Year-End Clearance!

Happy 2022, everyone. Time for my much awaited year-end round-up posts. As usual, I have given this very little thought - so let's just see what happens.

First of all: Cocktails. I've been perusing Reddit lately, and found r/cocktails. A lot of people were doing a cocktail advent calendar, where they got a new cocktail every day to make. When the Mexican Firing Squad came up (tequila, lime juice, grenadine, bitters) came up, I noticed that my brother-in-law had all the ingredients in his cabinet, so I made a few. I thought they were all right, my sister thought mine were too sour. I might play with later.

For New Year's Eve/Day, I had champagne (California) cocktails. Sour cherry juice, Maraschino, sparkling. Also, a tropical French 75: a little passion fruit puree, a pineapple chunk. gin, lime juice, triple sec, shake and top with sparkling. I liked the way gin went with the passion fruit.

For movies, we watch some Three Stooges (Curly Classics), followed by Marx Bros. - At the Circus and Night at the Opera. We slept through most of them, then went to bed at 12:01. For New Year's Day, The Thin Man.

I'm not sure what to say for movie trends in 2021. We watched ~17 movies from this year - more than most. A lot were mindless action movies, and not as much fun as that should be. We did like Nobody for action, and Barb and Star Go to Vista del Mar for comedy. I'll give them the Best of 2021 award.

I suppose COVID can take some of the blame, with a lot of hot movies postponed to next year (or the end of this year, so the DVD comes out next year). 

In general, we've cut our DVD subscription from three to two discs a week, with the plan to watch more streaming. Two issues with this:

• Discovery is a pain. Recommendations for the apps we have (Netflix, Amazon Prime) are trash. They don't want to help you find something you'll like, just something good enough to waste your time. They don't encourage curated lists. You're supposed to just watch whatever the latest one or two things they are pushing.
• It's hard to link to the movies, so I often don't feel like blogging them. See previous post. 

I'm sure we've seen some great movies on streaming, but in general, I haven't been very impressed. The selection isn't great and has been shrinking - or just moving around between platforms. The movies that the platform is green lighting tend to be the worst combination of director/producer self-indulgence mixed with playing to the lowest common denominator. They don't seem to be very original or very well focused. 

We have been getting back to some "classics" (old movies, black-and-white). We even saw The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Maybe that's where we should be looking on streaming. 

I don't have many other big finds for the year. We saw some decent horror, although my picks for Spook-tober were pretty weak. I guess Paradise Hills was a fave, also Wolf of Snow Hollow. 

For TV, we did Cowboy Bebop, both the live action and the (start of) the anime. We liked the live action a lot - maybe because we like John Cho - but there was too much backstory drama. But my sister has turned us on to The Great British Bake Off, and we'll be grooving on that for a while. 

For next year, I plan to subscribe to Disney-Plus (mainly for the Marvel TV shows). Not sure how long that will last.

And as always, the best movie of the year is still Bringing Up Baby, and we still haven't re-watched it this year. Maybe next year!