Not really a YEAR in review
I don't do the year-in-review memes so much. This is more my own tally of new-to-me pieces of entertainment consumed.
I see that I managed to outdo myself on the number of movies seen this year versus last year. I've seen 50% more movies in 2007 than I did in 2006 (120 versus 81). 120! Crazy! Television seasons completed, despite there being fewer arcs of Doctor Who viewed and rented, increased almost as much (46 to 33). I didn't quite manage to double the number of books read in 2007 as I'd resolved to do for New Year's 2006, but I came within shouting distance of it. Had I not been entertaining a baby by myself for much of the vacation that was not otherwise devoted to a wedding, I might have made it.
Not that anyone cares about that, nosir. Here are so recommendations based on what I read/saw and enjoyed (or didn't!) in 2007.
Movies:
I was in the car with my brother-in-law who was bummed that, aside from the two movies he went out to with me, he hadn't been able to see any movies in the theater this year. I told him he wasn't missing much as there weren't many I could point to that were stellar. Yet I saw twice as many in 2007 as I did in 2006 (29 to 15!), which I can only justify by saying that 1) I saw a number for free as audience pre-screenings (almost all of which were unwatchable) and 2) there were a lot of sequels I was locked into seeing as I am a completionist whore. Of the first category, I saw Killshot, Stop Loss, 1408, and The Simpsons Movie. The latter category was much larger and just as promisingly crappy as I suspected most would be. Most disappointing outing? Definitely Spider-Man 3. Other movies sucked harder, but this one really just took a great thing and blew it hard. Otherwise, I had mostly indifferent reactions to movies I saw in the theater because so many of them were more about the OMGSQUEE of getting to see the movie at last (Transformers) or something like it that the excitement only lasted a little longer than the movie itself (not that I don't still love The Transformers, but I'm less enthused about the live action movie now that I have the ability to, like, YouTube the clips of the transformations and skip the squishy human bits).
The exceptions that stood out were Grindhouse for the hilarity and kick-ass factor (definitely am pissed off that they're not releasing "Planet Terror" and "Death Proof" together on DVD); Paprika for being so different and visually thrilling; Pan's Labyrinth and Children of Men for their chilling view of humanity and grim acceptance that goodness does not a survivor make; SiCKO for actually making me angry; and I Am Legend for the acting and the six minutes of The Dark Knight that preceded it (AND WERE MADE OF AWESOME). I'd recommend all of them, though most of them, SiCKO included were terribly disturbing. That's probably why they stood out, as they provoked such an honest reaction. For more fun, light fare, I got sucked into Enchanted as it went along.
Old movies that were new to me:
The Departed: Absolutely chilling story, phenomenal acting, precision filmmaking from step one to step last.
Night Watch: Genre for the YouTube generation. I loved the stylistic choices even if the storytelling could be loosey-goosey. So worth it for just the style, but I stayed for the character development.
Arsenic and Old Lace: Laughed so hard I had to stop the thing and rewind to find out what I'd missed. It's been a never-fail gift idea for more than a few folks since I saw it (bought myself a copy, too, naturally).
This Film is Not Yet Rated: Documentaries should all be this fun. The evidence to prove all the things you've ever known already were wrong with the MPAA ratings system.
Deliver Us From Evil: Yeah, documentaries should all be as fun as This Film is Not Yet Rated. This isn't one of those fun ones. This is just outrage and pain onscreen from start to finish. You marvel at the strength of the survivors; rage against the impunity with which the perpetrator committed his crimes; and look for signs that things are changing to prevent such things from ever happening again.
The Bridge: Another heartbreaker that pushes every "SERIOUSLY DISTURBED" button you've got and answers none of the questions you can't even ask. Ethereal and haunting imagery combined with the all-consuming mystery of suicide (something that unfortunately came closer than the DVD this past year).
A Scanner Darkly: Much better in retrospect than I remembered from watching at the time. Keanu Reeves and Robert Downey Jr. are fantastic in this, and the animation style, though often grating on the eyeballs, serves the narrative and their performances SO WELL.
