nathanielwharton

[nathanielwharton]

My 2019 in Pop Culture

Same plan here as usual. I discovered this as a draft from back in January that I hadn’t found images for yet. Posting it now, without edits.

Top Forty Things From 2019

45. A Town Called Panic: Agricultural Fair I made a last minute dash into the city to see this at the New York International Children's Film Festival screening (I ducked in, huffing and puffing, as the lights went down), but I was so glad I did. I love these shorts, and this one was an absolutely bonkers, madcap wonder.

44. "Gotham City Guys" from The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part I enjoyed the second Lego Movie pretty well, but I loved this song.

43. Finding Drago This is an Australian podcast about the search for the author of Drago: On Mountains We Stand, a book about Ivan Drago from Rocky IV. It was a delight.

42. Crawl I had a pretty good time with a bunch of horror movies this year. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark made some good use of 3D realizations of Stephen Gammell's potent artwork. Ready or Not was a good cat-and-mouse with a fun ending to see with an audience. Happy Death Day 2U kept the comic frisson of the original, pushing it further into nutty science fiction, while slipping in some real emotion. But the one that probably gave me the most thrills was Crawl. An expertly nasty little piece of work, it efficiently keeps turning the screws up the the very end. Jesse and I remarked afterward that we basically alternated leaning forward with our hands on our faces and leaning back, bracing on the armrest, throughout the entire movie.

41. When They See Us Urgent and harrowing.

40. Mindhunter (Season 2) The rhythms of this show are so distinctive and engrossing. It's not exactly Zodiac: The Series, but it is fascinating in some similar ways and I hope they come back and make more of it.

39. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (Season 4, Part 2) I might (okay, definitely) be underrating this final batch of one of my favorite shows on TV. Blame it on Netflix’s half-season strategy, and not on these episodes that were as overstuffed as ever with a breathtaking array of jokes delivered by a note perfect cast. I’ll miss if, but I'm grateful for those final moments. (The line "Your books make me feel safe” definitely made me tear up.)

38. They Shall Not Grow Old in 3D This documentary was fascinating as a look at the less-covered (at least in my lifetime) First World War, and it was AMAZING as a visual experience, watching 100 year-old documentary footage in such an immersive way. And the short documentary that followed my screening showing the process of making the film was worth the price of admission on its own.

37. Glass at the Shyamalanathon Few things can top the weird thrill of seeing the ending of Split before hearing even a hint about the ending (Jesse and I were audibly shocked and delighted, and then spent part of the credits explaining the reveal to the kids in front of us after they asked us about it). So I was pretty psyched for this one. I caught Glass at the end of a Shyamalanathon at the Alamo Drafthouse, where they showed Unbreakable, Split, and a preview screening of Glass, with a Q&A with Shyamalan himself. I had a GREAT time.

36. Amazing Grace I saw it with about 8-10 people in the theater, and folks were still witnessing with Amens and hallelujahs from the back of the auditorium. They were well warranted.

35. The Twilight Zone Revival I definitely preferred this to the last revival, and the hit-to-miss ratio felt pretty standard for an anthology show. Highlights for me were "Nightmare at 30,000 Feet," "Replay," and "A Traveler." Looking forward to the next batch of them.

34. One Cut of the Dead A twisty, surprising one-shot zombie thriller that reveals itself to be something much different (and much more charming) than you'd expect.

33. Star Trek: Discovery - Pike sees his future This season of Discovery had a number of really strong elements (and I'm super intrigued to see what they do with that setup for the third season), but the part that probably most moved me was in episodes 12, "Through the Valley of Shadows." Captain Pike (a wonderful performance all season by Anson Mount; definitely looking forward to that spin-off) is given a vision of his eventual fate, which we know from the original series, in which he is severely disabled in an accident. He is told that if he takes the time crystal from the Klingon temple to help save the day in the season's storyline that he cannot change this fate and is essentially dooming himself. And he gives the most moving, Starfleety performance in choosing the greater good over himself.

32. Genndy Tartakovsky's Primal This was a visceral, thrilling surprise. I caught the first four episodes as a screening at the Alamo and it knocked my socks off. The final episode of this initial run was also really rad. Pure animation.

31. Under the Silver Lake Seeing this one at a late night screening felt just right, as it creates such a bewitching, hallucinatory spell. As someone who enjoyed reading about conspiracy as a youth and recognizes but (hopefully!) avoided indulging the kind of solipsism on display in Garfield's character, I was pretty into this movie.

30. Missing Link This Laika joint was an easy lay-up for me (an adventurer helping Bigfoot to find a lost civilization of yeti? sold.) and it did the trick.

29. Frozen II It's not as clean a narrative as the original, and Kristoff's storyline is too sitcommy, but this still packed a lot of emotional punch for me, and I love that it's a huge Disney animated movie that interrogates colonialism and the way that our history can obscure misdeeds and trauma.

28. The Righteous Gemstones Another acridly funny and tonally daring series from the McBride/Hill/Green team. Loved this first season, and certainly excited to see where they want to take it next.

27. A Series of Unfortunate Events (Season 3) This show continued to be a really marvelous adaptation of the books and the adaptation of the final story (and the elements they included from the ancillary Snicket books) really landed wonderfully. I really wish Netflix had already announced the same team was doing an adaptation series of the All the Wrong Questions books (with Warburton somehow still involved as Lemony Snicket).

26. Klaus & Noelle Two streaming services served up two new Christmas movies this year, and I dug them both. Noelle doesn't quite pull of the same magic trick as Elf, but I found it charming and the cast (and the fact that it is set, in part, in Arizona) went a long way to endearing it to me. And Klaus was a gorgeously animated, very enjoyable surprise. Odds are decent that I pop both of them on again at some point next holiday season.

25. Deadwood: The Movie A bit of bittersweet nostalgia, a post-script, and an elegy. Just the right balance of warm and melancholy. And while the movie definitely didn't give us the Al Swearengen I expected, I was so moved by his story (and McShane's performance).

24. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Season 3) The obvious surface pleasures of this show (the costumes and set design, the snaky sinuous camera work, the charming and charismatic performances, the rat-a-tat dialogue) continued apace, while the storytelling continued to strike a really enjoyable balance between joyful wish-fulfillment and (semi-)realistic period exploration.

23. Adam Sandler & Eddie Murphy on SNL and in the movies The two biggest SNL alumni that had not been back to host (ever, in Sandler's case, or since he was still a cast member, in Murphy's) Adam Sandler and Eddie Murphy both returned too the show that had given them their start and pretty much lived up to decades of expectations. Sandler came back at the end of the 2018-2019 season and it was such a warm, funny homecoming that was really funny without just spending the time revisiting his old characters (the travel agent commercial he was in was one of the best sketches of the season and benefited hugely from his performance), and a genuinely touching tribute to Chris Farley. (And he capped his year with a fantastic, nerve-jangling performance in Uncut Gems, which was a Safdie special, exhausting and exhilarating in equal measure.) Then, following his really galvanizing lead performance in Dolemite is My Name, showing how hilarious and wonderful in a dramatic role he can still be, in the last episode before Christmas in the 2019-2020 season, Eddie Murphy returned to host, coming in with the enormous expectations that would accompany his return to the show at any time with the recent example of having seen it done so right. And they crushed it. His episode understandably featured more of the play-the-hits style of character reprisals, but they generally had clever ideas for using the characters (Mr. Robinson returned to a gentrified neighborhood, Buckwheat was a Masked Singer, and Gumby gave a hilarious Update rant) and, best of all, Murphy brought the necessary energy to make it all work. On top of that, he elevated the non-recurring stuff like a great Baking Championship sketch that he underplayed to perfection, or a North Pole newscast that he knocked out of the park. Both episodes were a joy.

22. Doctor Sleep I liked a lot of stuff in the book, but I think the movie improved on it! I love Mike Flanagan's style of horror story anyway, and it was a really good fit for Doctor Sleep. And the movie does a remarkable job of squaring itself with the Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick versions of The Shining, including a really moving appropriation of elements from the original book and potent movie imagery into a surprisingly touching combination.

21. Stranger Things 3 The run-up to this season was so much fun (special ice creams and store decorations at Baskin-Robbins, a whole Fun Fair set up at Coney Island), and then the season itself was a big summer blockbuster blast that Katie and I spent a whole day on.

20. The Lighthouse This one lingered! Two great performances, a beautiful visual scheme, and a bracing spiral into madness for a story.

19. Parasite Bong Joon-Ho with another what-genre-is-this masterpiece.

18. Watchmen on HBO This was so much richer and provocative than I expected. A compelling and mostly satisfying sequel to a book I didn't much demand a sequel to, it was one of the best shows I watched all year and honored the original by actually being about something.

17. The Farewell A warm and delicate story that really moved me, with a terrific performance by Awkwafina.

16. Jojo Rabbit I've been on Taika Waititi's wavelength since Boy, and this one worked for me as designed, which meant that I was delighted and then devastated.

15. Apollo 11 Like They Shall Never Grow Old, there was such power to seeing a new, vivid angle on major 20th century history.

14. GLOW (Season 3) This season, with it's Las Vegas setting and it stage-show status quo, created a bunch of new dynamics and fun developments (the Christmas Carol version of their show was a delight) while continuing to deepen the characters. Love this show.

13. Dumbo I am generally a Tim Burton guy, but I was surprised by how much I loved this movie. And every moment Michael Keaton was on screen was a great one.

12. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker This was a weird year for Star Wars, with Star Wars: Resistance coming to a satisfactory (but disappointing compared to the previous two animated series) ending and publishing having a handful of fun tie-ins to Galaxy's Edge and Rise of Skywalker, without anything particularly standing out. And all of it was capped off with The Rise of Skywalker, a film that definitely suffers from a bunch of competing storytelling interests. But the big moments that need to hit all pretty much hit for me and the final moments on Tatooine especially got to me.

11. The Irishman We went to see this movie during it's special engagement in a Broadway theater, which felt like an appropriate experience for such an epic. Surprisingly funny and, in the end, almost breathtakingly melancholy, this was a really special movie.

10. Lethal White Another cozy, gripping read. The mystery was less nasty/scary than the last one, but it was still pretty involving, and I certainly want to see what happens next for Strike and Robin.

9. Toy Story 4 This felt truly unnecessary (and even kind of unwelcome) when it was announced, but it turned out to be a genuinely worthy entry. It hits or improves on the expected Toy Story elements (the jokes hit and the characters are lots of fun, and it may be the most beautiful Toy Story, with stunning widescreen animation), and Woody's story builds to a surprising and very emotional climax. Once again, I'd be happy if this was where we left the characters, which is no small feat for a movie that has to push beyond the ending of Toy Story 3.

8. Disney+ (The Mandalorian, The Imagineering Story, Forky Asks a Question, etc) I was still working full time at school and working on my master's degree this fall, so it's not like I really needed a new streaming service to spend time on. But this was such a fun thing to explore. The Mandalorian immediately became appointment television for us (if that whole first episode hadn’t have done it, the final scene would have). But so was The Imagineering Story (one of the best showbiz documentaries I've seen) and Forky Asks a Question ("What? No!" definitely entered our daily lexicon).

7. Once Upon a Time...In Hollywood I loved it for the hang out (I want to watch Cliff Booth and Rick Dalton watch episodes of TV shows together!). I loved it for the incredible tension of the Spahn Ranch sequence. I loved it for the wry wistfulness of the neon sign sequence. I loved it.

6. Knives Out Such a thoroughly great time. I love Rian Johnson's movies in general, but this might be my favorite since Brick.

5. Us I'm reasonably receptive to the "bigger and more rococo" sophomore film, so I was ready to respond to this movie. But it still really knocked me out. I love it for all of the great surface pleasures (scary "monster" design, tense scare sequences, incredible dual performances by Lupita Nyong'o) and I loved it for the chewy thematic ideas it teases at. Peele is two-for-two, in my book.

