The things I liked in 2025

Hello my friends…

2025 was a crazy year, at least for me. Some parts of it were really great. Other parts were pretty bad. But this is not a blog about life. This is a blog about stuff. So to round out 2025, I’ve put together a customary Substack year-end list of things I really enjoyed.

I don’t stay super up to date on movies or books. When it comes to new stuff, I usually only watch or read things I already know I’m going to like. And that makes for a pretty boring ranked list at the end of the year (OBAA, NTBTSTM, Avatar… Duhh!). So rather than counting down my favorite new things from 2025, this is a no-particular-order list of old things that were new to me.

Dark Star (1974), dir. John Carpenter

Good production design is one of those things that really knocks my socks off, especially low-budget science fiction. I think it’s the same neuron bundle in my head that fires when I see a blinking miniature city in a kaiju movie. Dark Star may not be the most ostentatious movie but it’s really something special. Will Sloan said it best with the first few sentences of his Letterboxd review: “Obviously I’m not going to say this is better than 2001: A Space Odyssey, because it isn’t. Come on. That would be crazy talk. What I will say, however, is…”

I’ve maybe never felt so immersed in a sci-fi movie as I have in Dark Star. It scratched an itch somewhere between the winding pathways of Super Metroid and the low-fi realism of Alien (Dark Star, of course, being Dan O’Bannon’s dry run for Alien). This was definitely one of the movies that haunted my year the most; I watched it in March and my thoughts have been straying to it ever since. I’m heavily due for a rewatch.

Hunger by Knut Hamsun

Hunger is one of many books I had never heard of before reading. I don’t know what it feels like to truly go hungry, but I certainly know what it feels like to walk around and act crazy and Knut Hamsun captured that feeling to a tee. One of the most absorbing and real first-person novels I’ve ever read. There’s a sequence that felt plucked from my own life, where the protagonist lies awake at night inventing new words and arguing with himself about their meanings. Of course when I do that type of thing I’m not destitute or staying overnight in a prison cell. But Hamsun made me feel like I understood what it was to be those things. And now I really want to be them!

The Red Spectacles (1987), dir. Mamoru Oshii

When I really like an artist, I often procrastinate consuming their work. This is partially because I don’t want it to be over, and partially because I want to hit the exact right criteria to enjoy their oeuvre to the fullest. It’s a tendency I’m trying to eliminate but I haven’t made much progress. This is all to say, I am in a strange spot where I’m a huge Mamoru Oshii fan who hasn’t seen Ghost in the Shell or Angel’s Egg.

I impulse bought a Patlabor box set a few years ago because it was hugely discounted, and fell in love with the OVA and first two movies. This year, I dipped my toe back into Oshii’s world with the Jin-Roh trilogy. While they were all pretty good, The Red Spectacles was the clear standout. Set in an alternate late-20th century Japan where a rise in terrorism has led to the creation of the Kerberos unit, a fascist power-armored anti-terror special police force, you’d expect this to be a grim, gritty action movie. Not even close. The Red Spectacles is a surreal slapstick neo-noir replete with diarrhea and espionage and dancing. And it looks incredible.

The story follows a former Kerberos cop returning to the country he fled three years prior, trying to reconcile his violent past, and finding a dying city that feels like something out of a nightmare. Really, you’ve never seen anything like this. The tone, the disjointed narrative, it all comes to a head with an incredible ending that I will not say anything about because you have to experience it for yourself. I think there’s a new restoration going around in fact, which I’ll have to check out. Watch this movie and then watch Stray Dog from 1991. You can watch Jin-Roh too but in my opinion it’s not as good.

Speaking of Mamoru Oshii…

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach

Making a single exception for this new release because it was just that good.

What makes Hideo Kojima so incredible to me is that I think you could consider every single one of his projects since MGS1 to be his masterpiece (yes I’m including Guns of the Patriots). Death Stranding 2 continues that trend. I think if I was schizophrenic I would be afraid that Kojima was an earth-walking demiurge. Every game he releases inches closer to feeling like a simulated universe designed to ensnare your soul. You might be able to put the controller down, but you can never stop “playing”. I enjoyed the first Death Stranding but the story and the gameplay (save for the mid-game mountain exploration section) failed to grab me in the way Kojima games usually do. DS2 solved that problem and gave me the MGSV combat I craved along with a truly affecting narrative that’s been stuck in my brain all year.

