Connections (The Year in Review 2023)

Three years after "lockdown" and "social distancing" became household terms, 2023's best pop culture offerings all contemplated what it means to connect with others - or reconnect, as the case may be. Whether it's the rekindled spark of long-forgotten love, or the incipient bond between two survivors thrust together at the end of all things, the best film, television, and video games of the year all found ways to interrogate the (fraught, complex, beautiful, tragic) ways we have learned to relate to, and rely upon, those around us.

FILM

The filmmaking debut of Markham’s Celine Song, PAST LIVES is an intelligent, insightful rumination on the human condition. What does it mean to have been close to someone, only to have been separated by time and distance? What happens when there’s an opportunity to reconnect? The film's refusal to provide easy answers, and its keen insight on the effects our actions have on others - in this case, the central trio of playwright Nora (Greta Lee), her childhood crush Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), and Nora's husband Arthur (John Magaro, who also starred in my favourite film of 2020) - makes for one of the most honest and accurate portrayals of relationships in recent memory.

There are not, in fact, eight mountains in THE EIGHT MOUNTAINS (LE OTTO MONTAGNE), but there is a lot of striking footage of cold, windswept hills and valleys in this tale of the lifelong (if halting, habitually interrupted) friendship between Pietro (played by, in order, Lupo Barbiero, Andrea Palma, and Luca Marinelli) and Bruno (Cristiano Sassella, Francesco Palombelli, Alessandro Borghi), whose chance encounter during a childhood vacation - one is a country boy, the other a city slicker - establishes an unexpected bond that persists across decades. Shades of Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend are unmistakeable.

Master filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan returns with another low-key masterpiece in ABOUT DRY GRASSES (KURU OTLAR ÜSTÜNE), which follows the trials and tribulations of one of cinema's least likeable protagonists, the solipsistic, cynical teacher Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu), who has been deployed to a remote, backwater village in frigid Eastern Turkey. As the film gets underway, Samet's ill-advised, though not precisely improper, favouritism of a female student (Ece Bağcı) begets a professional and personal crisis once he is accused of serious misconduct. As much about the consequences of self-serving behaviour as it is about the ways we justify ourselves to others - in this case, Samet's friend/roommate Kenan (Musab Ekici) and potential love interest Nuray (a striking Merve Dizdar) - the film plays out like a forgotten Dostoevsky story, even as it centers on very modern problems and sensibilities.

TV

In nearly every conceivable way - writing, acting, visuals - THE LAST OF US is an improvement over the 2013 video game from which it is adapted. Pedro Pascal’s Joel and Bella Ramsey’s Ellie are the father-daughter combo we didn’t know we needed, and the world they inhabit - a near-future wasteland where the cordyceps fungus has evolved to infect human brains, leading to societal collapse - is the setting for the most human zombie story ever told. The episode three side-story "Long, Long Time", lovingly referred to by fans as the ballad of Bill and Frank, is one of the finest hours of television.

It takes a couple episodes before SCOTT PILGRIM TAKES OFF well, takes off, but once it does, this maddeningly offbeat reimagining of the beloved Toronto-set comic book/film more than proves its worth. Reuniting the entire cast of Edgar Wright’s 2010 cult classic film - with a few fun cameos thrown in for good measure - the Netflix anime is relentlessly silly (vegan powers!), very funny, and so extremely self-aware that it almost reaches the point of self-parody, before circling all the way back around again into something altogether weirder. More self-indulgent cartoon remakes of cult Canadian classics please!

The gloriously goofy CUNK ON EARTH is what happens when you take the lunatic brilliance of Monty Python, pair it with the faux-gonzo journalism of The Daily Show or Sacha Baron Cohen, and wrap the whole thing up in an Attenborough/Schamaesque mockumentary anchored by the perfect deadpan delivery of comedian Diane Morgan as the title character, reporter/interviewer Philomena Cunk. The short-lived series (all six half-hour episodes are available on Netflix) has its hits and misses, but standout moments - Cunk's po-faced pronouncement that "Europe wasn't the only country having a history back then"; Cunk weeping mid-interview when she suddenly realizes that nuclear weapons remain an existential threat - will have you laughing out loud in spite of yourself.

GAMING

The only thing missing from Insomniac's SPIDER-MAN 2 (PS5) is a Stan Lee cameo, and then only because the legendary Stan the Man passed away a couple years before it went into development. An everything-but-the-kitchen-sink video game romp that stars not one but two Spiders-Man, this latest and greatest superhero game ably balances humour with tragedy, impeccable gameplay with amazing graphics (including a beautifully rendered New York City), and fantastic performances with a story that serves its performers. That said, the core of Spider-Man 2 is its relationships - between classic Spider-Man Peter Parker and newbie Miles Morales of Spider-Verse fame, between Miles and his mom, between Peter and Mary-Jane, and so on - making the personal stakes - how one friend reacts to another's betrayal, the clashes between children and their parents - just as compelling as the globe-spanning, world-ending stakes that Marvel is known for.

There are better Mario games - Super Mario 64 remains a perennial classic - and better multiplayer Mario games - I remain partial to the original Mario Party - but for a contemporary, easy-to-pick-up, hard-to-put-down party jam, few games compare with SUPER MARIO BROS. WONDER (Switch), the four-player(!) side-scrolling romp which once again showcases Nintendo at the top of its game. Whether galumphing across a classic 2.5D stage as Elephant Luigi, or blasting across one of the game's deviously intricate expert challenges, it's never anything less than a joy to play.

It's been a while since the VR space had a truly killer app, but KAYAK VR: MIRAGE (PSVR2/PS5) is certainly among the best of the current crop of VR "non-games" (a category which also includes The Line, Nature Treks, and the PSVR Shark Attack). No more and no less than a virtual kayaking simulator, Mirage combines the relaxation of a nature tour with the real-world thrills - a whale breaching, penguins wobbling along an ice floe, the discovery of a hidden jungle river - you'd normally travel a great distance to (maybe) be lucky enough to encounter.