4. Little Women I was only familiar with this story in a vague sense (like, I am sure I knew one of the sisters died in the book, but I didn't know which one going in). But I LOVED this movie.

3. Avengers: Endgame For this big, climactic year of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I had made note to include the Skrull reaction shots in Captain Marvel (Talos and the milkshake being the top of the heap), and Spider-Man: Far From Home was as consistently delightful as it's Spidey predecessor, but it's hard to think of a collective audience experience that was more fun than Avengers: Endgame. It basically played out as a series of huge payoffs and shocking moments for about three hours, and between the laughs and cheers and audible sobs, it really ran the full audience-reaction gamut. Hard to imagine another movie building up this kind of steam for a big finale again, and it was pretty special to see on opening night.

2. The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance I was pretty excited for this show. The original movie is dear to me, I'd heard really cool, encouraging stuff about the show, and the trailers were pretty gorgeous. And the show exceeded all of my hopes for it. It was funny and exciting. It developed the mythology of Thra in cool, intriguing ways. It was absolutely dazzling to look at. It jockeyed for position with the number 1 spot on this list. I adored it.

1. Godzilla: King of the Monsters I loved this. I wrote about it at SportsAlcohol.com. I saw it five or six times in theaters. A full meal for my imagination.

Top Twenty-Five Things I'm Excited About in 2020

Godzilla vs Kong No question, I'm spectacularly excited to see this one. I loved all three of the previous films leading up to it, and the status quo hinted at in the credits of King of the Monsters suggests some directions that I really hope to see explored further.

Animaniacs revival & Looney Tunes Cartoons Here's hoping that this is finally the year we get to see the new Looney Tunes they've been cooking up (seems like HBO Max will be a good place to put them...) and while it feels like a while since there's been new word on the Animaniacs revival that's due on Hulu, maybe that'll show up this year too. Looking forward to whatever Warner Bros. animation we can get.

Bill & Ted Face the Music One of the few decades-later sequels that I've actively been wanting to happen. I'm so glad this finally happened, and I can't wait to see what it will look like. I love the title. I love the details they've shared so far. And I'm glad to have an excuse to watch the previous two movies in the run-up to this one.

West Side Story Spielberg finally doing his movie musical! And it's a great musical! With a script adapted by Tony Kushner, no less. Sign me up.

Muppets Now I don't know enough about the format of this show to know how excited to be yet (they're generally good at improvising, but the notion of ad-libbed shorts doesn't sound quite like the Muppet Show revival I'd really like to see on Disney+). Still, new Muppets!

The French Dispatch Seems like this one should hit his year after a festival run. Really looking forward to getting a look at what he's cooked up this time.

Death on the Nile #thirtyBranaghPoirotmovies

Onward & Soul Two original Pixar movies in one year! Super excited about this. (Also pretty psyched for another original film from Disney Animation Studios in Raya and the Last Dragon.)

MCU at the Movies I glad to finally get that Black Widow movie this year, and I'm certainly interested to see The Eternals, which has a great cast and sounds like another new avenue to explore in the Marvel movie world.

MCU on Disney+ As excited as I am for the two theatrical Marvel movies this year, I'm also pretty into The Falcon & The Winter Soldier and WandaVision. Now that my beloved Captain America has effectively retired, I'm pretty excited to see what happens to his best friends as Sam Wilson becomes the new Cap. And the word on WandaVision (that it's going to be pretty weird), coupled with the hints that they are taking inspiration from Tom King's run on the Vision comic book, makes this one sound pretty special. The Mandalorian set a high bar for how exciting these Disney+ shows could be, so I'm looking forward to seeing what Marvel comes up with.

In the Heights Hamilton melted my brain five years ago, and the trailer for this movie adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s first Broadway musical is so wonderful. Can’t wait.

Jungle Cruise Mulan looks super cool, but I've got pretty high hopes for Jungle Cruise. Jaume Collet-Serra is responsible for some wild genre excellence and I'm hoping he was able to bring some of that cracked vision to a big Disney adventure movie with the Rock and Emily Blunt. Sounds good to me.

Tenet Certainly looking forward to seeing Nolan return with another big, original genre picture with a great cast.

Dune Denis Villeneuve's last two science fiction films were aces and he's assembled a great cast here, so I'm hoping he'll do something special with this book.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife For as bad a taste as the ghost-bros left me with in their furor over the pretty fun 2016 remake, I'm loath to admit that I'm really looking forward to this. I liked the trailer, I'm excited to see the original characters return, I really like the new cast members, and I'm looking forward to a story with a different setting and everything.

Last Night in SoHo I like all of Edgar Wright's movies, and this sounds like an interesting change-up for him.

Star Trek on CBS All Access First up this year we know we’re getting Star Trek: Picard, and I’m particularly excited because this is a Star Trek that will be reaching past everything we’ve already seen and showing us a story set in the galaxy after the destruction of Romulus and Spock’s trip back in time. It looks really cool, and it’s pretty exciting to see Patrick Stewart playing the role again. Beyond that, we should have Star Trek: Lower Decks, which sounds like it should be a lot of fun, and the third season of Star Trek: Discovery which, based on the ending of the last season, promises to also explore previously unseen corners of the Star Trek universe/timeline.

Penny Dreadful: City of Angels I loved the original Penny Dreadful, and I'm pretty into the milieu they've set this...sequel? revival? spiritual successor? Pretty cool cast, too.

F9 Still really enjoying these big, wild, nutty movies. And I know my #family will be excited to roll out and see this one together.

Cosmos: Possible Worlds I loved the last Cosmos revival, so I'm really looking forward to seeing what they've come up with for this one.

Over the Moon Netflix is supposed to have a new animated film directed by Glen Keane this year, so I'm looking forward to watching it.

The Witches I love the book (and the original film version, for the most part) and I'm always rooting for Robert Zemeckis to make another stellar entertainment. Hoping this is one!

My Favorite Thing is Monsters Volume 2 Maybe this year!

Halloween Kills I loved the 2018 Halloween sequel, so I'm fully down to see the next two installments, starting with this one.

No Time to Die Daniel Craig’s swan song as Bond, this one has had some pretty rad trailers and a very cool director. Hope he gets to go out on a great one!

[nathanielwharton]

My 2018 in Pop Culture

Same plan here as usual. This is what meant most to me last year in pop culture.

Top Forty Things From 2018

40. King Kong on Broadway I wrote about this as an adaptation of the Kong story over at SportsAlcohol.com, but here I'll just say that while I was really disappointed with this as a musical, the execution of Kong himself on stage was breathtakingly rad.

39. Rhyming "is nae" with "Disney" in Anna and the Apocalypse In theory, I don't have much of an appetite left for a zombie comedy, having been well and truly sated by Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland, and the wave of imitators that followed them. I felt like I'd seen all of the moves that are possible with that particular genre mash-up, and then I read about a Scottish zombie comedy that ALSO threw in the musical and the Christmas movie. So it was almost with a sense of grudging obligation that I accepted the inevitability that I'd see Anna and the Apocalypse. It won me over. It's got a winning cast, catchy songs, and a surprisingly effective melancholy tone. But I have to admit, the moment that really won me over was a moment in the song "Hollywood Ending" where "is nae" ("is not" in a Scottish accent) is rhymed with "Disney."

38. The Conners/The Roseanne Revival This was a real roller coaster in 2018. I was excited and apprehensive about the revival, and only slightly relieved when it began and was mostly pretty good. Still, there was an uneasiness with the way that the Roseanne character had been conceived for the revival and that basically exploded thanks to the behaviour of the real Roseanne. Still, overall I've enjoyed the revival and The Conners, and while I'm sad about what happened to TV Roseanne and real Roseanne(for different reasons)

37. "The Queen" episode of Castle Rock I liked the show pretty well overall, but oh man did this episode stand out. For most of the run, I'd just thought it was a cute bit of casting to have Sissy Spacek playing what seemed like a strangely minor role. Then this episode happened. It's a real acting showcase for Spacek and it satisfies with suspense and emotion in equal measure.

36. Kurt Russell performing "Santa Claus is Back in Town" in The Christmas Chronicles I'm a sucker for a Christmas movie, and this one is agreeable enough. There is some attempt at telling an emotional story that might hit you if you're in the right mood, and there is pleasant hint of Gremlins in the movie's portrayal of Santa's elves, but mostly it is a pretty satisfying expansion of the thought, "what if Kurt Russell was Santa Claus?" Russell is a hoot in the role, and the movie hits a peak when his Santa ends up in jail and breaks out into a jailhouse rendition of "Santa Claus is Back in Town." Downloaded and added to my Christmas playlist.

35. Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert This new wave of live musicals on TV hasn't always resulted in a great show (I honestly have forgotten a lot of the Peter Pan and Rocky Horror broadcasts), but sometimes they end up with some really cool television. Grease Live still reigns as the champion of these things, but this production of Jesus Christ Superstar was exciting and energetic and featured some neat ideas in its staging. It's shows like this that keep me hoping they'll continue to try these live musical shows.

34. The Death of Stalin Wrote about this for SportsAlcohol.com.

33. Isle of Dogs The visceral aesthetic pleasure of this film might outweigh the delicate emotional effect all of Anderson's films tend to achieve, but even if the complicated story and worldbuilding in the film kept it from succeeding for me fully on a first viewing, it did get me to want to watch it again (and again).

32. Keira Knightley in The Nutcracker and the Four Realms The movie as a whole is a good enough time in the way that all of these lavishly produced live-action Disney fantasy movies tend to be. But Keira Knightley, as the Sugarplum Fairy, single-handedly drags this movie up a notch with her fantastically daffy performance. To explain all the ways that her performance delights would be to spoil what happens in the movie, but I'll just say that she finds a few different registers to play in the film and she is amazing in each one. Think of this snub when you watch the Academy Awards.

31. The Favourite A three-hander where each leg of the triangle is different and spectacular. Turns out that acidic dialogue works just as well in the Yorgos Lanthimos world as alien affectedness, and the cast he's got for this one hurl barbs with aplomb.

30. Ash vs. Evil Dead Series Finale The third season of this show lost a bit of a step for me, not quite balancing the goofs and the horror quite as deftly as the show had done at its best. But it really brought it back around for the last couple of episodes. The finale in particular had some surprisingly big action and an ending that felt perfectly Evil Dead. If that's the last we see of Ash, it feels right.

29. DuckTales The first season wrapped up with some good adventure and some ambitious emotional storytelling. And the second season has seemed, if anything, even more confident so far (including an excellent Christmas episode).

28. Eighth Grade What a lovely, humane, gem of a movie.

27. The Old Man and the Gun I was head-over-heels in love with this one like halfway through the opening scene. If it had ended after that scene, I might have been satisfied, but the rest of the movie was truly wonderful too.

26. A Series of Unfortunate Events Season Two There's no twist for book readers as great as what they did with the Parent characters in the first season, but this second season of the show continued to be really great.

25. Rusty Lake: Paradise & Rusty Lake: Paradox This year I played all of the Rusty Lake/Cube Escape games, and it's probably a good thing that it takes a while between game releases or I might just burrow into these Twin Peaks inspired puzzles and not come out.

24. The last 20 minutes of Halloween I pretty well loved the entirety of this 40-years-later sequel, but the last twenty minutes or so were just next-level great. Basically, once everybody gets to Laurie's compound, this film was as scary as I wanted and as fist-pumpingly thrilling as I didn't know I could have expected.

23. Lost in Space Season One Might have loved this if it was just the one thing after another space survival show, but when you layer on an intriguing mystery and then add on Parker Posey's slitherly Dr. Smith? Yep, loved it.

22. The Haunting of Hill House Mike Flanagan has been doing cool horror work on smaller movies for a few years now, and I'm glad he seems to have found a patron in Netflix. The broader canvas of Haunting of Hill House allows him to do pretty much everything he's so good at, and even allows for some new tricks (like that "one long shot" episode, or the creepy background ghosts that go uncommented on in the story).

