The Best Film Performances of the Decade

The Onion’s AV Club came out with a list today of the 20 Best Film Performances of the Decade (see it at http://www.avclub.com/articles/the-best-film-performances-of-the-00s,35851/). It’s a fine list, although, I admit to have no fondness for their number 1, Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood, and am shocked to not see my top 2 choices on their list. Still, the tenor of acting this decade has been so high, and so many movies were created simply to show off their star performance. With that in mind, I offer an alternative list, with only a few performances coinciding with theirs. Some of these won Oscars, some were nominated, and some, well, only I seemed to love them. I’m ok with that, as those performances absolutely go toe-to-toe with the more famous ones. At the top is the performance that perhaps sums up the capabilities of this decade’s movie ambitions – and the costs.


1. Heath Ledger The Dark Knight (2008)
In our lifetimes I wonder if we’ll ever witness a performance this overwhelming, something that’s partly due to Ledger’s death. People, at the time of Ledger’s Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, argued that the Academy wouldn’t even recognize this type of movie had he not died before completing the film. I can’t possibly believe that (seriously, he would’ve won anyway), but in a way, it’s beside the point – Ledger did die, and that does color our perception of the performance, the full, demonic, invasive transformation of his Joker. You hear him sucking the wounds from his cheeks as though he’s feeding on the monstrosity of its presence. He seethes with anomie that takes over the stringiness of his hair, the sloppiness of his makeup, the rage of who he is. It goes beyond making a memorable “villain” and instead is like a generational embrace of nihilism and destruction – a force powerful enough to take the man playing the role. The Dark Knight concludes that humanity is a far more powerful adversary than the nihilism Ledger’s Joker, and you almost don’t even buy it. Here, he epitomizes evil like the great, dark monsters of cinema – from Bela Lugosi’s Dracula to Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance to Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter. May I say with seriousness, this performance is better.

2. Charlize Theron Monster (2003)
Didn’t every actor and actress try and physically morph into a character of slumming ugliness in the hopes of getting an Oscar? Certainly many tried and even succeeded this decade. For Theron, that involved 30 pounds, a layer of fake leathery skin, and a vicious streak that inhabited serial killer Aileen Wuornos. Did she do it for the award? Maybe, maybe not, but either way, nobody went as far for a performance as Theron did (at least, until #1). It’s not simply the physical transformation into near unrecognizability, although, Theron’s voice, eyes, and physicality complete the makeup work. It’s the riveting magnetism of the performance that gives the character sympathy, meaning, humanity. Argue if you want that the movie wasn’t that great – it wasn’t, but really all that does is emphasize the grand transformation at its center, a full showcase of a personality so powerful it can’t even fit into a scripted film.

3. Naomi Watts Mulholland Dr. (2001)
This is something you never see anymore – a daring part starring a no name actress that is both fearless and commanding, a part that turns its indie starlet into a true Hollywood star. Watts has to be varied in Mulholland Drive, just by the nature of her dual character – David Lynch didn’t make an easy task for her. Yet what gives the movie power is the way in which its labyrinthine final act of the movie is so rife with sympathy and ugliness. This is a woman that captivated us with her pure, sweet, gorgeous star innocence (her name was Betty, for crying out loud!). The unique, Lynchian moment in which a soap audition turns into a scene of carnal desire shows Watts in her full, indescribable range – pure, all right, but pure, adrenalized emotion.

4. Catalina Sandina Moreno Maria Full of Grace (2004)
Indie movies were perhaps more proscripted this decade, and even more beholden to having conclusive, positive endings. Maria Full of Grace is like that, but also more unvarnished and wise. Casting Moreno, who was unknown prior (and, really, afterwards), was key in the film’s wounding, humane power. She glows and wants, fears and does not know what she’s gotten herself into. In fact, she typifies what has become a trend that’s a powerful antidote to the all-star slumming of non-indie pictures – the unknowns that, through the truth of their embodiments of their characters, show us life on screen (see also Gabourey Sidibe in this year’s Precious).

