December 2021 Review – Happy New Year

So, first of all, happy new year to anyone and everyone! Second of all, I hope you had a good Christmas this year – though we here in the UK had a big spike of the Covid-19 Omnicorn variant, me and my folks managed a make-shift celebration despite things being far from ideal. Nevertheless I enjoyed my holidays and I hope you did too.

In many ways 2021 just felt like the worse sequel to 2020 – the same old problems, same old solutions and same old arguments as 2020 but more tired because nobody likes listening to the same old crap all the time.

But it wasn’t all gloom and doom. Before the government’s poorly foreshadowed 3rd lockdown (could be the fourth, I’ve lost count at this point), I did get to squeeze into the cinema one more time to see Spiderman No Way Home. It was pretty good. Not the best Spiderman movie ever, not the worst Spiderman movie ever, but an entertaining one for sure. It’s one of those movies that’s more an event than it is a movie – kind of like Avengers Endgame was before it – and thus a lot of focus goes on pleasing audiences than on the incredibly wonky script. At the end of the day it’s just dumb fun though and I’m totally fine with that.

In preparation for this film I watched all the other Tom Holland movies. I had been very on the fence about these in the past but ended up enjoying them more now than I previously had. Maybe it’s because I’m not a pretencious 18 year old prying for flaws in summer blockbusters anymore because I think that’s all movie criticism is, and instead just focus on whether the movie entertains me or not. Believe it or not, out of the Tom Holland movies, I actually thought the new No Way Home was my least favourite. It was a close race between it and Far From Home, but Homecoming is so much better than both in my opinion.

I’ve been thinking about reviewing all the Spiderman movies here from Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield too, but I think I’ll wait on that a little. Maybe save it for later.

It was also Christmas recently which means I got my hands on a new movie or two, and a game. The movie was Bonnie in Scotland (1935), which is a Laurel and Hardy movie I look forward to watching. Although I probably won’t review their work here, I will say I’m a fan of the duo. Every now and again I have an itch to watch their stuff. Recently I watched a couple of their shorts like The Music Box, Beau Hunks and Dirty Work. They’re all reliably good and surprisingly never feel repetitive despite the humour being so similar in a number of them. I’ll probably wind up watching some more soon after seeing the new one I got.

The game I got was Call of Duty Modern Warfare (the original one) on Steam. I used to have this on my Xbox 360 until the game decided that it didn’t want to work anymore. Because Call of Duty is kind of a joke now, it’s easy to forget how influential the franchise used to be; the original Modern Warfare is up there with Doom and Halo for changing the landscape of FPS titles in AAA gaming. Although it’s changes mostly bought about a tonal shift in storytelling, settings and environments more so than anything gameplay orientated, I still have to give the game credit for doing what it does well. I might give this game a retrospective review, but it might not be for a while if I do.

Anyways, that about wraps up December and thus all of 2021. This blog grew quite a bit, relative to my size, to an extent I didn’t think it would. Consistently seeing that more than just 10 random people look at every post is kind of crazy to me. Here’s to an even better 2022 where I’ll only be reviewing more movies, games and even resurrect my dead TV category for a bit!

So, hope you all had a good Christmas and wish you all the happiest of new years.