21. Creed II Creed was so great, and the notion of Stallone returning to the Ivan Drago well so worrisome, that I was a little apprehensive that this one would disappoint me. What a great surprise, then, that this was basically a best-case scenario for how this could have worked out. Even the Drago stuff is pretty compelling! I'd love to see more with Adonis and Bianca sometime, and I certainly still love Rocky himself, but for this round of playing with fire, I am satisfied.

20. Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters & Godzilla: City on the Edge of Battle The first two (out of three) animated Godzilla films hit Netflix last year and they were much more curious and idiosyncratic than I expected when they were first announced. Slowly paced, with an intentional disregard for the expectations of kaiju fans, they take a brilliant concept and proceed to use it to explore the perils of various belief systems. Each of these ends on a cliffhanger, so the success of the whole thing might depend a bit on how Godzilla: Planet Eater wraps things up, but for now it's a fascinating experiment.

19. The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs I can't say I sat around missing the horror host thing (I also love and regularly watch the family-friendly Svengoolie), but I was still surprised by how enjoyable and how nostalgic I found the experience of sitting back down with Joe Bob to watch a trashy horror movie. I didn't watch this as a marathon, but it did make for a bunch of swell weekends catching up with some movies I'd never seen and a charming film buff I hadn't seen in a while.

18. Bad Times at the El Royale Everything about this, from the cast to the aesthetic to the story, was just right up my alley. There was a moment late in the film where Maggie and I turned to each other, our jaws literally dropped, and we burst into nervous laughter.

17. BlacKkKlansman Wrote this one up over at SportsAlcohol.com.

16. Three Identical Strangers This documentary knocked me out. It's an amazing story with a bunch of incredible twists and turns and fascinating characters. It also poses some really intriguing questions and left me with a lot to think about. Don't read anything about it, just see it!

15. Disenchantment As a big fan of The Simpsons and i (and knowing the similar arcs they followed pretty well), I was pretty excited for a new Matt Groening animated show, and the first season of Disenchantment might have surpassed my expectations. It's funny, visually appealing, and takes some effective swings at the kind of emotional storytelling that it took the earlier series a couple of seasons to really nail. The finale sent me scrambling to the internet to see if it had been picked up for more episodes.

14. Nancy by Olivia Jaimes As a regular and avid comic strip reader, I propose that I was more blown away than most of the internet by the new Nancy. I regularly checked in on the soggy Gilchrist version of the strip, so imagine my surprise and delight at the change! It is neat to see a newspaper strip make any kind of impact in the culture again. Plus the strip is really fun!

13. Star Wars Star Wars: Rebels came to a close with a run of really exciting episodes and a really excellent finale. The comics continued to be really good. And Solo: A Star Wars Story showed up with smaller, not so fate-of-the-galaxy stakes and still just nailed the iconic characters it was digging into in exactly the ways it needed to. In a year where Star Wars fandom was showing itself to be home to a lot of the same toxicity as other fandoms, Star Wars itself kept up its end with lots of fun stuff.

12. The Last Best Story I thought I had a good idea what to expect from a high school newspaper riff on His Girl Friday, and this book certainly (thoroughly, delightfully) satisfies that. But I wasn't exactly prepared for the emotional depth and lovely observational detail in Maggie's book (I mean, I probably should have been, but it still sneaked up on me). I finished and just wanted to read it again.

11. "The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat" episode of The X-Files This second (and seemingly final) revival season of The X-Files boasted a more confident ratio of hits to misses than the previous one (even the nutso mythology episodes showed a stronger grasp of how the show works and what it means in the current moment) but the highlight, again, was a virtuosic episode written and directed by Darin Morgan. It was brilliantly funny, very X-Filesy, and sneakily provided a hilarious alternate series finale for fans in the event that Chris Carter would botch the actual one a few episodes later (luckily, he did as well as I might have hoped, really).

10. Arrested Development - Season 5, Part 1 I disagreed with most of the complaints people lobbied against the fourth season of Arrested Development, but I do think the batch of fifth season episodes released last year did fall prey to some of the shapeless storytelling and clunky greenscreen they were accused of before (I thought the fourth season did wonders with having the characters separated, while they flailed to meaningfully integrate Lindsay in the fifth season). And because episodes weren't as clearly defined in their storytelling, it left some of the character stories feeling both too dragged out and thinly developed (thinking here of Gob's struggle with his sexuality and Tobias's relationship with Murphybrown) by the time the half-season ended on a slight cliffhanger without really building significant momentum. But for all that, I love these characters so much and the show particularly really does right by the way that Michael and George Michael try to navigate their relationship with each other after the events of the fourth season.

9. Mary Poppins Returns This movie had impossible shoes to fill, and you can tell that everybody involved took that seriously. I saw this one twice. The first time, I really enjoyed it. The second time, it made me cry.

8. Marvel Cinematic Universe Black Panther was so fantastic, Avengers: Infinity War felt like a really special theater experience, and Ant-Man and the Wasp was a delightful trifle with an amazing, playful gut-punch of a stinger. Really, I had a great time will all three movies they put out this year and I loved the ride they took us on all the way through to the final text card in the Ant-Man credits.

7. Surprise, it's The Cloverfield Paradox! Sure, this is easily the least of the Cloverfield movies so far (it's still a fun haunted-house-on-a-space-station movie with an overqualified cast), but I don't imagine there'll be a more fun way to see one of these. I was already feeling that familiar Cloverfield excitement as the online marketing game started spooling up, but I pretty much leapt off the couch when Katie and I saw the Super Bowl ad that announced it would be dropping soon on Netflix, and freaked out even further when I looked on Netflix and saw the tag that it would debut after the game ended! We stayed up and watched it that night, and I went to sleep in the glow of a new Cloverfield. Gonna be hard to top that for excitement next time, but I'm looking forward to seeing them try.

6. Support the Girls Basically a "day in the life" movie about a manager of a Hooters-style sports bar, this movie (starring a perfect Regina Hall) is warm and human and reassuring because of the way it eschews the normal reassurances of this kind of thing and just plays it real. It's a beautiful movie.

5. GLOW I loved the first season of GLOW, and I think this second season is even better. It digs a little deeper into the supporting cast, doubles down on its resonance with things happening in the culture right now, includes that delightful episode within an episode, and ends on a perfect and delicate emotional note.

4. American Vandal Here's one of those shows with a perfect first season taking a shot at a follow-up, and they nailed it. Whatever trades are made in taking on a case with less personal involvement for our investigator leads are made up by the incisive observational writing (and hilarious bathroom jokes), this time throwing race and class into the mix. I'm sorry we won't get to see them take on another case and format, but these first two seasons are perfect.

3. Ready Player One I am in the tank for pretty much any Spielberg movie (I've loved the dramas he's done in the last few years) and here he's made a movie with cameos from King Kong and Mechagodzilla. I enjoyed the book this was based on, but I loved the movie even more. The visuals and action (and that amazing Shining sequence) are terrific, but the way that they restructured the game tasks build to make a moving argument for the ways even popular art are used for communication and connection, and Mark Rylance's portrayal of the Wonka-esque Halliday makes it all land.

2. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs I wrote about this one over at SportsAlcohol.com. I loved it.

1. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Parts One & Two To be quite honest, this would be hard to beat in any event since I got engaged to be married between Part One and Part Two. Luckily, the show was a really special event even beyond that personal association. A surprisingly moving epilogue to the Harry Potter stories (and more satisfying in performance where the performances of the actors makes up for some of the ways the supporting characters seemed more thinly conceived in the script than they did in the books), it was also a dazzling theatrical experience. The variety of tricks employed to bring the wizard world to the stage meant that just as you figured out how they pulled off one big effect you were met with three other nifty flourishes. I dig Rowling's continued noodling around in her wizard world through things like this play and the Fantastic Beasts films (I enjoyed Crimes of Grindelwald) as a way to tell new stories and explore nerdy minutia without undoing the lovely bow of that original series of books. (Side note: Because my pleasure reading time has been so heavily curtailed as I get through this first school year, I'm only about a third in on Lethal White. Really digging it, but don't feel like I can include it on this list properly.)

Top Twenty Things I'm Excited About in 2019

Godzilla: King of the Monsters Never would I have believed that we'd be getting a big-budget American Godzilla film that would prominently feature Mothra, Rodan, and King Ghidorah as the third film in a shared Godzilla/Kong movie universe. Now it is happening, and everything they've released to do with the film (trailers, posters, etc) have looked incredible. Gonna be hard to top this one for excitement this year.

Marvel Cinematic Universe Captain Marvel looks like a lot of fun, I'm sure Spider-Man: Far From Home will be great, and I'm pretty interested in whatever Marvel Studios ends up doing for the Disney+ streaming service, but the main event this year is obviously Avengers: Endgame. Whatever form this big finale for the first decade of MCU stories takes, I cannot wait to see it.

Star Wars As with Marvel, there's plenty to look forward to this year, with The Mandalorian presumably accompanying the debut of Disney+ along with the revival of The Clone Wars, but the biggest deal will of course be Episode IX, the grand finale of the main Star Wars saga and the story of the Skywalkers.

Arrested Development The original run of the series was nearly flawless. The fourth season is, in some ways, even more ambitious and special. And even though the first half of this fifth season was, to my eyes, guilty of some of the baggy, formless storytelling that season four had been accused of (and splitting the season like this meant that the first half felt weirdly unsatisfying), it still had a ton of joke that I really loved and developed the relationship between Michael and his son in a way that I did find satisfying after the fourth season cliffhanger. Excited for more of the show and crossing my fingers that it nails the landing.

Stranger Things III This one drops on my birthday! Setting the story in summer sounds fun to me, and I'm pretty excited to see these characters again after a year off.

The Twilight Zone The original series is a deep foundation of my pop culture world and I even found things to like about the UPN revival in the early 00s, so I'm predisposed to be interested in this. But giving it to Jordan Peele (also so psyched for Us) seems like a masterstroke and the trailer they just released is so perfect (both for the obvious love it displays for the original and the new energy it promises) that it's driven me to distraction. Cannot wait for this.

The Addams Family I was obsessed with The Addams Family back when the two Barry Sonnenfeld films came out in the 90s. I loved the 60s sitcom, the movies, and the animated series (and more recently was bitterly disappointed by the Broadway musical). But most of all I adored the Charles Addams cartoons. This latest animated film has been kicking around in some form of development for a while now (there was a time when it was reported that they were trying to get Tim Burton to give it the stop-motion treatment) and I'm a little apprehensive that it ended up with Illumination Studios. Still, a new animated Addams Family film is a must see.

The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance This sounds pretty special, and in any case it is exciting to get an ambitious new puppet project from the Henson Company delivered right to my Netflix queue this year.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood & The Irishman A new Tarantino film would be on this list no matter what, so those photos they released a while back were most exciting to just get a look at what he's going for aesthetically. And of course I'm intrigued and excited to hear that Netflix is throwing money at Scorsese to make a crime film starting De Niro, Pacino, Keitel, and Joe Pesci.

The French Dispatch Not sure if this one will actually hit this year or end up seeking out some awards-friendly release next year, but it's a Wes Anderson film about journalism with a predictably great cast. Exciting whenever it comes out.

Knives Out Rian Johnson writing and directing another mystery film with this cast? Let's do this now.

Little Women Lady Bird was sooo good that I'd be pretty into whatever movie Greta Gerwig made next, so the incredible cast she's assembled for this follow up is just icing.

The Righteous Gemstones When Jody Hill and Danny McBride make another HBO show, I'm going to watch it. Make it about a family of televangelists and make John Goodman the patriarch, and I can't wait to watch it.

My Favorite Thing is Monsters Volume 2 The first volume was a surprise highlight of 2017 and it was a bummer to see this follow up slide further and further back on release calendars. Hoping it finally arrives this year, but the original was so wonderful that I'm ready to wait as long as it takes.

