A decade in review

Everyone's doing 'decade in review' statistics or lists or overviews or what have you. I thought I'd join in the fun and tell you about my favorite movies that I watched in theater each year. This is, markedly, no quality assessment, so there's no need to tell me that the movies I picked aren't the best movies of their respective years by far. This is based solely on my own enjoyment.

Unfortunately, there is no way for me to track novels or shows, so sadly there will be none of that.

But movies. Let's do this!

2010: Megamind

Honorable mention to Buried, which is an intense thriller featuring Ryan Reynolds and only Ryan Reynolds. 

2011: X-Men: First Class

This year was a hard one, but considering how much I love this movie, there's really no contest.  

2012: Django Unchained

The other contenders this year are Cloud Atlas and Rise of the Guardians, both of which I like very much. Django won out because it's my favorite Tarantino in the end.

2013: Pacific Rim

There was no contest for this year. 

2014: Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Honorable mention to Big Hero 6 and Gone Girl. 

2015: Mad Max Fury Road

Honorable mention to The Martian and The Force Awakens.

2016: Rogue One

This year also had Star Trek Beyond and Deadpool but since I didn't pick the Star Wars movie last year, I picked it now.

2017: The Shape of Water

Honorable mention to Wonder Woman and Thor: Ragnarok.

2018: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

Honorable mention to Black Panther, Love, Simon, and Bohemian Rhapsody. 

2019: Captain Marvel

I realized while going through the movies that I've not been to the theater that much this year.


In review, I see it's very heavy on the superhero front and very few of these movies aren't action movies. What can I say, I know what I like. Although that might change in the future.

Happy new year to everyone! May the change you crave come to you!

Thoughts about things I saw: Deception

Sometimes something about the media i consume just gets me real good or stays with me for a bit but it’s not enough to write a whole essay about it or it doesn’t connect to a larger issue I can talk about. Sometimes I don’t even really want to recommend the movie or show or novel in general and it’s just that one thing that I have thoughts and emotions about.

This is what this series of posts is for. Enjoy short thoughts about things I saw.

(This is also probably gonna be more rambly than my other parts, just a warning.) 

First up: Deception

Deception is a fun, breezy crime procedural about a successful stage magician that helps the FBI solve (often magic related) crimes. It reminded me of The Mentalist sometimes in that Cameron, the protagonist, is lovably full-of-himself and mostly puts on a sort of stage persona when interacting with people. It’s generally a good time, if wildly improbable. 

What gets me, however, is Cameron’s backstory. The reason he helps out the FBI in the first place is so that he can help get his innocent brother Jonathan out of prison. His identical twin brother, who no one knew about until he got arrested. No one knew about him because their father raised them like that, so that he could do the most amazing disappearing children magic tricks. That’s so messed up. From the first episode on, I was blown away by how messed up that was and how little the show acknowledged that. 

Their father only proves more messed up, the more we learn about him, training his sons, one of which he takes great pains to hide from the public, to be the perfect stage magicians from a very early age on. He, for example, locked child Cameron into a tiny box and just left him, so that he would learn escape tricks. Oh, and additionally he was an accomplished thief, who once took Cameron to a bank that he knew would be subject to a bank robbery, effectively traumatizing him. What joy.

The show’s primary antagonist, a mysterious woman with a grudge and an obsession, in the end manages to convince Cameron that he is ultimately to blame both for Jonathan’s imprisonment as well as his less than ideal existence in the shadows, which ignores that Cameron suffered under their father as well, even if his suffering was different. 

The whole concept of their upbringing and the nature of their relationship resulting from that, is just something that is really interesting to me and that I’d love to see explored more deeply. The show’s mostly too light for that and, anyway, won’t ever get a second season, so I’m alone with my thoughts and feelings, which is precisely why I made this blog.

Satori over and out