My Favorite Things of 2018

2018 has been a wild year for entertainment. I watched a lot of brilliant movies, read some outstanding books/comics, and saw some TV shows that will stick with me for awhile. One of my favorite features that blogs do is talk about their favorite media from the year. The content that stood out above the rest! Instead of doing an individual article listing my favorites for each section of entertainment, I decided to just do a big article highlighting my favorites from each! I hope you enjoy this list and seek out some of these on here that you may not have heard of. Let’s start with a big one…

My Favorite Movie of the Year

Avengers: Infinity War

Much like Thanos’ grand plan, my pick for my favorite movie of the year feels inevitable. Avengers: Infinity War is a massive beast of a film, cram packed with heart, humor and action. Marvel has been building to this movie for ten years and it shows. Thanos is the big villain we needed. He feels terrifying in a way no other MCU bad guy has before. This is some of the best work that this franchise has produced, and I can’t wait to see the next chapter.

Honorable Mentions: Hereditary, Mission: Impossible – Fallout, Bad Times At the El Royale, Halloween

Some great horror, and the utterly break-taking new Mission: Impossible. Bad Times At the El Royale is the Tarantinoesque crime piece that I didn’t know that I needed.

My Favorite Video Game of the Year

God Of War

This was the hardest decision I made for this list. We had several masterpieces that came out this year, and I did my best to play them all. Red Dead Redemption 2 is an utterly engrossing Cowboy Simulator with some of the characters of the year. Marvel’s Spider-Man is the best superhero game since Arkham City. Celeste is beautiful and stupidly tough.

But God of War beats them out. While it doesn’t have a massive open world or the ability to fly through New York City, it has a pitch perfect story and combat mechanics that have to be played to be believed. Kratos’ axe is the best video game weapon of the generation. Nailing a skeleton in the chest and then recalling your axe so the skeleton explodes had me grinning. Added bonus: my wife and I said, “Boy!” in a Kratos voice for months after I finished God of War.

Honorable Mentions: Red Dead Redemption 2, Marvel’s Spider-Man, Celeste, Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey

My Favorite Book of the Year

The Grip of It by Jac Jemc

While I didn’t hit my lofty reading goal from last year, I still got a chance to read some FANTASTIC books this year. I got two new books by my two of my favorite authors (Orrin Grey AND Laird Barron) and enough novellas to fill up a potentially haunted house.

Speaking of which… What was my favorite book this year? It’s easily Jac Jemc’s The Grip of It. Jemc finds a whole new dimension to the haunted house story. It’s as much about the house as it is about the characters. The married couple of this story are destroyed by the terrors of their lives. Maybe? It’s not clear but that’s where the power comes from.

Honorable Mentions: Guignol and Other Sardonic Tales by Orrin Grey, The Human Alchemy by Michael Griffin, Blood Standard by Laird Barron

Happy 2018 everybody.