Missing Link There are other animated movies I'll be really excited for by the time they come out this year (Toy Story 4 and Frozen 2 will surely be huge events) but I'm probably most excited that Laika is back with a new feature.

Star Trek It looks like, as an attempt to get people like me to actually keep up their CBS All Access subscription outside of the two months they're offering new episodes of Star Trek Discovery (and I am pretty psyched for this second season!) they are planning on keeping us in new Star Trek as often as possible. An animated Trek comedy! A new series about Picard! More of those very cool Short Treks! I'm pretty into seeing what they have in store this year.

Looney Tunes Cartoons After years and years of grousing about Warner Bros' treatment of the Looney Tunes characters (even when they have something that kinda works, like Wabbit or New Looney Tunes, it has felt like they're on the C-list; and no, Space Jam 2 does not make me feel better), I'm intrigued by this series and am anxious to see some footage to see what they're cooking up.

Penny Dreadful: City of Angels I loved the original series, I'm a sucker for stories set in America in the 30s, and  I like the cast they're lining up, so I'm definitely into this.

Amazing Stories I don't even know if or when I'll get to see this (we already have so many streaming services and if I'm adding another one this year, it'll be Disney+), but I love the idea of a new Amazing Stories and if Spielberg directs an episode or two it'll make this a must watch somehow.

[nathanielwharton]

My 2017 in Pop Culture

Same deal as usual. This is what meant most to me last year in pop culture.

Top Forty Things From 2017

40. The Mummy I liked it. It's definitely got the worked-over vibe that people most object to in these shared-universe experiments, and it goes a little bigger and more action-heavy than I'd probably prefer for a Universal Monster movie. But, I liked the way it fused a modern Tom Cruise narrative with a traditional monster story. I liked the genuine horror movie flourishes throughout. I liked the winks at monster fans in the Prodigium headquarters. I loved Sofia Boutella's Ahmanet. And I loved Russell Crowe's silly/creepy thug Mr. Hyde. This one also got bonus points for The Mummy: Dark Universe Stories, the iPhone game that came out a month after the film. The story plays out a sequel to the movie, but the real nerdy thrill of it was the way it incorporated a bunch of original Universal Monsters characters and ideas, including Lisa Glendon from Werewolf of London and Kharis and Boris Karloff's Ardeth Bay from the original Mummy movies! 39. Baby Driver This was just a delight, a combination of classic crime movie and classic musical with that Edgar Wright energy giving it that extra nitrous burst of excitement. 38. "Every Country Has a Monster" on Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Return I'm one of those fans who loved Mystery Science Theater 3000 when he stumbled across it on cable in the 90s but has a little trouble with the way it gave license to a certain sourness and superiority about older movies among some audiences. Still, I found myself looking forward to the revival with a little trepidation as to whether it would find the right tone (or recapture the lo-fi public access charm of the original). The first twenty minutes or so of the first episode back (focused on the Danish giant monster movie Reptilicus, so they were doing well by me right off the bat) were pretty promising, but this song about giant monsters of myth across the world was where I decided I was on board for this revival. 37. Happy Death Day What a fun time this was! It's got a really charming lead performance and a fun story hook, but it's really the energy and inventiveness that it applies to slasher movie/Groundhog Day story of self-improvement that put it over the top for me. 36. John Wick Chapter 2/Free Fire/Atomic Blonde Hard to pick from among the three of these in terms of which action movie I had the most fun with this year. They've all got something special to recommend them. 35. The Scariest Story Ever: A Mickey Mouse Halloween This doesn't quite scale the heights of last year's Duck the Halls Christmas special, but it was still a funny, thoroughly delightful seasonal treat that I'll probably make a point of watching next October too. 34. My Favorite Thing is Monsters Vol. 1 I checked it out because I'd read it was a comic about a 10-year-old girl who was obsessed with monsters (picturing herself as a little wolfman) who tries to solve the murder of her neighbor. What I got was a moving story about historical injustice and personal revelation told with dazzling illustration. Really, this knocked me out. 33. Gemini/Murder on the Orient Express I think Gemini is actually going to be a 2018 release, but these two mystery films really scratched an itch for me this year. I was a big fan of director Aaron Katz's Cold Weather, a wonderful little mumblecore mystery story, but I wasn't prepared for how much I dug his twisty neo-noir, Gemini. And Murder on the Orient Express was kind of a similarly satisfying experience on the other end of the spectrum: a lavish, big-budget adaptation with a cast stocked with movie stars and exciting up-and-comers. I loved it, and now I'm all about seeing Branagh continue to work on his little proposed Agatha Christie universe. #thirtyBranaghPoirotmovies 32. Okja It's a new Bong Joon-ho film! That means it's got a bunch of thrilling filmmaking, wild performances, tricky tonal shifts, and a beautifully clear-eyed honest empathy. 31. The Get Down Season One, Part Two I was sorry to see this one cancelled after the still thrilling but also melancholy second half came out this year. I really fell in love with these characters, and it was always an exciting experience. And this was just one of the many Netflix shows I really loved this year (including Mindhunter, BoJack Horseman, Lady Dynamite, GLOW, Orange is the New Black, and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt). 30. The ending of Split I loved the rest of Split, and I was already onboard the M. Night Shyamalan comeback train from The Visit (after riding like five movies on the “oh no, he’s lost it so bad!” train). But those surprising final moments of Split, while holding the potential for another dive into disastrous hubris, made me straight up gasp out loud in confusion & delight.

29. The Samurai Jack Revival/Finale I enjoyed a lot of the original run of Samurai Jack, but I wasn’t exactly a devoted viewer & hadn’t particularly missed it in its absence. So I checked out the revival largely just to see what the great Genndy Tartakovsky would to with it after spending time on other projects. And wow! It turned out not only to be a truly gorgeous & riveting experience, but it also took the characters & elements of the original & gave them some interesting psychology & moral challenges. 28. Nathan for You’s "Finding Frances" I love Nathan For You, but this year’s season finale, “Finding Frances,” was probably the most interesting thing he’s done with the format. In some ways it’s basically Nathan For You: The Movie, finding a sprawling emotional journey, still filled with nutball comic cul de sacs, that also digs into the “Nathan” character & finds a new place to take him by the end. 27. Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events Season One I figured I’d check out the first season, despite the fact that it would mostly be covering the same material covered in the totally decent Jim Carrey movie, because I was interested to see Barry Sonnenfield finally get a shot at the material & because I wanted to see what they’d do with the later books. But from the first moments with Patrick Warburton’s Serling-esque take on Lemony Snicket (and that infectious theme song) I fell in love with the show. The cast is great, the adaptation work is clever and involving (including an ingenious side story with Will Arnett & Cobie Smulders that seems brilliantly designed to provide different-but-complementary experiences for fans and non-fans), and I stress again how much I loved Warburton. There’s also a wonderful flourish in the season finale that amped my love into adoration. 26. A Cure For Wellness If Gore Verbinski can keep getting people to give him huge budgets to make big, weird genre films about the rot at the center of capitalism and western civilization, I will keep seeing them and (presumably) loving them. 25. Opening sequence of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets The rest of the movie is a colorful bit of fun, but the opening sequence where we see, via montage, the establishment and development of the titular city of a thousand planets, is as sublime and moving a movie moment as any I saw this year. Thrillingly optimistic and hopeful, Besson briefly hits on something more than his usual enjoyably daffy nonsense. 24. Final seasons of The Leftovers & Vice Principals Two HBO shows I loved aired their final seasons this year. Both of them had set themselves up with particularly tricky tasks in providing satisfying resolutions without either ruining the mystique of what had come before or pulling their punches in a way that impacted the whole. And they both nailed it. 23. A Ghost Story I wrote about this one for SportsAlcohol.com. I found it bewitching and it stayed with me. 22. Star Trek: Discovery It was a long wait, but this new Star Trek show pretty immediately justified my subscription to yet another streaming service all on its own. I love the characters, I’m engrossed in the storytelling, and I’m challenged by the moral and intellectual ideas it’s exploring. Good Star Trek. (This also may as well be where I mention that I also watched, and pretty much enjoyed, the whole first season of Seth Macfarlane’s generic brand Trek cover, The Orville. Pretty well scratches whatever old school Trek itch Discovery could have left me with.) 21. Wormwood I love most everything of his that I’ve seen, but this is basically in competition with Tabloid for my favorite Errol Morris project.

20. Gorogoa Feels almost silly that I found what basically amounts to a puzzle game for my phone so entrancing & even spiritual. But I LOVED this thing. My only complaint is that it wished it kept going and going. 19. DuckTales Wrote about this for SportsAlcohol.com. A testament to how delightful this show is can be found in the fact that I put it in this slot instead of the also hugely enjoyable Milo Murphy’s Law. 18. Marvel Cinematic Universe While this year I definitely cooled on the Marvel television offerings (I still watched and enjoyed the Netflix shows despite some underwhelmed feelings, and I'm still pretty high on Agents of SHIELD, but Inhumans was a total misfire), it was perhaps the best year yet for Marvel Studios's cinematic offerings. I totally loved Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Spider-Man: Homecoming, and Thor Ragnarok. They each offered something fairly distinct and emotionally engaging (even Ragnarok, despite it's hilariously cheeky tone) and they were all a complete blast. Best Guardians yet, best Spider-man yet, best Thor yet! 17. Lady Bird Between 2016’s Edge of Seventeen and this,  guess I’m gonna hope for a wonderful teen girl coming-of-age movie every other year. And thanks to Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, and the idiosyncratic empathy of Greta Gerwig, this one was a true highlight of 2017. 16. Get Out The terrific horror-themed sketches on Key & Peele suggested a genuine feel for the genre, so it wasn’t a huge reach to expect Jordan Peele’s directorial debut horror movie to turn out well. But this one still felt like a revelation at the beginning of the year (not to mention a huge event when seen with an audience). 15. Your Name Another wonderful surprise, this one makes some clever and twisty shifts as what starts out as a charming body-switching comedy reveals an emotional core that really swept me away. 14. War for the Planet of the Apes I wrote about this one for SportsAlcohol.com. 13. Blade Runner 2049 I also wrote about this one for SportsAlcohol.com. 12. The Post I wrote about this for SportsAlcohol.com too! 11. Coco Look, I’m generally less excited about Pixar’s sequels than I am about its originals (and I generally really like or love their sequels! but still...), and Coco is a perfect example of why. It’s a great story with a bunch of lovable new characters, beautiful new worlds, and the fun of seeing something new. And as is often the case, it also packs a real emotional wallop. 10. S-Town Speaking of emotional wallops, this podcast miniseries was already shaping up to be an involving look at a fascinating character, but a bombshell dropped in an early episode spins the thing into something deeper and more powerful than anything else I listened to this year.

9. Colossal Wrote about this for SportsAlcohol.com. 8. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel While this show has many things that set it apart from the other Amy Sherman-Palladino shows I love (namely Gilmore Girls & Bunheads), it does share the qualities of being unstoppably effervescent and entertaining while offering hidden depths. We gulped the whole season down in two plane rides and can’t wait for the next batch. 7. Star Wars: The Last Jedi Wrote about the movie on SportsAlcohol.com. It was another good Star Wars year in general, with some excellent Star Wars Rebels episodes, the continuation of the fantastic Marvel comics, and some cool novels (generally I didn't read any bad Star Wars books this year, so that's good; personal highlights were Aftermath: Empire's End and Leia: Princess of Alderaan). But the real highlight was, of course, the movie. It was a joyful, powerful experience opening night (in a way that felt interestingly different from the experience of The Force Awakens), and it’s a movie that has lingered and deepened in my mind as I’ve thought about it. 6. The Shape of Water I run pretty hot and lukewarm on Guillermo del Toro (that is to say, I don’t particularly dislike any of his movies, but while I love some of them, others just don’t connect like I feel they should, despite how much the separate elements might appeal to me). But for every one that I just like okay, he connects with something like this, a gorgeous, perverse fairy tale retelling of the Creature From the Black Lagoon with tributes to Cold War paranoia, classic movie musicals, and a great Michael Shannon performance added to the mix. Just a lovely tribute to the way love can unite the disenfranchised and overlooked. 5. Kong: Skull Island An eye-popping fever dream of a monster mash, this movie assembled a stacked cast of actors I love and surrounded them with some of the most stunning monster movie images I’ve ever seen. A++++infinity 4. Stranger Things 2 What a wonderful surprise the first season of this show was, and what a relief and a joy to get this sequel that is, in most ways, even better. By the final scenes of the finale, I was more in love than ever. 3. The Florida Project I wrote a bit about this for SportsAlcohol.com, so I think it’s enough to say here that this is a very special movie. 2. American Vandal What a wonderful little surprise this was! Like Stranger Things last year, this was something that popped up on Netflix & gave me something I didn’t know I wanted. On one level, it’s just a silly, dirty joke really elaborately told. But on another level, it’s a sneakily moving portrait of the way that expectations and choices made when you’re young can really impact what you become in that transition from teenager to adult.

