My Favorite Media 2010

I've decided this post is entirely IndiaAdventure related, as besides travel and getting violently sick, about all I do in India to wile away the time is consume media.

Best Book:
This one was an easy one for me, Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. An astoundingly brilliant book, the best 'our generation' book since Egger's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Described by my sister as "mesmerizing", Freedom is a must read for anyone trying to figure out how to get through the incredibly boring and shitty middle part of life.

Best Video Game:
This is tough. Despite being the biggest year for video games sales in history, it was a surprisingly weak year for truly great games. Luckily, Halo:Reach came out to show everyone how an amazing game is made. It completely makes up for the awful Halo:ODST last year, and ranks as the best of the series for me. Its long, hard, beautiful, well paced, and incredibly inventive. I say its tough because I was also blown away by another game this year: Castlevania Lords of Shadow. Its so crazy that a Castlevania game is vying for my game of the year; Castlevania games haven't been good in over a decade, since Symphony of the Night in '97 (which I played through again this year in its entirety and its just impossible not to just spam kill everyone with the absurdly overpowered Holy Shield / Steel Rod combo). Lords of Shadow is a tremendously good game. Incredibly long, playing on the hardest difficulty level it took me well over 30 hours to complete. Its exciting, well balanced, innovative in parts, and where its derivative of other modern hack and slashers it does it better than the game its copying (I'm looking at you Shadow of Colossus and God of War III).

Best Album:

While I, like many, many others, have been listening to nothing but Kanye West's new minor masterpiece since it came out, unlike most top 10 lists you'll see I'll resist the urge to put the last great album of the year as the best album of the year (although its an amazing album, Kanye's best, and fully makes up for him picking on poor, homely little Taylor Swift). There were lots of great albums this year. Eminem's Recovery was a great return to form for him, albeit a bit one dimensional. The National put out their best album with High Violet. However sad I am about the demise of The Shins, James Mercer's new band Broken Bells put out a fantastic first album (although there are no songs on it that Natalie Portman would hand to you in a doctor's office waiting room). I'm an unapologetic Angels and Airwaves fan, and their free album this year, LOVE, is great; not a bad song on it. Shout Out Loud's Work wasn't received too well by a lot of critics, but I loved it and listened to it on repeat for weeks. Speaking of wearing the electrons off of an album, Vampire Weekend's Contra played on my iPod on repeat forever. The weird Americana/Bruce Springsteen/Punk drummer band Gaslight Anthem had their best album this year as well with American Slang; it probably made me more homesick for the US of A than any other this year. Freak folk was well represented this year by two phenomenal albums; Mumford & Sons debut Sign no More and Bombay Bicycle Club's Flaws. But, for my favorite album of 2010 I'm going to go with one you've probably never heard of but should be listening to; Swedish singer/songwriter The Tallest Man on Earth's The Wild Hunt. Its an amazing album and of an already amazing catalog, its Kristian Matsson's best yet.

Best TV show:
My sister records a bunch of TV for me onto DVDs and sends them to me at great cost all the way here to India. Unfortunately, I think 2010 TV was so bad its pretty much killed TV for me. I enjoyed the two seasons of Survivor this year like I always do, but that's just a guilty pleasure of course and doesn't represent anything close to art. Everything else was terrible. I've watched House for all of its seasons, even struggling through the awful season with the cop, but this one ended my viewing of that show. Terrible. All the sitcoms I used to watch have completely jumped the shark. Sorry, I think TV is dead, there is no best TV show of 2010 I'm afraid.
(Edit:) After writing this last night I remembered that in fact 2010 contained one of the best hours of TV ever - the final episode of Lost. So of course Lost is the best show of 2010, but unfortunately that only strengthens my argument that TV is shit right now as it was the end of one of the greatest series ever.

Best Film:
This one is tough for me, not because of all the great movies this year but because I've seen so few of them living here in 1850's India. But, of the ones I've seen, its a year with a fantastic studio monster Inception and a fantastic independent little gem Winter's Bone. I'm going to go with Inception, because while Winter's Bone is easily one of the best movies of this year or any other, its primarily so good because of the tremendous performance of its lead, while Inception is just all around amazing. Of course I haven't seen any of the late December Oscar bait movies so I could be missing the next Lost in Translation for all I know (one of which is a Sofia Coppola film, coincidentally). Honorable mention goes to Scott Pilgrim vs the World. I normally dislike comic book movies, but this is a wild, crazy, media mash of visual and auditory delight. Its not your parent's movie, that's for sure. And Kieran Culkin steals the show as the too cool for school roommate, his best performance in 8 years, since Igby Goes Down.