The best of 2020

A few years ago, I saw a post from someone who had tracked every film they watched that year. I’ve expanded the idea a bit and thought it might be interesting to capture the best of the best here for anyone seeking recommendations. ENJOY.

Overall best of the year: I May Destroy You

A masterpiece of craft with both depth and glorious surface richness. I can’t remember the last time I saw ideas explored so thoroughly while embracing the messiness and uncertainty of the themes.

Michaela Coel has given many excellent interviews and talks— but my favourite is this discussion with Louis Theroux. The pinnacle of great writing is to generate questions which cannot be easily answered but feel emotionally true.

The only thing more difficult is to be able to wrap up a piece like this with a satisfying conclusion. I think it manages it with another of the most mature approaches in great writing: understanding that satisfaction is more about a climax than an ending.

The best books I read

The Hidden Life of Trees

There are many obvious reasons to have become more interested in nature recently: moving to the countryside, becoming a father, getting older, going for more walks.

Instead it relates to maybe the best book I read in 2019: How to do Nothing. One of its key ideas is that if you don’t pay attention to something, you render it effectively passive. And so you cannot have any meaningful relationship with it.

For millennia, humans primary experience of the world was the animals, plants and environment around them. To return to that knowledge is to refocus on the real world.

At the small scale, I love that I can tell my daughter about the different trees and leaves as we walk through the woods. And at the macro scale, I find it strangely comforting that underneath our feet is a rich network of roots, microorganisms and fungi that can span continents.

• Wilding — We need to eat less meat. But part of the problem is the modern farming system has evolved into a horrible mechanised monster. This is the story of how Knepp farm allowed its estate to return to a natural landscape and the impact on both its business and the local environment. If we’re going to eat meat, this is a great place to get it.
• Into the Kingdom of Ice — It starts with trees that make the wood, that becomes the ship, that hosts the crew that travels to strange new societies. And then they hit the ice. A really absorbing exploration of everything that goes into the trip, then the struggle at its heart.
• A half baked idea — loss is both universal and extremely individual. This book writes about it in really beautiful poignant ways that I related to. And it has a great recipe for pizza. What more do you want.
• A History of Modern Britain — The present always seems to make more sense when you can put it in context. This Andrew Marr book is a really streamlined summary of the major plays and shed real light for me on things like Labour’s cyclical struggle with extremism, and how the Tories made home-buying the bullshit mechanism for everyone to “have a stake” in society.

The best films & TV I saw

A seriously light year for films that blew my socks off — of the 23 I tracked, nothing really felt like it belonged alongside the rest of my list. 2020 had a lot of rewatching, so maybe go and watch The Departed again, it’s a banger.

• Escape at Dannemora — Right on the borderline of tipping into total camp hilarity, the performances from Del Toro, Paul Dano and Particia Arquette are hugely entertaining. And naturally a prison break is always a solid context.
• The Boys, Preacher, Legion — Lumped together for being geeky comic book fare, the visual and narrative innovation and boldness in all of these was phenomenal. Legion probably wins for depth: again as a new father, a show based deeply around the impact of our parents means there are lessons I will think about forever when it comes to my daughter.
• Ladhood — I first discovered Liam Williams along with the rest of the amazing cast of Year Friends back in 2016 and I just can’t think of another comic quite like him. Ladhood is a bit like the Inbetweeners written from the perspective of your 30s.
• Middleditch & Schwartz — I know there’s a science to improv but when its firing on all cylinders, it truly seems magic. The first episode of this comes together in a way that’s inspired.
• Barry Series 2 — Indulges itself a little further than the first series both for good and bad but pulls some really audacious moves both in its violent spy themes and its acting class plot.

The best games I played

• The Last of Us Part 2 —Incredibly made all round, but its greatest trick is using games’ primary metaphor of the player being the character to create a completely different experience.
• Hades — They say the best games are a great loop of 30 seconds, repeated over and over. The genius of Hades is in matching the random, repeating “roguelike” core with characters whose stories gradually unfurl between runs. From a great little studio who deserve your money.
• Disco Elysium — writing-heavy games can feel laden, slow and boring. Disco Elysium’s key idea is that your abilities are things like rhetoric, your electrochemical system and the fantastically creepy “inland empire”, who will chip in mid conversation and make suggestions. The results are genuinely surprising, thought-provoking and — the rarest of things in a game — laugh out loud funny. As ambitiously well written as anything else I saw this year.
• Slay the Spire — Sometimes you don’t want flashing lights, shouting, banging and quick reflexes. Slay the Spire is just as exciting with no time pressure whatsoever and is a true example of you slowly adapt and become more skilled and experimental with builds across hundreds of playthroughs.
• Destiny 2 — There’s so much you could talk about with this game, but the fact is: the moment to moment shooting is better than anything else money can buy and that’s all that matters. Also: it lends itself really well to having a podcast on in the background for your brain while your eyes watch bad guys go boom.

Honourable Mention: M1 Macbook

OK, it’s not culture but it’s something I use every day that’s just phenomenal. I’d been pursuing the dream of working just on iPad for years: it’s faster, cognitively lighter. But it was a constant struggle. A MacBook that feels faster than the iPad, AND runs iPad apps is such a joy to use. Go try one for Apple’s 2 weeks return window and I bet you won’t take it back.