GregHowley.com

Ugh. Best of 2020? Sounds like an article discussing the upsides of having shingles. Yeah, 2020 was not a great year. But there was some good content. Let's dive into that yearly tradition I've done since 2011. It's a little something I call Best Of.

Movies

2020 was not a good year for films. I'm not even going to discuss many of the year's films. I saw Bill & Ted Face the Music, Enola Holmes, The Invisible Man, and Mulan, and they were different levels of okay. I have not seen Tenet, and Wonder Woman 84 airs too late to make this list. The movie Vivarium, I actively hated. Here are the rest of the year's films.

My 2020 movie of the year is Hamilton. I'd seen the show before at the Bushnell in Hartford, but we were sitting in the nosebleed seats, and I had a lot of trouble understanding what the actors were saying, which really hurts the overall show. Seeing it at home, when we projected it on the back of the house this autumn was awesome. I've had songs from Hamilton stuck in my head ever since.

Birds of Prey was a solid contender for movie of the year. After the train wreck that was The Suicide Squad, it's surprising that a sequel slash spinoff could be this good.

Another surprise hit was Greyhound. Tom Hanks is always great, and this World War 2 battleship story was a good one, for those who like such things.

The Hunt feels like it came out about 6 years ago, but that was actually 2020. It wasn't a great film, but it's worthy of mention on my list. It's a dark humor thriller, and reminds me a lot of last year's Ready or Not.

Netflix's The Old Guard was a better-than-expected movie, very much in the Highlander vein. Anything with Charlize Theron is good, and this is no exception.

After all the trash talk online, I found The New Mutants to be a bit better than expected. It's not terrible. Honestly, still better than anything DC has done recently, excepting only Birds of Prey.

I'd nearly forgotten about The Dead Don't Die until it popped up on whichever streaming service it's on. If you like movies that have dry humor, you'll like this. And the cast is just amazing: Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Steve Buscemi, and Danny Glover, amongst others.

Pixar's latest is Onward, and when my family watched it together, we thought it was pretty good.

The Rhythm Section is a film I covered in a preview last year. It was a just-okay film in the same genre as Bourne Identity or Taken.

Lastly, Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga. I love Will Farrell. This movie really wasn't great. But it's good for a stupid laugh.

Television

Television did better in 2020 than film did. We had a lot more quality programming, even if it was split across four hundred and six different streaming services.

10 - I Am Not Okay With This - Sneaking in at the number ten spot on my list is a Netflix show featuring an angsty young girl just learning that she has super powers. It was extremely light on action, but I really enjoyed it.

9 - Locke and Key - I was unfamiliar with the original comic, but had heard many good things about it. The TV show was entertaining, if not the year's best.

8 - Altered Carbon season 2 - I was disappointed overall with the differences between the original book and the television show, but enough of the book's underpinnings remained that I enjoyed Altered Carbon. Anthony Mackie as Takeshi Kovacs was a good move - I like him as an actor. I was sad to learn that the show won't be back for a third season.

7 - Raised by Wolves - In this far-future story, a war between religious extremists and atheists destroys the Earth, and humanity leaves for a distant world. The colony sleeper ship of religious extremists arrives years after the small ship with two androids, who carry embryos to raise as a new atheistic civilization. Raised by Wolves is the tale of those humans being raised by androids on a hostile world.

6 - For All Mankind - This show poses the question, "What if the space race had never ended?" by positing that in the 1960s, the Soviet Union beat the U.S. to the moon by about a month. This alternate history story is well-told, and one of my favorite 2020 shows.

5 - Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance - The creators here did an amazing job of taking the world presented in 1982's The Dark Crystal and expanding the worldbuilding hugely. They recreated the aesthetic of the original and expanded it. It's true to its roots, and this prequel is a worthy successor in every way.

4 - The Boys - I feel like everybody watched The Boys on Amazon Prime. It's a very adult superhero show, but it's also very entertaining. The second season did not disappoint.

3 - Umbrella Academy season 2 - As much as I enjoyed the first season of Umbrella Academy, the second season was better in every way. I've already watched it twice.

2 - Ozark, season 3 - Very much in the same spirit as Breaking Bad. It seems like everyone has watched Ozark. I watched all three seasons during quarantine. Excellent.

1 - The Mandalorian - Call it recency bias, but I really enjoyed what they've done with the second season of The Mandalorian. They're taking a note from the MCU and building an interconnected Star Wars setting, set after episode 6, and before episode 7.

Honorable Mentions

Breaking Bad - I'm adding it down here because it's not something released in 2020, but we watched the whole series this year. Great show.

Doom Patrol, season 1 - Another show from an earlier year which I only watched this year. It's like the Umbrella Academy, but even more adult and even more insane.

Games

I played far more games in 2020 than I have in recent years past. Nearly none of them were actually released this year, but I'll disregard that for this list, and just take down the games I played in order.

• Sentinels of the Multiverse - Whatever else I'm playing, I'm jumping back into the digital version of this tabletop card game all the time. This year, the developer added new achievements for beating every villain on Advanced, Challenge, and Ultimate mode, so I'm going through each villain one by one and getting all the new achievements.
• Far Cry 4 - I had purchased the game previously, but bailed out early on. This year, I went back to it and played all the way through.
• Dishonored 2 - I loved the first game in the series, and had always meant to purchase and play the second. But I didn't do so until it went on sale this year. Playing this is when I noticed problems with my computer.
• Baldurs Gate 2 - Since my PC was giving me issues, I decided to go back to an oldie but goodie, which I figured should run on just about anything. I played through the entirety of Baldurs Gate 2, and it was amazing.
• Baldurs Gate - After finishing Baldurs Gate 2, I figured it was time to go back to the original, which I'd never re-played. Very nice.
• Spirit Island - This one did come out in 2020. A great board game by the same team which made Sentinels of the Multiverse created this board game in which you play island spirits trying to repel colonizers.
• Far Cry 5 - When I got my new PC, I was looking for something to push my new system. So I actually paid full price for a game for the first time in a while.



• Borderlands 3 - After I finished Far Cry 5, I picked up the newest Borderlands game, which I only completed this past week. It's really just more of the same, but it's fun.
• Minecraft - When I moved my Minecraft world from the old PC to the new one, my daughters got me back on the LAN to play this together. We really do have quite a world built together.
• Avengers - When it went on sale, I picked up the new Avengers game. But I couldn't get very far into it before I just found it boring. I've already uninstalled it.
• Slay the Spire - I've only been playing Slay the Spire for a few days, but I love it. It's a roguelike card game dungeon dive. I'm focusing on doing well with the first character, The Ironclad.

Books

I track my books at Goodreads now, and my year in books this year is really sad. I got through Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy early in the year, and read both of the new Dresden Files novels, but other than that it's pretty slim. I've started another two books which I haven't finished. The two I'd really like to read soon are Cory Doctrorow's Attack Surface and Ready Player Two by Ernest Cline.

Easily my favorite book this year is the latest book in The Dresden Files. It's book number 17 in the series, which is crazy, but it's the best. This series has gotten better and better with each book. Book number 12, Changes had a ton going on and upended a lot of things which had been established early on. It was amazing. But this book does much the same in an even bigger way. I loved it.