Okay, wow, 2012 is done -- did everybody have fun? Not just in that last night where we saw Ryan Seacrest ceremoniously becoming the welcome host-husk to Dick Clark's frozen brain so that he may live for another century. No, I'm sure everybody's New Year's Eve was enjoyable. Mine was. I saw our bar's drunk owner make a three minute speech about the Fiscal Cliff to some light laughter and some good natured heckling. Then some wide-lipped woman started shouting about being a well-informed Republican, and she had to leave with her weird prehensile tail between her legs a few minutes before the ball dropped.
I'm talking like the entire year as a whole. Given that we talk about conversable, popular materials here, for we are those who are literate in culture, this year, we combined the best things in entertainment into one list. Last year, there was enough juice to talk about the best games and the best TV characters in their own lists, but this year, no such luck. But we must compare. Partly because it's fun to compare pineapples to bananas. Partly because 2012 was a light year in massive, cultural moments.
Sure, we had elections, and the Olympics, and The Avengers made two killion dollars, and rightly so, but this was a year of people, and their entertainment existing inside of spheres with lessened overlap with others. Without further adieu:
The Top 9 List Of Best Moments In Entertainment In 2012
9: The World Did Not End On December 21, 2012.
Am I the only one psyched about this? Yes, it was unlikely that a mad ocelot god would descend from an invisible mountain in the Central America, but, seriously, thank God we're passed this shit. No Mayan Apocalypse! Let's be optimistic. If the world had ended, well, then there would never be an iPhone 6 (NOTE: I do not own an iPhone (or an iPad (but I need to buy a new throw rug before I do (not, like, Persian, but something plush)))). If the world had ended, you wouldn't get to buy a puppy later this year. You wouldn't get to get in a snowball fight and drink green tea. <sarcasm>You wouldn't get to watch the NFL draft.</sarcasm> You wouldn't get to sleep late on Sundays with your significant other. You won't ever eat good cheesecake again. You wouldn't get to finish that novel you've been working on (hah!). You wouldn't ever get to learn how to do backflips. You wouldn't get to see Avengers 2. It's three years away, but still!
8: The Avengers Was Great, And Marked The End Of Glum, Lone Wolf Heroes, And Thank God For That, Because, I Mean, Really!
As I've mentioned in the review of Skyfall, the end of the lone wolf is upon us, an era originally marked, and appropriately closed, with the arrival of a Batman movie. Credit due to Christopher Nolan for giving us the superhero we needed during the Bush administration. It's over, though. We need color and magic hammers now. We need bigger than big. Joss Whedon basically made Summer Movie: The Movie. All your best friends -- and a few you haven't really talked to that much, but seem like decent guys, and I heard Captain America was a lot better movie than you would really expect it to be -- are all going to a lasers and space-whales party, and it's being DJ'd by the P. Diddy of sci-fi. Hey, shit, I'd hit up that party. I wouldn't even charge my phone up beforehand in anticiaption of wanting to play TNNS in lieu of having to talk to people. It was a magnificent team-up. It was a genre tear-down. It was a put-aside-your differences story and work together story. Damn, if we don't need that in the world right now.
7: Journey Came Out On PS3, Making Everybody Piss Joyful Tear-Bullets Out Of Their Eyes.
++ SPOILERS ++ Journey takes about 2 hours to complete, which is a little longer than it takes to watch Happy Gilmore but a lot shorter than it takes to read Paradise Lost. Like the Samuel L. Jackson film Snakes on a Plane, it is a game about its title. You land in a desert, brought there by a comet. You walk up a hill. You see a mountain in the distance. The mountain looks special. The word "Journey" displays on your screen. What follows is a march through inexplicable beauty, floating, and a monomaniacal devotion to reaching the mountain you saw in the beginning. You'll eventually die. Maybe a few times. Not as a function of this being a video game, but as a function of what occurs on the journey.
