With 2024
truly over
and finding myself with the day off work, I want to take the
time to write a retrospective of the media I enjoyed over the
past year. I like "best of the year" decisions as a driving
force for this sort of retrospective not necessarily because
it matters all that much what gets chosen, but because putting
disparate works of art that I like for very different reasons
up against one another inspires me to focus on what
specifically I value about each of them and how I prioritize
my values.
In addition to picking favorites, I'm going to post my updated
of-the-year lists for both films and games. These are living
lists I've been curating for years in which I choose my
favorite example of the medium for each year. This helps mitigate the problem that I don't ever see or
play everything in a given year and so my "best of the year"
at the time is never going to be fully-informed, and it gives
me a better perspective into years long past as I explore what
they have to offer. Historically, I've updated these lists
throughout the year as I watch particularly good films, but
for most of this year I've been saving the updates to do right
now. It's a fun way to look back on what the year has brought
to my doorstep and how my tastes have changed.
Film
I don't have concrete numbers prior to the first full year I
was using Letterboxd, 2019, but I'm pretty confident 2024 was
my lifetime high-water-mark for most films watched (so far)
with fully 251 films under my belt. 2019 was my previous high
point, in a year during which I was walking to
Scarecrow every week
and really starting to ramp up my independent theater
attendance with
Christa
and
Liz. The pandemic brought that all crashing down. In 2020, I
only watched 139 films; in 2021 and 2022 I didn't even hit a
hundred.
Part of this was just where my attention was at. I was more
focused on video games in those years for my leisure activity,
and in 2022 in particular I got deep into helping out with the
Elden Ring wiki. But I missed film, and it felt like
something else the pandemic—and the
total lack of mitigating behavior
on the part of the general public—had taken from me. Starting
to dig back into film last year and going so deep this year
has been a healing experience, especially since so many of the
films I've seen have been with dear friends and a few have
even been in the theater (with a heavy-duty mask on, of
course).
There are a few focuses of my film watching this year. The
director I watched the most of was Orson Welles (Othello,
F for Fake
for the third time,
The Lady from Shanghai, and
Touch of Evil—almost all films that are brilliant in…