Also worth a look: Kinky Boots; Goodbye, Lenin!; The TV Set; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead; Jesus Camp; Who Killed the Electric Car?; Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price; Hard Candy; Shut Up & Sing; The Scarlet Pimpernel
******************
Television:
Not the best year for TV. Every season of Spooks was fabulous, save for some of what they put the utterly wonderful Adam Carter through towards the end of the last bit. Dexter completely owned me straight out of the gate, although it, too, fell apart at the end of it's most recent season. I've never seen a better, more tense hour of television than the season two premiere of that show. Pushing Daisies has been the most surprisingly sustainable cute overdose I've ever taken. House reinvigorated itself for the fourth season with the new team selection, even though I'm not entirely pleased with how it turned out. Psych took me sweetly and sarcastically by surprise. The new BBC Robin Hood is always good for a giggle. Newsradio made me ache for the loss of Phil Hartman because he was a comedy god; anything he does on that show makes me laugh. All and any of those are totally worth a rental.
And then...? I was completely absorbed by Prison Break's tense first season and utterly relentless second season. Then the third season happened and it was too ridiculous for me to watch while sober. Ditto Heroes' second season. I just kind of shake my head over both of them and hope that, when I come back after the strike, they'll wrap-up/start-up fresher than they were this year. Smallville jogged along at a decent pace until mid-season six, and ever since then has been a chronic pain in the ass that's only been temporarily relieved by a cameo from Dean Cain (of all people!). LOST and Battlestar Galactica wasted time not knowing how to achieve whatever end their creators had in mind for them (if they have one in either case) that their third seasons were snoozers but for the start and finishing episodes (and some around the middle).
The real stinker this year was Doctor Who (::sniffle::). I realize I grew attached too much to Rose, but Martha sucked. Throwing YAY MARTHA angst parties instead of episodes did not make her more palatable. The third season managed to make Daleks boring, and I wouldn't have ever thought that possible. The best episode was one in which the Doctor was only a vague presence and was offscreen for pretty much most of the time. I think my David Tennant FOUR-YEAR-OLD-ON-CRACK tolerance is wearing thin. So much of Who was gratingly bad this year that I didn't want to watch the episodes at all. I've consumed Doctor Who like a mad woman since first watching the new series, and I was faced with being hesitant about the new episodes. It took effort to watch the series at all and I practically regret wasting the time. I outright hated about three-quarters of the season, loved only the one episode, and tolerated about three-four others. And now I hear less than stellar things about the Christmas Special. Ugh.
******************
Books:
Good on me, I finally finished all three books in the His Dark Materials trilogy and I finished Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk. These are books that I'd get so close to finishing, put down, forget for long enough that I didn't know what was going on, pick up again, and repeat the putting down process. I finished them. I came shy of the desired number of books to read for the year, but I at least polished off those. I also read a Gaiman book (!) and a Philip K. Dick book. It's like I've finally come around on genre.
Best reads of the year?
Everything's Eventual by Stephen King: A collection of short stories that I just tore through, including one of the only stories I've read that SCARED ME while reading it ("1408").
The Abstinence Teacher by Thomas Perrotta: Thanks to ivy03 for this one. I couldn't put it down. I wasn't in love with the way the story went, though I did love how indecisive the events and the players were. The reality factor was there--there weren't grand heroics, sweeping romances, or implausible victories/defeats. It was just real, fallible, frustrated and confused people trying not to step on each others' toes and failing. I'm going to check out more of his soon if only to enjoy the cadence of his prose.
Flesh and Blood by Reay Tannahill: A book on cannibalism that I picked up for the class I took over the summer. Absolutely stellar read, even if the research is old. She wrote a great compendium on the history of sex, too, which is definitely a must-read (and should be a forced-read primer for idiots in evolutionary psychology who think gender roles developed to subjugate half the population are, in any way, the result of biologically faulty or biologically-directed influences).
I read MORE, but I didn't read GREAT stuff. That should change this year--not quantity, perhaps, but quality. I'll take any suggestions you got after giving out all of mine!