The single best piece of sensory feedback in all of gaming is probably Phantom Pain’s sprinting animation and sound design. But man, when you drop your backpack in DS2 and you start running, it gets pretty damn close… Cynics will say that Hideo Kojima is making the same game over and over. But I think that’s the magic of the project. Chipping away at the block of marble over decades to reveal the perfect game. Can you imagine having not just the ego to make each of the Metal Gear Solid games in sequence and to think each time ‘I can do better’, but the talent and vision to back that up? Yoji Shinkawa also outdid himself on this one. “Firing on all cylinders” is somehow an understatement.

I literally bought a Playstation 5 to play this game and while it was a terrible financial decision that I regret on a lot of rational levels, when I think about riding that coffin board up the rivers of Australia, I really don’t regret it at all.

Dirty Ho (1979), dir. Lau Kar-Leung

My previous Lau Kar-Leung experience comprised only The 8-Diagram Pole Fighter, a sad, violent revenge story that instantly became one of my favorite martial arts movies. So imagine my surprise when the second Lau Kar-Leung movie I watched, Dirty Ho, was a zany slapstick comedy that also instantly became one of my favorite martial arts movies.

The choreography in this movie is insane. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. Imagine the scene in John Wick 2 where they’re shooting silenced guns at each other in the subway, but it’s with acrobatic kung fu instead of guns, and it takes up most of the movie. I am loathe to compare this movie to a John Wick flick but I don’t know how else to analogize the premise. Gordon Liu plays a martial arts master who pretends to not know martial arts while fighting off would-be assassins. Kung fu combat disguised as pratfalling escalates until it’s nothing but pure motion on screen; I don’t really know how to describe it because I’ve never seen anything like it. There’s a scene in a tea parlor that is absolutely transcendent.

And no it’s not about a dirty ho. It’s about a guy named Ho and his dirty behavior as a thief. So get your mind out of the gutter.

Clock Tower

I played and fell in love with the game Clock Tower this year. To be clear, I’m referring to the point-and-click SNES Clock Tower, not the PSX Clock Tower (a.k.a. Clock Tower 2 in Japan), which I also played this year but intensely disliked. I had always meant to play Clock Tower, but the arcane mess of which game was what always presented too strong of a barrier to entry. If the first sentence of this paragraph confused you, know that I would have once felt that way too, but I pushed through it, and am glad I did.

Clock Tower is a not-so-distant ancestor of survival horror games like Resident Evil. Jennifer, clearly modeled after Jennifer Connelly in Dario Argento’s Phenomena, finds herself trapped in a big creepy mansion. She must traverse the house and solve various inventory-based puzzles while fleeing and hiding from the enigmatic “Scissorman”. The atmosphere is incredible, with some truly creepy moments and hectic chase sequences. The ending in particular made my jaw drop. The controls are as clunky as you’d expect from a point-and-click SNES game, but I never found them to be overly limiting. It’s about as tedious as methodically checking all the rooms in a Silent Hill game, which I always enjoyed anyway. Clock Tower is a great example of a strong vision and aesthetic shining through the constraints of a nascent medium. In a sense this is what a “video game” should be.

There are a few other entries in the Clock Tower series which did absolutely nothing for me– your mileage may vary. In a just universe we’d be getting a Resident Evil: Requiem style legacy sequel by now. I strongly recommend checking this game out if you’re interested in horror. It’s not long, and there are some fun nooks and crannies to explore. I believe they also just released a remake/remaster of it on Steam. No idea if that’s good or not. I’m the kind of guy that’s always just gonna emulate the original.

A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick

I’m a big Philip K. Dick fan– who isn’t? His point of view is so singular and fascinating, and I love the way he straddles the line between fancifully goofy and genuinely disquieting. Ubik has always been my favorite Dick book for that exact reason. I still randomly shudder sometimes thinking about how unsettling I found Jory. I also love the way Dick infuses gnosticism and his own loss of touch with reality into his stories. If VALIS is the keystone for Dick’s psychosis and exegesis, then A Scanner Darkly is his beating heart. It’s real, vital, and grounded.

