This felt like another year where streaming put Hollywood to shame, even with the added entertainment apocalypse of the Writer’s Strike being felt by both. Almost every movie out of Hollywood felt like a waste of two hours, but some interesting series made watching larger screens not a total waste.

Arts and culture-wise, moving out of Hong Kong and its better, if beleagured, art scene quickly reduced interesting art and theatre to a nil with Singapore relocation.

Movies

Films were just bad in 2024. Other than the rather bizarre (intriguing, until the last 1/4, I’d say) The Substance, studios stuck to safe, formulaic, money-printing sequels and franchises. It was a starkly depressing movie landscape in 2024.

Mad Max Furiosa

Strangely, this prequel to Max Max: Fury Road was way better than it had much of a right to be.

The vision of the post-apocalyptic wasteland and the story of Furiosa was visually spectacular and over the top and I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would. I also have to admit I didn’t cotton onto it being the prequal to Fury Road (I highly recommend making them a double-header) until the very end of the film with the one scene there which links the two movies together (at least in my mind).

Kinda worth the watch, though it’s probably time with this one to let the Mad Max franchise rest.

Series

Streaming services seem to be eating Hollywood’s lunch these days. Perhaps because they have guaranteed eyeballs that they can monetize across, or the fact most people seem willing to watch anything every evening, while I felt the vast majority of stuff on all the services (Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, HBO, Apple, Paramount, Peacock) were pretty terrible, there were a few bright spots I enjoyed.

True Detective: Night Country

I have to admit to not having seen any of this series before hearing Jodie Foster was in this season.

I loved this show. In fact, in Jan and Feb 2024, I’d say it was the only interesting thing on any screen, anywhere.

Atmospheric, spooky AF, and with rich, flawed, and interesting, well-acted characters across the entire cast range, I was watching this voraciously as each episode came out to know what happened. I feel it might have been foreshortened by the impending writer’s strike since it seemed to end abruptly, but was a great piece of storytelling.

A Chief of Police in a remote Alaskan small town that has just gone under full Arctic night investigates the mysterious disappearance and grisly deaths of a group of scientists from a remote research station somehow connected with a murder of a Native activist years previous and a mine that is the main reason the town is there. Highly recommended.

Invincible S01

This animated series really surprised me since I figured I was pretty much over anything superhero due to the MCU and DC Comics OD-ing everyone on superpowers, but this coming of age tale of a teen coming into his superpowers was both shocking, surprising, and… well, really good.

Interesting things to say about identity, duty, frailty, and the failings of our parents and authorities. Better storytelling imho than what we’ve seen from with Marvel or DC. Worth the watch.

Sadly, the second season was a bit too trite and failed in the excellent promise and ending of the first season, but I’d recommend this for an innovative non-MCU/DC universe tale which was compelling, watchable, and interesting.

Fallout S01

While I think this suffered from an extremely confused first episode where way too many characters were introduced initially (I’m assuming especially if, like me, you’re not familiar with the video game series), this ended up being super watchable and a great first season.

Quirky, slightly sinister at times, and with this underlying mystery of whether the end of the world was corporately engineered or a global political miscalculation, it kept me hook me straight through to the season 1 finale. The art direction from this 1950s “our great atomic future” era is really well done and spot on.

So, give this one a chance and get past the first episode. It gets good quite quickly after that.

Silo S01 and S02

While I felt Season 1 was a bit slow, I think I can forgive it the slow burn as setup to a more excellent Season 2 which I am really finding much more compelling. Definitely been enjoying it way more.

I actually read the original Wool book that the Silo franchise is pulled from. If you haven’t, I’d recommend the excellent books the series is based on, Wool by first time author Hugh Howey. The series is slightly different IIRC, but they’ve done a great job staying true to the original.

Franklin

A surprisingly good recommendation I picked up from the Economist, I actually quite enjoyed this dramatization of Franklin’s time in Paris during the US War of Independence trying to enlist French aid against the British. Micheal Douglas was surprisingly good as Franklin (words, I never thought I’d utter) and while it does take some liberties with the history and relationships is a pretty accurate depiction of the events surrounding Franklin managing to get French aid to the Revolutionary War effort against the British.