AWKWARD CANUCK AWARD, 2023 EDITION

Every year, I save the final spot on this list for a Canadian or Canadian-adjacent project that stood out amongst the latest crop of maple-blooded talent. This year, I found myself uncannily, inescapably drawn towards THE CURSE, product of the comically depraved mind of Nathan Fielder, who graduated from one of Canada's top business schools with really good grades.

For the uninitiated - hoo boy, the uninitiated may want to pass this one up, let's be honest here - Fielder has carved out a very specific, darkly comic persona over the past decade or so, first as an uncomfortably weird correspondent on This Hour Has 22 Minutes, then as the even more uncomfortably weird host of faux-reality show Nathan For You, which saw him, among other things, open a viral "Dumb Starbucks" store in Los Angeles. (Last year's The Rehearsal, another faux-reality series featurning an even odder version of the Fielder persona, was a bit of a misfire, a bit to cruel for my liking though it had its moments.)

All of which brings us to vantablack comedy The Curse, co-produced, because of course it is, by the Safdie Brothers of Uncut Gems fame. This painfully uncomfortable series - the first purely fictional work in Fielder's oeuvre - stars Fielder and Emma Stone as husband-wife reality TV hosts Asher and Whitney, whose "Fliplanthropy" - god, what a name - is a misguided, hilariously inept effort to make gentrification "woke". Watching Stone's Whitney and Fielder's Asher break down in very different ways - Whitney all smiles and buzzwords even as she becomes increasingly desperate in her bid to please all parties at all times; Asher's deranged obsession with a family he is convinced has placed a curse on him - results in some of the most excruciatingly funny viewing of the year. (Benny Safdie is also excellent in a supporting role as scumbag TV producer Dougie.)

It's hard to pick a favourite moment, but Fielder, who has always had a knack for playing a person only pretending to be human, probably has the year's funniest scene, during the closing moments of the fourth episode. Having been forcibly enrolled in an improv class by his wife so he can "learn to be relatable", Asher fails a simple improv game when, in a moment of panic, he emits a stream of hysterical nonsense. Intending to come off as whacky, he instead looks as if he's just been possessed by a particularly awkward (and possibly sarcastic?) demon. It's bizarre, horrible, cringe-worthy television, and unlike anything else out there.

RIP Ian Tyson

via CBC:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/ian-tyson-dead-at-89-1.6699778

Four strong winds that blow lonely
Seven seas that run high
All those things that don't change come what may
But our good times are all gone
And I'm bound for movin' on
I'll look for you if I'm ever back this way

Think I'll go out to Alberta
Weather's good there in the fall
I got some friends that I can go to workin' for
Still I wish you'd change your mind
If I asked you one more time
But we've been through that a hundred times or more

Four strong winds that blow lonely
Seven seas that run high
All those things that don't change come what may
But our good times are all gone
And I'm bound for movin' on
I'll look for you if I'm ever back this way

If I get there before the snow flies
And if things are goin' good
You could meet me if I sent you down the fare
But by then it would be winter
There ain't too much for you to do
And those winds sure can blow cold way out there

Four strong winds that blow lonely
Seven seas that run high
All those things that don't change come what may
But our good times are all gone
And I'm bound for movin' on
I'll look for you if I'm ever back this way

This Age of Innocence (The Year in Review 2022)

I have always had a soft spot for films about children, whether it be those films which simply allow kids to be kids (François Truffaut's Small Change, Jean Vigo's Zéro de conduit), or those in which children are forced, through circumstance, to confront harsh "adult" truths (Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander, again Truffaut with The 400 Blows). This year, I find myself once more drawn to stories of childhood or the childlike; stories of innocence celebrated, lost, and in some cases regained. From a community of uneducated yet deeply intuitive women to the world's most ingenuous shell, here are my picks for the best* of 2022.

(*As a reminder, I only ever award new creations. So even though it pains me to exclude this year's best seven hours of television, The White Lotus: Sicily, I am obliged to do so on the basis that it's technically a season two. That said, #teamharper and #teamluciamia all the way.)

FILM

Sarah Polley's WOMEN TALKING proves that it's still possible to make mature films for mature audiences. Polley's film, which follows a group of girls and women in a tightly-knit religious community as they reckon with relevations of systemic sexual abuse, is intellectually rigorous, religiously fraught, and informed by a profound humanism. Polley, working from the novel by Miriam Toews, offers a sympathetic, nuanced portrayal of a group - illiterate, sheltered, largely ignorant of the outside world - grappling with a crime of almost unimaginable evil. The wonderful ensemble cast, including standout performances from child actors easily holding their own against big names like Jessie Buckley and Claire Foy, makes the most of Polley's screenplay, which wisely refrains from the sort of dramatic (and exploitative) recreations of the acts of violence that form the background to this difficult story. Polley starred in the greatest Canadian film of the 20th century; she may well have directed the greatest of the 21st.

Speaking of great directors, Céline Sciamma's PETITE MAMAN owes more than its fair share to fellow Frenchman François Truffaut. Sciamma's slim, almost fairy tale-like feature (it runs all of 72 minutes, or, if you prefer, 0.4 Fabelmans) follows a young girl (Joséphine Sanz), in mourning after the passing of her grandmother, encountering another girl the same age (Gabrielle Sanz) who looks suspiciously familiar and who lives in an even more suspiciously familiar house. To say more would be to spoil the delightful, intriguing atmosphere. Truffaut homages direct - a callback to the hilarious breakfast scene in Small Change - and indirect - a keen insight into how children think, and the grace to allow them to behave naturally - make this one of the best on-screen depictions of childhood yet.