I read Scanner this year for the first time and felt assaulted by its stark portrait of drug addicts in decline. The future world of A Scanner Darkly is not so far removed from our own, and inventions like the scramble suit or Substance D don’t shunt you out of the scenario at all. While squarely in the science-fiction genre, Scanner has characters that feel like they live just down the street from you and social issues you could see on the news. Dick manages to stay more grounded than I’ve ever seen him while still plumbing his usual depths of psychosis, perception, and cognition. The afterword to this book hit me like a freight train.

After finishing reading, I immediately handed the book off to my wife who enjoyed it just as much, and we watched the Linklater adaptation together which was cool but of course couldn’t hold a candle to the novel.

Lawrence of Arabia (1962), dir. David Lean

Not exactly making any waves here, but Lawrence of Arabia is one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. I saw the 70mm restoration at the Paris Theater earlier this year and it blew my mind. I don’t feel like I need to go into too much detail– if you have seen this you know how great it is, and if you haven’t you probably still have a pretty good idea. Four hours flew by and I genuinely thought there was at least an hour to go when it ended. Omar Sharif is probably the coolest guy ever.

To Be or Not To Be (1942), dir. Ernst Lubitsch

I went through a brief Old Hollywood comedy phase at the beginning of this year. To Be or Not To Be was one of the highlights. It took a minute for me to see the vision, but once it got rolling it just didn’t stop. They set up all the dominos and then somehow keep knocking them over again and again for the entire remainder of the runtime, and it just doesn’t get old. I’m not usually turned off by old-fashioned comedy, but I know some people can’t stomach it. I think Jack Benny is hilarious in this movie in a way that transcends the time period. The sensibility feels modern enough that I could imagine it punching through some people’s aversion to laughing at anything pre-1990s.

My point being I guess, if you think you’re not going to like this, give it a chance, and if you think you are going to like this, what are you waiting for?

Warlock by Oakley Hall

I came to the book Warlock in the same way that a lot of guys who are very similar to me probably did. It’s one of only a few novels that Thomas Pynchon ever publicly praised– and he did so effusively. I like Pynchon a whole lot and so I decided to read something that he read and enjoyed.

I read a lot of Cormac McCarthy this year, specifically his Border Trilogy. I’m a big fan of Cormac McCarthy, and I really enjoyed The Crossing, but overall the trilogy left me a bit underwhelmed. I bring this up because my main touchstone for the written Western is McCarthy. I remember having my mind blown by Blood Meridian in high school and never really touching another cowboy book since then. Well, until the Border Trilogy and now Warlock.

The effect of reading All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain, and then jumping to Warlock a few months later was something like admiring a beautiful stained-glass window adorned with elaborate depictions of the American southwest, doomed men scrambling for order in the frontier, blood begetting blood, things of this nature, and then I pick up Warlock and the glass goes completely transparent and through the window I can actually see the events transpiring.

Oakley Hall’s novel has a remarkable clarity in its writing that lets the story really shine. I found myself death-gripped by the characters, wanting to know the fate of every gambler, gunslinger, lady, and geezer in the lawless town of Warlock. It’s a masterful revisionist Western, juggling both the earnest desire to watch the ‘real cowboy story’ of Tombstone, Arizona play out while also investigating the cycle of revenge, the inherent corruption of American law enforcement, the roots of the labor movement, and the dangerous allure of McCarthyist (the other McCarthy) mob justice. Warlock keeps galloping forward, long after the warm glow of the frontier myth has faded. We are left with dust, blood, and broken heroes.

“I will kill anything that moves, so sit still or die, you sons of bitches; or if you move, crawl! I can spit a man through at fifty yards! I have got lightning in both hands, I comb my hair with wildcats and brush my teeth with barbed wire!”

“I am spoiling for a fight! Come on, you sons of bitches – I eat dead cowboys!”

Goodbye to this year! And here’s to another one, which is coming up very soon I believe.