#and I didn’t include apocalypse weekend or paradise lost

[nathanielwharton]

My 2018 in Pop Culture

Same plan here as usual. This is what meant most to me last year in pop culture.

Top Forty Things From 2018

40. King Kong on Broadway I wrote about this as an adaptation of the Kong story over at SportsAlcohol.com, but here I'll just say that while I was really disappointed with this as a musical, the execution of Kong himself on stage was breathtakingly rad.

39. Rhyming "is nae" with "Disney" in Anna and the Apocalypse In theory, I don't have much of an appetite left for a zombie comedy, having been well and truly sated by Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland, and the wave of imitators that followed them. I felt like I'd seen all of the moves that are possible with that particular genre mash-up, and then I read about a Scottish zombie comedy that ALSO threw in the musical and the Christmas movie. So it was almost with a sense of grudging obligation that I accepted the inevitability that I'd see Anna and the Apocalypse. It won me over. It's got a winning cast, catchy songs, and a surprisingly effective melancholy tone. But I have to admit, the moment that really won me over was a moment in the song "Hollywood Ending" where "is nae" ("is not" in a Scottish accent) is rhymed with "Disney."

38. The Conners/The Roseanne Revival This was a real roller coaster in 2018. I was excited and apprehensive about the revival, and only slightly relieved when it began and was mostly pretty good. Still, there was an uneasiness with the way that the Roseanne character had been conceived for the revival and that basically exploded thanks to the behaviour of the real Roseanne. Still, overall I've enjoyed the revival and The Conners, and while I'm sad about what happened to TV Roseanne and real Roseanne(for different reasons)

37. "The Queen" episode of Castle Rock I liked the show pretty well overall, but oh man did this episode stand out. For most of the run, I'd just thought it was a cute bit of casting to have Sissy Spacek playing what seemed like a strangely minor role. Then this episode happened. It's a real acting showcase for Spacek and it satisfies with suspense and emotion in equal measure.

36. Kurt Russell performing "Santa Claus is Back in Town" in The Christmas Chronicles I'm a sucker for a Christmas movie, and this one is agreeable enough. There is some attempt at telling an emotional story that might hit you if you're in the right mood, and there is pleasant hint of Gremlins in the movie's portrayal of Santa's elves, but mostly it is a pretty satisfying expansion of the thought, "what if Kurt Russell was Santa Claus?" Russell is a hoot in the role, and the movie hits a peak when his Santa ends up in jail and breaks out into a jailhouse rendition of "Santa Claus is Back in Town." Downloaded and added to my Christmas playlist.

35. Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert This new wave of live musicals on TV hasn't always resulted in a great show (I honestly have forgotten a lot of the Peter Pan and Rocky Horror broadcasts), but sometimes they end up with some really cool television. Grease Live still reigns as the champion of these things, but this production of Jesus Christ Superstar was exciting and energetic and featured some neat ideas in its staging. It's shows like this that keep me hoping they'll continue to try these live musical shows.

34. The Death of Stalin Wrote about this for SportsAlcohol.com.

33. Isle of Dogs The visceral aesthetic pleasure of this film might outweigh the delicate emotional effect all of Anderson's films tend to achieve, but even if the complicated story and worldbuilding in the film kept it from succeeding for me fully on a first viewing, it did get me to want to watch it again (and again).

32. Keira Knightley in The Nutcracker and the Four Realms The movie as a whole is a good enough time in the way that all of these lavishly produced live-action Disney fantasy movies tend to be. But Keira Knightley, as the Sugarplum Fairy, single-handedly drags this movie up a notch with her fantastically daffy performance. To explain all the ways that her performance delights would be to spoil what happens in the movie, but I'll just say that she finds a few different registers to play in the film and she is amazing in each one. Think of this snub when you watch the Academy Awards.