5. Jamie Foxx Ray (2004)
So many actors found movie vehicles for their perfect impersonations of famous people, it became a little boring. Ray is a lumpy, occasionally formulaic biopic, but there’s no missing what Jamie Foxx accomplishes as Ray Charles (and if you did miss the movie, he brought it to you everywhere else, including Kanye West’s #1 hit “Gold Digger”). You can argue where Ray works is in showing you the demons that made Charles impossible to deal with and a desperate drug addict were the same that made him great. What that really means is that the precision of Foxx’s work makes you believe in the overwhelming size of his drives and abilities. Foxx is scaldingly, charismatically spot on here.

6. Ellen Burstyn Requiem For A Dream (2000)
In one unforgettable story from Director of Photography Matthew Libatique on Requiem For a Dream, Libatique discussed filming Ellen Burstyn’s famous monologue about what it means to get old. The camera drifted a bit, and director Darren Aronofsky confronted him on it. Libatique’s lens had become too fogged up to see – he was crying too hard. That was the take Aronofsky used. Burstyn’s work was beyond fearless – ugly and terrifying in spurts, her portrait of a deluded drug addict makes the movie’s upsetting, kick-in-the-pants story its true heart.

7. Phillip Seymour Hoffman Capote (2005)
Hoffman seemed everywhere in film this decade, but his work as Truman Capote is the most unforgettable. Hoffman invaded the persona – the voice, the invective, the gestures, the demons, the physical fanciness as well as the control and manipulation of his words. In Capote, Capote’s gifts are also his downfall – his obsession and vanity get tangled with his sympathy, his morality, his talents. As a portrait of the twisted depths that drive artistry, Capote works because Hoffman so specifically inhabits all that drives Capote.

8. Meryl Streep Doubt (2008)
She got four Oscar nominations in the 90’s and 6 in the 80’s, but I’ll take each of her three (and, I can say with reasonably certainty that this year will make four) Oscar nominated performances this decade as a mark of the true power of Streep’s abilities. Adaptation, The Devil Wears Prada, and this year’s Julie and Julia show a Streep so comfortably ferocious and relatable, she was an entirely new imposing figure. Doubt is the finest of her work here, as a terrifyingly serious, focused nun convinced of a horrible wrongdoing. She was matched up with Phillip Seymour Hoffman in an intense mental showdown, but he can’t stand a chance – Streep’s singular certainty and last minute collapse is the height of masterful, invasive acting.

9. Christian Bale The New World (2005)
Call it my personal favorite. Terrence Mallick’s occasionally-painfully-slow, methodically gorgeous take on the Pocahontas story seemed to many like an art school joke. I’m convinced it was more, a deeply beautiful meditation on civilization’s reining in of the wild spirit. Bale’s eyes are unforgettable – as John Rolfe, the man who loved Pocahontas and brought her to civilized celebrity, he takes over the movie from Colin Farrell only to take it to a more deeply felt, more genuine place. He later became so severe an action hero, it’s easy to forget that so much of Bale’s range comes from his warmth, his certainty about humanity. Here, you saw the gentle version of that same instinct.

10. Daniel Day Lewis Gangs of New York (2002)
His performance in There Will Be Blood may be more iconic, but I’m convinced Paul Thomas Anderson wouldn’t have even known Daniel Day Lewis’s bloody, terrifying abilities before Gangs of New York. Scorcese missed the ball on this movie – I don’t even think he knew what he was making – but Lewis’s maniacal ruthlessness is such a potent force on screen, it enlivens and justifies the mess around him.

11. Zhang Ziyi Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
She played on the persona so many times afterwards (even making it into Rush Hour 2!), Ziyi nearly killed all the goodwill she built from Crouching Tiger. Her performance, however, is the movie, despite its set-piece, high-wire flying fight scenes. The truth is the core of the movie is her impetuousness, her youthful insatiability, and her desire for freedom. Ziyi is magnetizing and unnerving at once, a warrior and a little girl fighting for recognition.

12. Billy Bob Thornton The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)
Thornton’s best and last great performance came from nothing but staring with deep, wounded eyes. The Coen Brother’s existential noir brimmed with beautiful black and white cinematography, but it was matched by Thornton’s haunted vacuousness, a performance of seeming passivity that helps keep a movie about an absence of personality from ever seeming empty.

13. Eddie Murphy Dreamgirls (2006)
When performing on SNL in the 80’s, you knew Murphy could inhabit James Brown, but perhaps you missed the pain and viciousness of his eyes. In Dreamgirls, Murphy, more than his starlet costars, inhabits fame’s dark side, and coming from work as recognizable as his James Brown impersonation, you feel like you know the source of his infamous staged energy.

