So it's always been my favorite time of year to see the short list of movies and music of the year, and I've written my own every year, digressing into top performances, rushing to see the onslaught of Oscar bait in December. In this blog, I will write my opinion of the ten best movies, albums, and singles of the year, and as I prepare a separate list on the 10 most meaningful pieces of music/movies/writing to me personally this year - a pivotal one for me, a not entirely interesting one for movies or music - I stop to wonder a bit about making the lists at all.
It is, above anything, a method of opinion setting, of stratifying what I saw, and, in a fashion that the critic in me is always placating, of validation that my opinion is the most important and well thought out opinion of all. By placing things in lists, you create quick references for this sort of thing - you start to think that a #1 or #4 placement of a certain work says something of who you are. Or, perhaps more innocently, it's a way to play important, a method for asking that my thoughts on the year be heard. I've moved my thoughts over here this year, for the brief amount of time I can devote to them, and for very few to register that they're being written. Yet here they are, a document of some kind that at least they were there.
In any case, my thoughts on the year.
Movies:
Movie lists are bound to be incomplete - studios save their best movies for December anyway, and it never seems to work out to see that movie you'd been waiting for while it remains in town. This year, more than ever, I feel like I missed all the best ones, and it's not entirely because I simply didn't have the time. Sherrybaby never came to Seattle, to my knowledge, Deliver Us From Evil left in a week, and quite honestly, the great independent movies that surprise me I'll catch up on months down the line. A couple years back, I was stunned after watching The Door On The Floor to discover it truly was one of the finest movies of that year, and I'd ignored it entirely when it was around. Those surprises are why I love movies, and I haven't had many of those in movies that came out this year.
That is also because nothing made me too extraordinarily excited this year. Even looking at the top of my list this year, almost nothing grabbed me as much as Junebug, The New World, or Brokeback Mountain did last year. The one above all others that did was Ali Salem's Sweet Land, a movie that attempts to do nothing else but tell a love story against the backdrop of a 1920 farm run by two immigrants who barely know enough English to speak to each other. It follows a simple, good natured farmer named Olaf, his mail-order bride, Inga, and the ways in which they learn to harvest, communicate, and connect. It's a movie that sounds like nothing, yet in following two characters forced to the bare minimum of communication, it forces them to communicate in tiny, forceful actions, something that makes the gestures of love and the nature of dreams the most definitive presence on screen, even as it makes its period tropes - an erotically exposed ankle! A subtext-loaded meal! - electric and spellbinding. It's a movie in which an older Inga, uttering the phrase "I know," has the power to devastate the viewer. Thinking about it, by barely trying, it tackles the language-as-divider themes of Babel, the value changes of The Queen, the strained family dynamics of Little Miss Sunshine, but makes each of those look like the most contrived of creations - in a year where the most ambitious movies looked to be the height of unconvincing showmanship, a movie like Sweet Land quietly proves itself braver, truer, and more moving than anything I saw this year. One scene - in which Inga, played beautifully by Elisabeth Reaser, silently shares an apple pie with her neighbor - speaks to the need for validation and connection amongst people, as well as to the reasons we act as people, even as it technically barely speaks at all.
Besides that, Todd Field's Little Children, is extraordinary because it might be the first movie I've seen surrounding a sexual affair in which those impulses were life affirming and escapist at once, in which the power of sexual compulsion was made sinister and human in the same breath. Quite simply, it made you feel its characters' compulsions were your own, and that it was the height of understanding to accept and disagree at once with what you were watching. It also features a performance of magnificent humanity by Kate Winslett, who deserves an Oscar. I say that having seen Steven Frears' The Queen, a fine movie I'm supposed to love, with a very good performance by Helen Mirren I'm also supposed to love. The Queen will be on more Top 10 lists this year, but it is not a superior movie.
The rest of my top ten list? There are great moments on there. United 93 faces directly the tension of not wanting to see what happened on September 11th, and also needing to see, to visualize what occurred. It is so powerful that at times, you may find yourself crying, or stirring, or desperate to do anything else, and this is, in its squirmy specificity, a triumph. Bubble, Steven Soderbergh's experiment in DV realism and distribution, is unmatched in its original vision of small town cynicism. The Good Shepherd brims with shadows and ideas, allowing the remoteness of its center to be a cipher of fascinating insight - the world, it seems, exists in the movie only in the magnification of Matt Damon's glasses lens. And For Your Consderation drops the interviews from the Christopher Guest movie, but gains in cynicism - it's an easy story of Hollywood hype, perhaps, but it also is a nasty and humane look at trying to find any way to keep your headin the movie industry (nasty because each of the characters sort of fail, and sort of succeed).
The rest? They're fine movies, I suppose - each has something fascinating about it, but none are movies I love.