31. The Favourite A three-hander where each leg of the triangle is different and spectacular. Turns out that acidic dialogue works just as well in the Yorgos Lanthimos world as alien affectedness, and the cast he's got for this one hurl barbs with aplomb.

30. Ash vs. Evil Dead Series Finale The third season of this show lost a bit of a step for me, not quite balancing the goofs and the horror quite as deftly as the show had done at its best. But it really brought it back around for the last couple of episodes. The finale in particular had some surprisingly big action and an ending that felt perfectly Evil Dead. If that's the last we see of Ash, it feels right.

29. DuckTales The first season wrapped up with some good adventure and some ambitious emotional storytelling. And the second season has seemed, if anything, even more confident so far (including an excellent Christmas episode).

28. Eighth Grade What a lovely, humane, gem of a movie.

27. The Old Man and the Gun I was head-over-heels in love with this one like halfway through the opening scene. If it had ended after that scene, I might have been satisfied, but the rest of the movie was truly wonderful too.

26. A Series of Unfortunate Events Season Two There's no twist for book readers as great as what they did with the Parent characters in the first season, but this second season of the show continued to be really great.

25. Rusty Lake: Paradise & Rusty Lake: Paradox This year I played all of the Rusty Lake/Cube Escape games, and it's probably a good thing that it takes a while between game releases or I might just burrow into these Twin Peaks inspired puzzles and not come out.

24. The last 20 minutes of Halloween I pretty well loved the entirety of this 40-years-later sequel, but the last twenty minutes or so were just next-level great. Basically, once everybody gets to Laurie's compound, this film was as scary as I wanted and as fist-pumpingly thrilling as I didn't know I could have expected.

23. Lost in Space Season One Might have loved this if it was just the one thing after another space survival show, but when you layer on an intriguing mystery and then add on Parker Posey's slitherly Dr. Smith? Yep, loved it.

22. The Haunting of Hill House Mike Flanagan has been doing cool horror work on smaller movies for a few years now, and I'm glad he seems to have found a patron in Netflix. The broader canvas of Haunting of Hill House allows him to do pretty much everything he's so good at, and even allows for some new tricks (like that "one long shot" episode, or the creepy background ghosts that go uncommented on in the story).

21. Creed II Creed was so great, and the notion of Stallone returning to the Ivan Drago well so worrisome, that I was a little apprehensive that this one would disappoint me. What a great surprise, then, that this was basically a best-case scenario for how this could have worked out. Even the Drago stuff is pretty compelling! I'd love to see more with Adonis and Bianca sometime, and I certainly still love Rocky himself, but for this round of playing with fire, I am satisfied.

20. Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters & Godzilla: City on the Edge of Battle The first two (out of three) animated Godzilla films hit Netflix last year and they were much more curious and idiosyncratic than I expected when they were first announced. Slowly paced, with an intentional disregard for the expectations of kaiju fans, they take a brilliant concept and proceed to use it to explore the perils of various belief systems. Each of these ends on a cliffhanger, so the success of the whole thing might depend a bit on how Godzilla: Planet Eater wraps things up, but for now it's a fascinating experiment.

19. The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs I can't say I sat around missing the horror host thing (I also love and regularly watch the family-friendly Svengoolie), but I was still surprised by how enjoyable and how nostalgic I found the experience of sitting back down with Joe Bob to watch a trashy horror movie. I didn't watch this as a marathon, but it did make for a bunch of swell weekends catching up with some movies I'd never seen and a charming film buff I hadn't seen in a while.

18. Bad Times at the El Royale Everything about this, from the cast to the aesthetic to the story, was just right up my alley. There was a moment late in the film where Maggie and I turned to each other, our jaws literally dropped, and we burst into nervous laughter.

17. BlacKkKlansman Wrote this one up over at SportsAlcohol.com.

16. Three Identical Strangers This documentary knocked me out. It's an amazing story with a bunch of incredible twists and turns and fascinating characters. It also poses some really intriguing questions and left me with a lot to think about. Don't read anything about it, just see it!