14. Cate Blanchet I’m Not There (2007)
If you need proof of Blanchet’s versatility, may you find it in 2007 when her performance as Bob Dylan in I’m Not There earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress at the same time as Elizabeth: The Golden Age earned her a nomination for Best actress – for playing Queen Elizabeth. Squint and you’ll have trouble telling her apart from the real Dylan, all scrawny limbs and severe cheekbones. Even when you can tell the stunt impersonation for the glorious sleight of hand it is, her work as a driven artist frayed by his own idealism is mesmerizing in its own right.

15. Cameron Diaz Things You Can Tell Just By Looking At Her (2000)
Rodrigo Garcia’s Things You Can Tell… (2000) and Nine Lives (2005) each tell short, intricately delineated stories of women interconnected by their lives and feelings, and each overflows with miraculous performances. Things… sticks with me, though, above all else due to Diaz’s sweet, astonishingly beautiful performance as a lonely blind woman in a dead-end love affair. Say what you will about Diaz as a star, Diaz is an actress of true feeling and range. Here, her character may not even know how beautiful she is, and has nothing to hide her own isolation and disappointment behind. She delivers an astonishingly lovely speech at the end of the film asking "What is the life of a woman anyway?" It answers its own question.

16. Judi Dench Notes From a Scandal (2006)
Dench had long been accepted as a perennial, majestic, presence of acting royalty. Yet her work in Notes From a Scandal turned her severity both inward and outward at once. As a teacher who discovers an affair between another teacher (Cate Blanchet) and student, Dench is harsh and furious, but also lonely, isolated, and turned on by the power it provides. The movie is luridly soapy, but Dench’s work also makes it deeply felt.

17. Jack Nicholson About Schmidt (2002)
For Nicholson, the notion of being this free of vanity seemed highly impossible. Indeed, as Schmidt, Nicholson is frumpy, sad, angry, lonely, and imperfectly blanketed in the world’s worst combover. Alexander Payne’s dramedies climaxed with Oscar recognition in 2004’s Sideways, but Schmidt was closer to who he was – a deep, unclear pool of conflicting emotions embodied in Nicholson’s entire physical presence.

18. Mickey Rourke The Wrestler (2008)
So many dramas this decade reveled in the hard, unvarnished truth of their characters. Darren Aronofsky knew where these performances came from (see #6), and in Mickey Rourke, he found an actor willing to plum the depths of his “used up piece of meat” living long past his expiration date. One look at the famous scene on an abandoned boardwalk in which Rourke tells Evan Rachel Wood that he only wants her not to hate him, and you, with full sympathy, believe.

19. Daniel Craig Casino Royale (2006)
Action movies became so serious this decade, and it was a bit of the trifecta of Matt Damon, Christian Bale, and Daniel Craig that helped complete the shift. Craig, for my money, came in by radically reshaping Jamed Bond into a short-fused paragon of seriousness. Many balked that Craig was an enemy to the fun of Bond (particularly in 2008’s awful Quantum of Solace), but he’s beyond magnetic on screen.

20. Nicole Kidman The Others (2001)
New Nicole Kidman performances have fallen into a sort of disfavor, but 2001 seemed to be the height of her career – an Oscar nomination for Moulin Rouge was inevitable, and all the while, critics and audiences alike lamented that Kidman couldn’t be nominated also for The Others. The Others was a horror film in the vein of The Sixth Sense, in that its ending was all shock, but it builds on the rich, smoky textures of Kidman’s performance as a mother equally unable to keep ghosts from her children as she is unable to keep the world from getting to them first.

Honorable Mentions: Maggie Gyllenhaal Sherrybaby, Vera Formiga Down to the Bone, Christoph Waltz Inglourious Basterds, Molly Shannon Year of the Dog, Terance Howard Hustle & Flow, Johnny Depp Pirates of the Carribean, Tim Robbins Mystic River

The Greats: The Sweet Hereafter

I couldn't quite find the essay I would like to read about The Sweet Hereafter, Atom Egoyan's 1997 masterpiece about a small mountain town torn apart by a school bus acccident, so I figured I'd write what I thought myself. Roger Ebert last week wrote a beautiful piece about how he now feels, 15 years after its release, that Hoop Dreams was the great American documentary. Well, rewatching The Sweet Hereafter, I'm more certain than ever it was the greatest of a certain type of movie the 90's perfected: the indie drama.

