Jill Kolongowski: I’ve rediscovered that you can always make time for yourself to cook. That’s a great gift.
Rosemary Van Deuren: Kino’s gorgeous new Metropolis on Blu-ray. Even the hardest-to-please, film-restoration purists will fall off their couch at this one. 25 minutes of footage assumed lost for over 70 years was discovered in a film archive in Buenos Aires and added back in, with the rest of the movie painstakingly restored. The disc also boasts a new recording of the original, full-length composed score, which restorers utilized to help properly place the new footage and retain the intended story pacing. You’ll get chills.
Mike Vincent: Fatboy Slim & the Chemical Brothers. Both take me back, well, to the mid-1990s when I was young and relevant. In 2010 both brought smiles to my face and made me feel really good. Trying to find a nice version of a song off the latest Chemical Brothers disc brought me a great quote from the British DJ Pete Tong, “You’re never too old to rave.”
Kevin Mattison: This year my wonderful wife bought me a record player for my birthday. I hadn’t had one for nearly 10 years and had found myself frequently missing the soft, looping imperfections of vinyl. I immediately dug out my original copy of The White Album by The Beatles and played it ad nauseum. It’s a chaotic album, a brilliant clustering of opposing ideas. It’s also the album I learned to play guitar to, on my father’s old Alvarez twelve string, strung with six.
Gavin Craig: This year I discovered that there had been a Wii remake of the old NES game A Boy and his Blob. It’s still a clever concept—you play a boy who has to make his way through the game by transforming his blobular sidekick into different objects (a trampoline, a hole, an anvil, a coconut, etc.) using various flavors of jelly beans. For a system that lacks the processing power of either the Xbox 360 or the PS3, Wii designers do a really amazing job of creating games that are beautiful to look at (Kirby’s Epic Yarn is another great example), and A Boy and his Blob does a great job of being both cartoony and dark, innocent and threatening. It’s a great invocation of childhood, and I don’t have to wait until the girls go to bed to play it. (I also discovered that the original NES A Boy and his Blob isn’t really worth revisiting on its own, but that’s okay too.)