I have to admit this might not be everyone’s cup of tea and part of my enjoyment of this might have been the fact I’d read Isaacson’s excellent biography on Franklin a year back which definitely make you feel he was the most impressive of the Founding Fathers and that you really need to be as accomplished as he was (seriously, entrepreneur, writer/publisher, scientist, and statesman… how’s your todo list for 2025 looking right now in comparison?)

There is no season 2 to be had here, so you should consider this a one-off mini-series.

Games

Much like reading, my aspirational gaming habit did not get as much exercise as I would have liked in 2024, so while I tried a few games (and have a whack on my Steam still to play) few actually grabbed me enough to recommend or continue playing through to the end. With one exception.

Inscryption

Atmospheric to the point it actually made the hair on the back of my neck stand up at one point, this seemingly innocuous but slightly grisly card game you play against a sinister opponent in an abandoned cabin is pretty amazing. With its strange sacrifice mechanics and progression and this deeply macabre goings-on underneath the surface of its play, it does an amazing job keeping you hooked through the game.

It is very well done and should be a modern classic for its originality, atmosphere, and game and sound design. Highly recommended to play on a dark night by yourself with no one around. Available on Steam and for most platforms.

Theatre, Arts, Music, and Exhibits

Sadly, while I did do some ballet and other theatre, overall it was not great in terms of an arts year. Hong Kong is definitely better than Singapore for innovative arts and exhibitions, so lamenting the return to SIngapore for work, but did get to see two notable exhibits that I’d love to see more of.

Xuamenxing Arachaeological Exhibit - Hong Kong Palace Museum

It’s been a while since I’ve managed to do anything even remotely archaeological (ironic, since I considered doing a PhD in it at one point). And for some reason, it seemed a lot easier to see exhibits of this nature in places like Paris, Firenze, Rome, and London (and to a somewhat lesser extent, Berlin) than Hong Kong. For some reason, anywhere below the equator just seems to put less stock in these exhibits than Western Europe.

But this collection of masks and statuary from the Xuamenxing culture near Chengdu, was really exceptional. Held at the Palace Museum HK, it’s one of the few exhibits I’ve seen in the building that I enjoyed or found anything more than Beijing-boosting propaganda (and even then, the official “Unity through Diversity” tagline from the Beijing government on this exhibit was a bit of an eye roll for a culture wiped out by its contemporaries).

Still, once you got past that, this was an exceptional exhibit and had some amazing finds of masks, statuary, and artifacts from the vanished Chegndu culture that it represents the extant remains of.

If it’s reshown anywhere near you, I highly recommend checking it out.

Titian and the Venetian Renaissance - HKMOA

Held at the HKMOA, this exhibit I enjoyed less for Titian than the Tintorettos and Veroneses that had been restored and provided by the Uffizi in Florence for display. The restorations were exceptional and moved previously seen darkened Rennaissance art into the vibrant colours and images seen when these paintings originally debuted in the 1600s (in fact, the contrast between some restored vs non-restored works was amazing in terms of the differeneces.).

While I feel a much better job could have been done telling the tale of Venetian history and its importance better and how Titian and his co-creators fit into the world stage at that time and how the wealth of Venice (through the control of the spice trade and the defeat of Genoa led to the ability for rich patrons to encourage the arts in people like Titian) drove much of what we consider Renaissance art today, this was a great exhibit for the survey of the art it provided. Some really great examples of their works including the newly restored Tintoretto Miracle of St. Mark (aka The Slave) and an example of Titian’s Bella type.

Of course, the easiest way to see all these is simply to go to Italy (which everyone should do at least once in their life), but for those of us who aren’t complete jet-setters or have the deep pockets for the expense, plus the expanded costs during this year of Catholic Jubilee, this is a great second option.

Fin

And that’s a wrap on 2024. I had hoped in 2023 to be having a much larger Arts section to be writing about as well as more Games, but 2024 was much more difficult to put time aside for watches, playing, and the arts than I had hoped. Let’s see if I can do better in 2025.

In any case, I hope you found something interesting and useful in the above to add to your own lists (lemme know if you do).

If this post was useful to you, please lemme know via mail or elephant below. Feel free to @mention or ping me on @awws on mastodon or email me at hola@wakatara.com .