So, this is the time where everyone starts making lists; either to reminisce about the year that’s ending, or to write down their resolutions for the next one. Mine is one of the former. Now, my list will skew a lot to pop culture events, but that shouldn’t surprise anyone reading this blog.
Now, of course 2010 wasn’t all roses and peaches. It had its ups, and many downs. But I guess it’s good to focus on the ups. Now, in no particular order, here are my 2010 highlights in TV, Movies, Life, and Games. (Bear in mind, you might find spoilers if you haven’t seen/read/listened to my choices below).
As this is a long text, I decided to do a content list. Feel free to skip around to whatever bit interests you.
- TV
- Community
- Chuck
- Doctor Who
- Fringe
- Supernatural
- The Walking Dead
- Lost
- Honorable mentions: Misfits, Modern Family, Nikita, 24, Sherlock, How I Met Your Mother, Leverage
- Movies
- Inception
- The Social Network
- Toy Story 3
- Scott Pilgrim versus the World
- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
- Honorable mentions: Kick-Ass, The Town, Easy A.
- Life
- Friends
- School
- iPhone
- Orlando
- Scott Pilgrim
- World Cup
- Games
- Red Dead Redemption
- Mass Effect
- Infinity Blade
- Honorable mentions: Halo: Reach, Starcraft II, Splinter Cell: Conviction, Scott Pilgrim versus the World: The Game, LEGO Harry Potter Years 1-4, Alan Wake, Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, Game Dev Story, N.O.V.A.
TV
Community
I said no particular order? I lied. A bit. Community quickly rose to one of my favorite shows. Like the best comedy shows, it has heart surrounded by funny. It uses pop culture, not as a crutch, but as a way to open stories. Unlike The Big Bang theory, it doesn’t pander to its viewers with it. The Big Bang theory gives people exactly what they want; Community pushes the boundaries of what people should want in a network show.
The cast is perfect (Donald Glover and Danny Pudi usually steal the show, though), the writers are sharp and witty, and balance the funny and the serious in a way no other show does.
Favorite episode: “Mixology Certification”
Hard choice. C’mon, this year had “Modern Warfare”, “Epidemiology”, “Contemporary American Poultry”, and “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas”. But no episode had the effect on me that this 22 minutes of television. Abed said “This is a dark chapter for our group”, and it was. But without the low points, the high points wouldn’t shine as much. One of my favorite episodes overall.
Chuck
There’s something about this show that I love. I don’t know if it’s the occasional geeky humor, the heart it has in its lead, or just how beautiful Yvonne Strahovski is. While the show has had its lows this year, it also has had very high…highs. Plus, it introduced one of the pairings that I would actually support in an spinoff: Morgan and Casey. Add that up with great casting like Scott Bakula and Linda Hamilton (on my Christmas list this year: Have them both share a scene together!), and Timothy Dalton as the great Volkoff. Chuck is better when it has a single villain, instead of an entire organization, to focus on. Chevy Chase, and even Brandon Routh, served this role well. But no one has the gravitas that Dalton infuses Volkoff with. Here’s hoping he survives until the end of this season, at least.
Favorite episode: “Chuck versus Phase Three”
Chuck versus The Other guy as a very worthy runner up. But Phase Three gave us what every fan wanted: an episode where of Sarah Walker, kicking ass, all the time. This episode shows that strong female leads do exist in television. If anybody doesn’t love Yvonne, and Sarah, in this episode, they simply don’t have a heart.
Doctor Who
A reinvention of the series, it brought a new TARDIS, a new Doctor, and a new companion. And guess what? It worked! Matt Smith acts like he really is 900 years old, Karen Gillian doesn’t take the Doctor’s occasional bull, and Arthur Darvill was an awesome character that got the short stick this season. I’m glad he’ll have a lot more screentime next season.
Favorite episode: “The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang”
Simply amazing. The whole series folded on itself to give us this grand and sweeping adventure. While the first one concentrated on the large scale chaos Russell T. Davies used to do, the second one focused on our characters, using a great time travel story. Doctor Who at its best.
Fringe
If there’s an award for “Series that started with promise, but actually delivered later”, Fringe would win it, hands down. Once it concentrated on its alternate universe storyline, the plots improved, the characters evolved, and the stakes were raised. Sure, we might get a Monster of the Week episode sometime. But having it play out in an alternate universe? Awesome. Anna Torv, Joshua Jackson, and especially John Noble, have a high order with this series, and they all deliver. Can’t wait to see were the series goes from this, if it survives the Friday Death Slot.
Favorite episode: “Peter”
Mad scientist causes a war between two universes? Meh. Mad scientist causes a war between two universes, because he wanted to save his son, by stealing him? Now we’re talking. A tour de force by John Noble, this tragic tale took us there, and back again, and made us understand the hard choice Walter Bishop had to do. A series high.
Supernatural
To be honest, I wouldn’t have placed this one here on July. I’m a firm supporter on ending series own their terms, when their creators want to. But, while creator Eric Kripke stepped down once his 5 year storyline ended, Sera Gamble (ling time writer and producer) stood up to the challenge. The sixth season has been really good, and even great some times. It’s not afraid of moving the storylines forward, or to kill important characters if needed.
Favorite Episode: “Swan Song”
But as great as Season 6 is, the ending of Season 5 was the best episode this year. It could’ve served perfectly as the end of the show too. But it brought closure to five seasons of development. It was epic, moving, and tragic. Who would’ve thought this B-movie type of series could serve that? Call me crazy, but I get emotional when I watch this episode’s climax.
The Walking Dead
The rest of the season didn’t live up to its excellent Pilot. But in six episodes, it told a story the best way it could.
Favorite episode: “Days Gone Bye”
Great, suspenseful, and emotional. The scene inter-cutting Morgan trying to shoot his wife, and Rick having pity on the leg-less zombie, was gross and moving at the same time.
Lost
Last, but definitely not least, comes Lost. Now, I’m sure a lot of people disagree with me. But I think that the same amount of people agree with me. If there was a show that divided people 50/50, is this one. Me? I enjoyed the parallels to the series. Whether it was the order of the episodes matching with Season 1 (Various/Kate/Locke/Jack), phrases and music from previous season coming back to haunt us, or simple framing of scenes (Hatch in S1, Cave in S6). The problem, if there was one, was that people invested everything with a certain aspect of the show, and felt let down when it didn’t pay off. People with outlandish theories and shippers might have been the worse off. But, as with other fandoms, I think they are missing the forest for the trees. Whatever doubts I had myself, were washed away by the final episode. I learned to let go. Lost decided, once it reached its middle point, to dump all the mythology stuff in seasons 4 and 5. Want to know moreabout the Dharma Initiative? Here. The Others? Here. Moving islands through time and space? Here. But focusing on characters, the sense of community, and the big picture? That’s what Season 6 is for. Season 6 was neatly bringing everything, and everyone, together.
Favorite episode: “The End”
No contest. Episodes like Happily Ever After (funny title, thinking about it now) and The Candidate were great. But the first one seems a bit redundant once you learn the sidways secret, and the second one is a prelude, although shocking and emotional, to The End. But “The End” is the closest we’ll get to a lost movie. A two and a half hour final episode that aired May 23 (1 hour and 44 minutes without commercials; not to shabby either) closed my most influential series, ever. No other show made me think, analyze the human condition, laugh, cry, and altogether show what life must be about, than this one. The idea of Living Together, so we don’t Die Alone, presented in the fifth episode of the first season, proved to be the ultimate mantra. This episode is the definition of epic: a battle between good an evil, heroes, villains, and the ultimate sacrifice… It all payed off, with these people realizing that what they lived, and died, for was worth it. The final scene, bookending the series in a perfect way, still gets me to this day. Lost, you had your good and bad moments, just like life. You’ll be missed.
I finish this entry with a quote by the ultimate McGuffin, Christian Shephard:
This is a place that you… that you all made together so that you could fine one another. The most important part of your life was the time that you spent with these people. That’s why all of you are here. Nobody does it alone, Jack. You needed all of them, and they needed you.
Honorable mentions: Misfits, Modern Family, Nikita, 24, Sherlock, How I Met Your Mother, Leverage
Movies
Inception
Expertly crafted, works like clockwork, and a somewhat infuriating cliffhanger. My type of movie. The two and a half hours breeze by, as you learn more about the concept of extraction (and Inception), with the always adorable Elliott Page as our guide. Add in great action, humor, and a great deal of thinking (some would say…ahem…layers in layers of thinking).
The Social Network
This one barely entered the 2010 list, thanks to the crazy scheduling by the Mexican distributors. Cats and Dogs 2 premiered the same day here and in the USA, but Scott Pilgrim premiered 5 months later. We’ll be getting Gulliver’s Travels tomorrow, but True Grit and Black Swan are nowhere to be found. But I digress.