Dean Fleischer-Camp's stop-motion mockumentary MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES ON is not, strictly speaking, a film about childhood - despite Marcel's comically high-pitched voice (by actress Jenny Slate), the titular anthropomorphic shell remains of indeteterminate age. Nevertheless, it is a story about a good-hearted, childlike, and hopelessly naïve figure who just wants to enjoy his small-scale life, which involves a pet ball of lint, a bed made out of a slice of bread, and the occasional misadventure by candy-wrapper parachute. When Marcel's googly eyed family goes missing, thoughtlessly packed into a suitcase by one of those big humans lumbering around the house, it sends Marcel on a teeny tiny and altogether heartwarming adventure to track them down. 2022 doesn't deserve a film this innocent.

TV

The exceedingly weird SEVERANCE - a show in which Christopher Walken plays one of the more normal characters - is far and away the best new series of 2022. Alternatingly blackly funny and spine-tinglingly mysterious, it follows a group of individuals who have undergone an operation that effectively splits them into two personalities, each with no memories of the experiences of the other. At the office, these "Severed", including Walken, the always-excellent Adam Scott, and Britt Lower, are entirely ignorant of their outside lives - they cannot remember where they live, who they love, anything at all. Outside, these same people go about their lives, incapable of remembering what goes on during a day at work (or even whether their "other half" likes the job they've consigned themselves to). Why someone would choose to make that split, and what lengths they might go to to undo it, are the central questions in a series that offers up some tantalizing answers, while teasing several more mysteries to unravel in the upcoming Season 2.

As the restaurant industry faces a long-overdue reckoning with toxic work conditions, new dramedy THE BEAR offers an intelligent, honest, and even funny portrayal of the lives of food and hospitality workers. The story - a former Michelin-star chef (Jeremy Allen White) returns home to take over the family sandwich shop following the suicide of his older brother (Jon Bernthal, in flashbacks) - dovetails nicely with broader conversations about mental health, addictions, and (this being the restaurant industry) male egocentrism. Despite the heady subject matter and characters who are not always easy to like - though sometimes they are very easy to sympathize with - it manages to have some wonderful comedic moments while remaining remarkably kind-hearted.  

GAMING

The latest adventure for the cutest little pink puff to ever waddle, KIRBY AND THE FORGOTTEN LAND is the best Switch game of 2022, and a reminder of the innocent, kid-friendly and yet universally welcoming design ethos embodied by Nintendo. While it can't hold a candle to that one game where Kirby is literally a ball of yarn, it's a worthy addition to the gosh-darn adorablest canon of family-friendly co-operative video games.

It might be a stretch to call a Downloadable Content pack one of the best games of the year, but Canada's own CUPHEAD: THE DELICIOUS LAST COURSE is just too delightful to go unacknowledged. A six-level DLC amuse-bouche ahead of Cuphead 2 (if you're listening, Studio MDHR, please make a Cuphead 2), it introduces several new boss battles that may well be the best - and most fair - parts of the entire Cuphead experience. Any video game with a level lifted straight out of the Woodland Café Silly Symphony is essential in my books.

Some video games flirt with breaking the fourth wall; THE STANLEY PARABLE: ULTRA DELUXE stares it straight in the eyes, picks up a sledgehammer, and smashes right through it. The only thing missing from its latest iteration, a sort-of Parable 1.5 upscaled for next-gen systems, is a scene where a hand reaches out of the TV and boops the player on the nose. While Stanley Parable is tough to write about without ruining the experience, it can best be described as the most self-aware video game ever made, one that knows what the player is thinking and is always, hilariously, one step ahead of you. Never have I been so enthralled by the question of which office door to walk through.

BOOKS

Sarah Polley's first book, RUN TOWARDS THE DANGER operates partly as film memoir, from a former indie darling actor turned indie darling director, and partly as a painfully personal diary of life outside of film. In devastating detail, Polley grapples with a series of traumatic moments and periods in her life, beginning with her experiences (and grave misgivings about) her time as a child star, moving on through difficult pregnancies, her experience of sexual assault, and, in the chapter that gives the book its title, the concussion which for years impaired her cognitive function (and which helps explain not only her several years' absence from filmmaking, but also why Greta Gerwig took over from Polley on Little Women). Alternatingly heartbreaking and horrifying - for both, see the chapter about her Stratford "Alice in Wonderland", in which she is stricken by debilitating physical and mental impairments  - it also contains the kind of warmth, intelligence, and perceptiveness on fine display in Polley’s other creation this year. 

CANCON AWARDS 2022

Wouldn't you know it, the inaugural Four Winds Seven Seas Lifetime Achievement Award goes to... Sarah Polley.

For any other person, forty-three would be far too young for a lifetime award. But Polley isn't any other person; she's one of Canada's singular talents, an actor, screenwriter, director, and writer who has been contributing to the Canadian cultural landscape, in one way or another, for four decades and counting.

As it happens, 2022 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Polley's best acting role, as the teenaged survivor of a horrific bus crash in Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter, a film (and role) that happens to deal with a lot of the same themes - the stories people tell themselves and others; the innocence of children and especially the innocence of little girls - as Polley's Women Talking, the best film this year (and one that's sure to earn her her first Oscar nod since 2006's Away From Her). 2022 also saw the release of Polley's debut memoir Run Towards the Danger, which deservedly won her the Toronto Book Award, and which similarly sees Polley reflecting on her difficult youth as a (mostly unwilling) child star.

