2018 Annual ‘Leftovers’ | Viewing Edition [2018 Film and TV Roundup]

It’s the end of the year, so, as usual, I’m putting together my annual ‘Leftovers’ list for books and things I watched this year.

The previous post covered books; this one covers films and TV series (mostly old films and old series, so I won’t bother distinguishing new from old).

This year was still as melodramatic as ever. I gave a lot of things five stars on Douban, but I suspect that, even years from now, only two old series will still make me think, ‘I’m three lifetimes lucky to have seen this.’ They are:

Three-Lifetimes-Lucky Pick: Twin Peaks (Season 3)

Over the past five or six years, one prestige English-language series after another has appeared. There are more great shows than anyone could possibly watch, and on Douban, the ratings for good series are practically 9s by default. But after catching up on Season 3 of Twin Peaks this year, the great English-language series in my mind split into two categories.

One category is ‘prestige TV’: all those top-tier shows I’d watched before.

The other category is ‘celestial TV’: Season 3 of Twin Peaks.

To see David Lynch, late in life, leave behind a peak-of-peaks masterpiece distilled from everything he had learned—and as an amateur translator of ‘Lynch-speak’ (whew~~)—I was so happy I could roll around on the floor.

A perfect ending!

Season 3 of Twin Peaks gave me goosebumps more times than I can count; that part was expected. What I didn’t expect was to see David Lynch’s ‘infinite tenderness’. Twenty-five years have passed since the opening of Season 1, when Laura was murdered. A quarter of a century later, when the story resumed, what Lynch still couldn’t let go of was how to save that girl.

Inside the strangest mind in cinema, there was somehow a heart of unparalleled tenderness.

Three-Lifetimes-Lucky Pick: Ping Pong the Animation

I’m nearly forty, and I cried at an animated series so hard I could barely stop.

After the first few episodes, I thought it was about ‘friendship’. A few more, and I thought it was about ‘talent’. A few more, and I thought it was about ‘growing up’. Only at the end did I understand that this series was about just two words—‘life’.

Next are the two films that surprised me most this year: