To paraphrase Colin, while TV and movies were dealt another brutal blow by the strikes last year, the music industry felt fully back in swing as we closed out the first half of this decade. Finally, it seemed like there was more going on than songs about isolation during the pandemic or leftover relics from the 2010s! Perhaps not coincidentally, this corresponded with era of girl pop hitting its zenith (or perhaps merely just new heights) with Spotify’s data showing that women dominated the lists of most-streamed artists, songs, and albums of 2024. On top of that, long-dormant artists like Camera Obscura and Jamie xx showed up with pretty good new albums and others, like The Smile and Charley Crockett, couldn’t help but put out multiple complete LPs. I’ll just say it, 2024 was an embarrassment of riches!

But here’s what’s freaking me out: at the end of every year, I scoop up a bunch of albums from other “best of” lists and cram them into my ears as fast as possible so I can make the actual, definitive, best top 10 list on the Internet (not really, usually I crap out and make a big apologetic post). The thing is, at some point in late 2023, I definitely did stream The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess and yet not only did Chappell Roan *not* make last year’s list, I totally forgot about her until the Guts World Tour turned this sleeper hit into a smash.

Of course, the second time around I fell in love with Chappell Roan like everyone else, and her follow-up single “Good Luck, Babe!” was 100% my #1 summer jam, despite allegations of it being a BRAT summer. But there are precious months where I could have been way more on top of my shit instead of wasting my time on the mental gymnastics that could justify THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT as really good, actually. So what does that mean? What lesson have I learned from this humbling experience? Listen to new music more times, I guess. Don’t be a boring old guy? Oh no, more on that later!

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Much like the rest of 2024, I’m still not quite sure what to make of the year in music, even though it is officially, entirely, completely over. Once again, we here at Mildly Pleased would like to take more of a moratorium approach to a year after it’s completely dead and gone. None of this posting a Best of the Year List in November nonsense. Or maybe we just increasingly need the extra time for list-making when our lives continue to make keeping engaged with new music, TV, and movies harder by the year.

Anyways, as usual, music was the easiest medium for me to feel like I was on top of, especially when this year had the most to offer in terms of rewarding releases, since TV and movies were still reeling from multiple industry-wide strikes that happened last year. Still, I sometimes felt a bit on the outside looking in on the year in music, just because this year felt so pop-dominant (thanks, the algorithm). And while I did appreciate pretty much all of the year’s big pop releases, not a ton of them will be making my list. Instead, a lot of it will once again be pretty indie-centric, even if this year didn’t feel quite as rewarding for releases just a bit below the radar. Continue reading →

Early on in 2023, before a very necessary pair of strikes screwed everything up, it seemed like we had a really easy theme all set up for my annual wrap-up: unfinished business. Between the likes of Fast X, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, and Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One we had an absolute glut of (perhaps arrogantly conceived) half movies. And then there were all the franchise pay-offs on the other end of the spectrum, John Wick: Chapter 4, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, and plenty more were all slated to wrap-up some other long-running stories. Then things went off the rails and we all started to wonder if the recovery we all thought we were promised in 2022 would never actually come to pass.

Well, all that chaos aside, I’m sticking with that theme. Because I’ve got some real unfinished business. I thought I had a pretty good handle on 2023 until I started seeing my friends’ lists and award nominations and realized I actually still had a ton of homework to do. And then I went and had a really weird couple of weeks that sapped my motivation to pay attention to movies. So I created a living document here. And I’m gonna keep trying to work on 2023 as we continue on into the new year. You got a problem with that? Too bad!
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I didn’t really touch on this in my top ten albums or TV shows lists, but it didn’t feel like a particularly special year for either of those mediums. I would not say the same for movies, even if it was sometimes hard to tell where the state of film was heading, especially after actors and writers went on strike and we had that weirdly long gap of notable movies coming out in the wake of Barbenheimer. Though, once November rolled around, I felt like we got a bunch of really great, prestige-y movies, and it seems we’re still getting a bunch coming out in time for the Oscars.

This feels a bit like the way things used to be, and I could complain about this familiar feeling of having to cram in watching a bunch of movies in December and January in preparation for this list, but I won’t. Mainly because movies are in such a weird, uncertain state that I’m just glad talented filmmakers are able to get their work out at all, and if that comes with the price of seeing the best films of the year all at the same time, that’s the price I’m willing to pay. This is all a long-winded way of saying that I thought this turned out to be a pretty good year for movies, and hopefully one that saw Hollywood reflecting on how to reinvent itself instead of churning out the same old garbage. Continue reading →

2023 was a year of extremes. We had the crushing lows with box-office bombs like Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and The Marvels and glorious highs like the cinematic triumph that was Barbenheimer. We had big stretches of nothing in the summer and then a boss rush of awards darlings all crammed into December.

As usual there are more than a few movies I wish I’d made the time to see before making this list. This year’s collection of neglected hopefuls includes;

Past Lives
Priscilla
May December (ya know, a lot of Colin movies)

And some Sean movies like John Wick 4 and Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning.

Also, The Iron Claw, (which feels like a real John movie). Otherwise I’m happy with my list. Aw, here it goes….

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There was plenty of good TV to be watched in 2023, but compiling my list did not make me all that excited for the future of the medium. Mostly because basically all of the shows appearing on this list are shows that I’d already been watching, and in fact, a lot of them were shows airing their final seasons. Now, it’s certainly on me to find new shows to watch, but this year, it just didn’t seem like there were as many new buzzworthy shows that everyone was talking about.

That, of course, could be for a few reasons, the most obvious one being that there was a writer’s strike this year that kept shows both new and old from airing seasons before the year’s end. Also, it seems like a lot of streaming services in the last year or two have indicated an emphasis on profits and producing less scripted entertainment, which has foreshadowed the possible end of “peak TV”. Which, honestly, felt like it was going to end sometime soon anyway. The amount of daring, off-beat shows that we got the past decade or so just never quite seemed sustainable, even though it was fun while it lasted. Well, with that somewhat depressing preamble out of the way, here are the shows that made 2023 memorable while it lasted. Continue reading →