• For Ellen – understated wistful indie.
• Safe Haven – romantic pic that plays its genre cards well.
• Underground – 1928 silent set around the London Underground network.
• Iron Man 3 – (Shane) Black is back.
• Star Trek Into Darkness – nice character dynamics and lots of running around.

The best things I watched at home

• Uzak – slow burning Turkish drama.
• Touch of Evil – Orson Welles classic.
• Fallen Angels – Wong Kar Wai classic.
• Lawrence of Arabia – one hell of a classic.
• Magnolia – revisiting one of my all time faves was worthwhile.
• All About Eve – likewise.
• Pulp Fiction – its been a few years since my last watch, but still holds up.
• Fallen Angel – a clever and entertaining Otto Preminger noir.

Fuck my life (both home & cinema)

• Brick – self indulgent nonsense.
• Le Mepris – I still don’t quite ‘get’ Godard. Could be described as self indulgent nonsense.
• Trance – self indulgent nonsense with two gratuitous vagina shots.
• The Great Gatsby – self indulgent nonsense that preaches against self indulgent nonsense.

So I make that a hit rate of 20 out of 81, or 24.7%. Not bad.

Also, the kind of film I don’t like seems pretty clear now.

 

Films I enjoyed watching in 2012

Instead of doing a straight top ten this year I’ve decided to put together a list of notable films I’ve seen in 2012, regardless of their release date.

Rather than going for a list of films I think are technically excellent (The Master, Tabu etc), I’ve gone for a list that really connected with me and made me feel things in only the way movies can.

I’ll start with the handful which were released in UK cinema’s in 2012:

Bombay Beach – A touching documentary about a neglected community in California, both beautiful and frightening in its portrayal of poverty.

Holy Motors – Full of ideas, wonderfully obtuse, and stunningly ambitious.

Moonrise Kingdon – Filled me with joy.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower – The appearance of this has surprised me, as it didn’t make any of my initial considerations for best of year lists, but as I was thinking about the films which moved me I couldn’t help but recall how Perks’ dreamlike quality has stayed with me.

A Simple Life – Two fantastic performances in an unlikely love story. All the more brilliant considering the love story is a strictly platonic one between a bachelor and his mother figure maid.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (pictured) – The deepest character study of the year, so deep that you don’t realise until the end that this slow burning murder anti-procedural was really about the melancholy of one man. An absolutely memorable cinematic experience.

Here are a few older films I watched for the first time (or in two cases re-watched) in 2012: 

Grave of the Fireflies (above) – The most heartbreaking film I’ve ever seen.

Le Quattro Volte – A hugely affecting, near silent film about life and death in rural Italy.

Norwegian Wood – Slow, soft and touching. Like Perks, it represents an author’s nostalgia-fuelled melancholic dreams and burns into your psyche.

Rebecca – My new favourite Hitchcock.

 A Serious Man – A re-watch of this proved that it is the Coen brothers’ definitive work.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada – Tommy Lee Jones directs a Cormac McCarthy homage worthy of the great American author himself.

The Third Man – My first re-watch of this classic since I was a teen. Intricately plotted and perfectly directed, they don’t make them this good anymore.

At the midway point of 2012 I also wrote this list, see how my opinions have (and haven’t) changed.

Top Tens: Critics vs. Bloggers

Whether you know me in person, follow me on twitter or read this blog, you might have heard me going on about the Sight & Sound top ten movie list recently. Well just bear with me a little longer and I’ll shut up about it for the next ten years. Promise.

So the Sight & Sound poll results were announced last week, and as expected, Vertigo triumphed. Personally I was happy to see The Searchers return to the top ten but sad to see Singin’ in the Rain go. My biggest disappointment was the lack of any film more recent than 1968 at the top. In The Mood for Love placed highest at 24, but There Will Be Blood not even making the top 100 was a surprising oversight.

Well, not ones to let our opinions go unheard, the ‘Film Bloggers of the Internet’ have gathered together under the guidance of HeyUGuys’ Adam Lowes to put forward our own top tens. Amazingly 120 people contributed and came up with a very different list.

Here are both lists:

Critics (Sight and Sound)	Bloggers (HeyUGuys)
1. Vertigo	1. Jaws
2. Citizen Kane	2. Back to the Future
3. Tokyo Story	3. = The Dark Knight
4. The Rules of the Game	3. = Blade Runner
5. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans	5. = 2001 A Space Odyssey
6. 2001: A Space Odyssey	5. = There Will Be Blood
7. The Searchers	5. = Psycho
8. Man with a Movie Camera	5. = Citizen Kane
9. The Passion of Joan of Arc	9. Pulp Fiction
10. 8½	10. = The Thing
	10. = Alien

More ‘mainstream’ than S&S but not as shit as imdb’s Top 250, the blogger’s list makes for an interesting read. What we have managed to do at the very least is establish a consensus on the best modern films, something that Sight & Sound failed to do.

There’s an interesting inversion going on: Where the critics conglomerated around a handful of established classics and threw in a wide variety of modern films to their individual lists, the bloggers were quite happy to agree on the likes of Jaws, Back to the Future and Blade Runner as amongst the best in cinema, but had a scattershot approach to anything made before the sixties aside from Citizen Kane.

The two lists side by side make for fascinating reading – and provide a definitive top twenty  if you like (well, 21 anyway). It also shows that personal film favourites are quite generational.

The greatest films of all time: My top ten

With Sight & Sound due to announce their list of the greatest ever films this week I thought I’d have a little go and come up with my own top ten.

For those of you not in the know, Sight & Sound is a BFI-published magazine which has been running since 1932 and takes a serious, scholarly approach to cinema. Once a decade they invite critics and directors to contribute their top ten films, resulting in one of the most definitive lists of the greatest movies ever.

I for one am very excited about the results, and particularly keen to see if Citizen Kane holds onto the top spot as it has done since 1962 or finally relinquishes its place. It will also be interesting to see if There Will Be Blood (above) can become the youngest film to be inducted into the list in several decades.

In putting together my own list I wanted to strike a balance between creative brilliance (what I would refer to as the best movies) and personal preference (the ones I would call my favourite movies), so this list should represent my admiration for the art form as well as my own tastes.

I also wanted to use this as a springboard for a series of reviews, looking back not only at these ten films, but also many others that made my initial long-list and a few greats I’m yet to see (Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans springs to mind). So look out for those in coming months.

In this situation it seems unfair and almost impossible to rank each film individually, so here are my ten sorted chronologically:

The General (1927)

Casablanca (1942)

Black Narcissus (1947)

All About Eve (1950)

Singin’ in the Rain (1952)

The Searchers (1956)

Persona (1966)

Ashes of Time (1994)

Magnolia (1999)

There Will Be Blood (2007)

Edit: Between the Sight and Sound results being announced and Hey U Guys running their own poll amongst bloggers (which I have contributed to) I have actually revisited my list and made slight alterations. I decided to make my selection more personal, thinking about the films that have made an impact on my life rather than focusing more on ones I think are technically brilliant.

For reference, the old list was: The General; Casablanca; Black Narcissus; Sunset Boulevard; Singin’ in the Rain; Rear Window; The Searchers; Persona; 2001: A Space Odyssey; There Will Be Blood

Let me know what you think of my list on twitter.