Skip to main content

2022: Here We Go Again!


We’re here again! End of another largely terrible year. As I accurately foretold this time last year it was indeed marginally better than the last one -though only marginally. 2021 was a dud, and only seemed to further show us the face of our doom. We’ve got a new COVID variant to worry about (wasn’t this supposed to be over by now??), and what societal, cultural progress is being made is so slow it’s likely to mean zilch anyways. Still, 2022 could be better -although I gotta tell ya honestly, it won’t. I have seen it, and I curse every day the wizard who gifted me this hideous clairvoyance. But I feel obliged to warn humanity of what is to come. Ripped from the headlines, this is the fate of our world in 2022!

January –In Canada, the Conservative Party kicks out leader Erin O’Toole for not being repugnant enough, replacing him with fellow Irish-Canadian blowhard Rex Murphy to rebrand the party’s image for the 1950s. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, vacationing in Barbados but seeking to avoid a repeat of the Truth and Reconciliation Day scandal, has a golden retriever sit in for him in Parliament.

February –The Oscars, deciding to cave to Marvel President Kevin Feige’s pleas that they give more recognition to highly commercially successful films, proceed to award Best Picture to Dune. In response, Feige produces a miniseries about Captain America fighting aliens masquerading as Academy voters and destroying the Dolby Theatre -it goes on to win twenty-four Emmys.

March –Queen Elizabeth at long last passes away within a month of Prince Andrew being arrested for sex trafficking. Royal popularity at an all-time low, the newly crowned King Charles tries to rehabilitate the crowns’ image by starting a TikTok account. In a video where he attempts to lip-synch to a song by The Weeknd, he discovers in real time the singer is black and suffers a fatal heart attack.

April –Wildfires, floods, tornadoes, and hurricanes across North America -and all within a single month. An emergency climate conference is held at which world leaders decide on a plan to ease up on greenhouse gases a tiny bit each year and see if it does anything. The worlds’ leading climatologists throw up their hands in frustration and walk into the rising seas where Florida used to be.

May –Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos’ space race accelerates, each pouring millions of dollars into their game of one-upmanship. Musk takes Harrison Ford to space, Bezos counters by planting an Amazon flag on the moon, and Musk retaliates by registering Mars as a Tesla product. As this goes on, the general populace takes little notice of both billionaires weaning their employees off wages entirely until they’ve successfully rendered their workforces slaves.

June –Jurassic World: Dominion opens below expectations and becomes the last non-Disney owned movie to play in a theatre. All remaining cinemas are renamed Disneyporiums and fitted with interactive seats and handlebars to contain the raucous enthusiasm. Every non-Disney filmmaker left is pitted against one another in a battle royale for the chance to show their movie at Lincoln Centre. Surprisingly, it’s Terrence Malick who emerges victorious.

July –A new COVID variant, Unicron, first identified in Namibia, scourges across the world with an infectiousness that exceeds all prior strains. As cases and deaths rise in the worlds’ richest countries the UN decides that maybe it’s about time they considered distributing vaccines to Africa, to the dismay of Bill Gates and the vaccine patent holders.

August –Itching for a chance to justify exorbitant military spending, the U.S. government turns a campaign to kick the Taliban out of Afghanistan into The Forever War II –this time with even more war crimes, more drone strikes, more propaganda, and more half-assed attempts to install puppet governments in the Middle East. This time enlisting in the army comes with a free status of qualified immunity.

September –The Critical Race Theory controversy in the United States reaches new heights as it makes its’ way to the Supreme Court, who decide to bar wholesale any teaching of the country’s history of racism, colonialism, Nazism, genocide, the humiliating business with Vietnam, that time Canadians burnt down the White House, and that time Trumpists almost did it again.

October –Saskatchewan’s evil plan to privatize healthcare through wilful sabotage of the province’s medical system comes to fruition through a vote by the Sask Party at a legislative convening they don’t tell the press about. The night of celebration is short-lived however, when the ghost of Tommy Douglas pays a visit to beat the shit out of Scott Moe.

November –In the U.S midterms, the Republican Party wins majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate after an uphill battle against the appeals of President Joe Biden’s old fashioned folksiness. Considering for a moment the results might have been different if they had actually done anything in the past two years, the Democrats instead decide its’ easier just to pin the loss on leftists.

December –Sick of all the bullshit, the dastardly cabal of Lizard People secretly running the world finally reveal themselves to the validation of basement-dwelling conspiracy dopes everywhere. On Christmas Day they leave the planet, taking with them their capitalism, their viruses, and a few million willing human test subjects. In their absence the world discovers happiness for the first time and rejoices for exactly one week -before realizing the ozone layer is gone and everybody melts into a puddle of pancake.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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....
1 comment
Read more

Back to the Feature: New York, New York (1977)

New York, New York  is a two hour forty minute musical movie largely about a toxic relationship and I understand why it was Martin Scorsese’s first big flop. Some have blamed its poor reception on the kind of movie it was, of a style and tone Scorsese wasn’t known for, but I find that hard to believe. Even after only five films, he’d proven himself an extremely versatile director, and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore  found an audience. Sure this jazz musical love letter to New York City was following up Taxi Driver and its’ far more cynical take on the city, but then it’s also ‘from the director of Taxi Driver ’ which itself was a big hit. Was it a matter of public appetite for musicals, or mere word of mouth and early critical reception that dissuaded viewers? Irrespective of that, I was stunned to discover this movie was the origin of the titular song, which I’d assumed was much older (it’s definitely got the sound of something that might have come out of the Jazz sce...
Post a Comment
Read more