I've long been a fan of Polley, ever since my personal political awakening which coincided more or less with the moment Polley had her teeth knocked in during an anti-Mike Harris rally. As an actor, Polley has appeared in some of the most iconic Canadian films ever, including The Sweet Hereafter and Don McKellar's Last Night (two contenders for greatest Canuck film ever), alongside a memorable turn in the greatest Canadian TV series of all time, Slings and Arrows (please, just go watch it now if you haven't already). Transitioning to work behind the camera, Polley wrote/directed the Alice Munro adaptation Away From Her (Oscar nominations for Polley's screenplay and Julie Christie's lead performance), the Seth Rogen/Michelle Williams/Luke Kirby love triangle Take This Waltz (2011), and the stellar Stories We Tell (2012), a fascinating family portrait that may well be Canada's greatest documentary. 

Back in the 1980s, when a young Polley was already making a name for herself as the star of Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and CBC's Road to Avonlea - the problematic legacies of which she grapples with eloquently in her recent memoir - it's doubtful anyone could have predicted her evolution from beloved child star to intelligent young actor to award-winning filmmaker and author. 

But revisiting her career now - her perceptive, engaging performances; her intriguing and decidely un-Hollywood career choices (let's all imagine a world in which Polley didn't drop out of Almost Famous); her socially conscious advocacy and friendships with the likes of Jack Layton - is it any surprise that she now ranks among the greatest of Canadians? 

Dearly Departed (The Year in Review 2021)

It is, perhaps, an odd synchronicity that 2021's best new pop cultural creations deal so frequently with loss and the absence of loved ones. 

On TV, a group of teens grapples with the death of their friend, while a perennially-delayed adaptation finally delivers on its vision of a deadly global virus. (Like I said, synchronicity.) Over on what, in any other year, would have been the big screen, a widow is haunted by her departed husband, while a theatre director reels from a devastating loss. Happily, pure escapism remains the case for video games, with space raccoons, space llamas, and other assorted oddballs dominating our consoles - though I'm not sure what it says that the funniest game of the year is also a divorce simulator.

FILM

THE NIGHT HOUSE is a masterclass in horror filmmaking: tense and atmospheric, with impeccably timed jump scares, interesting practical effects, and judicious use of CGI. It's also intelligent, brilliantly acted by Rebecca Hall as a grieving widow, and absolutely terrifying. I fear-cried during this movie, and it's been a long time since I did that. Like other great horror films before it, it operates at both a literal level - things that go bump in the night - and the metaphorical - what does it mean to be haunted by the loss of a loved one?

An hallucinogenic fever dream, THE GREEN KNIGHT resolutely refuses to abide by genre conventions, operating simultaneously as a medieval fantasy, fairy tale, psycho-sexual drama, and pagan horror (again, not unlike a certain horror film). Dev Patel stars in this revisionist take on the fabled Sir Gawain, Knight of the Round Table, whose foolhardy bravery sets him on a quest to confront the title character. Eerie detours, from a magic mushroom trip to a visit from a ghostly princess, keep the film, and viewers, consistently off-balance.

A worthy addition to the "Movie-Named-After-Song-But-It's-Not-A-Musical" cinematic universe, DRIVE MY CAR is an intelligent, moving adaptation of the Haruki Murakami short story of the same name. Following a compelling and rather unexpected prologue, this three-hour film expands into an exploration of grief, love, despair, and hope, all situated within the framing device of a troupe of actors rehearsing Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya." Highly literary, in the best possible sense. (And no, the song doesn't even make the soundtrack.)

TV

By the time the needle drops on Redbone's 1974 classic "Come and Get Your Love" in Episode 5 of RESERVATION DOGS, this Indigenous-centric series has long-since earned the right to play the favourites. Redbone was, of course, the first massively successful Indigenous-led rock band, and there's a decent argument that Dogs broke a similar cultural barrier on TV this year. The series follows a group of Indigenous teenagers reeling from the death of their friend, albeit with quick tongues and a keen sense of humour. Dark themes abound, but it's the goodheartedness, the laugh-out-loud jokes, and the lived-in atmosphere that make this dramedy one of the more interesting debuts in recent years.

Whoever said the woke aren't funny hasn't spent much time in RUTHERFORD FALLS, the heartwarming new comedy from the minds behind The Office and Superstore. Like Reservation Dogs, with which it shares an overlapping cast, Indigenous communities are front and centre, in this case the fictional Minishonka Nation which neighbours the title town. Unlike Dogs, this fits more in the classic sitcom mould, following a nerdy museum owner (Ed Helms) and his best friend, an aspiring Indigenous historian (Jana Schmieding) as they're drawn into a halfway-meaningful, halfway-absurd dispute over their communities' shared future. Politically astute jibes - the scene with the clueless white lawyer doubling down on a misappropriated term is one of the funniest of the year - are paired with an honest, forthright understanding of the legacy of colonialism and the challenges facing Indigenous communities.

I have yet to see a perfect Brian K. Vaughan adaptation, but Y: THE LAST MAN does an admirable job of translating the early issues of the award-winning comic book to the small screen. Unfortunately, its subject matter - a global virus kills every Y-chromosome-carrying organism on the planet, save one amateur escape artist and his pet monkey - is probably what doomed it to a single season. As it is, we're blessed with ten tightly-packed episodes featuring excellent performances from actors well-known (Diane Lane as the newly-installed, first-ever female president) and up-and-coming (Jess Salguiero, as the president's chief of staff, and Elliot Fletcher, as a trans man trying to navigate a female-dominated landscape, are standouts). Oh, and Ampersand the monkey is adorable. 

GAMING

The perennial underdog does it again, with the below-the-radar GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY arriving as the best and funniest superhero game in years. While relying a bit too much on its MCU inspiration, the great writing, interesting plot, and wonderful characters will have you laughing out loud throughout. Y may have TV's cutest monkey, but GotG has not one, not two, but three ridiculously entertaining animal sidekicks, including history's greatest Space Llama.