1. Twin Peaks: The Return I was looking forward to this, and I had a pretty open mind as far as what it could be or what to expect from it. But I still had no idea how amazing and immersive and gripping it would all be. I wrote about it over at SportsAlcohol.com and talked about it on the podcast and I STILL only scratched the surface of how I felt about it.

Top Twenty Things I'm Excited About in 2018

Arrested Development Returns! I adored both the original run of the show and the fourth season that hit Netflix five years ago. I cannot wait for this. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs It's the new Coen brothers project. And it's supposed to be something like six hours of new Coen brothers project. Holy smokes. The Last Best Story I really loved Maggie's last book, and the tidbits I've heard about this one make it sound terrific. Been anticipating this one for nearly three years and it's almost here! Isle of Dogs Wes Anderson movies pretty much automatically quality as "most anticipated" for me, and the trailer for this one looks thoroughly delightful. And it hopefully augurs an exciting year for stop motion animation. While I'm obviously into The Incredibles II and Ralph Wrecks the Internet, I'm even more intrigued with the untitled Laika film scheduled for this year. There's been so little news about it, it seems possible it won't actually hit this year, but even if it doesn't there's Early Man, a new Aardman film directed by Nick Park due out in February, and Jan Svankmajer's final film, Insects, that I hope makes its way to the US this year. Ready Player One I'm sure I'd see this one no matter what, but the fact that Steven Spielberg directed it means I'm actively excited to catch it on day one. Marvel Cinematic Universe After a stellar 2017 (and all the goodwill they built up over the last ten years in general) I'd be excited for their three pictures this year. So the fact that they've got Black Panther (a terrific cast in Ryan Coogler's follow-up to Creed!), Avengers: Infinity War (the beginning of this big two-year culmination event, written & directed by the folks who made my beloved Captain America movies), and Ant-Man and the Wasp (I had a great time with the first one, and Down With Love guarantees Peyton Reed my attention forever), gives me confidence that they'll have another great year in 2018. Star Wars I'm forever excited about Star Wars (or at least the current firehose volume of it still hasn't made me bored of it yet) so I'm pretty interested to see Solo: A Star Wars Story, and I'm also really on the hook to see the final batch of episodes of Star Wars Rebels. Roseanne Revival Maybe I'm just tempting fate because of how the Twin Peaks revival turned out, but I'm excited for this one. I love the original show (one of my favorite little things about getting cable has been that Roseanne is on one channel or another almost all the time) and I'm equally apprehensive about and intrigued by the news that's come out about the revival so far. But I'll definitely be watching the whole thing. Lethal White AND Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald A new Cormoran Strike book and a new Wizarding World movie with a screenplay by J.K. Rowling! I understand why neither of them are exactly the kind of cultural event that the Potter books and movies were, but I'm personally so excited for both. A Wrinkle in Time AND Mary Poppins Returns Two big Disney productions that are super up my alley, so I'm grouping them together. Wrinkle promises an adaptation of a wonderful book from an exciting director and a fantastic cast. And Poppins has the liability of a director I've been extremely mixed on in the past, but it also has a perfect cast and the original Mary Poppins is a movie a really love deeply. Really excited to have these bookending the year. A New Cloverfield The God Particle was on this list last year, and it's on there again this year. We're only a couple of weeks into the year and it's already been delayed again, so this is in hopes that it does really come out this April. But in any case, with God Particle and Overlord, another mysterious genre film from Bad Robot that fans have been speculating could be another Cloverfield movie, both scheduled for release this year, seems pretty likely we'll at least get one new Cloverfield picture. (UPDATE SINCE I WROTE THIS: the game is afoot again!) Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters It's got a killer premise and it's just hit Netflix! I'm excited for this one, and it seems possible that the second film in the announced trilogy could also hit Netflix before the end of the year. New Darin Morgan X-Files episode The new season of the X-Files revival already seems off to a stronger start than the last one, but no matter what it does hold the promise of another new episode by writer Darin Morgan. This is an event. Disenchantment Look, I still watch (and usually enjoy) The Simpsons. I adore Futurama. I am super excited for a new Matt Groening animated series, and tickled by the notion that it'll explore a new genre. My Favorite Thing is Monsters Vol. 2 The first half of the story was such a beautiful, engrossing, moving surprise this year, that I can't wait for the follow-up. Sense8 Finale Movie I'm glad they're getting a chance to wrap things up the way they want to here, and I'm looking forward to one more visit with this nutty, beautiful show. My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman AND Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee I don't keep up with all of Netflix's stand-up comedy offerings or the like, but I am super excited for these talk shows by a couple of my absolute favorite comedy curmudgeons. I actually watched (and really loved) the episode of Letterman's show with President Obama, and I'm looking forward to getting through all the rest of both of these throughout this year. Mute It looks like Duncan Jones's new film, some kind of spiritual follow-up to his great Moon, is finally going to show up on Netflix early this year! And they've also got the next films by Gareth Evans, Jeremy Saulnier, and David Mackenzie that could always drop sometime this year AND The Other Side of the Wind, a lost Orson Welles film! The Predator A new Shane Black movie is a cause for celebration, and while trying to revive the Predator seems like a dicey proposition, he's assembled an exciting cast and co-wrote the film with his Monster Squad collaborator Fred Dekker, so I'm looking forward to seeing what they've cooked up enough to put it here instead of the other genre sequels I'm intrigued by this year (like David Gordon Green's Halloween or J.A. Bayona's Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom). The Happytime Murders A Roger Rabbit riff with puppets would be enough to get my attention, but get Brian Henson to direct it in his first theatrical feature since his Muppet films from the 90s and I'm fully excited.

[nathanielwharton]

My 2016 in Pop Culture

Same deal as last year. This is what meant the most to me last year in pop culture.

Top Forty Things From 2016

40. Penny Dreadful Season 3 This turned out to be the final season of the show, and while it feels a little rushed to a conclusion in the end, the majority of the season was another wonderfully ghoulish ride. With the characters scattered at the end of the second season, the third season adds a weird western flavor to the Penny Dreadful world, finally pulls the trigger on introducing Dracula, and once again offers a stellar Eva Green showcase (an invaluable service). I'll miss this one.

39. Achewood Returns As with Bloom County last year, Achewood made something of a surprise return in 2016. Though updates have again petered out, it was a real treat to spend some time with those characters once a week.

38. Gravity Falls Series Finale Disney XD finally dribbled out the last Gravity Falls episode in early 2016. And boy, the wait was worth it. The ending was as funny, strange, mysterious, and ultimately moving as the show was at its best.

37. The Witch This was a movie to sink into, with an immersive atmosphere and a creeping sense of unease that became almost overwhelming by the end. And then in its final moments, that unease bloomed into something thrilling. Terrific movie.

36. The Fireman Joe Hill's latest novel, and it's another rich, engrossing yarn with good characters. Always excited to see what he's cooked up, and this one didn't disappoint.

35. Galavant Season 2 I just really loved this show and am sorry to see it go after a second season that did fun stuff with the characters and avoided the pacing hiccups of the first season.

34. The Jungle Book/Pete's Dragon It seems like it is going to become a running theme in these lists that I express concern about Disney's "make live-action versions of our classic library" strategy (it can seem pointless, and certainly seems like a dead end road if they're not generating new original films in addition) and then end up loving the resulting films. And I loved both of these ones, finding them dazzling to look at and, ultimately, moving.

33. Duck the Halls: A Mickey Mouse Christmas Special I've loved the Mickey Mouse shorts that Paul Rudish has been doing for Disney Television Animation, and this first half-hour episode they made as a Christmas special maintained the style and energy I've enjoyed in the shorts and applied them to a Christmas story with new music and a focus on Donald Duck. So of course I loved it.

32. The Shallows/Nerve/Don't Breathe/The Boy It was a great year for smaller genre fare. All four of these accomplish exactly what they set out to do, and do it with wit, style, and craft that exceeds what you might expect from movies like these. They were also all GREAT audience movies.

31. Paper Girls It was a good year for "kids on bikes," and this comic series is a really great entry in the genre. I wasn't prepared for some of the twists and turns in the story, and I'm pretty interested to see where it goes.

30. Grease: Live Holy smokes. This was a dazzling adrenaline rush of live television. It was a fun mounting of the show, with nice performances, and while some of the staging and performances occasionally felt strange when they too closely seemed to be doing karaoke of the movie version, it was mostly a really fun and thrilling piece of television. A best-case scenario for the new TV-musical boom.

29. Archie Comics Mark Waid's Archie continued to be really fantastic, and the new Betty & Veronica, Josie & the Pussycats, and Reggie & Me all got off to excellent starts. But my favorite of the lineup is probably Jughead, now written by Ryan North (of my beloved Daily Dinosaur Comics). It's a truly perfect match of writer and subject.

28. Hell or High Water A great hang-out movie, with characters and actors I just loved watching interact, but it also features a story with opportunity for both excitement and commentary. A great western.

27. Kubo and the Two Strings Somewhere between the wonderful The Boxtrolls and the dazzling Kubo and the Two Strings, Laika solidified their image as a can't-miss animation studio for me. Each time out they come up with something different, but they share a few general qualities: they are gorgeous, they are funny and off-kilter, and they are unlike anything else currently on offer in American animation.

26. Ash vs. Evil Dead Season 2 This was, in many ways, an improvement on the already great first season. It explores a number of other horror subgenres through the Evil Dead lens, ramps up the thrills and carnage even further, and gives Bruce Campbell even more to play. And it features perhaps the most disgusting sequence in any Evil Dead.

25. Star Trek Beyond The third film in the Kelvin timeline, Beyond also functioned (by default, as the only new filmed Star Trek this year) as the 50th Anniversary celebration of the franchise. Luckily, they came prepared with the best of this new series of films. The crew continues to be as wonderful as ever (and the film finds opportunity to pair them up and give us some excellent character moments). And the story works as a nice interrogation of some Trek principles, proving them fresh and sadly relevant as the real world took a turn for the isolationist and regressive.

24. Arrival I wrote about this one for SportsAlcohol.com.

23. “Mulder & Scully Meet the Were-Monster” The X-Files revival was, appropriately for the original series, a mixed bag with the good, the bad, and the nutty all jumbled together. But there was a clear highlight, and as I'd hoped, Darin Morgan basically justified the entire revival in his one episode. His "Mulder & Scully Meet the Were-Monster" was funny and weird and moving, in the best tradition of his previous X-Files work. It was packed with winks and references, Duchovny and Anderson were clearly having a ball, and interestingly it seemed to offer a different perspective (or even a response or rebuttal) to the main thematic concerns of his episodes from the original series. At the conclusion of his episode "Jose Chung's From Outer Space" (one of my favorite episodes of TV, full stop), Chung narrates, "Then there are those who care not about extraterrestrials, searching for meaning in other human beings. Rare or lucky are those who find it. For although we may not be alone in the universe, in our own separate ways on this planet, we are all alone." Though he was known for writing the funny ones, this loneliness, this belief in the impossibility of real human connection, forms the emotional underpinning that grounds Morgan's X-Files episodes. And his episodes are often hilariously critical of Mulder. So it threw me for a loop when "Mulder & Scully Meet the Were-Monster" was surprisingly sympathetic toward him, and ends with this simple exchange between Mulder and the titular monster. Guy Mann - I don't mean to get too personal, but this has been a real trying time for me. I've been through a lot. But just having someone like you to... Look, what I'm trying to say is, I'm glad to have met you. Mulder - Like... Likewise.

