The biggest news of 2012 was—
THE MAYANS BLEW IT! THE WORLD DIDN’T COME TO AN END! (Of course, the Mayans’ biggest problem was they could see five centuries into the future but took no notice of the Spanish conquistadors making port on their shores.)
The second biggest news of the year was—
THE REPUBLICANS BLEW IT and THE WORLD DIDN’T COME TO AN END! (Well, maybe it did for them, but just like the Mayans, they just didn’t see what was going on around them.)
Meanwhile…
In theaters, we said hello and goodbye and “maybe.” The Hunger Games proved a YA novel could appeal to both youth and adults and raised high hopes for the film versions of the remaining two books—and hopes they don’t chop the last one into TWO movies. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter proved you can carry a joke too far and Prometheus was like the great restaurant you’d been hearing about but when you got there the food was just so-so and you had trouble recommending it to someone else.
In the category of rebooting reboots we got The Amazing Spider-Man which wasn’t “amazing” so much as it was just enjoyable and Skyfall, the twenty-something-eth James Bond film, better than most but probably not the best. The Bourne franchise got its own reboot-refresh and asks the question, How many times can you tell the same story? Not too many more, let’s hope.
The two biggest events involved people in spandex. The highest-grossing movie of the year was Marvel’s The Avengers, a crowd-pleasing superhero fest. The Dark Knight Rises was a satisfying conclusion to Christopher Nolan’s Batman Trilogy that could not have been done better, but still was not as good as The Dark Night. And there’s another Hobbit movie.
On the small screen the biggest disappointment (so far) was the much-heralded high concept The Last Resort, which despite excellent production values and a solid cast, just didn’t engage viewers. The biggest surprises were Arrow, a TV-budget Batman that caught on and Revolution, or what happens where there’s no power to the people. The newest incarnation of Sherlock Holmes (Elementary) thrives among all the other procedurals and fractured fairy tales (Grimmand Once Upon a Time) have a new entry, the reimagined Beauty and the Beast. We said goodbye to Fringe, which went out with a whimper and one of the CSIs (I mean, this stuff is supposed to be real, but it’s soooo far out there sometimes it might as well be SF.) The Walking Dead and True Blood continue with truly gonzo years, and Falling Skies was back but…
Vampires continued to rule the pages (and the increasing numbers of e-reader screens) but there are too many to mention and none really noteworthy.
So what do we have to look forward to in 2013?
Pacific Rim (a new take on monster movies), After Earth (or “Take Your Child to the Office Day”), The Man of Steel (another Superman reboot), the second installment of the Star Trek reboot, more capes, more cowls. Be sure to check Cloud Atlas when it comes to DVD/Netflix (I don’t even think the bootleggers bothered with this one), it’s worth your time. We may get confirmation that the elusive Higgs boson (aka “the God particle”) was actually discovered last year, and scientists are confident we will discover the first truly earthlike extrasolar planet in 2013: not “Earthlike but too big/small/close/far away from its sun. A place you could walk on with no spacesuit (provided you’re inoculated against germs and stuff alien and inimical to terrestrial biology.)
(Of course, if we can find them, they can find us, too. And they may decide they don’t want to be found. And they might decide to do something about it. And it seems disaster always strikes when we have a black president. So… 2013 may turn out to be a very exciting year!)
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