15. Disenchantment As a big fan of The Simpsons and i (and knowing the similar arcs they followed pretty well), I was pretty excited for a new Matt Groening animated show, and the first season of Disenchantment might have surpassed my expectations. It's funny, visually appealing, and takes some effective swings at the kind of emotional storytelling that it took the earlier series a couple of seasons to really nail. The finale sent me scrambling to the internet to see if it had been picked up for more episodes.

14. Nancy by Olivia Jaimes As a regular and avid comic strip reader, I propose that I was more blown away than most of the internet by the new Nancy. I regularly checked in on the soggy Gilchrist version of the strip, so imagine my surprise and delight at the change! It is neat to see a newspaper strip make any kind of impact in the culture again. Plus the strip is really fun!

13. Star Wars Star Wars: Rebels came to a close with a run of really exciting episodes and a really excellent finale. The comics continued to be really good. And Solo: A Star Wars Story showed up with smaller, not so fate-of-the-galaxy stakes and still just nailed the iconic characters it was digging into in exactly the ways it needed to. In a year where Star Wars fandom was showing itself to be home to a lot of the same toxicity as other fandoms, Star Wars itself kept up its end with lots of fun stuff.

12. The Last Best Story I thought I had a good idea what to expect from a high school newspaper riff on His Girl Friday, and this book certainly (thoroughly, delightfully) satisfies that. But I wasn't exactly prepared for the emotional depth and lovely observational detail in Maggie's book (I mean, I probably should have been, but it still sneaked up on me). I finished and just wanted to read it again.

11. "The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat" episode of The X-Files This second (and seemingly final) revival season of The X-Files boasted a more confident ratio of hits to misses than the previous one (even the nutso mythology episodes showed a stronger grasp of how the show works and what it means in the current moment) but the highlight, again, was a virtuosic episode written and directed by Darin Morgan. It was brilliantly funny, very X-Filesy, and sneakily provided a hilarious alternate series finale for fans in the event that Chris Carter would botch the actual one a few episodes later (luckily, he did as well as I might have hoped, really).

10. Arrested Development - Season 5, Part 1 I disagreed with most of the complaints people lobbied against the fourth season of Arrested Development, but I do think the batch of fifth season episodes released last year did fall prey to some of the shapeless storytelling and clunky greenscreen they were accused of before (I thought the fourth season did wonders with having the characters separated, while they flailed to meaningfully integrate Lindsay in the fifth season). And because episodes weren't as clearly defined in their storytelling, it left some of the character stories feeling both too dragged out and thinly developed (thinking here of Gob's struggle with his sexuality and Tobias's relationship with Murphybrown) by the time the half-season ended on a slight cliffhanger without really building significant momentum. But for all that, I love these characters so much and the show particularly really does right by the way that Michael and George Michael try to navigate their relationship with each other after the events of the fourth season.

9. Mary Poppins Returns This movie had impossible shoes to fill, and you can tell that everybody involved took that seriously. I saw this one twice. The first time, I really enjoyed it. The second time, it made me cry.

8. Marvel Cinematic Universe Black Panther was so fantastic, Avengers: Infinity War felt like a really special theater experience, and Ant-Man and the Wasp was a delightful trifle with an amazing, playful gut-punch of a stinger. Really, I had a great time will all three movies they put out this year and I loved the ride they took us on all the way through to the final text card in the Ant-Man credits.

7. Surprise, it's The Cloverfield Paradox! Sure, this is easily the least of the Cloverfield movies so far (it's still a fun haunted-house-on-a-space-station movie with an overqualified cast), but I don't imagine there'll be a more fun way to see one of these. I was already feeling that familiar Cloverfield excitement as the online marketing game started spooling up, but I pretty much leapt off the couch when Katie and I saw the Super Bowl ad that announced it would be dropping soon on Netflix, and freaked out even further when I looked on Netflix and saw the tag that it would debut after the game ended! We stayed up and watched it that night, and I went to sleep in the glow of a new Cloverfield. Gonna be hard to top that for excitement next time, but I'm looking forward to seeing them try.