22. Star Wars I guess this works as a proof of concept for Disney being able to sustain this new pace of Star Wars media. The comics continued to be generally excellent. Star Wars Rebels dug a little deeper with their own characters and made canny use of characters like Ahsoka, Darth Vader, and Grand Admiral Thrawn. Aftermath: Life Debt, the second in the trilogy of novels telling the story of the immediate...aftermath of Return of the Jedi, offered some cool glimpses of what characters both important and obscure were up to in that time period, and also develops some intriguing story threads that look to pay off in the next novel and in Episode VIII & IX. Catalyst, the novel that provided backstory for some of the main characters in Rogue One, was also one of the most enjoyable. And the publishing highlight of the year was Bloodline, the novel focusing on Leia Organa's exit from the new galactic government she'd fought to establish and her role in the origin of the Resistance in the new trilogy. And Rogue One: A Star Wars Story was a proof of concept all on its own, building some real goodwill for me toward the notion of these Star Wars spin off films. It offered up a new batch of characters that I liked, a cool story with some interesting Star Wars world building, and some rad filmmaking with a bunch of iconic images.

21. Weiner This documentary might play more like a horror movie after the 2016 election season, but it played like a raucous audience-participation comedy with the New York audience I saw it with. Weiner is an incredibly fascinating subject, and the movie has surprisingly intimate access through some rough times for Weiner, his campaign, and his family.

20. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping I wrote about this one for SportsAlcohol.com.

19. The BFG Steven Spielberg adapting a wonderful Roald Dahl novel with a screenplay by Melissa Mathison? Yep, this was an easy guess to be one of my favorites of the year, and that's exactly what it was. As with most Dahl adaptations, it finds a little more sentiment in the story than I found on the page, but it's a charming, wondrous marvel. And Mark Rylance's BFG is just perfect.

18. Beyonce's "Lemonade" on HBO I don't know if you'd call it a movie or a collection of videos or something else altogether, but it was beautiful and moving and very special. Any insight I could offer would pale compared to the great writing it inspired by others, but I found it dazzling.

17. Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life I really loved this revival. It was full of checklist hitting and Palladino self-indulgences, but I even mostly loved that stuff and was pretty into the stories they chose to tell. And, as is the goal of a revival like this, I loved getting to see all of the characters again. Sure, I'd have loved to spend more time with some of them, but I was pretty satisfied overall with the balance we got. And I loved the ending.

16. The Handmaiden I wrote about this for SportsAlcohol.com.

15. Hail, Caesar! I wrote about this for the SportsAlcohol.com list.

14. Green Room I could describe this literally as a white-knuckle thriller because it had me actually clutching my armrests when I was watching it. Impeccably crafted and astonishingly intense. And a perfect final moment.

13. Marvel Cinematic Universe It was another good year for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, despite some disappointments (Agent Carter had a delightful second season and was summarily cancelled, Luke Cage and Daredevil both started out great and petered out to varying degrees). Agents of SHIELD continues to be a lot of fun (I don't know if it gets better and better in an uninterrupted curve, but I look forward to it each week). Doctor Strange was super cool, introducing new characters I'm excited to follow in future adventures and providing a really dazzling experience in the theater. But the highlight this year was surely Captain America: Civil War. A really exciting example of how this shared universe, long-form storytelling can pay off, this was a great movie. I loved the characters, both returning and brand new (psyched to see Spider-Man and Black Panther in their own movies), and I found the story to be really intriguing, posing some interesting moral questions and paying off story threads planted throughout a number of the previous films. And it builds to a climax where the feeling of dread that had been building in the pit of my stomach throughout left me emotionally drained at the film's ending.

12. The Get Down Season 1 What a blast! The history of hip hop in the Bronx presented as a super-hero-origin musical Baz Luhrmann fantasia. It may not be accurate, and it may be a Luhrmanny mash of ideas and characters, but I loved it and I'm excited to see the rest of it when it goes up on Netflix.

11. 10 Cloverfield Lane The trailer for this movie could have been on this list by itself, both because it is a fantastic trailer and because the revelation of the title at the end of it was a genuine surprise. And then the movie itself turned out to be equally fantastic. Mary Elizabeth Winstead kills it, and John Goodman gives an incredible performance. If they turn out movies like this, they've got me onboard this Cloverfield thing for a good long while.

10. "One Trek Mind" Panel at Star Trek: Mission New York I went to my first Star Trek convention this year! I had a great time, and on the morning of the last day I went to my favorite event of the weekend. The panel was really just moderator Jordan Hoffman hosting a discussion with the audience with the goal of selecting the ideal crew from all iterations of Trek. You can hear it here, but the experience of being in the big hall as the debate was waged was something else. The audience was really engaged, it was a delight to see folks argue their picks (a group of young girls who came up to advocate Dr. Crusher was a particular highlight), and the way the crowd rallied behind Captain Janeway was freaking thrilling. And seriously, this thing was bonkers. Just look at that picture.

9. "Hallelujah" on Saturday Night Live Like a lot of folks, I was pretty surprised and upset by the results of the 2016 presidential election. And as much as I love Saturday Night Live (and I do! I could have gladly put Kevin Roberts, David Pumpkins, or this Russel Crowe sketch among many others), I was dreading the first episode after the election. I was in no mood to see some wan jokes about Donald Trump yukking it up in the White House or painting the walls gold or something, so I was particularly dreading the cold open, the kick-off sketch of the show and the traditional spot for a political sketch. I was surprised, then, to see this performance, done as tribute to both Hillary Clinton and the recently departed Leonard Cohen. Whatever I expected from that opening sketch, it wasn't to be moved to tears. But while it was a small thing, I found it cathartic.

8. Vice Principals Season 1 I wrote about this show for SportsAlcohol.com. And I'll just say that after that stunner of a final episode, I can't wait for the next season.

7. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them/Harry Potter and the Cursed Child This year marked J.K. Rowling's return to her wizard world, and I really loved it. I'm super on-board with the idea of her telling stories in that world in a different format (in this case a play and a film, instead of a new novel), allowing the seven existing books to stand as they are. I found Cursed Child intriguing and moving (and I'd really love to see it onstage), a lovely extended epilogue to Harry's story. And I loved Fantastic Beasts. I found the new characters instantly endearing, the world building and intimations of story in the world around them pretty exciting, and I adored the final moments of the film. Really into following along with whatever else she's cooking up along these lines.

6. Zootopia/Moana I loved Finding Dory, but this year Walt Disney Animation Studios really brought their A-game. Zootopia was a wonderful surprise, thoughtful and engrossing, and Moana proved about as adept as Frozen in getting me to well up with emotion throughout. Both films were hilarious, gorgeous, and exciting. What a great year for Disney fans.

5. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt Season 2 I wrote about this for SportsAlcohol.com.

4. The Fits What a wonderful, special little movie. It weaves a powerful, mysterious spell, and I really loved it. I don't want to talk too much about it if you haven't seen it, but I'd definitely recommend it.

3. The Nice Guys Russell Crowe is a freaking delight and Ryan Gosling gives probably my favorite performance of his yet, but the tremendous pleasure of this film pretty much comes down to Shane Black. It's the Shane Black special, with clever and unexpected plot turns, hilarious dialogue, terrific characters, and just a real cool vibe. On the shelf along with Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang as a movie I'd happily watch any time.

2. Stranger Things Season 1 I'd been following this since it was announced as Montauk and all that was known about it was that it starred Winona Ryder and might have an Amblin-y vibe. So I wasn't so much surprised by its existence as I was by how successfully it was what it attempted to be. Like the greatest Stephen King miniseries that never existed, it was involving and atmospheric, and I just loved it. And it stuck the landing so well that I'm equally excited for the next season and wary of them opening up an ending I loved.

1. Shin Godzilla I wrote a bunch about this one for SportsAlcohol.com.

Top Twenty Things I’m Excited About in 2017

Kong: Skull Island I'm down for a King Kong movie at any time, but the posters and trailers for this one have been so great that I worry my expectations are impossibly high. Can't. Wait.

War for the Planet of the Apes The other two films in this revival Apes series were genuinely great. Everything I've read about this one has been really intriguing, and the teaser was excellent.

Baby Driver Edgar Wright's new movie! He's four for four, and it's almost four years since The World's End came out. It was kind of a toss-up whether I was gonna put Baby Driver or Sofia Coppola's The Beguiled or A Cure for Wellness, the new Gore Verbinski movie, on here. Or even Colossal, Nacho Vigalondo's kaiju film. Really excited about all of them, but I think Baby Driver might top the list.

Okja Bong Joon-Ho has a new movie coming this year. That's enough to warrant my excitement, but it's also got an interesting cast and some kind of monster or giant creature. This is also a Netflix release, and they've also got Duncan Jones's Mute and Jeremy Saulnier's Hold the Dark, so they're really earning my subscription fee.

The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara Spielberg directs a new screenplay by Tony Kushner. I'm there.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi I am riding high on Star Wars love, and this year is going to have plenty to keep me afloat. More Star Wars: Rebels, more great Marvel comics, a handful of novels, and finally at the end of the year, the new adventure with Rey, Finn, Poe, Kylo Ren, and Luke Skywalker! Written and directed by Rian Johnson! Holy smokes!

Blade Runner 2049 Really cool teaser, an interesting director, cool cast, and now I'm really into this one. And honestly, I’d be intrigued by a sequel to Blade Runner no matter what.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales AND Beauty and the Beast For all the hemming and hawing I do beforehand about these live-action adaptations of Disney's animated classics, I've been pretty into all of them after seeing them. And Beauty and the Beast looks great. I also adore the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies, and I found the fourth one disappointing and I still kind of like it. So I'm pretty psyched that the new one promises a return to form, with an exciting directing duo and a couple of beautiful teasers.

The Mummy I still have intensely mixed feelings about this whole approach to reviving the Universal Monsters, but I've really liked some of what I've read in interviews with Kurtzman, and the teaser for this one was intriguing. Who am I kidding? I'll be there for this.

God Particle This may be the next Cloverfield movie, and even if it isn't, it's got a terrific cast and an intriguing premise, so I'm into it.

Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2017 Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and Spider-Man: Homecoming both start out with a lot of goodwill on my part (both general Marvel Studios goodwill and based on the original Guardians and the new Spider-Man's appearance in Captain America: Civil War). The Guardians ads have been spectacular so far, and the Spider-Man trailer pressed the right buttons for me. On top of that, this fall we get Taika Waititi's Thor: Ragnarok, which I'm already too excited about and I haven't seen a single frame. There's also Iron Fist and The Defenders due on Netflix, the continuation of the current season of Agents of Shield (which I'm really enjoying), and a few other potential TV projects like the IMAX/television Inhumans. I feel pretty safe that the MCU won't be slowing down for me this year. (And it's not Marvel Studios, but Logan looks great.)

Coco A new, original Pixar movie! Of course I'm excited. (Note: I'm even into seeing what they're up to with their Rocky III sounding Cars 3, so there's no chance I'd miss their fall offering.)

Riverdale Another one where I'm equally excited and afraid. In any case, I'm super interested to see how this works, so they've got me for the season!

