Shot of Jack #14

Top 10 Movies & TV of 2022 and Regarding Grief and Mourning

Hello. Welcome to 2023 and welcome to Shot of Jack, my monthly newsletter about what I’ve been up to and what I’m interested in. I’m Jack Cameron, but you knew that.

This year, Shot of Jack will come out the first week of the month every month.

This January newsletter is a Year In Review issue. We’ll look forward next month, but right now we’re going to look back at the top ten television shows and movies I watched for the first time in 2022. They aren’t in order of quality because that would have taken another week for me to decide. Instead they’re in alphabetical order.

(One bit of housekeeping. As an experiment I’m cross posting this newsletter at its home on Substack and over on my Post.News page one day later. Post is a newer social media platform and where a lot of us Twitter refugees ended up after Elon let the neighborhood go to shit.)

TELEVISION I WATCHED IN 2022:

1.       ANDOR. (Disney+) I learned a long time ago that it’s more important who is writing and directing than it is what they are writing and directing. So unlike most people, I wasn’t surprised at all when Tony Gilroy wrote the best damn Star Wars show anyone could ask for. This is the guy who wrote Michael Clayton and the first four BOURNE movies. If you gave up on Star Wars after Disney took over, give this a watch.

2.       DEVS. (Hulu) This was a surprise. An Alex Garland (Ex Machina) written miniseries. It was something that had been on my watch list since it aired, but I only got to it this year. Imagine a tech company run by a mad genius billionaire played by Nick Offerman. Now imagine they’ve built something that might change the world forever…or perhaps it already has. This miniseries was a blast to watch and I wish I had taken more time with it.

3.       OUR FLAG MEANS DEATH. (HBO Max) It seems Taika Waititi is everywhere these days, but for me I just immediately think of his unforgettable Blackbeard in the utterly ridiculous Our Flag Means Death. Anyone who says you can’t do comedy in 2022 due to ‘woke culture’ needs to watch this.

4.       PEACEMAKER. (HBO Max) 2022 seems to be the year of the TV Show no one demanded. James Gunn’s Suicide Sqaud movie was silly fun. But who knew he could take the least interesting character and keep that silly fun going for a whole season of a television show? John Cena as the dim-witted, psychotic, but lovable Peacemaker is fun to watch and one of the best super-hero things I encountered in 2022.

5.       SEVERANCE. (Apple TV) Of all the major streaming services I watch Apple TV the least. That said, Severance is the only show I actually watched TWICE this year. I don’t really want to say much about this show because the less you know the better going in. That said, I love every moment of John Turturro and Christopher Walken on screen together.

6.       SLOW HORSES. (Apple TV) The only other Apple TV thing in this newsletter is a show about a group of screw-up British spies led by Gary Oldman based on a series of novels. What more do you need to know? The first season has the best on screen fart I’ve ever heard. Season two just finished airing and it’s one of the things I’m most looking forward to watching in 2023.

7.       THE BEAR. (FX on Hulu) My friend who works in a kitchen told me about this show and said, “The only thing it gets wrong is there seems to be only one shift and the turnover should be higher.” That’s high praise and it definitely earns it. The Bear stars Jeremy Allen White who you might know as Lip from Shameless. Here he stars as a world class chef forced to come back to his hometown and make a sandwich shop work. Show creator, Chris Storer has created an in-your-face masterpiece.

8.       TRUST. (Hulu) I sought out this show after reading an article about Brendan Fraser’s comeback where they referred to this role as one of his best performances. Trust is about the kidnapping of John Paul Getty III. If this sounds familiar, you may be thinking of All The Money In The World which is based on the same true story. That film had Christopher Plummer as the elder Getty after they recast Kevin Spacey. They should have simply cast Donald Sutherland who just absolutely owns this part in Trust. It’s not really fair to compare a ten-hour miniseries with a two-hour movie, but that said, Trust is better by every metric I can think of.

9.       WE OWN THIS CITY. (HBO Max) Twenty years ago David Simon created one of the best television shows in history with The Wire, a five-season inquiry into the lie of the American Dream in Baltimore. The six-episode miniseries We Own This City has Simon and his crew back in Baltimore in a spiritual sequel to The Wire. But unlike its predecessor, We Own This City is based on the real systemic racism in the Baltimore Police Department and how one of the most corrupt departments in the country was exposed. John Bernthal does incredible work in this.

10.   WESTWORLD Season 4 (HBO MAX) Unlike a lot of people, I’ve enjoyed every season of Jonathan Nolan’s and Lisa Joy’s exploration into artificial intelligence, consciousness, free will, and morality. The fourth season started bringing ties from the previous seasons together in a vortex that was leading to a really interesting fifth and final season we’ll never see thanks to the number crunchers at HBO Max who chose to cancel it. That said, the ending of the fourth season thankfully kind of works for a series ender.

MOVIES I WATCHED IN 2022

1.       EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE. The word ‘multiverse’ used to be something no one but us super-nerds knew, but 2022 was the year of the multiverse. Three of the movies on this list are multiverse movies. And the best of them was the only one that didn’t connect to some previous intellectual property. Everything Everywhere All At Once manages to be funny, poignant, violent, and silly. The filmmaking team known as The Daniels give Michelle Yeoh her best movie since Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and the triumphant return of Mr. Short-Round himself, Ke Huy Kwan. Highly recommended.

2.       GLASS ONION. (Netflix) Remember how I mentioned that I knew Andor was going to be great because Tony Gilroy was writing? Well, that’s how I knew Glass Onion was going to be one of my favorite movies of the year before I saw it. Rian Johnson wrote and directed my favorite Star Wars movie and then directly after that he took James Bond himself, Danial Craig and turned him into a Southern, acerbic, homosexual private detective and a murderer’s row of a cast and made Knives Out. So when I heard that Netflix had signed Johnson up to do a bunch of sequels, I knew they’d be a lot of fun. Glass Onion does not disappoint. With an all new supporting cast every bit as impressive as the first movie, Craig and Johnson have crafted a hilarious and clever pandemic era murder mystery. Janelle Monáe in particular is incredible. The only movie I watched twice in one day last year.