I don't quite know the best way to describe this genre, but in a way it's the movie I came of age watching. As a teenager in the 90's, I ate up film reviews, Top 10 lists, critical essays, TV shows. Each year, it seemed a new "understated" drama had upped the ante on quality and verismilitude, that each one was more genuine and true to the bone than the last. This climaxed in a way in 1996, the year in which four indie movies - Shine, Fargo, The English Patient, and Secrets and Lies - competed for best picture. It climaxed in another way in 1995, the seminal year of indie movie-making when Dead Man Walking, Leaving Las Vegas, The Usual Suspects, and The City of Lost Children were released. And in another way, it climaxed in 1999, the year of breakout creativity in the indie world that led to Being John Malkovich, Magnolia, All About My Mother, and American Beauty winning the Oscar for Best Picture.

But in my estimation, that was on the downslope of the true revolution, and the true revolution climaxed in 1997, one of the great, indominable years for movie making. Some of the movies that year aren't as notorious as those others, but they are, in many cases, better: Boogie Nights, LA Confidential, The Wings of the Dove, Waiting for Guffman, In The Company of Men, Afterglow, Deconstructing Harry, Chasing Amy, The Apostle, The House of Yes, Ulee's Gold, The Ice Storm, and towering over all of them in quality was The Sweet Hereafter. Well, almost all of them. In all honesty, I must except Boogie Nights - I think there were, truly, four perfect movies of the 90's - movies just perfect, each second, from beginning to end: Pulp Fiction, Trainspotting, Boogie Nights, and The Sweet Hereafter. I said The Sweet Hereafter was the best movie of the year at the time, but who's to wrangle with perfection? (Plus, I was 15 at the time, what did my opinion matter?)

The Sweet Hereafter is the type of movie that transfixes you with emotion and grips your core. It's told wildly out of order, but then, it's in the exact right order, the central school bus accident occurring just over an hour into the movie, long after you know it's going to happen - until it, truly, has become part of the cold, sunny landscape. It is eventually as present as the clouds or the mountains of the scenic town.

The movie "begins" somewhere in the middle, with Ian Holm's sturdy Mitchell Stephens' car being stuck in a town's car wash, just after receiving a call from Zoey, his drug addict daughter. She attempts to reminisce with him, but he wonders if she's simply doing so in an attempt to ask for more money. We're certain this has happened before. This moment is telling for the movie - the town has malfunctioned, given up the appearance of functioning and abandoned its day to day duties. Stephens opens his door and runs out of the car into the car wash - he too, dealing with his child who is not dead but is just as lost, cannot escape the downpour of grief in the town. He shows up at the Bide-a-Wile motel, where two of the grief-stricken parents attempt to run their business, but in their and the motel's disarray, it's treated about as half-assed as the carwash is.

It then picks up a dual thread of Stephens later, 2 years later, on a plane coincidentally sitting next to Zoey's childhood friend, and before the accident, where the town is a different, functional place. There's Dolores, the kindly bus driver, who in the "present" wears a neck brace and speaks with giant spaces between her words, and sits in front of a wall of all the children of the accident, framed. There's Nicole, the 16-year-old with a budding singing career who is secretly having an affair with her father, Sam. And there's Billy, whose children Nicole babysits, who is having an affair with Risa, who runs the motel, seen "earlier" in happier times.

Watching The Sweet Hereafter, I'm struck by how spellbinding the grief that binds the movie is, the extraordinary sense of detail it takes to make the "present" distinct from the "past" - one look at a character's face, and you know what part of the timeline you're seeing. Yet there's an additional piece. In a famous scene from the movie, around 40 minutes in, Nicole - in the "past" - is babysitting Billy's children, Mason and Jessica. She reads the Robert Browning poem "The Pied Piper of Hamelin." "When, lo, as they reached the mountainside/ a wonderful portal opened wide/ As if a cavern suddenly hollowed/ And the piper advanced and the children followed."