Gaming auteur Suda51 remains bizarre as ever in the inexplicably Nintendo-approved NO MORE HEROES III. The latest, and possibly last, in the off-the-fourth-wall action-adventure series, NMHIII is funny and exciting, with off-brand lightsabers and exploding technicolour pixels galore. That said, it's so bizarre - there's a giant pink puff monster that shouts "Adrian!", Rocky-style - that it may not be for all tastes. Boisonberry!

IT TAKES TWO to sabotage a teammate, a philosophy this game takes to heart. A full-blooded co-op adventure game with a humourous bent, its best laughs come not from the painfully leaden script, but from the ability to spoil your partner's progress at any turn. Even though it means your own progress is halted, there's nothing funnier than pulling a literal rug out from under your teammate (you play as feuding spouses) and watching them plummet, Looney Tunes-style, to the ground. And then doing it again after you swear this time you'll be nice. There were quite a few contenders, but It Takes Two is the funniest game of the year.

CANCON AWARDS 2021

I normally reserve this space for overlooked Canuck titles, but it so happens that a lot of 2021's best productions are Canadian or Canadian-adjacent. Much of the Rutherford Falls and Reservations Dogs casts were drawn from First Nations across Canada, while Y: The Last Man was filmed in Toronto and Guardians of the Galaxy developed by Eidos Montréal. 

That leaves only Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, the recent HD re-release of the beloved series, to celebrate as this year's recipient of the Four Winds Seven Seas CanCon Maple Award. As it happens, I've written about Mass Effect on this blog before, albeit a decade(!!) ago. Back then, I called it the greatest Canadian video game of all time. Revisiting it now, so many years (and one very controversial finale) later, I stand by that assessment. 

Time has done little to dull Mass Effect's complex, layered "consequence" system, which tracks player decisions big and small in order to dictate the turns of its three-game narrative. Yes, the main story beats remain the same across all playthroughs, but what's fascinating is how each Commander Shepard's experience is uniquely tailored to the choices you, the player, make. Mass Effect 3 (which had yet to release when I wrote my original ode to the series) remembers important details, like who you fell in love with in Mass Effect 1, but it also remembers that one time you insulted that one journalist in Mass Effect 2. That's something no other video game series has ever accomplished, before or since. I'm Four Winds Seven Seas, and this is my favourite video game on the Canada.

Odd Couples (The Year in Review 2020)

In a year where lockdown threw us into unusual social configurations - "support bubbles", anyone? - there's a good chance you spent a significant amount of time hunkered down with one person - a relative, a friend, a roommate (hopefully a tidy one!) - in front of your favourite streaming service or gaming console. A similar phenomenon played out on those very screens, as a remarkable number of the year's best creations featured pairs of people thrust together by circumstance and forced to make the best of it. From a pair of ragtag bakers, to a pothead detective and his sidekick, to a couple of small-town radio geeks, this was a year for close friendships and odd couplings - right down to the best co-operative video game I've played in a long time. Here, then, are my picks for the best of an otherwise not-best year.

FILM

I have a soft spot for FIRST COW, the last movie I had tickets for before #2020 shut down my favourite cinema (and, uh, all the other ones). That said, this intimate character study, about a pair of hardscrabble travellers trying to eke out a living at a 19th century trading outpost, is ideal home viewing. John Magaro and Orion Lee, neither of whom you have heard of, put in fine performances as Cookie and Lu, friends who steal milk from a rich man's dairy cow in order to kickstart their very small-time bakery business. That director Kelly Reichardt is able to craft such a moving and at times tense drama out of these seemingly small stakes is testament to her feel for this milieu, previously visited in her seminal Meek's Cutoff.

While THE VAST OF NIGHT plays like a lost Twilight Zone episode (replete with opening voiceover and fake TV distortion effects), it owes just as much to classic space invader cinema. In particular, Vast works as a kind of unofficial remake of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, even as it's set about twenty years earlier, in the 1950s apple-pie-and-sock-hop USA that Encounters director Steven Spielberg actually grew up in. Like a certain other Spielberg classic, Vast does an incredible job of raising tension despite showing little, if any, of the alien threat that may or may not be menacing a small town. The film's period-accurate lingo, and charming fascination with old-school technology - just check out those deliberately long takes of phone operators working the lines, or characters winding up audio reels - only add to the feel that this was a labour of love.

Some may knock the moral posturing of THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7, Aaron Sorkin's righteously angry account of the events surrounding the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention. But to write it off as liberal fan service misses the point: sometimes it's fun to see the good guys win, especially when they make fools of the bad guys - in this case, the combined weight of a racist, conservative, U.S. justice system - in the process. Sacha Baron Cohen and Jeremy Strong, as a kind of pothead Laurel and Hardy version of Yippie cofounders Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, are the best parts of a wonderful ensemble cast. And while it's billed as a drama, 7 is also one of the most consistently funny movies of the past year.

TELEVISION

Alex Garland's 2018 Oscar Isaac dance-fest Ex Machina gets a spiritual sequel in DEVS, a near-future sci-fi thriller starring Sonoya Mizuno and Nick Offerman (and Sonoya Mizuno and Nick Offerman). Like its predecessor, Devs imagines the consequences of a revolutionary technological advance - in Machina, humanlike A.I.; in Devs, something far stranger - and those who dare to play with it. Although Devs's central conceit (no spoilers!) is infinitely less plausible than Machina's rogue AI, it still makes for an interesting and thoroughly entertaining thought experiment, especially when lead character Lily (Mizuno) comes face-to-face with herself and the choices she's made.