3.       INSIDE. (Netflix) A few friends recommended this to me and hell if it isn’t my favorite piece of pandemic art I’ve encountered. It’s not really so much a movie as it is a series of one-man sketches and songs by comedian Bo Burnham as he tries to amuse both his audience and himself. Really great stuff. If nothing else, watch this bit about the Internet.

4.       LAST NIGHT IN SOHO. Edgar Wright’s vision of 1960s London is a beautiful noir fever-dream. This time-traveling murder mystery kept me guessing. Anya Taylor-Joy is enchanting throughout.

5.       NIGHT OF THE COCONUT. (Nebula) I’d wager that almost no one reading this has even heard of, let alone watched Night of the Coconut, but Patrick H. Willems has taken up more hours of my life than any other filmmaker in the last two years. This is because Night of the Coconut is the ‘season finale’ of the YouTube channel Patrick H. Willems. The feature length movies is available exclusively on Nebula, a streaming platform founded by a group of YouTubers including Patrick himself. (It’s only $15 a YEAR.) Patrick’s YouTube channel is a series of video essays about movies that also includes an ongoing narrative that is resolved in the feature length Night of the Coconut which was just as fun as his essays.

6.       NIGHTMARE ALLEY. In the same way Edgar Wright created a world you could just fall into with Last Night in Soho, Guillermo del Toro gives you a lush, dark, and twisted noir that is predictable but too beautiful to ignore.

7.       SPIDER-MAN: FAR FROM HOME. (Sony) Spider-Man movies have been hit and miss over the years, but this nostalgia-fest featuring all three live-action Spider-Men from the 21st century is worth the hype. It’s so much fun that you probably won’t notice how empty it is. That’s okay though. It’s entertaining as hell and that’s what these things are supposed to be.

8.       THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN. As a big fan of In Bruges, the same writer, director and main two actors doing absolutely anything is going to end up on my Best of the Year lists. Martin McDonagh again teams with Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson. This time around they’re friends on a small island in Ireland in the early 20th century until Brendan Gleeson decides he doesn’t want to be friends anymore. This meditation on friendship hit home for me because I’ve had a few friends become former friends in recent years.

9.       THE FABELMANS. Speaking of movies that hit me right in the heart, Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical drama about a creative young man who yearns to tell stories while his parents’ marriage fall apart seems almost custom made for me. Michelle Williams gives an Oscar-worthy performance as Mrs. Fabelman. I loved this movie and I can’t be objective about it, but I’m happy to say that Spielberg isn’t phoning it in during his seventh decade of filmmaking.

10.   TOP GUN: MAVERICK. (Paramount+) It’s far from original and it’s anything but deep. That said, watching Top Gun: Maverick in a theater was an absolute blast in a way few movies are these days. Special effects are great, but nothing beats real g-forces on real faces. This is one of the few sequels done decades after the original that was worth the wait.  

What I’m Thinking About

As you likely know, I’ve been writing about homicide victims in my hometown of Tacoma for over on my website: TacomaStories.com. This year I’m writing about a new homicide victim every Monday in an effort to catch up on our unprecedented homicide rate.

After spending all that time talking to victims' families as well as losing friends and family of my own, this is what I can tell you about grief and mourning:

- YOU DON’T GET OVER IT: You’re never going to ‘get over’ it. What you will do is get used to that person only being in your thoughts. There’s a hole in your life shaped like that person and no other person will ever properly fill it. Eventually you’ll be grateful for that.

- MOURNING IS NOT A LINEAR PROCESS: You might cry right away you might not. You might cry, then not cry for a long time, and then a certain song comes on and it’s like you just learned they were gone. As noted above, you don’t ‘get over’ or ‘get past’. You get used to it, even if you don’t want to.

- JUSTICE IS AN ILLUSION: Whether an individual dies through violence or circumstance, accident or negligence there will be anger that will make you demand ‘justice’. Sometimes there are responsible parties. Sometimes there aren’t. “I want justice,” is something that I heard from the relative of a man who was killed moments after he killed someone else. Even when your loved one’s killer is already dead, there’s a sense of injustice because you’ve lost someone close to you and it feels wrong.

- EVERYONE GRIEVES IN THEIR OWN WAY: Some people cry. Some people take shelter in religion and believe that it all is part of some cosmic plan. Some people just get back to work because it’s the only thing that still feels real. In other words, if someone just lost someone close and they aren’t behaving how you think they should, it’s probably simply because they mourn differently than you.

- STAYING ALIVE IS AN OBLIGATION: When you lose someone it can seem impossible to cope with a world without that person in it. You may even think perhaps you should die too. This ‘survivor’s guilt’ is a real thing. More often than not it’s dumb luck that separates us from the recently deceased, but regardless of who they were, they’ve lost their life and that makes yours that much more precious because they still exist in your mind and that’s worth preserving as long as you can. Think about them. Write about them. Feel gratitude that throughout all of space and time you got to share your experience for a time however brief with the person you’ve lost and that’s worth everything.

I don’t know if any of this will help or not, but I felt like it was worth sharing. Remember no matter who you are or what your circumstances there is a silent army of people who care deeply about you. If you do find yourself thinking suicidal thoughts, there’s no shame in calling the 9-8-8 Suicide Prevention hotline. Stay safe out there.

One Last Thing
If you got this far it’s safe to say you’ve enjoyed this. Why not share it with a friend?

Thanks. See you next month.

- Jack Cameron