6. Support the Girls Basically a "day in the life" movie about a manager of a Hooters-style sports bar, this movie (starring a perfect Regina Hall) is warm and human and reassuring because of the way it eschews the normal reassurances of this kind of thing and just plays it real. It's a beautiful movie.

5. GLOW I loved the first season of GLOW, and I think this second season is even better. It digs a little deeper into the supporting cast, doubles down on its resonance with things happening in the culture right now, includes that delightful episode within an episode, and ends on a perfect and delicate emotional note.

4. American Vandal Here's one of those shows with a perfect first season taking a shot at a follow-up, and they nailed it. Whatever trades are made in taking on a case with less personal involvement for our investigator leads are made up by the incisive observational writing (and hilarious bathroom jokes), this time throwing race and class into the mix. I'm sorry we won't get to see them take on another case and format, but these first two seasons are perfect.

3. Ready Player One I am in the tank for pretty much any Spielberg movie (I've loved the dramas he's done in the last few years) and here he's made a movie with cameos from King Kong and Mechagodzilla. I enjoyed the book this was based on, but I loved the movie even more. The visuals and action (and that amazing Shining sequence) are terrific, but the way that they restructured the game tasks build to make a moving argument for the ways even popular art are used for communication and connection, and Mark Rylance's portrayal of the Wonka-esque Halliday makes it all land.

2. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs I wrote about this one over at SportsAlcohol.com. I loved it.

1. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Parts One & Two To be quite honest, this would be hard to beat in any event since I got engaged to be married between Part One and Part Two. Luckily, the show was a really special event even beyond that personal association. A surprisingly moving epilogue to the Harry Potter stories (and more satisfying in performance where the performances of the actors makes up for some of the ways the supporting characters seemed more thinly conceived in the script than they did in the books), it was also a dazzling theatrical experience. The variety of tricks employed to bring the wizard world to the stage meant that just as you figured out how they pulled off one big effect you were met with three other nifty flourishes. I dig Rowling's continued noodling around in her wizard world through things like this play and the Fantastic Beasts films (I enjoyed Crimes of Grindelwald) as a way to tell new stories and explore nerdy minutia without undoing the lovely bow of that original series of books. (Side note: Because my pleasure reading time has been so heavily curtailed as I get through this first school year, I'm only about a third in on Lethal White. Really digging it, but don't feel like I can include it on this list properly.)

Top Twenty Things I'm Excited About in 2019

Godzilla: King of the Monsters Never would I have believed that we'd be getting a big-budget American Godzilla film that would prominently feature Mothra, Rodan, and King Ghidorah as the third film in a shared Godzilla/Kong movie universe. Now it is happening, and everything they've released to do with the film (trailers, posters, etc) have looked incredible. Gonna be hard to top this one for excitement this year.

Marvel Cinematic Universe Captain Marvel looks like a lot of fun, I'm sure Spider-Man: Far From Home will be great, and I'm pretty interested in whatever Marvel Studios ends up doing for the Disney+ streaming service, but the main event this year is obviously Avengers: Endgame. Whatever form this big finale for the first decade of MCU stories takes, I cannot wait to see it.

Star Wars As with Marvel, there's plenty to look forward to this year, with The Mandalorian presumably accompanying the debut of Disney+ along with the revival of The Clone Wars, but the biggest deal will of course be Episode IX, the grand finale of the main Star Wars saga and the story of the Skywalkers.

Arrested Development The original run of the series was nearly flawless. The fourth season is, in some ways, even more ambitious and special. And even though the first half of this fifth season was, to my eyes, guilty of some of the baggy, formless storytelling that season four had been accused of (and splitting the season like this meant that the first half felt weirdly unsatisfying), it still had a ton of joke that I really loved and developed the relationship between Michael and his son in a way that I did find satisfying after the fourth season cliffhanger. Excited for more of the show and crossing my fingers that it nails the landing.