Mason asks about the meaning of the story. Why did the Piper want to take all the children from the town of Hamelin? Was he mad that the town didn't pay him? Was he just mean? They discuss this, and Nicole says she guesses he wasn't mean, simply, very angry. Nicole is a victim herself, of course, of incest with her father, shown to us in one scene (ostensibly taking place later in the same night) where her father seduces her by candlelight. This scene is disturbing because it's sort of romantic - the first time you see the movie, you think back making sure you were right that this man is her father. Later, she comes home from the hospital, paralyzed - a reference to the lame child of "The Pied Piper" who misses all the children, who finds it "Dull in the town since the children left/ I must admit that I'm bereft/ of all the wonderful sights they see/ that the Piper also promised me." She sabotages the lawsuit that Stephens is trying to mount by lying in a deposition while her father, sitting nearby, can't say anything.

As played by Sarah Polley, Nicole is the true center of The Sweet Hereafter. The final scene is one I remembered, vividly, no matter what part of my memory of The Sweet Hereafter wandered away. In it, it is again the night of her reading "The Pied Piper" to Mason and Jessica. Each has fallen asleep, and she closes the book and kisses each one of them on the forehead. We know, from earlier in the movie, she then changes her clothes into something more provocative, talks briefly with Billy, who gives her his dead wife's clothing, then goes on a "date" with her father. Yet here, we see something different. She leaves the childrens' bedroom and walks to the window. She stands, and then the window, covered by curtains, is filled with light. The movie ends.

For years, I thought to myself, what does it mean? I assumed Billy's car had pulled up. Perhaps this was foreshadowing? A flashback to a simpler, more peaceful moment?

But that's not how the lights come up, really - I'm imposing an earthly explanation. The lights are not shown from left to right or right to left, the window lights up at once just as Nicole stands in front of it. The scene is filled with Mychael Danna's moving medieval-sounding flute score, just as the movie is filled with Polley herself singing on the soundtrack. I think of this scene, now, as nothing less than Nicole commanding the gods to cause this accident. She is not mean, just very, very angry. She is the piper leading the children by flute and her music to the portal in the mountainside, preserving for them the perfect love their parents have, and yet making the town suffer for her victimization.

This is an extraordinary conclusion to an extraordinary movie. Twelve years later, it's clear this was the epicenter of the career of everyone involved. For Polley, she received so much extraordinary press for the performance, and was discussed as a longshot for an Oscar nomination. Yet perhaps everyone knew she wouldn't get one. For one, it was a competitive year - Kim Basinger won for LA Confidential, which wasn't such a travesty, even though she beat Julianne Moore in Boogie Nights (truly her signature role). Also not nomiated that year were Christina Ricci and Sigourney Weaver in The Ice Storm, Heather Graham for Boogie Nights, Stacy Edwards in In The Company of Men, Debi Morgan in Eve's Bayou, Miranda Richardson in The Apostle, and Catherine O'Hara in Waiting for Guffman, so at least she's in good company.

Additionally, though, everyone knew she wouldn't get a nomination based on the nature of the performance. Her rage is so internal and never expressed. In fact, the fascination of Nicole is how the rage could be there at all, under such a placid stare. Still, you see it, you feel it. In her extraordinary scene at the deposition, Nicole lies, but so sincerely - she elicits tears even as she is emitting lightning bolts of ferocity, spinning a concoction out of mid-air.

Polley was working a lot right after the movie, she was the "it" girl for a moment because of The Sweet Hereafter. She starred in Go, but then sort of wandered away from the limelight, which is perhaps a reason she was so right to play Nicole. She got an Oscar nomination a couple years ago after all - for writing the Alice Munro adaptation of Away From Her, and in a way, I saw Nicole in that script, too, wandering about that movie's intersection of anger and grief.

As for Egoyan, he was a favorite filmmaker of mine in the 90's. He was always leading up to The Sweet Hereafter, it seems - after kinky, fragmented works like The Adjustor, he just got better and better in quality. A low-grade, video-shot indie called Calendar still seems the work of a daring auteur. Then, in 1995, his Exotica already seemed a plenty formidable tentpole in 90's indie filmmaking. Afterwards, he never quite found his feet again - Felicia's Journey, released two years later, was a half-salacious ramble, and his attempted epic of the Armenian genocide, 2002's Ararat, was a splattery fragmented mess. In effect, Calendar - the story of a couple attempting to location-scout for a documentary about the Armenian genocide as their relationship crumbles - was really all he had to say about the genocide, and it wasn't even about the genocide. It was about a filmmaker who cannot stop what he sees happening.