I see that I managed to outdo myself on the number of movies seen this year versus last year. I've seen 50% more movies in 2007 than I did in 2006 (120 versus 81). 120! Crazy! Television seasons completed, despite there being fewer arcs of Doctor Who viewed and rented, increased almost as much (46 to 33). I didn't quite manage to double the number of books read in 2007 as I'd resolved to do for New Year's 2006, but I came within shouting distance of it. Had I not been entertaining a baby by myself for much of the vacation that was not otherwise devoted to a wedding, I might have made it.
Not that anyone cares about that, nosir. Here are so recommendations based on what I read/saw and enjoyed (or didn't!) in 2007.
Movies:
I was in the car with my brother-in-law who was bummed that, aside from the two movies he went out to with me, he hadn't been able to see any movies in the theater this year. I told him he wasn't missing much as there weren't many I could point to that were stellar. Yet I saw twice as many in 2007 as I did in 2006 (29 to 15!), which I can only justify by saying that 1) I saw a number for free as audience pre-screenings (almost all of which were unwatchable) and 2) there were a lot of sequels I was locked into seeing as I am a completionist whore. Of the first category, I saw Killshot, Stop Loss, 1408, and The Simpsons Movie. The latter category was much larger and just as promisingly crappy as I suspected most would be. Most disappointing outing? Definitely Spider-Man 3. Other movies sucked harder, but this one really just took a great thing and blew it hard. Otherwise, I had mostly indifferent reactions to movies I saw in the theater because so many of them were more about the OMGSQUEE of getting to see the movie at last (Transformers) or something like it that the excitement only lasted a little longer than the movie itself (not that I don't still love The Transformers, but I'm less enthused about the live action movie now that I have the ability to, like, YouTube the clips of the transformations and skip the squishy human bits).
The exceptions that stood out were Grindhouse for the hilarity and kick-ass factor (definitely am pissed off that they're not releasing "Planet Terror" and "Death Proof" together on DVD); Paprika for being so different and visually thrilling; Pan's Labyrinth and Children of Men for their chilling view of humanity and grim acceptance that goodness does not a survivor make; SiCKO for actually making me angry; and I Am Legend for the acting and the six minutes of The Dark Knight that preceded it (AND WERE MADE OF AWESOME). I'd recommend all of them, though most of them, SiCKO included were terribly disturbing. That's probably why they stood out, as they provoked such an honest reaction. For more fun, light fare, I got sucked into Enchanted as it went along.
Old movies that were new to me:
The Departed: Absolutely chilling story, phenomenal acting, precision filmmaking from step one to step last.
Night Watch: Genre for the YouTube generation. I loved the stylistic choices even if the storytelling could be loosey-goosey. So worth it for just the style, but I stayed for the character development.
Arsenic and Old Lace: Laughed so hard I had to stop the thing and rewind to find out what I'd missed. It's been a never-fail gift idea for more than a few folks since I saw it (bought myself a copy, too, naturally).
This Film is Not Yet Rated: Documentaries should all be this fun. The evidence to prove all the things you've ever known already were wrong with the MPAA ratings system.
Deliver Us From Evil: Yeah, documentaries should all be as fun as This Film is Not Yet Rated. This isn't one of those fun ones. This is just outrage and pain onscreen from start to finish. You marvel at the strength of the survivors; rage against the impunity with which the perpetrator committed his crimes; and look for signs that things are changing to prevent such things from ever happening again.
The Bridge: Another heartbreaker that pushes every "SERIOUSLY DISTURBED" button you've got and answers none of the questions you can't even ask. Ethereal and haunting imagery combined with the all-consuming mystery of suicide (something that unfortunately came closer than the DVD this past year).
A Scanner Darkly: Much better in retrospect than I remembered from watching at the time. Keanu Reeves and Robert Downey Jr. are fantastic in this, and the animation style, though often grating on the eyeballs, serves the narrative and their performances SO WELL.
