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LISTS
December 31st, 2020
Apocalypse Wrapped: 2020
Dwelling on anything other than the art gets really painful really quick, so let's not. Here are some of my favorite discoveries of the year, in no particular order. Non-2020 releases are marked with the release year, because I do love a format.
BOOKS: A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf (1929)
My first experience with Woolf, read alone in my room in-between bouts of writer's block. Who'd have thunk it'd resonate?
Honorable Mentions:
To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf (1927)
The City We Became - N.K. Jemisin
MUSIC: Fetch the Bolt Cutters - Fiona Apple
Who here is surprised? We could probably already have guessed that I'm one of the people who needed this album when it came out. It also might be the first album I've ever actually sat down and listened to all the way through on release, given I'm not really of the listening-party, sit-at-the-record-player generation. (And of course, "sat down" in this case translates to "laid face-down on the bedroom floor at midnight to catch the album as soon as it dropped." We're not fancy here.) On the one hand, Fetch the Bolt Cutters is unextraordinary in in that it's just another in a line of Fiona Apple albums that hand me what I need when I need it. NBD. On the other hand, this year is different, and I am different this year, and this album is special because I'm not sure it would have spoken for me twelve months ago.
Honorable Mentions:
Free Love - Sylvan Esso
Kitchen Sink - Nadine Shah
TELEVISION: Legion (2017-2019)
This has got to be one of the best shows I've taken the longest to actually finish. (This title will be claimed by Atlanta when I finally get my act together. I KNOW, I'm SORRY, I'm SLOW and I'll get there by next year, I PROMISE.)
Hands down my favorite comic show, possibly my favorite comic-adjacent thing (I won't put it up against Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse and you can't make me). I'm not sure I can think of another piece of media that is so clearly making innovative, confident, off-the-wall artistic choices and sticking the landing so well. (Again, Atlanta, I KNOW.) The production design is killer and strange, the whole show leans into the surreal with a vengeance - and maybe because I'm so turned off by the narrative and emotional hand-holding in so many mainstream comic franchises, Legion's refusal to explain things to me is genuinely cathartic.
The soundtrack's a banger, too.
Honorable Mention Caveat: Killing Eve Season 3
Yes, I'm giving it its own blurb, because oof. Disappointing, y'all, like fan fiction without the actual emotional payoff fan fiction would've provided. I so wish they'd paid off what they set up, but, you know, can't win 'em all. At least, now that this show has vacated my hyper-fixation brain, I have extra bandwidth for new snarky murder media, or someone's journey to learning how make a proper rum baba, or something.
Other Honorable Mentions I Don't Feel the Need to Apologize For:
I May Destroy You
The Great British Baking Show, Collection 8 (US)
This Way Up
Dickinson
GAMES: Alice is Missing
I don't really know how to express how genuinely this game fits me as a person. Alice is Missing is a silent role-playing game in which a group of high school students react to the sudden disappearance of their close mutual friend, communicating exclusively over text over one finite 90-minute period.
It's also one of the most immersive, intense RPGs I've ever experienced. Part Twin Peaks, part Life is Strange, there is a sweet spot of heartbreak and nostalgia and grief at the center of Alice is Missing. Few games, tabletop or video or otherwise, have hit as hard in such a short span of time. I don't know what to do with all this nostalgia for a place I've never been and an adolescence I didn't experience, aside from playing this game as many times as I can find people willing to play it. (And for a sense of how it's actually played, check out one of the few recorded livestreams of the game, run by the designer Spenser Starke, here.)
Honorable Mentions (a.k.a. the Anti-AiM List):
Crusader Kings III
Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Family
Like seven different Nancy Drew games
Project Winter
Among Us
MOVIES: Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019 France, 2020 US)
Look, I've already written about how this movie recalibrated my understanding of storytelling. All hail Queen Céline. More space for other favorites!
MOVIES: The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open (2019)
This almost entirely single-take film has stuck with me since I first saw it at the beginning of the year. After a tense chance encounter on the streets of Vancouver, two Indigenous Canadian women spend the film dancing around each other's circumstances, privilege, entitlement, and Indigenous identity. On its own, but especially if you're particularly frustrated by the lazy handling of female trauma in pop culture, the women of TBRwtWBO both in front of and behind the camera tell a vastly underrepresented story with respect and kindness, all without diminishing any of the brutality of the experience. (This is what happens when you let people tell their own stories, she shouted for the seventeenth time.)
MOVIES: Chungking Express (1994)
I love Chungking Express. It makes me feel happy. I could be more cogent and talk about form or style or something but really, this movie just made me feel good to watch and I feel good thinking about it. Faye Wong is a fab manic pixie dream girl and Takeshi Kaneshiro's pineapples break my heart and Tony Leung at THE END? Come ON. I'd like to thank Barry Jenkins for talking about his love of Wong Kar-wai and Chungking Express so that I might piggyback off of his film school experiences. In the Mood for Love is also a banger.
Honorable Mentions:
I'm Thinking of Ending Things
Alps (2011)
The Lobster (2015)
Bar Bahar (In-Between) (2017)
House of Hummingbird (2018 South Korea, 2020 US)
THE REST: No dwelling.
Good riddance, 2020, but time is a flat circle, or something. Please keep taking care of each other in 2021. I love you.
https://www.mutualaidhub.org/
https://www.capitalareafoodbank.org/
https://www.raicestexas.org/
https://www.communityjusticeexchange.org/nbfn-directory
https://www.navajowaterproject.org/
https://www.thetrevorproject.org/
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