Stranger Things III This one drops on my birthday! Setting the story in summer sounds fun to me, and I'm pretty excited to see these characters again after a year off.

The Twilight Zone The original series is a deep foundation of my pop culture world and I even found things to like about the UPN revival in the early 00s, so I'm predisposed to be interested in this. But giving it to Jordan Peele (also so psyched for Us) seems like a masterstroke and the trailer they just released is so perfect (both for the obvious love it displays for the original and the new energy it promises) that it's driven me to distraction. Cannot wait for this.

The Addams Family I was obsessed with The Addams Family back when the two Barry Sonnenfeld films came out in the 90s. I loved the 60s sitcom, the movies, and the animated series (and more recently was bitterly disappointed by the Broadway musical). But most of all I adored the Charles Addams cartoons. This latest animated film has been kicking around in some form of development for a while now (there was a time when it was reported that they were trying to get Tim Burton to give it the stop-motion treatment) and I'm a little apprehensive that it ended up with Illumination Studios. Still, a new animated Addams Family film is a must see.

The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance This sounds pretty special, and in any case it is exciting to get an ambitious new puppet project from the Henson Company delivered right to my Netflix queue this year.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood & The Irishman A new Tarantino film would be on this list no matter what, so those photos they released a while back were most exciting to just get a look at what he's going for aesthetically. And of course I'm intrigued and excited to hear that Netflix is throwing money at Scorsese to make a crime film starting De Niro, Pacino, Keitel, and Joe Pesci.

The French Dispatch Not sure if this one will actually hit this year or end up seeking out some awards-friendly release next year, but it's a Wes Anderson film about journalism with a predictably great cast. Exciting whenever it comes out.

Knives Out Rian Johnson writing and directing another mystery film with this cast? Let's do this now.

Little Women Lady Bird was sooo good that I'd be pretty into whatever movie Greta Gerwig made next, so the incredible cast she's assembled for this follow up is just icing.

The Righteous Gemstones When Jody Hill and Danny McBride make another HBO show, I'm going to watch it. Make it about a family of televangelists and make John Goodman the patriarch, and I can't wait to watch it.

My Favorite Thing is Monsters Volume 2 The first volume was a surprise highlight of 2017 and it was a bummer to see this follow up slide further and further back on release calendars. Hoping it finally arrives this year, but the original was so wonderful that I'm ready to wait as long as it takes.

Missing Link There are other animated movies I'll be really excited for by the time they come out this year (Toy Story 4 and Frozen 2 will surely be huge events) but I'm probably most excited that Laika is back with a new feature.

Star Trek It looks like, as an attempt to get people like me to actually keep up their CBS All Access subscription outside of the two months they're offering new episodes of Star Trek Discovery (and I am pretty psyched for this second season!) they are planning on keeping us in new Star Trek as often as possible. An animated Trek comedy! A new series about Picard! More of those very cool Short Treks! I'm pretty into seeing what they have in store this year.

Looney Tunes Cartoons After years and years of grousing about Warner Bros' treatment of the Looney Tunes characters (even when they have something that kinda works, like Wabbit or New Looney Tunes, it has felt like they're on the C-list; and no, Space Jam 2 does not make me feel better), I'm intrigued by this series and am anxious to see some footage to see what they're cooking up.

Penny Dreadful: City of Angels I loved the original series, I'm a sucker for stories set in America in the 30s, and  I like the cast they're lining up, so I'm definitely into this.

Amazing Stories I don't even know if or when I'll get to see this (we already have so many streaming services and if I'm adding another one this year, it'll be Disney+), but I love the idea of a new Amazing Stories and if Spielberg directs an episode or two it'll make this a must watch somehow.