Skip to main content

2016: A Year in Review

It’s the start of a New Year so it’s time to look ahead once again. For me that means digging up my time machine out of storage and travelling forward into the next year to see exactly how well we fared out in 2016. The results were interesting to say the least, and now I’m back with the biggest headlines of each month. What’s in store for the coming year? You may be surprised. Or you may not. Nevertheless, enjoy these snippets of 2016:

-January: In the world of fashion, the mullet comes back into style. Jimmy Fallon sports one for a Tonight Show bit leading to millions of men and boys adopting it. Michael Bolton rejoices.

-February: Chris Rock is replaced as Academy Awards host at the last minute by a safer Steve Harvey. The Oscar for Best Actor mistakenly goes to Leonardo DiCaprio.

-March: After the Full House reunion on Netflix’s Fuller House, comedy suffers a mild stroke. On a related note, the mullet goes back out of style.

-April: Climate change forces polar bears to take drastic action and in a hostile takeover they drive everyone out of the Territories. The rest of Canada doesn’t notice.

-May: The Anonymous-ISIS War is brought to a temporary halt when a large population of irritated mothers cut off their kids’ internet connections. 

-June: A bill is passed allowing M16 assault rifles to be issued to all Americans, which miraculously brings an end to all mass shootings and gun violence.

-July: Adele goes on a world tour, her single “Hello” receiving wide acclaim for its simple title and soulful love ballad. Lionel Ritchie decides to show her how it’s done.

-August: More than six hundred courageous trans-people come out of the closet, but no one cares because they were never on a bad reality show.

-September: Justin Trudeau cements his place as sexiest world leader when he does a photoshoot for Vogue. During his four week holiday, Stephane Dion is left in charge. Even conservatives beg Trudeau to come back.

-October: Doctors discover a cure for common sense, but realize most of the world’s been operating under it for decades.

-November: Under suspicious circumstances, Donald Trump is elected President of the United States with running mate Sean Hannity. Canada prepares to welcome three hundred million American refugees. 

-December: Just in time for the holiday season, the dead rise from their graves and begin devouring the human race. Zombie Charlemagne is appointed supreme potentate while Zombie Lincoln leads the slaughter of humankind. Nevertheless everyone living and undead come together on the 18th to watch the fiftieth anniversary of How the Grinch Stole Christmas? on ABC. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Strange History of the American Spoof Movie

Parody movies have been around for a lot longer than we tend to think of them. Even from the earliest days of Hollywood there were movies meant to satirize a particular subject or genre. In the silent era, Buster Keaton was responsible for a few. And in the early sound era, almost as soon as the monster pictures took off did you see comic versions of them -Abbott and Costello hosting a few. But parody movies tended to be subtle for most of cinema history, or parody came in conjunction with another goal of the comedy. It really wasn’t until the 1980s and 90s that it took off and became popularly understood. And there is perhaps a line to be drawn to the counterculture comedy explosion that began in the 1970s through avenues like  Saturday Night Live , which frequently parodied from even its earliest years popular movies and cultural properties of the time. But that is still a way’s back. To my generation though, ‘parody movie’ is perhaps a less known term than the more blunt ‘s...

A Stylish and Charmingly Reinvented David Copperfield

The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery (Which He Never Meant to Publish on Any Account)  is the most important book Charles Dickens ever wrote. It is not the most famous or influential by any means (that would of course be A Christmas Carol ), but it is the book that is the purest expression of the authors’ style, identity, and worldview. It is his most personal work, semi-autobiographical in its story of the chronology from infancy to adulthood of a character who overcomes great loss and hardships to find a fulfilling life as a writer. To read David Copperfield  is to understand Dickens himself. Armando Iannucci knew this when he decided to make a new adaptation of the novel for a twenty-first century audience. He also knew that Dickens adaptations are ubiquitous at this point. Films are a bit rarer, but every few years a new television adaptation rears its head to keep the authors’ unique world an...

Notes on the Title Cards of The Lord of the Rings

It might be sacrilege for one who both considers The Lord of the Rings  trilogy to be one of the greatest triumphs of cinema and has been an avid lover of the films since adolescence, to declare that the original theatrical cuts of the films are better than the much beloved extended editions. Easily it’s my most controversial opinion regarding these movies. Don’t get me wrong, I do like the extended editions quite a lot, especially as someone who just enjoys spending time in that universe. They flesh it out more, add extra flavour, and in increasing the length by about an hour really emphasize the epic quality of these films. But I find that the original cuts are generally more cleanly paced, more seamlessly edited, and much more accessible to audiences. All the stuff there is to love about The Lord of the Rings  is there in the original versions, the plethora of new and extended scenes merely add to that for fans. And of those, they fall into three camps for me: 1....