The Highs of 2021 

The mesmerising thing about the coming of a new year is that it is one of the most palpable acknowledgements of change. The second 2022 arrived I found myself thinking back to when 2021 arrived and one can not help but compare the two. It has been a year of change, a year that started worlds apart from where it ended, both in terms of the world and in terms of myself. This has been the year that I was least active on this blog, which was due to a myriad of factors. My passion has withered and waned, without the motivation of a University course I’ve been behind on checking in with what I enjoy. However, I’ve been desperate to write about so many different things but alas I’ve spread myself too thin this year, I’ve been busy and the last few months have been a blur of work and socialising so I settled on finally writing a somewhat reflection on my favourites of the year, granted I have not been able to see a lot and there are probably some interesting choices in here. They are in no particular order and there are no particular rules, I just wanted to share some of the things I enjoyed during a year where there seemed to be little to enjoy. 

The Green Knight

A24’s ability to consistently produce films that I can not help love was not defeated this year with the release of David Lowry’s retelling of the famous poem The Green Knight. A film drenched in gorgeous imagery and fascinating storytelling that utilises everything A24 does right. It can be slow, frustrating and even at times nonsensical, but the spectacle and wonder is what drives The Green Knight, it’s a solemn and disorientating film, very rarely touching the tropes of Arthurian legend, instead being a narrative about naivety, youth and feeling out of touch with the world we are in. Most of the film’s success comes from Dev Patel, who is one of my favourite actors working today, delivering this vulnerable performance of a man in a dance with death, constantly prevailing past it in order to reach the inevitability of his demise. Lowry translates the hypnotic melancholy of the poem, composing breath-taking visuals and consistently resisting the urge to create a conventional fantasy story. It is a fascinating film with a fascinating relationship to its source material that left me in awe. 

Succession

From fantasy to about as current as possible, Succession is the TV show of 2021, it is also one of the most astounding pieces of Television I have ever seen in my life. I wrote a small piece about the first two series as I finally caught up with them but with the release of Season 3 this year I could not ignore it in my rundown of 2021. Season 3 was set up to be the thrilling battle between the Roy family that the show has been teasing throughout, but as per, Succession's biggest success is subverting HBO’s track record of ‘water cooler television’ for character television. This isn't really a show about the Machiavellian business tactics of the rich, it is a film about the broken family of the Roy’s and how this environment and wealth will consistently corrupt and damage these children’s lives. Compared to the other two season’s, it is certainly slower and more dependent on progressing to the finale than creating shock episodes weekly. But this works in its favour, the show perfectly moves its pieces towards the finale and when we arrive, everything pays off and everything comes to fruition. The finale makes Season 3, it may just be the most astonishing hours you can watch this year, every actor delivers the performance of their career and Armstrong will blow any expectation you have out of the water. Succession is a rare breed of being a fascinatingly complex and sincere piece of writing whilst also being entertaining and downright rewarding to watch.

The Matrix Resurrections

I know a fair few of you will have seen the words The Matrix Resurrections and immediately stopped reading, which is fair, it’s a controversial movie with a lot of people having some strong feelings about it. But in all honesty, I couldn’t help but love everything about this version of The Matrix 4, purely because I will always appreciate bold and messy films over boring and restricted films. I adore the original Matrix films, I think they have aged wonderfully and for big budget action films, it is refreshing to see something reaching for bold philosophical ideas mixed with over the top action to find the definition of camp. After a year of blockbusters feeling so tiresome and corporate, relying on corporate manufactured nostalgia and iconography (looking at you a certain Spiderman film), I loved watching a film relying on some of these ideas yet playing with them and settling on a character study instead. This is not really a Matrix film, as it is an admittedly messy character study about Neo, Trinity, ‘The One’ and the legacy of The Matrix. It’s Lana’s attempt at communicating her relationship with the original trilogy, something that she loves but not exactly for the reasons they became popular. I adore The Wachowski’s I think they are consistently bold and entertaining and I left The Matrix Resurrections with a massive smile on my face, having had a blast of a time with a film attempting some pretty big things, even if it doesn't always land. 

The Outer Wilds 

It is probably apparent that not a lot of you know what The Outer Wilds is and that is because it is something I very rarely talk about on this blog: a video game. I used to be a lot more into conventional gaming culture back in high school, but these days I use this medium as a means of involved escapism, it is a hobby where I seek out games with an immersive aspect rather than any sort of competitive or social element. I also find myself fascinated by the concept of game design and also how game design has this turbulent relationship with narrative, video game narratives always felt years behind but The Outer Wilds is, in my opinion, the first proof of concept on how to write a narrative within a video game. The Outer Wilds is a game about discovery, curiosity and knowledge, with the only barrier to progress being how much you know, in all effective cases you can finish the game within 20 minutes if you know how. It is a magic trick of forcing you to pay attention to the narrative in order to learn how to progress, to read and involve yourself with these characters to discover how to solve that progress. Not many puzzle games have hit that dopamine hit of solving a puzzle like The Outer Wilds, because these puzzles are not restricted by gaming conventions but by how willing you are to discover. I’ve got a surprising amount to say about this game so I may get round to a full write up off it, in the mean time I would strongly recommend it.

The French Dispatch

There was very little doubt that this film would end up on my favourites of the year, in fact it was quite hard to go into it without being entirely biased. I’m a big fan of everything Wes Anderson has produced, I think he is not only an impressively stylised director, I also really appreciate his unique writing style and his commitment to stories about people. The French Dispatch is a film I had high expectations for, but also knew very little yet it still managed to be my favourite film of the year. 

The opening of this film can be quite intimidating, in fact it can be at times downright disorientating, with this overwhelming narration and exposition about the setting and the concept all whilst dazzling you with some of the most impressive shots you've ever seen. It whizzes through several characters, 3 of whom you don’t actually see their faces and then suddenly stops with a moment where Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray) offers a solemn bit of criticism to Sazerac's (Owen Wilson) piece, the film slows down for a moment after the first genuine interaction between two characters. That is what the film is about, throughout all three of it’s admittedly stacked and complicated narratives, the focus always comes back on the journalists who’s passions and personal troubles are what makes these stories more than the stories themselves. Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand and especially Jeffrey Wright are the heart and soul of this film, each one has a unique love, which Wes highlights through sparing uses of colour, and they are all slightly bolted on to society involving themselves in these stories yet residing to be ever the observer. The most mesmerising thing about The French Dispatch is how it disguises what the film is actually about through entertaining 'Wesisms' , but the moment it clicks and the ending hits, nothing has come close this year as making feel such a complex range of emotions. Wes’s latest magic track is something special and my film of the year.

If there is one thing that sums up my 2021, it is probably having no real idea what is going on. It has been a year of feeling quite out of the loop, exhausted by misinformation and feeling at the mercy of an unreliable and unpredictable government. As I look back at the year, i noticed a residing theme that runs through my favourite pieces of media, the reward of knowledge and learning to process the hand you are dealt. Whether it be Neo admitting he isn't the messiah and that his love is more important, or Kendall and Gawain both realising they aren’t the heroes they think they are, or when I finally put together the pieces and solved the puzzle to save the universe,  or even simply when a  journalist begins to see themselves in the story they are writing about. I am going into 2022 hoping I can have more of grip on the hand I've been dealt, it may be idealistic, maybe that is only really possible in fiction but I think we can all appreciate wanting to have a little bit less ignorance and a little more understanding.

Thanks for reading, happy new year.