Sean Lemme

I started blogging as a way to lazily pass my high school senior project and somehow I've kept doing it for more than half my life

Sean’s Top 10 Video Games of 2019

Well, unlike some other media, it would be hard to make a case that 2019 was the year of the decade for video games. With aging hardware and new consoles looming on the horizon, this last year was all about keeping on keeping on. Games as a service continues to be a thing, with the added wrinkle that game subscription services really hit their stride with the massive success of Xbox Game Pass. I guess it sort of became a year about catching up with stuff for best of the decade and wrapping up this console generation. It didn’t help that some of the year’s most exciting titles either disappointed (Anthem) or slipped into 2020 (DOOM Eternal). Oh well, plenty to look forward in the months to come!

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Sean’s Top 10 Movies of 2019

Both John and Colin talked about how unusually good this year was at the cinema, so I gotta admit: there are a lot of good movies I haven’t seen yet due to an unusually hectic December and January. Given that it’s award season, it stings that I haven’t seen prestige pictures like 1917 and Little Women, indie darlings like The Souvenir and The Last Black Man in San Francisco, foreign films like Pain and Glory and Ash is Purest White, or literally any 2019 documentaries.

But! I did see a lot of shitty movies. I went to the movies with my dad most Tuesdays last year, and that meant I saw some real clunkers, like Men in Black: International, Dark Phoenix, and Terminator: Dark Fate. It also meant I got to spend more time with my family and see a lot of my favorite movies of the year more than once, so I wouldn’t change a thing. In fact, it even helped me pick up on a pattern in cinema this year: If 2017 was the year of the mom, 2019 was the year of the dad.

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Sean’s Top 10 TV Shows of 2019

Man, I really need to watch Succession, huh? 2019 was the end of the decade and it felt like it everything I loved had to end with it. In the last year, I said goodbye to the likes of Steven Universe, Broad City, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Catastrophe, Veep, Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas, The Tick, Jessica Jones (and all Marvel Netflix), Game of Thrones, Fleabag, Legion, Bajillion Dollar Propertie$, Silicon Valley, and Mr. Robot. That list doesn’t even include shows that are returning for brief final stretches this year, like Bojack Horseman and The Good Place. So yeah, that Succession is looking pretty good.

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Sean’s Top 10 Albums of 2019

The year that was 2019 felt excruciatingly long and full of terrors. Yet, somehow, the end of the year really snuck up on me. Usually, as the year goes on, I keep a list of albums I’ve liked and need to revisit, then actually do that starting around November. Unfortunately, some real life distractions and my own focus on getting my best of the decade lists in order resulted in me never getting around to a proper list-making process this year. So this is about as far from a “best of 2019” list as I’ve ever done, really it’s just the 10 albums I’ve listened to the most. I’m even going to forgo honorable mentions, because my list of those right now is about 40 albums.

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Horrorble: Mortdecai

Mortdecai (2015)

I had a lot of options when it came to picking a movie to close out this year’s festivities. I could have done what I usually do and review a bad movie from this year (Serenity was a front-runner, as were two movies I’ve actually seen, Dark Phoenix and Men in Black: International) but this isn’t just any Shocktober, this is the Decade of Death! In honor of the work we put in this month, I decided I wanted to review a bad movie that represented the darkest, bleakest aspects of the 2010s as a whole. Something so horrible only those who lived through this decade would remember it. So what were the bad directions cinema went in over the past 10 years? Well, there were the unnecessary franchise films, so I could have watched something like Dumb and Dumber To. There was the collapse of theatrical comedies, so I could have watched something like Grown Ups. Then there was “cancel culture” and the backlash to it, so I could have watched something unsavory or truly deplorable but quickly decided that was a bad idea.

One film exists in the crossroads of these terrible trends. A brazen, foolish attempt to simultaneously cash in on the goodwill generated by one decaying franchise and the tiniest opportunity of another. A comedy so painfully unfunny that even watching it on Hulu, I still wanted to find a way to get my money back. A film starring a person who was already creatively burnt out and would go on to reveal himself to be so problematic that I remember hearing an audible groan in the audience when he appeared in another movie just a year after this one. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Mortdecai.

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Shocktober Day 28: Hereditary

Hereditary (2018)

Looking over the scores on our individual scores on Herditary‘s Letterboxd page, it appears I liked it the most out of the Mildly Pleased crew. Contributor Michael Sevigny gave it the lowest score of all of us and went on to say in his Midsommar entry “Ari Aster’s filmmaking is anathema to me.” Harsh, dude. Why is it that our biggest cinephile was coldest on the film, while our least film-savvy writer (me) liked it the most? I could have just asked, but let’s guess instead.

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Shocktober Day 25: The Killing of a Sacred Deer

The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

Does it make me a basic bitch if I need to engage with a film on its most literal level to enjoy it? Or, to take a step back, is it fair that I need to enjoy a film to like it? The Killing of a Sacred Deer clearly has a lot going on that thoughtful critics can engage with: complicated social criticism, obscure references, deep themes, and deliberate deconstruction of cinematic tropes. But it’s also, for me, a movie that pushes director Yorgos Lanthimos’ stoic style too far. When I hear the phrase “it’s not for everyone,” I always think “I’m not everyone, it must be for me.” But in this case, a deliberately off-putting movie made me too uncomfortable to really like it. And I think that may be my problem, not the movie’s.

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