2024 Oaties

2025-01-02T06:23:31Z

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^[1]. 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 their way but also somehow compromised, except for F for Fake, which is perfect). But the director that really crystallized the most for me was Sidney Lumet. I only watched two of his films this year, Fail Safe and The Anderson Tapes, but they got me to look back on the incredible quality and the sheer variety of everything else he's done and realize that he's quietly become sort of a touchstone director for me across many decades and genres.

Film Of 2024: I Saw the TV Glow

The decision between this and Challengers was the toughest I've faced since 2019. Both films are, on the surface, genre pieces that are intense to the point of near absurdity. Both rotate around messy interpersonal relationships between damaged people who still strive in their flawed ways to build something real with the people around them. Both are at their roots deeply grounded in queer experiences while also refusing to allow that queerness to be a constraint. They seek to draw the lines between the experience of being queer and the experience of existing in a world that demands rigidity along all lines.

Both films mean the world to me. Challengers made me whoop and holler, and I Saw the TV Glow made me weep. I need art to give me both of these experiences like I need air to breathe.

But I put myself to the task of choosing just one because such a choice crystallizes my understanding of what films mean to me. And my choice—at least this year—is I Saw the TV Glow because I realized one of the things I value about it is its specificity. Both films speak to experiences that resonate deeply within me, but Challengers I think hits that note for a broader swath of audiences while the knife point of I Saw the TV Glow's most cutting points land for fewer people.

After all, this isn't my pick for the best film of 2024. I don't know what that is and I don't care. This is the defining film of 2024 for me personally, and hitting me personally so precisely gives I Saw the TV Glow a narrow edge.

Films of the Years

I made a point during this year of trying to watch more older movies to cover gaps where I didn't yet have five movies. While I haven't yet managed to extend my streak of contiguous years—I've still only seen four films from 1970, up from three last year—I did add 1931 (Study No. 8), 1944 (Laura), 1948 (The Red Shoes), 1949 (Begone Dull Care), 1950 (Sunset Boulevard), 1951 (The Lavender Hill Mob), 1953 (Roman Holiday), 1957 (12 Angry Men), 1959 (Some Like It Hot), and 1960 (The Bad Sleep Well) to the list.

New winners I saw this year:

1958: Touch of Evil replaces A Movie. I love experimental short films, but A Movie is not among my favorites and Touch of Evil for its flaws gives me a lot more to chew on.
1967: Le Samouraï replaces PlayTime. Both of these films are flawless gems of the form and choosing between them broke my heart. Not for the last time this year, I ended up making the decision as much because I remembered what was magnificent about Le Samouraï better at the time as anything. New years resolution: rewatch PlayTime with at least one person.
1972: The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant replaces Solaris. Solaris, while magnificent, is solidly among the lesser Tarkovskys, while Bitter Tears is an incredible psychodrama and tour de force of performance from Carstensen and Hermann especially.
1979: Alien^[2] replaces Stalker. It may seem like a rough year for ol' Andrei, but he's still got three films on the list so who's he to complain. Alien edges this one out through the absolute precision of its depiction of its world.
1994: Chungking Express replaces Four Weddings and a Funeral. When it comes down to romcom versus romcom, I am honor-bound to pick the one that is more beautiful and poetic.
2000: State and Main replaces Songs from the Second Floor. Both of these films are very funny, but State and Main is genuinely a great time while Songs from the Second Floor is more along the lines of darkly amusing. Girls, as the poet said, just wanna have fun.
2005: Summer Time Machine Blues replaces Imagine Me & You. As much of a mark as I am for the British rom-com format, I have to admit that the craft that goes into making a compelling and fun time travel story is way more impressive.
2020: The Father replaces The History of the Seattle Mariners. Honestly I'm not sure the latter really counted in the first place given that it was serialized. Although The Father is quite good, it's not quite on the same tier as some of the other films on this list. But then, 2020 was a weird year all around.

Games

I didn't play a lot of games this year, but I did play games a lot. Between Dark Souls III Archipelago runs, a Dark Souls SL1 run, and the Elden Ring DLC I continued to dump an incredible amount of time into From Software's oeuvre, and that's without counting the time I spent watching friends play. As always, Liz and I put a solid chunk of time into Civilization VI, but more than that the release of Against the Storm captivated us as it quickly hurtled itself into the hundo club^[3]. Naturally, I also spent some time captivated by Balatro, although not as much as some.

The real surprise star of this year, though, showed up a little late to the party. It was, of course,

Game of the Year: UFO 50

I don't want to take the wind out of the sails of the review I'll write for this game once I finish it, some three hundred or so hours after starting, so I'll keep this brief. I came to UFO 50 a few months after it launched. I'd heard friends, mostly arcade and retro enthusiasts at first, singing its praises for a while, so I decided to check it out on the assumption that I'd find a handful of its 50 games entertaining enough to justify a few hours of play.

I was not prepared for how good this game actually was.

I have, at time of writing, played 40 of these games, beaten 35 of them, and cherried^[4] 31 of those. There are only three games that I would say I don't like; the vast majority I consider good to excellent. Some of them are genuinely brilliant concepts that could easily hold up a full ten-hour game in their own right; some of those even are full ten-hour games in their own right. The amount of genius shoved into this pack is astounding.

But the real heart of why UFO 50 is my game of the year is the same reason I chose Elden Ring in 2022: the people I play it with. My little discord has a dozen or so people all playing, dipping into different games in different orders, swapping hints and strategies and cheering each other on. Everyone has different games they love, and I've lost count of the number of times I considered a game not worth attempting whether from difficulty or from frustration, only to have someone who loved it come guide me all the way to a cherry. It is a microcosm of what I imagine the experience of going to an arcade with a crowd of friends must have been like in its heyday, and that's incredibly precious to me.

Games of the Years

It's a lot tougher to get new years onto the games list than films, just because of how much longer it takes to seriously play a video game. Nevertheless, the original Populous made my fifth game for 1989, allowing me to add Super Mario Land (a game I frankly don't feel that strongly about) to the end of the list.

New winners I played this year:

2001: Silent Hill 2 narrowly beats out Metal Gear Solid 2. Both obviously excellent games, I can't argue that MGS2 isn't more important, but I personally value how effective SH2 is as a horror story—a genre that I think gets done a huge disservice by video games more often than not. I think 2 is also my least favorite mainline Metal Gear Solid, albeit only because of the sterling competition.
2017: Hollow Knight displaces Night in the Woods. This is one where recency bias could definitely be a factor; I haven't replayed Night in the Woods since it came out, and I still have extremely fond memories of its writing and bittersweet mood. But Hollow Knight brings the mood in spades as well, on top of an extremely compelling mechanical core and the experience of playing it through with a friend.

There are a few additional rules. I only list media from a year where I've actually seen or played five or more films or games, respectively. Despite sometimes appearing on Letterboxd, television shows or episodes, miniseries, and filmed stage productions are not eligible for the list. Games are placed based on their initial release year, even if they're ports, remasters, expansions, DLC, or episodic releases—unless they're so transformative as to be functionally different games, like Resident Evil 2 (2019). ↩︎
Technically I had seen Alien before this, but it really didn't click with me until this viewing so I'm counting it as a film I saw this year anyway. ↩︎
Shouts out to Aura for inspiring me to assemble this list. ↩︎
A cherry is the in-game representation of not just beating a game, but mastering its systems so well that you can achieve another, tougher goal on top of mere victory. A cherried game's disk appears shiny and red on the main screen. ↩︎