Also worth a look: Kinky Boots; Goodbye, Lenin!; The TV Set; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead; Jesus Camp; Who Killed the Electric Car?; Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price; Hard Candy; Shut Up & Sing; The Scarlet Pimpernel
******************
Television:
Not the best year for TV. Every season of Spooks was fabulous, save for some of what they put the utterly wonderful Adam Carter through towards the end of the last bit. Dexter completely owned me straight out of the gate, although it, too, fell apart at the end of it's most recent season. I've never seen a better, more tense hour of television than the season two premiere of that show. Pushing Daisies has been the most surprisingly sustainable cute overdose I've ever taken. House reinvigorated itself for the fourth season with the new team selection, even though I'm not entirely pleased with how it turned out. Psych took me sweetly and sarcastically by surprise. The new BBC Robin Hood is always good for a giggle. Newsradio made me ache for the loss of Phil Hartman because he was a comedy god; anything he does on that show makes me laugh. All and any of those are totally worth a rental.
And then...? I was completely absorbed by Prison Break's tense first season and utterly relentless second season. Then the third season happened and it was too ridiculous for me to watch while sober. Ditto Heroes' second season. I just kind of shake my head over both of them and hope that, when I come back after the strike, they'll wrap-up/start-up fresher than they were this year. Smallville jogged along at a decent pace until mid-season six, and ever since then has been a chronic pain in the ass that's only been temporarily relieved by a cameo from Dean Cain (of all people!). LOST and Battlestar Galactica wasted time not knowing how to achieve whatever end their creators had in mind for them (if they have one in either case) that their third seasons were snoozers but for the start and finishing episodes (and some around the middle).
The real stinker this year was Doctor Who (::sniffle::). I realize I grew attached too much to Rose, but Martha sucked. Throwing YAY MARTHA angst parties instead of episodes did not make her more palatable. The third season managed to make Daleks boring, and I wouldn't have ever thought that possible. The best episode was one in which the Doctor was only a vague presence and was offscreen for pretty much most of the time. I think my David Tennant FOUR-YEAR-OLD-ON-CRACK tolerance is wearing thin. So much of Who was gratingly bad this year that I didn't want to watch the episodes at all. I've consumed Doctor Who like a mad woman since first watching the new series, and I was faced with being hesitant about the new episodes. It took effort to watch the series at all and I practically regret wasting the time. I outright hated about three-quarters of the season, loved only the one episode, and tolerated about three-four others. And now I hear less than stellar things about the Christmas Special. Ugh.
******************
Books:
Good on me, I finally finished all three books in the His Dark Materials trilogy and I finished Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk. These are books that I'd get so close to finishing, put down, forget for long enough that I didn't know what was going on, pick up again, and repeat the putting down process. I finished them. I came shy of the desired number of books to read for the year, but I at least polished off those. I also read a Gaiman book (!) and a Philip K. Dick book. It's like I've finally come around on genre.
Best reads of the year?
Everything's Eventual by Stephen King: A collection of short stories that I just tore through, including one of the only stories I've read that SCARED ME while reading it ("1408").
The Abstinence Teacher by Thomas Perrotta: Thanks to ivy03 for this one. I couldn't put it down. I wasn't in love with the way the story went, though I did love how indecisive the events and the players were. The reality factor was there--there weren't grand heroics, sweeping romances, or implausible victories/defeats. It was just real, fallible, frustrated and confused people trying not to step on each others' toes and failing. I'm going to check out more of his soon if only to enjoy the cadence of his prose.
Flesh and Blood by Reay Tannahill: A book on cannibalism that I picked up for the class I took over the summer. Absolutely stellar read, even if the research is old. She wrote a great compendium on the history of sex, too, which is definitely a must-read (and should be a forced-read primer for idiots in evolutionary psychology who think gender roles developed to subjugate half the population are, in any way, the result of biologically faulty or biologically-directed influences).
I read MORE, but I didn't read GREAT stuff. That should change this year--not quantity, perhaps, but quality. I'll take any suggestions you got after giving out all of mine!