David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin made an excellent paring in creating this movie, with great performances by Eisenberg, Timberlake, Garfield, and Hammer (twice!) . This is the movie that shows that you don’t need explosions, deaths, and violence to create a tense film, that keeps you on the edge of your seat the whole time. A great exploration of our time, where the youth are able to become billionaires if they work for it, topple companies that have existed for ages, and all while dealing with teenager stuff. The kind of movie that makes me wonder…I’m 19 years old too, so what the hell am I doing? This movie gains my vote for Best Movie of the year.
Toy Story 3
The most adult movie I’ve mentioned so far, and it stars a cowboy and an astronaut, both toys. It deals with moving on and letting go. Both qualities shared with Lost, and exemplified here in a mashup between the both (uh, spoilers, if you haven’t watched Toy Story 3). The feeling of wanting to be needed is very human, and its what these toys suffer. All wrapped in funny one liners, great characters, and a happy ending. This is what “children” movies should aim for. They shouldn’t be simple and flashy affairs; they should have content that makes people, both children and adults, think, even if they don’t notice because they’re busy watching a metrosexual Ken, and a lovesick Spanish Buzz.
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
See my blog header? My about page? That’s how defining Scott Pilgrim was for me. I’ll talk more about the series itself in its next entry. But the movie was everything I expected, and more. An explosion of visuals and sound that fits perfectly with this TV-savvy, movie-watching, book-reading, game-playing, generation. It’s a generation, enabled by the internet, that seeks to know more, and are processing several streams of information at once (in 10 seconds, they (hell, we) can start a conversation at MSN, answer a Tweet, and comment on a Facebook photo). A love letter to the comic book series developed by Bryan Lee O’Malley, this movie deals with the burden that past relationships carry, how love is complicated, and how heartbreak can transform people into something they don’t want to be. With swords.
This is a movie I’ll be able to watch over, and over again until I die. The jokes are perfectly timed (Kieran Culkin is a standout), the music is loud and awesome (I seriously have them stuck in my head), the actors are outstanding (Winstead, Wong, Kendrick, Schwarzman, Evans, and Routh), and it has a better ending than the book.
The Social Network might be the best movie this year…but Scott Pilgrim is my favorite one.
+1000000 EXP indeed.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
So…yeah. It’s hard to do a “Year in Review” kind of post without mentioning one of my favorite sagas. The thing is (and the reason I didn’t post a review for the movie), I was underwhelmed by the film. It was a competent one, effects top notch, and the performances serviceable. But that’s it. For me, it barely registered as “okay”. I believe the reason almost everyone seems to like it is the next one: The people who read the books can fill out the background story by themselves, and the ones that had not read them, don’t even know it exists. However, those “background details” are what makes a story shine. I feel that Deathly Hallows Part I was just a series of scenes without much context. Sure, it’s one of the films closest to the book in amount of scenes shown. But I feel it’s far from it in spirit. Instead of using the forest scenes to provide Voldemort’s backstory (missing from Half-Blood Prince), or highlight Harry’s crisis of faith in Dumbledore, they just walk around from one point to the other. Some people might say those are plots that can be cut. And well, they have been. But I feel that, in the movie universe, Voldemort is just a bad guy who kills for fun and wants power. Meaning, a stereotypical bad guy, instead of the psychotic egomaniac death-fearing xenophobic loveless person the book portrays. And Dumbledore forever will be the good, wise, old guy.
Now, this could all be solved in Part II. Perhaps it will, perhaps it won’t. But I’m a firm believer in that every film must stand by itself. We shouldn’t give points to this film “because Part II will address those issues”. Nobody knows. I did exactly that with Half-Blood Prince, and it didn’t pay off. What we have here, is a film close to the book text, but missing all its spirit.
This review might sound terribly negative. And it is. Still, it’s hard for me to dislike a movie with the Weasley twins, or Emma Watson’s Hermione, or Ron saving the day, or Dobby’s appearance. I just wish they had done it in a way were the audience actually cared about it.
Now, come July, I might eat might words. Hell, I WANT to eat my words, and I want Part II to be the best way to end the saga. But for now, the only thing Part I did is lower my expectations for Part II.
Honorable mentions: Kick-Ass, The Town, Easy A.
Life
Friends
First of all, I’m not gonna say names here. You know who you are. But I wanted to say thanks to all my friends for making 2010 great. Whether it was getting together to watch Lost, or talking about Lost at SpoilerTV, or having an argument through Twitter, it was cool. Just hanging out with good food, talking about life, religion, politics and sports is what life’s for. The parties we had this year were also a highlight, and I hope to have more of those next year (except for a particular one late this year… As Abed might say, “That was a dark chapter”). Thanks guys, for making my last semester at high school and the first semester at college, bearable.