Cate Blanchett shepherded the Phyllis Schlafly bio-series MRS. AMERICA into existence, and her devotion to the woman, if not her politics, is on fine display in her starring role. Schlafly, who died in 2016, has long been derided/heralded - depending which side you're on - as the "first lady of the conservative movement", and Blanchett makes the most of this queen of anti-feminists in an unapologetic, largely unsympathetic performance that nevertheless succeeds in making Schlafly human. They say know your enemy: Schlafly's last published work was "The Case For Donald Trump".

GAMING

The only thing missing from GHOST OF TSUSHIMA is a virtual Toshiro Mifune, scratching his beard and gruffly barking orders at a gang of misfit rōnin. In his place, we get Jin Sakai, the title "Ghost", a samurai who betrays his honour code and embraces some historically dubious but highly entertaining stealth tactics more suitable for a ninja. While this heavily fictionalized 13th century waraji-and-kimono epic bears only passing resemblance to the real thing, you'll be too blown away by the photorealistic Japanese landscapes and brilliant swordplay to care.

Retro sequels are a dime-a-dozen these days (perhaps $0.25 a dozen is more accurate), but STREETS OF RAGE 4 stood out from the moment I got my hands on it. The co-operative gameplay is superb, and the graphics and soundtrack manage to simultaneously look modern but feel retro. Of course, the addition of unlockable 16-bit sprites and the original Streets soundtrack doesn't hurt either.

I loved Carrion, but there's only one 2020 video game that truly captures what it means to be an unstoppable horror movie killing machine, and that game is MANEATER, aka I, Jaws. As far as I'm concerned, Maneater is perfect: it lets you control a giant shark, it throws you into combat against killer crocodiles and one very angry Shamu, and you can most definitely eat yachts. Gloriously scientifically inaccurate and aggressively entertaining, it's the perfect game for anyone looking to blow off some of that 2020 steam.

COMPLEMENTARY CANADIAN CONTENT CHAMPION'S CHALICE (CRONENBERG EDITION)

Over the years, I've made a habit of closing out my annual reviews with my favourite Cancon creations. This time out, I'm slightly shaking things up with one regular award plus an honourary prize to my favourite Canadian cameo-maker of 2020, the one and only Mr. David Cronenberg.

Elevating what's been an otherwise terrible season of the worst Star Trek series (and yes, I've seen Enterprise), Cronenberg shows up for about three total scenes of Star Trek: Discovery, all while wearing his trademark glasses in a future where the need for prescription eyewear has long since been eradicated. (There's even a joke about it.) Rumour has it Cronenberg may join Michelle Yeoh on the long-gestating Section 31 spinoff series, to which I say: beam me up! (And yes, "long-gestating" is a body horror pun.)

Cronenberg is also the best part of Disappearance at Clifton Hill, a Niagara Falls-set neo-noir that ought to be a lot better, and weirder, than it actually is, given its plot of missing kids, kitschy Québécois tiger trainers, and a pathological liar who turns to scuba diving podcaster Cronenberg for investigative guidance. You can probably skip this one, or simply fast-forward to the Cronenberg scenes.

As for our regularly scheduled award, a nice big Maple Prize goes to vantablack comedy THE KID DETECTIVE, the year's other weirdsville Canadian neo-noir - only this one is actually good. Adam Brody stars in the title role, a former small-town celebrity who's still at it as a 30-something private investigator desperately trying to relive his glory years. This North Bay, Ontario-set film is so deadpan it's practically comatose, and while that might be a turn off for some, its played-so-straight-it-reverts-to-funny style will find an audience in anyone who loved Inherent Vice, Computer Chess, or the early/self-aware seasons of Riverdale. Three maple-flavoured doobies out of four.

Seeing is Believing (The Year in Review 2019)

The end of a decade meant the end of many beloved series, and I spent much of 2019 bidding fond farewells to my favourites: the Skywalkers; the Baskets family rodeo; detective Angie Tribeca and her merry band of misfit cops; Jared-Donald and the gang from Silicon Valley; Selina Meyer, who will forever remain our Veep; Maggie Gyllenhaal and the Jameses Franco inhabiting The Deuce; and, of course, Fleabag, who left us just as we were getting to know her.

But 2019 was also a year for some wonderful new creations, challenging us not only to look forward, but to reconsider how we look. From a drug-fuelled odyssey that dizzily toyed with our perceptions, to a religious dramedy that circled questions of faith, to a glitchy Space Odyssey riff that forced gamers to view the world through an artificial lens, these are my picks for the best of 2019.

FILM 

Hereditary was terrifying, but MIDSOMMAR is believable. That's the main reason why Ari Aster's sophomore effort, a horror film set in a remote Swedish community, is better than its predecessor. The always excellent Florence Pugh stars as Dani Ardor, a college student struggling with the combined burdens of (a) a recent, if cliché, personal tragedy, and (b) a fucking awful boyfriend. It's that boyfriend who grudgingly allows Ardor to tag along on a "guy" trip to study a pagan cult hidden away so far north that, for several months mid-summer, the sun never sets on their community. Such a setting would be alien enough as is, but thanks to a combination of peer pressure and more insidious methods, Pugh's character spends most of the film high as a kite, taking the audience along for a very unsettling and hallucinogenic ride. Just call it the world's longest anti-drug PSA.

It begins with ABBA and ends with the Beatles, but THE TWO POPES is about so much more than the musical tastes of its title characters. Though nominally about a fateful meeting between popes Benedict (Anthony Hopkins, excellent) and Francis (Jonathan Pryce, in his best role since Brazil), this funny and moving chamber piece is better described as a biopic of the latter, current pontiff. Say what you will about the Catholic Church, but the film makes a strong case for Pope Francis as a real reformer, a man of unwavering faith and a deeply felt moral commitment to concerns such as inequality and climate change. The witty and banter-heavy script won't score any points for profundity, but its earnestness may make even the most hardened cynic reconsider their views on the guy(s) in the funny hat.

