Tag: Michael Mann

Check out previous instalments here.

Thus spoke the prophet: “Well, the years start comin’ and they don’t stop comin’.” There were elections and wars, genocides that proceed unabated and natural disasters that we can hardly call natural when we’ve created conditions that make them inevitable. So many celebrities died that there would have been a whole “fuck you, 2016!”-style outcry if we didn’t have other things to worry about: those who lived long lives, like Maggie Smith, James Earl Jones or Donald Sutherland, and those whose lives were cut tragically short, from Shannen Doherty to Liam Payne. (Reports of Noam Chomsky’s death were greatly exaggerated.) But there were bright spots, too – Mickey Mouse finally entered the public domain, all that Mikey Madison stock we bought early is paying dividends, and Terrifier 3 made people throw up. (If that one doesn’t sound like good news, please factor in some 2000s kid nostalgia.)

It was a year of endings and beginnings, as are, admittedly, all years. Ciara finished her thesis after years of toiling in the PhD mines. Dean suddenly became an investigative journalist, and he rocks at it. Ciara’s extended family found out that she’s a writer or something when she wrote about her epilepsy journey for the Irish Independent, and Dean helped found a network of community groups to promote integration in Tipperary. Ciara watched all of Seinfeld for the first time, and Dean finally finished Fez, a video game he first purchased in 2012. We both launched new podcasts: Ciara’s is about films, as is her wont, and Dean’s is about Tipperary, as is his wont, these days. Both of them are excellent, if we do say so ourselves. 

As ever, we’ll be singing the praises of our favourite films released in 2024 in March, for the ninth (ninth!) annual Sundae Film Awards. Right now, we’re going to look back at the best films from the rest of the medium’s history that we watched for the first time this year, from North Korean kaiju adventures to camp classics about child abuse.