School
Whatever my grades were this first semester at college, I really liked it (ITESM). I do feel it provides a great platform to improve yourself. You get exactly what you give. And what I plan to give it next year, that I didn’t this one, is time to think things through, focus on what matter, and just try to have fun. College is the perfect place to grow as a person, and I intend to do it.
iPhone
Ugh, feels like a plug. Or bragging. But I don’t intend either. Just want to say that I love that Apple is in the front place in the mobile market again. Microsoft sat on his throne too long, and Apple took advantage of that. Thanks to the iPhone, the whole industry is in an upheaval, with one sole winner: the consumer. When you have three great companies (Microsoft, Google, and Apple) competing to be better and innovate, you can’t lose.
Plus, the iPhone is awesome. I hope to program for it next year.
Orlando
I’ve covered this topic here a bit, so I’m just going to say that I loved meeting new people (especially those with similar interests to mine), and that I hope to go again.
Scott Pilgrim
The last book, Scott Pilgrim’s finest hour, was the only one released this year, but for me, the whole experience began at an airport in Orlando. I’ve heard about the movie, and quite liked the trailer, so I picked up the first two books. I was hooked. Scott Pilgrim portrays what it is to be a teenager in this pop-culture obsessed world, but going beyond the shallow things like “short attention span”, and “geek/dork/slacker”. It shows how teenageers are sometimes just short adults, and sometimes they just don’t want to grow up. Having that, set against a backdrop of an epic quest to rival Odysseus’ one, provides one of the best series I’ve read. If you want to know how much I like it, just check that there’s an entry about it in the section above (Movies), this one, and the one below (Games).
World Cup
Awesome to watch, awful for mexican fans. Just what the hell was Aguirre thinking? An underwhelming cup for our team, punctuated by mistakes (a huge one by the referee in the game against Argentina), didn’t prevent the games from being enjoyable.
Games
Red Dead Redemption
I’ll be honest: I haven’t finished this game yet. But that is because it’s huge and open-ended. Rockstar proved that it doesn’t need to stick to its urban games (Grand Theft Auto) to succeed. Great storyline, great controls. It’s multiplayer isn’t of my liking, but I’m still more of a Campaign kind of guy.
Mass Effect
Sunday December 12, 6:00 PM. That’s when I started playing Mass Effect. Wednesday December 15. That’s when I finished Mass Effect. Total play time: 24 hours. Day I bought Mass Effect 2: December 17.
I know, it seems excessive. But Mass Effect is one of the best science fiction stories I’ve ever seen. There are cinematic scenes, hard decisions by the characters, and a sense of doom many movies wish to have. It also deals, as the best science fiction does, with issues like racism, sexism, violence, politics, and morality.
As a Roleplaying Game, you decide what happens and what doesn’t. You can decide to catch an assasin, or kill him. You could charm your way through the mission, or kill anyone in site.
There’s one factor that elevates it above other games too; your character from Mass Effect 1 can be exported to Mass Effect 2. And then, that same character, to Mass Effect 3. This has several implications: One, your choices matter. You decided to kill certain character in Mass Effect 1? Though luck, that same character would’ve helped you a lot in Mass Effect 3. You ended Mass Effect 1 with a lot of money? Nice, you can use some of that money in Mass Effect 2. Just the sheer scale of deciding what happens in the galaxy, and actually play the next game and see its effects, is huge. Can’t wait for Mass Effect 3 next year.
Infinity Blade
See that screenshot? That can be played. On a cellphone. Open it (Right click – See Image) to see it at full resolution.
When you lose hitpoints because you’re staring at how awesome it looks, that’s when you’ve got an impressive game. Fuck, 5 years ago I was happy that my cellphone could play Snake.
Honorable mentions: Halo: Reach, Starcraft II, Splinter Cell: Conviction, Scott Pilgrim versus the World: The Game, LEGO Harry Potter Years 1-4, Alan Wake, Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, Game Dev Story, N.O.V.A.
_____________________________________________________
If you actually read every entry, then you rock. I owe you a beer/cookie. You choose.
This is probably my largest written text ever, and I quite liked it. It helped me remind myself that, whatever bad things happened in 2010, there was also a lot of good stuff.
2011, here I come!
-D