Egoyan chronicled that sensation best with The Sweet Hereafter, which wanders through a feeling. He drenches you in it, like Mitchell running through his carwash, and finally sees it released by the light at the window. A movie like it had never been made before and has never been made since.

Top 20 Best Albums of the 00's

I've come to accept that for this decade, a Best Albums list is a dead enterprise. Not only is it full of the great artist of the 90's, it feels like a holdover of concepts developed in the 90's. I could and will go a step further: it feels like a holdover of concepts developed in the 20th century.

Without an "Alternative" to take over, a ska or an electronica to point to definite trends, an Alanis Morissette and Courtney Love to "challenge the notions of women in rock." Without a punk or a hair metal or a disco or a new wave or a British invasion in this decade, we can look back at the last 10 years of music and say, conclusively: What happened? It wouldn't quite be right to say not much, but it certainly requires a different framework. Suddenly I've become an old man reminiscing about the old days at age 27.

Technology happened. First in mp3's promulgated, then Napster, then iPod. More simply than that, the computer happened. Everywhere. We all had one, and we all began to play our music on it. We didn't hold albums and records, and we rarely played them all the way through. This is what I mean - I'm admittedly attached to the concept of the album, and my #1 album of the decade is like an album's last stand - a brilliant fly in the face of the pallbearers of the Album's coffin.

That album - Green Day's American Idiot is also fantastic. I won't divorce my personal taste from this list, but it's worth noting this album isn't entirely a reflection of my tastes. For one, one very deserving album is not on it, the album I once listed as the best album of 2003 and an album I've written extensively about: Lucinda Williams' World Without Tears. I think of it as an all time great. I also think there's no room for it here.

For other artists who were "90's" artists like Lucinda, I had to be careful. PJ Harvey's Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea is as great as an album in the top 10, but I already had two albums released in 2000 by artists who were integral to music in the 90's. To say nothing of the fact that Harvey's two subsequent records - Uh Huh Her and White Chalk probably could have been on this list somewhere.

But they're not, neither is Sleater-Kinney's One Beat, Aimee Mann's Lost In Space, Liz Phair's Liz Phair, or Fiona Apple's Extraordinary Machine, though I loved them all. Their great times are behind them, I suppose.

Somehow I also talked myself out of including Eminem's The Marshall Mathers LP - it too was released in 2000 and not especially relevant. I can't quite say why, but it didn't seem right on this list. Neither did The White Stripes Elephant or The Killers' Hot Fuss, though they may feel right to other list writers.

This list feels right about what we went through in this decade, and it had some great music. Let us sit back and appreciate what we had, even if it feels, sometimes, that this decade had the long shadow of its previous, parent century restricting any of its freedom. This list is dominated by 90's artists who got angrier, rowdier, older, and wiser - and is, indeed, topped by one who did all of those things, gloriously.

The 20 Best Albums of the 2000's

1. Green Day American Idiot (2004)

For a minute, the rage in 2004 reached the fury, electricity, and relevance of our great musical past. This is the album that out-sold their 90's standard bearer Dookie, dared to add conceptual weight and operatic tendencies to their approach, and for all purposes, worked. Even when songs like "Extraordinary Girl" lost you in their attempt at story and consistency, the consciousness of the record elevated everything around it. "Holiday" sounded like profound rebellion and "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" took anxiety into the 00's pop pantheon like no other single did, becoming a ubiquitous anthem of the down and out.

That can be said of the record, too, whose true subject is the ultimate failure of rebellion, the hopelessness of those who "beg to dream and differ from the hollow lies." Not only was it the true record of the dawning of the rest of our lives, it had the bravery to see the clouds in the dawn.

2. D’Angelo Voodoo (2000)

It seems strange to reward an album released merely three weeks into the decade, but here it sits, a brilliant, unforgettable anachronism - a sonically explosive r/b record built on musicianship, endless jams, soul grooves, and the audacity of an artist. D'Angelo used his liner notes to decry the state of modern r/b, so he took it back a couple of decades. "Playa Playa" overwhelms with horns and harmonies, "Devil's Pie" adds a turntable, and "Left & Right" brings in Method Man and Redman - it moves as far forward as it plunges backwards. Its climax too, the breathlessly naked (like its video) "Untitled (How Does It Feel)" is the ultimate soul catharsis - a building of music and ideas expressed in beautiful confession.

