End of Year 2022: Favorite Watching

General Discussion Events
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I don’t watch a ton of stuff, but here’s what I enjoyed the most this year.

Andor just to beat that drum a little harder.

Yellowjackets has so far managed to to stay on the good side of showtime schlock, I’m hoping the next season will continue to keep that balance instead of veering into Dexter territory.

Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure Stone Ocean continues the series in style. Watching the evolution of the art style as it follows the original manga’s shifts while adapting it is great fun every series and Jolyne is just a badass no matter how you cut it. I wish more runs of the show would feature a bunch of women being bros.

Chainsaw Man does the impossible of taking such an unusual manga and adapting it in ways that both make sense and elevate the original material. It spends as much attention to detail to quiet, reserved moments as it does to the horrifying action. I’m not going to say Chainsaw Man is for everyone because boy does it go places, but it captures that elusive feeling of something genuinely fresh in the genre from the comic and bring it to the show.

Ybbaaabby twitch stream aka Abby Russel formerly of Giant Bomb has a wonderful little community and it’s a lot of fun keeping up with everyone and watching her stream. She was one of my favorite parts of the site when she was on and was a desperately needed counterpoint to everyone else, so it’s nice to be able to still have that as a regular part of the week.

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I may be late to this show, but seeing as season two is about to come out - I binged Vinland Saga finally. What a fascinating show, especially watching a perceived villain become one of the most complicated and interesting characters.

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Sliding in under the wire is Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery now on Netflix. Takes a bit to get going (Rian Johnson likes his mantel to look like a cabinet in John Wick) but hot diggety ding dong does it get there.

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Gonna give my +1s to a few of the things mentioned here: Spy X Family, Chainsaw Man, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, RRR, Barbarian, Nope.

But also gotta put in a vote for Black Panther Wakanda Forever, and Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, the latter being such an unexpected surprise I literally watched it all in one sitting.

(Hears a faint chanting of “…Andor! Andor!” in the distance…)
“I’ll watch it I promise!! :sob:”

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Only part way through it cause by proxy emotional damage but everything everywhere all at once is gorgeous. It’s so great to see the intergenerational dynamics and trauma on display and given centrality especially in a media landscape where the biggest films centering asian stuff and peoples was fantasy and historical fiction. The specifics are very chinese diaspora but the shared struggles of living between worlds and intergenerational trauma have been so scarcely represented in our lifetimes in major fiction that this feels like a sea change though the load of responsibility is on the industry to support more to support the specificities of the unique struggles within each diaspora community

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This year was a great year for animation.

Some personal tv favorites: Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury , Akiba Maid War , Bocchi the Rock! , Chainsaw Man , Kaguya-Sama: Love is War -Ultra Romantic- , Pop Team Epic season 2 , Ya Boy Kongming! , Cyberpunk: Edgerunners , Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean , Harley Quinn Season 3 , Owl House season 2 and the first season 3 special , The Ghost and Molly McGee.

as for movies:
My Father’s Dragon , The Bad Guys , Dragonball Super: Super Hero , Apollo 10 1/2 A Space Age Childhood , and Turning Red.

Also a really strong year for stop-motion films with Wendell & Wild , Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio , Marcel the Shell with Shoes On , Mad God and The House.
and i still haven’t been able to see Inu-oh , Puss in Boots: The Last Wish and The Sea Beast!

on the live action side of things i loved these movies:
The Batman , The Banshees of Inisherin , Three Thousand Years of Longing , EEAAO , Glass Onion , Crimes of the Future , Kimi , Decision to Leave , Confess Fletch and Prey.
we also got a lot of great horror like Barbarian , Nope , Scream V and Bodies Bodies Bodies

and tv wise:
Barry Season 3 , The Final Season of Better Call Saul , What We Do in the Shadows Season 4 , Severance , The Bear , Peacemaker and my favorite show of the year shockingly after two very bad star wars shows preceding it was Andor

I’d go into more detail on a lot of these but then this post would be essay length so i decided to mostly just list things instead.

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A lot of favorites of mine have already been called out here, so I’ll add just a couple more I think that were missed.

The Northman
What a beautiful movie. That’s probably weird to say for a Norse tale of revenge, but this movie is a psychedelic trip. Its great and weird and plays with myth and fantasy in a way I wish more movies would. Plus I think its definitely a revenge movie in the same vein as movies like I Saw the Devil or Oldboy. It screams at you that all this macho “viking” violence is bullshit and you, Amleth, are a giant fucking idiot for engaging with it. It’s kind of a refreshing thing to see in a world of Nazis obsessed with “vikings badass” imagery.

I also want to shout out a small Youtube channel that has swelled my reading list and is also really informational on SF and Fantasy writing and the publishing business. That’s The Outlaw Bookseller. A seasoned bookseller and writer who can talk very authoritatively on science fiction and fantasy books. He’s just a bit curmudgeonly and really has no time for a lot of newly published SF or fantasy, but I find his videos incredibly interesting and the depths of his knowledge and experiences are fascinating. I would never have discovered wonderful authors like C.L. Moore, Alfred Bester, Greg Bear, and so many others without this channel.

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I really enjoyed The Northman even if it was ultimately a very straightforward movie. Robert Eggers is really good at making the past, wherever he sets his movies, feel like a foreign setting.

The movie of the year for me though was The Banshees of Inisherin. I appreciate that the movie is clearly on some level an allegory for the Irish Civil War and/ or the Irish relationship to the British but the movie is at its strongest for me where it is first and foremost simply a tale of male friendship and the toll it takes on a life. The intimacy of a small community being rocked by a rift and how everyone in the village has their own story and life to lead was where it landed best for me especially when it is decades in the brewing and not easily resolved.

Also unbelievably great performances once again from Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell with superb support work from Barry Keoghan and Kerry Condon.

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Now that everything is over, I am finally sliding in here as late as I could possibly be.

I suck at watching things. I am so, so bad at watching things. Asking me to sit still and just look at things with my eyes for more than an hour? I go full Miette. I still won’t go into a movie theatre. It took me a month to muster the will to sit down and watch Glass Onion, and I still paused it in the middle of the flashback sequence to go do dishes just to do something with my hands.

Also, Netflix deleted my profile off the family account on a lark this year, which fucked up my recommendations. They will never recover.

My favorite thing I watched this year was Russian Doll, season two. I managed to get through the entire thing over the course of a week by watching it in the morning, when my brain is awake and my body is desperately trying to turn itself into a slug. There is something about Nadia desperately trying to rewrite and understand a past largely made-up of her mother’s mental illness and how it impacted her life, while Alan tries to reconnect with a past that was never his, because no one ever told him about it, that really fuckin’ got to me.

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