Ten Best Movies of 2006:
1. Sweet Land
2. Little Children
3. United 93
4. Bubble
5. The Good Shepherd
6. For Your Consideration
7. Volver
8. Borat
9. Half Nelson
10. The Departed
Music:
There are a number of reasons I wouldn't make a great music critic, but chief amongst them is that I have no desire to do anything beyond following my instincts on music. I hate The Arctic Monkeys because they sound like everything else, but I haven't listened closely enough to know that specifically, and I don't think I ever will. I hate the Raconteurs because I don't much care for Jack White, and I have no desire to change that.
The other question one has to ask when writing these lists is, considering music is the most emotional, the most subjective of any medium, should you list the album that meant the most to you emotionally, or the one that's the most "important"? If I chose the latter, certainly Dylan's Modern Times - a magnificent updated text of covers and reappropriations to comment on modernity - would be #1 and not #3, and if I totally followed my emotions, certainly Neko Case's Fox Confessor Brings The Flood, an album I've written extensively about already, would tower over all others this year - it's an album of conceptual daring as well, it just happens to have been less heard. Instead, I chose The Dixie Chicks, a band of inspiration this year because Taking The Long Way is a little of both importance and emotion. It's second half gets weighty with filler, but Taking The Long Way is so moving and extraordinary because of what works on it - the brim of earned self-righteousness, confidence won and lost, the liberation and loneliness of speaking the truth, and, simply, beautiful melodies on what becomes important and powerful in life. "The Long Way Around," its opening number, is truer and more beautiful than every other song released this year.
As for singles, the pop ones that ruled the radio tended to be pretty charming (Yung Joc's mind-numbing cell phone ring "It's Goin Down" notwithstanding). The summer's two biggest songs, "Crazy" and "Promiscuous," prove us to be lucky to still be hearing things on the radio this punchy, and the rest of 'em - the techno-Jacko of "My Love," the motor-boating lunacy of "London Bridge" - aren't so slow on the uptake either.
I also included a quick list of some other great songs form imperfect albums, because it's always better those songs get heard too, no?
The other question one has to ask when writing these lists is, considering music is the most emotional, the most subjective of any medium, should you list the album that meant the most to you emotionally, or the one that's the most "important"? If I chose the latter, certainly Dylan's Modern Times - a magnificent updated text of covers and reappropriations to comment on modernity - would be #1 and not #3, and if I totally followed my emotions, certainly Neko Case's Fox Confessor Brings The Flood, an album I've written extensively about already, would tower over all others this year - it's an album of conceptual daring as well, it just happens to have been less heard. Instead, I chose The Dixie Chicks, a band of inspiration this year because Taking The Long Way is a little of both importance and emotion. It's second half gets weighty with filler, but Taking The Long Way is so moving and extraordinary because of what works on it - the brim of earned self-righteousness, confidence won and lost, the liberation and loneliness of speaking the truth, and, simply, beautiful melodies on what becomes important and powerful in life. "The Long Way Around," its opening number, is truer and more beautiful than every other song released this year.
As for singles, the pop ones that ruled the radio tended to be pretty charming (Yung Joc's mind-numbing cell phone ring "It's Goin Down" notwithstanding). The summer's two biggest songs, "Crazy" and "Promiscuous," prove us to be lucky to still be hearing things on the radio this punchy, and the rest of 'em - the techno-Jacko of "My Love," the motor-boating lunacy of "London Bridge" - aren't so slow on the uptake either.
I also included a quick list of some other great songs form imperfect albums, because it's always better those songs get heard too, no?
Five Best Albums of 2006:
1. Taking The Long Way Dixie Chicks
2. Fox Confessor Brings The Flood Neko Case
3. Modern Times Bob Dylan
4. The Information Beck
5. I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass Yo La Tengo
Ten Best Singles:
1. "Crazy" Gnarls Barkley
2. "Promiscuous" Nelly Furtado
3. "Gold Lion" Yeah Yeah Yeahs
4. "Not Ready To Make Nice" Dixie Chicks
5. "Sweet Talk" Spank Rock
6. "My Love" Justin Timberlake
7. "Ain't No Other Man" Christina Aguilera
8. "Unwritten" Natasha Beddingfield
9. "Irreplaceable" Beyonce
10. "London Bridge" Fergie
A mixtape of ten other terrific songs:
1. "Conceived" Beth Orton (from Comfort of Strangers)
2. "Summer Dress" Shawn Colvin (from These Four Walls)
3. "Modern Times" The Black Keys (from Magic Potion)
4. "My Mind Is Rambling" The Black Keys (from Chulahoma)
5. "Turquoise Boy" Sonic Youth (from Rather Ripped)
6. "The Mistress Witch From McClure" Sufjan Stevens (from The Avalanche)
7. "The Day Is Short" Jearlyn Steale (from A Prairie Home Companion Soundtrack)
8. "Sign On The Door" Kasey Chambers (from Carnival)
9. "Sidewalk" The Starlight Mints (from Drowaton)
10. "Bout It" Yung Joc (from Step Up Soundtrack)
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