3. TV On The Radio Dear Science (2008)

TV On The Radio managed to incorporate everything, yelling, "Hey Jacko, fuck your war" in one breath while intoning poems to the dead over synth and guitar noise in "Halfway Home" with the other. 2008 seemed to me, in a way, as the best year of the 80's - when we embraced our synth and performer greatness and lost the hairgel and spandex. TV On The Radio is the document of how much we've learned - appropriating guitar and keyboards where we need them, hip hop if it fits - but only to serve the poetry, the goal of the record. Science and Science intone and demand answers, yet look to the future, seeing the "Golden Age" coming round. The record ends with a ballin' masterpiece, "Lover's Day" that is sexually explicit alright, but it's also so sweet about what it is - a simple declaration of "I'm gonna take you home."

4. Beck Sea Change (2002)

I get into trouble for telling people my true feelings of Beck - that I found Odelayand Midnite Vultures empty, ultra hipster excuses to start dancing and not feel bad about it. I think Beck's run in the 00's outdid his work of the 90's, by so much, and it's because he gets released in Sea Change to explode with meaning, with sadness, with the realization that "These days, I barely get by." It was a smash - it turned Beck from a weirdo with a two turntables to an artist of range and feeling. It turned the line "I'm tired of fighting for a lost cause" into a radio friendly refrain, even as it made you long for a drink. Sea Change was perhaps incorrectly labeled our modern-times version of Blood On The Tracks, but there's no denying that if this decade need a document to express how people truly, deeply felt, they could begin with the acoustic strumming that opens "The Golden Age," and end with the guitar that learns to "let it pass by the side of the road."

5. Radiohead Kid A (2000)

In a way, Kid A defines Radiohead more than even OK Computer did. This was the record, in 2000, was the album that turned the band into the chroniclers of digital technology's fearful, occasionally bankrupt ascendancy. It put conceptual weight into the notion of words and ideas that betray us. "Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon," Thom Yorke sings on the album's opening, "Everything In Its Right Place," a song of such sinisterness you truly believe nothing to be in its right place. His aftertaste was ours - sour, ferociously angry, saddened, silenced. The paranoia would define a second significant Radiohead and Yorke decade, and Kid A would remain unequaled in their work.

6. Kanye West The College Dropout (2004)

The truly great, occasionally forgotten accomplishment of Kanye West is that he actually managed to sneak humanity back into rap - especially in a decade of so much posturing and look-how-every-chick-in-the-club-wants-me bravado. There is one song of that bravado on The College Dropout, and it actually doesn't say that every girl wants West, it says every girl likes to groove out to Anita Baker. "All Falls Down," the song that truly showed West's pop capabilities, is a song about the way images and self-consciousness are crippling, humanizing feelings. In a flow as smooth and inviting as West's, it felt like a true, welcome, even brave breakthrough.

7. DJ Danger Mouse The Grey Album (2003)

The moment technology really began to change music - Danger Mouse's still-not-quite-legally-released triumph is to take two albums and make them better. I mean that. I mean that because it bridged music in a way we didn't know we could do. It acknowledged everything we could do had already been done, so we had to work with what was there. And it made us realize our idols weren't that far apart - creating a digital idol all his own.

8. Neko Case Fox Confessor Brings The Flood (2006)

It makes sense that in a decade of reappropriation, its greatest, most "artistic" new voice would come from one singing in a manner that made her sound like Patsy Cline - a throwback to the wild, soothing women of country's past. Yet Fox Confessor is an album of modern anxiety, a magnificently full treatise on the notion that speaking the truth takes all of you and can leave you vanquished, forced to speak. She sings of the "Star Witness" who sings when she runs, the widows of St. Angel reveling in their husbands' ashes, murder victims, and even John the Baptist saying what must have seemed - to him - the Truth. Yet by locking her ideas so deeply inside her inscrutable, luscious productions, she created a fascination that was entirely, wonderfully new.

