What Kind of Year Has It Been?

With 2012 rapidly receding and 2013 inexorably encroaching in defiance of the Mayans' will, it's time for reflection and the arbitrary ranking of art. Since I primarily write about films, I'll be putting up my Top 20 of the year up on January 1st as per tradition, but before then, I wanted to talk about the non-cinematic stuff that delighted and enchanted me this year.

Most of it's TV related because TV is still the most exciting medium going - compared to the admittedly fairly good year in cinema, TV had another banner year in a steady succession of them - and because I read precisely one book released this year (Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise, highly recommended) but there's music, comedy and such mixed in as well so that the New Year can begin completely free of guilt over unacknowledged greatness.

Greed, Fear and Hobbitses

Bilbo contemplates all the money he could have earned, but didn't.

 There's going to be a lot of stories over the next couple of days about how "badly" The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is doing at the American box office. Those quotation marks are a small but essential part of the conversation, since any such talk ultimately boils down to the idea that the film has made staggering amounts of money - through 10 days it has earned roughly $150 million in the US alone with another $288 million coming from overseas; more money than the vast majority of us will see in our lifetimes - but not quite as much as people might have expected. Then again, the figures being dealt with are so vast that just doing okay might be the same as failure as far as the studio is concerned. It's the difference between an athlete being able to run 100m in less than or dead on 10 seconds; it's an achievement either way, but it's also the difference between a gold medal and nothing.

"And That's The Story": Some Thoughts on Bob Hoskins

Like many people, I was saddened today to read that Bob Hoskins, the great British actor who over four decades proved to be equally adept in small-scale home-grown productions and in big-budget Hollywood fare, as well as on the stage, has been diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease and has announced that he is retiring from acting as a result.

I usually don't write about news stories since I tend to think there are sources better able to report news as it's breaking. However, Hoskins has been one of my very favourite actors for almost as long as I can remember, and this news has affected me in a way that I wasn't anticipating. As such, I wanted to put down my thoughts about Hoskins as an actor, and why I will dearly miss his presence in film and television.

The Weirdest Timeline: The Complicated Nature of Community's Fourth Season Renewal

Back in November, I wrote about NBC's decision to hold the second half of Community's third season back until a later date, one which, at the time, was undetermined.The aim of that article was to establish why the news was not necessarily a sign that the cultishly adored sitcom was in imminent danger of being cancelled, and that everyone should calm the fuck down already.

Rethinking Matthew McConaughey

I feel bad for using this ridiculous image as the main one for the article, but if he's going to continue to make artistically interesting choices, then I might no longer get to make fun of him anymore, DAMMIT!

If you're anything like me - and why wouldn't you want to be? I'm grrrrrreat. And a cartoon tiger, apparently - then you probably don't think all that much of Matthew McConaughey, if you think of him at all. For the best part of the last twenty years, he's been a blandly charming presence in a succession of slightly rubbish dramas and extremely rubbish romantic comedies, most of which, if their posters are to be believed, seem to revolve around him leaning on things:

I choose to believe that the level of commitment he brings to any given role can be determined by the angle at which he leans and how few clothes he is wearing on the poster. So we see that he is putting a lot of effort into Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, could give a shit about Failure to Launch, and is super-committed to his work in Surfer, Dude.

You've Got To Accentuate The Positive: What's Good About The 2012 Oscar Nominations?

The Oscar nominations were announced today - not that anyone would notice since it's not like everybody is talking about it all the damn time - and they confirmed once again that the Oscars are worthless. And I don't mean that in the sense that all human endeavour is worthless because one day we'll all die and no one will care about anything we did in life, and besides which the sun will one day implode and destroy the Earth, eradicating all trace of all humanity, making our irritation at Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close getting an Oscar nomination seem pretty trivial.

No, I mean that the Oscars are worthless because they fail to do the thing that they are meant to, which is recognise the exceptional films released in any given year. Sure, they sometimes get it right - the nomination for The Tree of Life, in particular, strikes me as unusually spot on for once - but for the most part they celebrate the merely okay, rather than the excellent.

Considering that last year saw some truly great films released, ones that were bold, daring and strange, it would be easy to write about the many, many great films that were snubbed in favour of mediocrity. However, since everyone is going to be doing that, I've decided to set cynicism aside and focus on the positive, looking at the little delights sprinkled amongst the dullness.

The film that scared me the most as a child and still does, sort of

One of small pleasures of New Year's Day is seeing what old films the various terrestrial and digital channels dig out of their vaults to give a fresh airing since they don't have any original programming to fill the schedule. It's usually the same four or five old war films or comedies from the 1960s, but every so often an interesting little curio slips through. Such was the case this year, as Channel 5 decided to air a double-bill of The Wizard of Oz and its belated sequel, Return to Oz.