The delightfully-named US is the best socially-conscious horror film since Get Out, which means it is also the best Jordan Peele film since Get Out. In quick succession, director Peele has established himself as a brilliant satirist of western hypocrisies - especially those of our neighbours to the south. Where Get Out directly confronted anti-black racism, US operates as a slightly more subtle - as subtle as a mounting pile of blood-splattered corpses can be - allegory on, well, whatever you choose to make of it. Is US's tale of creepy doppelgängers really about capitalism? Race relations? The North American genocide of Indigenous peoples? That each of those interpretations is equally plausible - far more so than the comparably inane conspiracy theories that surround Peele's beloved influence The Shining - is a testament to the director's skill at putting just enough, but never too much, information up on screen. Lupita Nyong'o is fantastic in the lead role.

TELEVISION

Is it déjà vu, or is it THE TWILIGHT ZONE that's making you wonder whether you've seen Jordan Peele's name twice on this list? Nope, it's just the fact that in Peele's effort to take over all corners of your pop cultural mind, he put together a (mostly) enjoyable new sci-fi anthology series that, like his films, is heavy on the social commentary, loves to play with audience perceptions, and can be very funny - but only when it needs to be. Not all the episodes land, but standouts like "Replay" and "Not All Men" make for must-watch television, in the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and between the pit of man’s fears, and the summit of his knowledge.

Violently satirical THE BOYS works well both for those who love superheroes (me!) and those fed up with their total domination of contemporary pop culture (also me!). While the concept is hardly original - what if superheroes existed in our world (or a close approximation of it) - the delivery is first-rate. Jack Quaid and Karl Urban headline a stellar cast of vigilantes who set out to expose and take down a team of intimidatingly powerful corporate-owned "heroes"/asshole celebrities known as The Seven. Each member of the Seven is a thinly veiled analogue for a familiar Marvel or DC superhero, inviting viewers to imagine what would happen if someone like Superman or Aquaman, instead of using their powers for good, did that thing which, frankly, seems far more likely: exploit those abilities for personal gain.

GAMING

OBSERVATION really only works if you've already seen 2001: A Space Odyssey. If you have, then you'll get infinitely more enjoyment out of this intriguing and at times bewildering sci-fi adventure that places you in the digital shoes - and behind the digital eyes - of a spaceship's mysteriously evolving on-board Artificial Intelligence, nicknamed HAL SAM. As SAM, you must try to survive a doomsday scenario in which most of your crew are dead and your ship is falling to pieces. Much of Observation is confusing by design; other parts are confusing by mistake. But even when the going gets seriously weird and the glitches threaten to derail the experience - at one point, I spent ten minutes floating blissfully outside the spaceship before realizing that I wasn't actually supposed to be there - it never ceases to be compelling. CUBE, CUBE, PYRAMID, DOUBLE ARROW, INFINITY, amirite?

UNTITLED GOOSE GAME asks the question no one dared ask: what's it like to see the world through the eyes of a chaos-fomenting waterfowl terrorizing the inhabitants of a quaint English village? As I wrote in my review, the answer is the most absurdly low-stakes stealth-puzzle adventure this side of Sneak 'n' Snore. Nipping little boys on the shirttails, stealing carrots from a cranky old farmer: does life get any better than this?

When you're tired of reality, it's nice to know that Home VR has finally landed, bringing with it a whole new way of looking at - and experiencing - the world, including that of the wonderful little puzzler A FISHERMAN'S TALE. It's not a long game, and most of it boils down to finding the right widget to stick into the right doohickey. But oh, what a joy to move around in Fisherman, its world made vastly more intriguing by VR's ability to mess with the player's concept of space (and, after a couple hours in the headset, time). Short and sweet, and one of the finest demos for what not-reality can offer.

This is 2018 (The Year in Review 2018)

In an era defined by rich bastards and the rich bastards who enable them, there were a surprising number of sympathetic elites on display in the best pop culture creations of 2018. From the billionaire investor chuckling his way through the great art documentary, to the trust-fund kids of the year's three best TV series, it was hard not to like these occasionally fictional, occasionally fictionalized, depictions of the quote-unquote "elect". Elsewhere, proper escapism was in order, with audiences treated to flights of fancy - some beautiful (the world's greatest video game), some joyous (thank you Stan Lee), some thrilling (this year's best film) - that provided momentary respite from this darkest of timelines. And then, after all that excess and escapism, there was also the year's best, and most incisive, depiction of "America", through that most honourable medium of the protest song. Though you'd be hard-pressed to find one unifying theme across this year's great art, I can offer this: even as things fall apart, our artists will never fail us.

FILM

I wasn't the biggest fan of Alex Garland's previous film, Ex Machina, which I thought embraced a lot of the misogyny and male-gaze it was ostensibly meant to criticize. I wasn't alone in this sentiment, and whether by happy accident or by design, Garland's masterful follow-up, ANNIHILATION, is just about the polar opposite: a film about five brilliant and strong women - all soldiers and scientists - sent to investigate a mysterious energy bubble enveloping an unidentified and thickly forested area of the United States. Within, our heroes - Jennifer Jason Leigh, Natalie Portman, Tessa Thompson lead a stellar cast - find an eerie, alien landscape where flora and fauna have mutated into strange hybrids (and where to say more would constitute spoilers). Intelligent and unusual, Annihilation is a lucid, feverish, dream - often beautiful, mostly terrifying - that proves just as unsettling for audiences as it does for the characters on screen.

SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE takes a gloriously absurd idea - what if there were an infinite number of Spider-Mans (Spider-Men?), and at least one of them sounded like Nicolas Cage? - and turns it into a thrilling, hilarious, and surprisingly affecting animated film. In fact, this cartoon(!) may well be the greatest Spider-film to date, a worthy tribute to its two creators - Stan Lee and Steve Ditko - who both passed away this year. On the one hand, its many variants on the Spider-theme only serve to remind us what made their creation so brilliant in the first place. On the other hand, the film's greatest feat is that, among all the wacky Spider-alternates (the standout of which is Peter Porker, Spider-Ham), its best character is the one least connected to the "classic" Spider-mythos. I'm referring to the film's true star, Afro-Latino teenager Miles Morales, who manages to find time, amongst all the psychedelic and fourth-wall-breaking mayhem, for his own, very touching, origin story as the Ultimate Spider-Man. More so than any Spider to date, by the time Morales finally dons his own version of the costume, and goes for that exhilarating first swing across the New York City skyline, you get the feeling that he's damn well earned it.

The great documentaries are those that tell a very specific story - say, about bible salesmen, or aspiring basketball players - that also illustrates something broader about the world in which we live. The wonderfully titled THE PRICE OF EVERYTHING is just that: a "niche" film about the hyper-inflated contemporary art market that also features enough fascinating shades of humanity to be of interest to any, general, audience. What's particularly impressive is this film's refusal to dwell on the obvious - that wealthy investors are dangerously distorting the market - instead offering up a host of complex perspectives (and personalities) that challenge viewers' expectations and prejudices. These include: the (unavoidably likeable) collector with deep pockets, tacky taste, and an earnest love of art; the semi-forgotten Warhol contemporary, Larry Poons, whose decades-long refusal to commercialize makes for an uneasy relationship with a white-hot market that has suddenly "rediscovered" him; and the brash, opinionated Sotheby's auctioneer who speaks dismissively of museums, yet also gets genuinely choked up while reflecting on her first love: a painting at her local public gallery.

TELEVISION

You've never heard of him, but Jesse Armstrong was an integral part of the team that turned the TV series "The Thick of It", and its film spinoff In the Loop, into two of the funniest British comedies of all time. SUCCESSION, Armstrong's New York-set HBO series following the trials and tribulations of a Rupert Murdoch-like family of one-percenters, is hilarious, offensive, gratuitous, and - ever-so-rarely - actually kind of charming. Mostly, though, it's an opportunity for a fantastic cast - Kieran Culkin and Matthew Macfadyen are standouts - to unleash the kind of profanity-laden tirades that would make Malcolm Tucker proud. That said, the ending is pretty dumb, setting up a rather silly plotline for Season 2.

Speaking of selfish, insensitive, billionaires: the infamous John Paul Getty III kidnapping - the one that inspired that part of The Big Lebowski - gets a non-exploitative and exceedingly well-crafted miniseries adaptation in TRUST. Donald Sutherland stars as the elder Getty, a right-bastard of an oilman who refuses to pay ransom on his own kidnapped grandson (that would be Getty III), a ne'er-do-well who's gotten mixed up with sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll, and some brutal Italian gangsters. Harris Dickinson is very good as the angel-like Getty III, and he's joined by acting stalwarts including Hilary Swank, the always-terrific Anna Chancellor, and - in the role of a lifetime - Canada's own Brendan Fraser.

This year's other trust-fund fuck-up was probably the most likeable: PATRICK MELROSE, as portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch, in one of the best short-form miniseries in ages. A series that, sadly, not many people watched, though given the subject matter - a survivor of child sexual abuse spirals downwards into drug and alcohol addiction, only to slowly crawl his way back out - it's perhaps not that surprising. Content warning aside, it's an insightful and truthful account of a man's despair, and also his remarkable ability to, if not overcome it, at least learn to live with it. Deeply affecting, and of course brilliantly acted, it's also at times quite funny, with intelligent writing (it's adapted from a series of novels by Edward St. Aubyn) that's acerbic in the best possible way. This is the kind of series where, even while Cumberbatch is stumbling around a grime-laden bathroom with a rusty and comically oversized syringe bleeding out of his arm, he's still got a quip or two for the occasion.

GAMING

This is an easier category, insomuch as the best game of the year also happens to be the best game of all time. A reissue of it, anyway. As I wrote in my review of SHADOW OF THE COLOSSUS, the PS4 remake of this wanderer-vs.-giants tale is the definitive version of a game of astonishing scope, sophisticated narrative, and utter beauty. It is the answer to the (annoying) question “are video games art?” and it is absolutely essential. It is the reason to own a PS4, or if you can't afford it, a PS3, which is home to an equally beautiful HD remaster.

Remakes aside, this year's best game is RETURN OF THE OBRA DINN, Lucas Pope’s hotly anticipated, and yet totally surprising, follow-up to Papers, Please. I wrote about Papers, Please in this blog before, where I called it a "subtle but highly sophisticated rumination on dehumanisation." Obra Dinn is not those things, but rather a murder mystery game with shades of sci-fi/fantasy and an incredible retro art style. Per my review, the fact that Obra Dinn is so different from its predecessor is both a letdown and also its best feature. Violent, mysterious, and compelling, it is quite unlike, and therefore about 99 times better than, any other game in this (very bloated) market.

MUSIC

Blogspot inexplicably prevents me from embedding it here, so just go watch THIS IS AMERICA, again, as a reminder of why Childish Gambino's era-defining music video is easily one of the great artistic achievements of 2018. It's also one of the great protest songs of all time, managing to be both painfully explicit in its condemnation of anti-Black violence and racism, and also tantalizingly enigmatic in just about every other way. A year after Bob Dylan won a Nobel Prize, and in the same year that Kendrick Lamar won a Pulitzer, it was Gambino, aka Donald Glover, who provided the best argument for the vital role of music during these (and any other) turbulent times.