The Leftovers Final Season The final season of a show that moved me like very works of art ever have. Not sure what to expect or even what I want from it, but I'm definitely looking forward to it. HBO is also serving up final seasons for Girls and Vice Principals, so I guess it's a good year for me to get super excited about the ends of shows I've loved.

Star Trek: Discovery I am going to subscribe to CBS's streaming service for the months this show is airing. That's how excited I am for it.

Twin Peaks Like Blade Runner, it is so strange that this is coming out and stranger still that it's in a form that is so exciting in its own right. Lynch directing (and co-writing with Mark Frost) like eighteen hours of new Twin Peaks! I genuinely don't know what to expect from it, but I'm excited.

Fourth Cormoran Strike Novel After a thoroughly enjoyable year of new Wizarding World material, I'm also anxiously awaiting news about J.K. Rowling releasing a new Robert Galbraith mystery this year.

Stranger Things 2 I really loved the first season, and as much as I think it ended perfectly and am kind of wary about them following up with a sequel, they built up a lot of goodwill and trust with me the first time around. And that teaser for the second season (and the episode titles they released) pretty easily override any doubts.

Olaf's Frozen Adventure It's a Frozen Christmas special from Walt Disney Animation Studios. Up. My. Alley.

The Fate of the Furious Of course I'm psyched for this. But it would be on this list over some others stuff I'm excited about for the perfect genius of the title alone.

[nathanielwharton]

My 2015 in Pop Culture

In 2012 and 2013, I put up some lists of my personal favorites in movies and television that I’d seen that year on Livejournal. Now that I’m contributing to the year-end lists at SportsAlcohol.com, it felt a little redundant to just do my own top ten lists elsewhere. Still, I like having a little record of what resonated with me in a particular year, so instead of doing a bunch of separate lists, here I’ve made note of my favorite things from pop culture in 2015 (and a list of the stuff I’m most anticipating in 2016).

Top Thirty Things From 2015

30. ABC’s Family Comedies With a slight adjustment to their schedule facilitated by my Hulu queue (I save Fresh Off the Boat to swap for Modern Family), I’ve made a pretty enjoyable ritual of ABC’s Wednesday family comedy bloc. I bailed on Modern Family a while back, but that still leaves me with a really solid set of four family sitcoms in The Middle, The Goldbergs, Fresh Off the Boat, and Black-ish. And while, like most Muppet fans, I’ve had my own nits to pick with aspects of The Muppets, I’ve generally really enjoyed the show and I’m thrilled they have a show on primetime on a network.

29. Crimson Peak This basically felt like a lush update of one of those AIP Roger Corman/Vincent Price Poe adaptations I loved as a kid (sure, and still do).

28. The Last Man On Earth This show has been pretty unpredictable, veering from lovely, quiet melancholy to excruciating cringe comedy to...whatever you’d call those stomach lurching final moments in the last episodes of 2015. But most of all, it’s been valuable as a Will Forte delivery system. And I do value that.

27. The Big Short I'm a little surprised to find an Adam McKay movie on this list that isn't one of his broad comedies, but I really responded to this one more than I expected. It's entertaining, for sure, but I also found it genuinely educational. I guess I'll follow McKay anywhere?

26. SNL 40 Sure, the special was kind of strange and baggy, with moments of genuine hilarity mixed with moments that left you irritated, disappointed, or befuddled. In that way, it really was a pretty great tribute to the show itself, in all its many facets. There were probably episodes of the regular show that were more consistently funny this year, but the anniversary special, for all its self-regard and flaws, did indeed feel special.

25. Penny Dreadful This monster mash got even more confident and accomplished in its second season. And it was already so up my alley.

24. Comedy Central’s Lineup This year, at various points Comedy Central aired Inside Amy Schumer, Review, Broad City, Nathan For You, Drunk History, and the final season of Key & Peele. That is incredible.

23. What We Do In The Shadows One of those movies you want to show any friend who hasn’t seen it yet. Worth seeing if only to hear Jemaine Clement’s Vlad explain why vampires prefer virgins.

22. Gravity Falls This year, the show’s big mysteries started getting answers and the results proved so satisfying and entertaining that the news that it would be the show’s final season generated a real mix of emotions. On the one hand, I’ll miss a show that is capable of being as funny and lovely and straight up weird as this one. But on the other hand, there’s a real rush in seeing a show swagger out at the top of its game.

21. The Peanuts Movie It's a hard thing to create a feature film out of the gentle, often melancholy, Peanuts strips that satisfies in the way a modern animated feature has to. It's also hard to transfer the asthetic that made the comic strip and hand-drawn animated versions of the characters so endearing into 3-D computer animation. And it's probably impossible to distill everything people love about fifty years of comic strips and decades of TV specials into a ninety minute feature. But darned if The Peanuts Movie doesn't basically pull it off. It's gorgeous, funny, and does a creditable job of maintaining the feel of the characters and their world. Even the inevitable happy ending feels more like a lovely tribute to Charlie Brown and his creator (a moment of grace bestowed by Schulz's heirs to their morose-even-in-success father).

20. Career of Evil Another year, another Cormoran Strike novel that manages to be somehow simultaneously cozy and inviting and grisly and suspenseful. Rowling is a wonderful storyteller, and in Strike and his partner Robin, she's given us another couple of lovable characters that I can't wait to follow to the next adventure.

19. Show Me a Hero Here we have a David Simon miniseries about the ways the debate and politicking around a civic issue impacted a community AND we have about six hours of Oscar Isaac giving another terrific performance. If only I'd watched it earlier in the year, I would have included it on my SportsAlcohol.com ballot!

18. Anomalisa Here's what I had to say at SportsAlcohol.com.

17. Tomorrowland I've said before that I'm generally pretty in the bag for the modern live-action Disney fantasy/adventure movie. And while I really liked this year's Cinderella, I loved Tomorrowland. It's a weird combination of chipper Disney adventure, gee-whiz futurism, urgent commentary, and Brad Bird imagination, and I just loved it.

16. Ash vs. Evil Dead I haven't gotten to see the entire season yet, but what I've seen has been fantastic. And this would probably have made my list for the pilot alone, a joyful jolt of that old Evil Dead spook-a-blast mojo (made even better, no doubt, by seeing it with a vocal Paleyfest audience).

15. Archie Comics While the excellent Afterlife with Archie and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina continued to trickle out in 2015, the biggest Archie news of the year was the relaunch of Archie and Jughead comics with new creative teams and a new creative direction. Archie came first, pairing writer Mark Waid and artist Fiona Staples, and the first issue hit the ground running, reintroducing the characters and their relationships to readers (as we join them, longtime sweethearts Archie and Betty have broken up! and rich girl Veronica Lodge is just moving to town!). Jughead, from writer Chip Zdarsky and artist Erica Henderson, takes an even more outright comedic tack than Waid's gently comic Archie. I love them both so far.

14. Roar This wasn't a new movie in 2015, but it did get a theatrical rerelease and that was one of the best times I had in a theater all year. It's hard to describe the experience of watching it, but the blurbs in this trailer do as good a job as any.

13. Bridge of Spies I wrote about this one for the SportsAlcohol.com list too.

12. The Marvel Cinematic Universe This is going to just be a blanket entry for all the Marvel stuff that I loved this year. At the movie theater, I thought Avengers: Age of Ultron was really great, sprawling and overstuffed but with an excellent handle on each of the characters. And Ant-Man was a real delight, spry and charming. On television, Agent Carter started the year off in truly wonderful fashion. I also continued to watch and enjoy Agents of SHIELD, but that show got kind of shown up by some newcomers to the Marvel TV landscape as, over on Netflix, Daredevil and Jessica Jones proved to be excellent (especially Jessica Jones). Between all of those, Marvel had a pretty solid hold on my imagination all year.

11. Star Wars This is another blanket entry to cover the entire year in Star Wars. Obviously, the big climax to all of it was the release of The Force Awakens, and I wasn't disappointed. It was really something else to get to sit in a sold-out theater and see a new adventure with the likes of Han Solo, Leia, Chewie, and it was all the more exciting to find so much to love in the new gang. But the high of that experience was supported by an entire year of Star Wars media. I love the new comics, which manage to capture a pretty Star Warsian flavor while also exploring tones, characters, and the nooks and crannies of the galaxy that the movies will never get to. I generally enjoyed the new novels, and even when the writing wasn't to my liking, the stories were generally pretty interesting. And Star Wars Rebels has quickly proven to be a worthy successor to the surprisingly good Star Wars: Clone Wars. Really, they played me expertly throughout the year.

10. Creed Wrote this up at SportsAlcohol.com too.

9. The Cost of All Things I may not have read this one if I wasn't friends with the author, but I enjoyed it as much as I did because she's a terrific writer. It's her first novel and it's got an involving mystery, compelling characters, a neat fantasy hook, and a genuinely moving conclusion.

8. The Hateful Eight While it doesn't exactly continue the rousing, crowd-pleasing example of his previous two pictures, Tarantino's latest does at least continue his streak of absolutely excellent films with a surprising amount on their mind, amidst all the double-talk and bloodshed. I've gone back and forth, and expect I will for a while yet, in considering whether this is a dark but ultimately maybe sorta hopeful movie, or whether it's a truly bleak howl of despair. In either case, I know that I love it.

7. The Leftovers I watched the first season of this show last fall, when its themes dealing with loss, mourning, and regret hit me like few things ever have. I wondered if I'd find this second season less potent removed from the immediacy of that context. It was still amazing. Beautiful, mysterious, and moving.

6. Mad Men I put this on the top of my TV ballot for SportsAlcohol.com, and wrote a little about why here.

5. Bloom County 2015 This was a genuine, and very welcome, surprise. Thrice retired from comic stripping, it truly seemed that Berkeley Breathed had said goodbye to Opus and friends when he ended the Sunday-only Opus. Then, out of nowhere, he dropped a new Bloom County strip on Facebook. It doesn't run strictly daily, and he tosses in selected reruns from the original run of the strip on occasion, but he's pretty consistently supplied five or six new strips per week. And even more exciting, they've been good! He's recaptured that old Bloom County energy in both the writing and the art, and the (basically) daily pace gives him room for the characters and stories to take a more natural shape than his Sunday-only efforts were able to. Who knows how long he'll keep it up, but I'm glad to have it again while it's here.

4. Inside Out I wrote about this for the SportsAlcohol.com list.

3. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt Even though I really should have known better (Tina Fey and Robert Carlock creating a show around Ellie Kemper should have been enough!), this show was a genuine surprise to me. Within moments of starting the first episode, I found it filling a 30 Rock sized hole in my heart that I didn't even realize was there. It was so delightful and invigorating to sink into the rhythms and pleasures of their particular style of joke writing/delivery that I was even more surprised when I found myself genuinely moved by Kimmy's speech to Titus at the end of the pilot. For all of the color and comedy, the crackerjack supporting cast, and Kemper's effervescent charm, the thing that surprised me most, and marks the show as really special, is the foundation of trauma and empowerment beneath Kimmy's journey.

2. Mad Max: Fury Road Holy cow, you guys. I already wrote some about it here, so I'll take this slot to point out this video. I described it somewhere as the perfect Reese's Cup of 2015 pop culture, and I stand by that now.

1. Hamilton If I may brag for a moment, we saw this back on February 13th at the Public Theater. Consequently, I actually got to be part of that first wave (now a tsunami) of folks who are evangelical in their love for this show. If you've seen it, or listened to the cast recording, you have an idea, but I still don't know how to express the exhilaration and joy of discovery of getting to see it before the buzz (and not even knowing much about it beyond the "musical about Alexander Hamilton" logline). While the rest of the items on this list could probably jockey with the things within a couple of adjacent spots, this is easily the number one pick for most exciting, amazing, and quickly beloved thing I experience in pop culture last year.

