30 Reasons 2021 Didn't Totally Suck - PART ONE

Comedies, action films, and oddball historical epics fill out our first ten entries

It’s Tuesday, February 1, and here’s where we are!

I finished a pilot script!

Whatever happens after this point, I’m just glad to have one completed creative project for the year. I can take a breath now and, whatever else I do this spring, I can feel good about actually accomplishing one of my goals for 2022.

Ambition has certainly never been my problem. If I could just create five or six clones of myself, everything would be solved because I could finally have enough time for everything I’d like to write. Until then, I just have to keep my head down and check off projects one at a time. Next up? My annual round-up of the best things I saw in the previous year.

Normally, when I do these year-end lists, they’re made up entirely of movies, but this year, I’m going to be mixing it up, including long-form narrative from the small screen as well. The companies that make all of this media have spent the last 24 months doing their best to make it all one big cauldron of content soup, erasing the distinctions between the theater and your home screen. Fine. I agree. The lines have blurred, perhaps beyond the point where we can ever fix it, and so that’s the media landscape now.

My list should reflect that, just as the title of the list this year reflects the truth about the year itself…

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30 REASONS 2021 DIDN’T TOTALLY SUCK:

PART 1

I think it’s safe to say 2021 sucked. Just like 2020 sucked. Just like 2019 sucked. We’ve been in this increasing Spiral of Suck now for a while, and more than ever, my film and television consumption is all about trying to assuage some of the non-stop horror that is Dealing With Other Human Beings at this particular time and place.

I’m not ranking these in any particular order. The older I get, the more futile it feels to me to try to break an entire year’s worth of films down into direct comparisons and rankings. These are all so different, and each one of them is special to me for different reasons. The entire point of this list is to celebrate these, and each one of them has profound value. Some were released theatrically. Some were released to streaming services. Some are feature films. Some of them are ongoing narrative series or special television events. None of them are “lesser than,” so let’s just dig in and start with one of the year’s oddest pleasures…

Riders of Justice

image courtesy of Magnet Releasing

Sometimes you just want to know what happens next.

This might be one of the most quietly compelling scripts of the year because it doesn’t feel like any other film you can name. It doesn’t do anything you think it’s going to do, and even once you’ve got the general idea, it keeps throwing the strangest twists at you. It avoids easy genre definition nimbly while simply hooking you into needing to see how they’re going to connect it all.