Journey's closing flight sequence and accompanying music is the single best moment in games for 2012. Yes, I damn near cried at sheer bewilderment. Play it with headphones.
6: The Cackling, Meta-Brilliance Of The Cabin In The Woods Means I'll Never Need To Watch Another Horror Movie Again.
Because my brain is a goddamn sonuva bitch that won't let me get a moment's rest, I'm often deconstructing things, and DAG-GUMMIT, Joss Whedon (Again? Okay.) and Drew Goddard's movie does deconstruction and meta to the n'th degree. If you haven't seen this movie and like comedies, and at its core, its a comedy, see it. Learn as little about it as possible, and just NetFlix that shit. Then, having seen it, you'll never need to watch a horror movie again. ++ SPOILERS++ Know this about The Cabin In The Woods (the first "The" in the title is sometimes a silent "The"): it is the horrific deconstruction of the genre we always needed. Its closest cousin is the original Scream, but Scream didn't blow up the world at the end, dropping the mic like a perfunctory bukkake to anybody that thought a film with scientists being killed by unicorns and mermen could end any other way.
5: The Last Story Came Out On The Wii.
This is Final Fantasy: The Movie: The Videogame. Follow the logic? If Final Fantasy 1 had been made, and then none of the others had, and time had proceeded, and then in 2010, the same guy had decided to make Final Fantasy 2, this would be that game. It's the adventure you imagined in your mind when you were playing 8-bit Nintendo games that didn't have enough pixels to show much more than a slashing sword and four-letter names for characters. It's a boy's childish imagination given form with all the beguiling panache we all want in a save-the-princess / save-the-world adventure, which we detailed at exhaustive length in our earlier review.
4: The 2nd Law, Muse's New Album, Caused My Friends And I To Argue About Dubstep And Thermodynamics At My Buddy's Girlfriend's Former Roommate's House Warming Party.
The album, was, well, it was okay. It gets better with a few listens, and the opening track sounds like a Bond theme, which is spectacular. Lyrically, it could use work, and there are a bunch of break-up tracks mixed in with the ones about energy-dependence, so make sense of that, if you can. However, it did spawn an blue-hot discussion between my friends and I about the laws of thermodynamics at my buddy's girlfriend's former roommate's house warming party. Because of the voice over on that one dub-steppy track near the end of the disc. What? Don't be threatened by the search for truth.
3: Quentin Tarantino Made Django Unchained, The Movie He Had Probably Wanted To Make All Along.
In Kill Bill and Inglourious Basterds, it was obvious how much Tarantino just wanted to make an 'effing western. All the slow-boil intensity. The vignette-style scenes. The magnificent, spontaneous, violence that he's known for. The slamming zoom-ins. The inhumanly-evil villains (although in Django's case, historically-accurate). In his other movies, it was goofy, and quaint, and effective. In Django, it's exactly how it should be. He would be hard-pressed to top this. It all suited Tarantino so well, my hope is that he has one or two more good movies in him, and then he'll just step aside, which has confessed he's interested in doing.
2: XCOM: Enemy Unknown Made Me Fear For The Life Of Ann "The Wall" Veal, And Her Laser Shotgun.
XCOM has more candelabra-toting, step-by-step, "ohfuckohfuck" moments than a haunted house made of newspapers. The Lord taketh away in the turn-based, you versus aliens turn-based strategy game where you can name your characters after funny things, as I've inferred. There is no reloading in Ironman mode. Nobody can save your characters from death after they die. Only you can save them from death before they die.
Which brings us to the big winner!
1: There Was No Single Greatest Thing This Year.
At least not worth arguing about or listing on this here Internet. Too much happened, specifically to you, and specifically to me, to put something arbitrary at the top of the list. I've laughed too hard at too many things that few too people would find relevant or funny. You're probably the same way. So the single greatest thing in entertainment this year was the thing that made you laugh the most.
-- @Alex Crumb (originally published 1/2/13)