Top Twenty Things I’m Excited About in 2016

Godzilla: Resurgence I loved 2014′s American Godzilla movie, so don’t interpret this as a slight at all, but this summer supposedly will see the release of a real deal Japanese Godzilla movie, and I can’t wait! Leaked images of the suit design are radical and creepy, and Toho Studios seem to feel like they have something to prove. Between this film, the promised sequel to the American film, Kong: Skull Island, Nacho Vigalondo’s Colossal, and the Gamera movie suggested by this surprise announcement trailer from last year’s New York Comic Con, kaiju fans might just be in a new golden age.

Hail, Caesar! It’s a new Coen Brothers movie, it looks amazing, and it’s almost here!

The BFG Steven Spielberg adapting Roald Dahl, with a script by Melissa Mathison and Mark Rylance as the titular giant (and Bill Hader and Jemaine Clement on hand as nasty giants)? Let’s do this.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children Tim Burton’s next film. I’ll be there.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them AND Harry Potter and the Cursed Child No word yet when we can expect the next Cormoran Strike novel, but while we’re waiting, this year will give us Rowling’s return to the world of Harry Potter. These seem like wonderful and unexpected ways for her to further explore that world without wading back in for a sequel novel. I don’t know when I’ll actually get to see a production of The Cursed Child, but I’m really excited about both of these.

The X-Files Six episodes, a mix of individual cases and conspiracy stories, and episodes written and directed by some of the MVPs of the original series. My excitement has reached a level where I’m courting disappointment, but really this will all be worth it if we get one more Darin Morgan episode worthy of being mentioned next to his others.

Captain America: Civil War I’ve loved the previous two Captain America movies, and this one looks so great to me. When the trailer already gets me a little choked up, I’m ready to see how it all plays out. And that’s just one part of this year’s raft of Marvel-related anticipation, along with a new batch of Agent Carter, Doctor Strange, and more Netflix shows (I already know I like Luke Cage!). Star Trek Beyond I love this cast and crew, and I’m beyond excited to see them finally out there on their five year mission, having a brand new Trek adventure.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story I’m super interested to see how this “Star Wars Story” thing works out, and it’s even more exciting that this first one has a cool story hook, a great cast, and a filmmaker in Gareth Edwards with a fantastic eye and a real way with a set piece.

Moana Moana’s South Pacific setting, beautiful designs, and fantastic creative team (with names like Taika Waititi, Eric Goldberg, and Lin-Manuel Miranda) have me dying to see it. And I’ll throw in a mention for Zootopia and Finding Dory, both of which I’m really looking forward to and expect to enjoy.

Kubo and the Two Strings Laika are on a streak of making only movies that I adore, and the gorgeous trailer for this one suggests they might continue it this year.

The Nice Guys I love Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang so much, and holy smokes does the trailer for this one make it look like Shane Black is bringing that same magic back this summer.

The Jungle Book The trailer for this one feels a little like a dirty trick, making me pretty excited for another of these live-action remakes of a Disney animated classic (a practice that feels like a weird dead-end for them to be pursuing with such zeal). But this does look really cool to me. And really, this entry also just acts as a stand-in for the other Disney live-action fantasy/adventure films that I’m looking forward to this year (Pete's Dragon and Alice Through the Looking Glass).

Keanu AND Conner4Real These movies aren’t exactly connected, but they’re both feature films by comedy teams that I have a huge amount of faith and trust in. Keanu has Key & Peele (and Peter Atencio), and Conner4Real has the Lonely Island crew. And both will have me in the audience opening day.

Pee-Wee's Big Holiday Five years ago I got to go to the opening night of The Pee-Wee Herman Show on Broadway. I was surprised both by the depth of feeling and affection in the room (he got a standing ovation before and after the show), and by the way that he was still able to inhabit that character and make him charming. He’s obviously not a thirtysomething guy any more. He’s slightly thicker (really slightly, considering how slim those suits are) and his voice is lower, but the essentials were there, and it makes me optimistic for this long, long-awaited comeback vehicle.

Mascots It’s been too long since we’ve had a proper Christopher Guest joint, and this sounds like a world that could be a great fit. Plus, we’re pretty sure we’ll get some excellent Fred Willard rambling, right? The Get Down Before I saw the trailer for this thing, I was interested by both the subject matter and the Baz Luhrmann of it, but I wasn’t sure how the two would actually fit together. After seeing the trailer, I was just desperate to see the rest of it.

The Witch This just really looks like my jam, and the positive buzz out of festival screenings last year makes it sound like it could be special.

[nathanielwharton]

Ode to Dhosey

Tumblr is the place people go to on the internet to dump their feelings, right? I don't actually know if they mean these kinds of feelings, but it's got to be good for something. This is where I'm at right now. Forgive me if this gets maudlin.

Friday morning, I found out my friend Dan Hosey is dead. I woke up to a text message from Travis Birdwell asking me to call him, and after waiting until I knew he was awake back in Arizona, I did. He told me that Dan had been found in his apartment on Thursday morning, and that the word had reached him via the Nies brothers.

I'm confident that I'm not alone among the people who knew and loved Dan in saying that it's been really difficult to work through this news. It's frustrating being so far away and finding myself with nothing to really do to help. I've been thinking a lot about his sisters, Colleen & Kim, and his mother, Janet, and all of our friends who are surely going through similar waves of shock, confusion, sadness, and regret. There's been weird physical stuff I wouldn't have anticipated. My cheeks have felt hot for much of the last couple of days. And my face has often felt tired and sore and achy. And while talking I'll occasionally feel a frog in my throat (which, fair enough, seems appropriate when talking about Dan).

Dan was smart. All of his friends and teachers knew it (in fact I'm sure it could be a source of frustration for his teachers to know that he was a such a smart guy with such a messy, disorganized backpack). I first really spent any time with him when I was in sixth grade and the school district sent a couple of us over to the junior high for a first-period seventh grade math class. There were only four of us (me, my friend Bryan Brown, Dan, and his sister Colleen), and Dan was only a fifth grader. It was really intimidating, and I wasn't really the outgoing fast-friends type, but we ended up sorta sticking together by default. Despite my wariness about those siblings from another school (and Colleen later told me that they didn't like me at first anyway because I came off as stuck up), it's really just lucky for me that we spent the next three years together anyway, out of our element, for an hour or two each day (once we ended up in the same junior high, we'd go to the high school for math and then walk back to the junior high together). It was basically inevitable that we'd be friends, and I'm so grateful we did.

Dan was funny. I don't just mean that he had a good sense of humor or a sharp wit, though he did have both. That quick intelligence of his meant that he was quick to get any joke, and he could wield sarcasm and silliness with equal aplomb (and catching snatches of The Simpsons marathon this week, I've realized how many Simpsons quotes I think of first as Dan's rendition; I keep hearing Dan's voice doing Homer's rendition of "Little Spanish Flea"). And of the many ridiculous and hilarious noises he would make, his laugh was one of the best. But when I say he was funny I really mean that he was one of the most naturally fun and funny people I've ever met. You'd still take him seriously because of his obvious intelligence, but he was also just endlessly, surprisingly hilarious. His whole manner was just funny. He had a weird spastic grace, which would mean that he was just as likely to tumble flailing off of a chair (or pin his head to the ground under a backpack) as he was to perfectly execute some marching band maneuver or snag some impossible racquetball return (maybe still just before running headlong into a wall). All of us still tell Dan stories, to each other and to anybody else who will listen. I've definitely regaled kids that I've babysat with tales of Dan's exploits (like the time he claimed to be "quality in its purest form" immediately before walking into a door, or when he was kicked out of math class for farting too much, or when he accidentally switched seats mid-ride on Space Mountain at Disneyland).

Dan was a good trombone player. I know I told him this, but I had really wanted to play the trombone when we first were presented with the option of learning an instrument in elementary school. I couldn't get a sound out of the mouthpiece, so I ended up playing saxophone as a last resort. Consequently, I always admired Dan for managing to actually play the trombone, and I was proud to be friends with the best trombone player in school.

Dan made weird noises. If you ever watched 30 Rock and started using "blerg" in everyday life, then you have a taste of what it was like being Dan's friend. He was full of nonsense interjections. Spend enough time around him and you'd start accidentally slipping the occasional blerg, blarg, yerg, nyarg, or shmerf into your own speech (though Dan was probably the only one who could yelp out an unselfconscious "shmerfdeboogily").

Dan was a good friend. He was loyal, kind, sweet, and always up for something fun (unless you called when he was sleeping, in which case the fun was the groggy-Dan phone call punctuated by what felt like minutes of silence). I have a brother that I really love and am grateful for, but Dan truly felt like another brother. We'd squabble and roughhouse and tease each other, but I don't remember ever having any serious fights or disagreements. I loved him, and I was proud of him (he called me at one of my first jobs out of college and asked me to be a reference for an application he was filling out; I'd never felt more honored). In high school, we came up with this semi-elaborate choreographed thing that involved catching each other's punches and kicks. Part fake fight, part secret handshake, part nerd dance (there was a spin in there). It was the kind of thing two pretty dorky teenage boys would do. And I know it's kind of silly, because we hadn't done it in at least ten years, but I cried when I realized he was the only other person who knew his half of it, and he's gone now.

I didn't see him very much in the last eight-ish years. My back injury meant a cessation of our regular racquetball games when I was back in Arizona, and we really just saw each other once every year or two. Ryan and I spent the day at the zoo with him and I heard about his new job as an EMT, including driving the ambulance (he said the most embarrassing thing so far was to blow through an intersection with lights and sirens going and then realizing you should have turned, necessitating a hasty u-turn while all those stopped cars at the intersection looked on waiting for you; "EVERYbody does it, I've just done it a few more times..."). I was back in town less often, and some years I would call and try to cajole him into meeting for mini-golf or bowling and get the familiar "...THINKING" response before finding out he was busy. The last time I saw him was over two and a half years ago, but it was such a perfect Dhosey visit.

He met me, Travis, and Matt Sutton for dinner in Mesa. Right off, Travis and I were chatting in the parking lot when Dan pulled in, driving a shiny new yellow car (I don't know from cars and I was still impressed at how nice a car he was driving). I had seen Colleen a few days before and heard that Dan had a new car, but I didn't know it would be this nice. Turns out, of course, that he'd already had an accident with his new car and this was the spectacularly nice loaner the repair place had given him. ("My car's nice," he insisted. "Just not THAT nice.") The rest of the evening he was in fine form. Here's the report I posted on Twitter for Jesse & Marisa back in New York:

That evening we learned that he had a new job and a new apartment. He looked good, and he seemed to be doing well. I went home happy for my friend.

When we were in high school, Dan, Ryan and I would joke about looking forward to having houses three in a row and sitting out front as old men together. As we ended up living in separate states and saw each other less often, that seemed obviously unlikely to happen, but I really did still look forward to getting to sit down together decades from now, three old men. When I was looking for the other photos in this post, I found this picture.

I think I just spotted it on the internet a long time ago and saved it. I had titled the file "Dan in 20 Years," and I've saved it, transferring it from computer to computer, hard drive to hard drive, for the last fifteen years.

So, Dan, when old man Ryan and I sit down together, we'll still know what you would have looked like then.

But we'll sure miss you.

[nathanielwharton]

red jumpsuit jason sudeikis forever

[nathanielwharton]

Let’s just talk about Wednesday’s perfect “not giving a fuck” attitude because it’s marvelous.

[nathanielwharton]

Jesse has seen all of Adam Sandler's movies (the real Sandler movies...the Happy Madison-style Sandler movies), and he's ranked them all for us.

You might be surprised by how high Jack & Jill ranks.

(Spoiler: It's not last!)

[nathanielwharton]

What it says on the label! I wrote it!

An analysis of the themes of I, Frankenstein and an appreciation of how those gargoyles turn into light beams.

Our coverage of I, Frankenstein continues well after the rest of the media. This time, a deep look at the connections (tenuous and otherwise) this film has to Mary Shelly’s novel. There’s also some asides about how gargoyles die and the naming conventions of both the lead character (protagonist feels incorrect in this case) and the movie itself.