9. Sleater-Kinney The Woods (2005)

Had it not been Sleater-Kinney's curtain call, The Woods would have been the album that turned Sleater-Kinney into psychadelic legends - or at least, to the extent these indie 90's holdovers could be. The Woods finds fury in a manner the already furious post-punkers didn't think they could grasp - not to the Punk recent past, but to the classic rock of decades ago, trading on Keith Moon drums, Hendrix guitar riffs, and pure protest anger. Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein sang of ripping themselves open, and they do, on track after track, scream with more command and excitement than they'd ever done before. "The Fox" is so loud and virulent, that by the time they lead you wondering about political bs'ing in "Wilderness," you know longer recognize this band you loved. By the time "What's Mine Is Yours" adds some sex into the mix, you like whose shown up even better.

10. Blackalicious Blazing Arrow (2002)

Ten years after A Tribe Called Quest and Pharcyde, Blackalicious mastered the alternative hip hop creation. Blazing Arrow was and has been unsurpassed as the smoker's rap/soul record for the spoken word and poetry slam crowd, and might have been just as irrelevant and underground if it hadn't been so fun, so wild, and, most importantly, so vast and unrelenting. Blackalicious, and its loquacious, un-stutterable leader Gift of Gab spew forth rhymes at a pace that seems beyond comprehension, but find it evoking positivity (as in the Gil Scott Heron guesting "First in Flight") just as easily as it decries urban decay ("Sky Is Falling"), or wanders into stoner-rock with "Brain Washers," spoken word with "Release, pts. 1, 2, and 3", or experimental music with "Chemical Calisthenics." The album is 75 minutes of pure hip hop heaven, casting a light on the possibilities of rappers, poets, thinkers , and dancers alike who want to cram all they can into one, bold, encompassing statement. By the time the final, gorgeous soul number "Day One" promises to "get your soul back," you think it may in fact have done just that.

11. Girl Talk Feed The Animals (2008)

12. PJ Harvey Stories From The City, Stories From the Sea (2000)

13. Outkast Speakerboxx/The Love Below (2003)

14. Bob Dylan Love and Theft (2001)

15. Jay-Z The Black Album (2002)

16. Wilco Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2001)

17. Madonna Music (2000)

18. The Dixie Chicks The Long Way Around (2006)

19. LCD Soundsystem Sound of Silver (2007)

20. Queens of the Stone Age Songs For The Deaf (2002)

A scene I love

This week I watched Yi Yi, the Taiwanese movie directed by Edward Yang that in 2000 had the rare ability to beat out Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon for Best Foreign Film in several key US film awards, even in the year that Crouching Tiger was supposed to be the foreign movie that made it ok to like foreign movies. There's a lot to love about Yi Yi, and there's a lot that I did love, but there's one very brief scene I want to talk about.

In the scene, Ting-Ting, a thoughtful, quiet teenage girl who has not slept since her grandmother had a stroke prepares for a date. The teenage boy she's seeing was dating her friend, but since turned his affections towards Ting-Ting. She holds up a khaki skirt and a blue button down shirt in a mirror and contemplates them briefly. We then cut to her date, with Ting-Ting looking stately and beautiful in the same skirt and shirt. The topic of her outfit doesn't come up on the date, and perhaps Yang, who also wrote the movie, thought in his mind about Ting-Ting meeting Fatty, her date, and him saying "you look pretty" and that was the end of it. Perhaps he said nothing at all. One of the great accomplishments of Yi Yi is the ability to look at two characters ostensibly doing nothing and to envision a probable wealth of experiences before or after the moment we're witnessing that occurred between the characters were seeing. They are complex, but fully visible. As Fatty tells Ting-Ting during their date, all people's decisions and actions are beautiful, and movies help us live the lives of others in order to see this.

The truth is the actions of that scene in which Ting-Ting picks out her outfit are related to that view of people as beautiful regardless of their decisions, and actually I immediately thought of three other movies and works that had a similar scene - a character in private determining what he/she would wear, and that outfit showing up later with little consequence. Still, every time I've seen this scene, it makes me realize that what I'm watching has been written with an eye of what people go through to convince others that we're ok, by coming up with details that conceal themselves. A writer and director going through the trouble of contemplating what their characters do when we're not looking, because we all do it, go through motions to make our insecurities concealed.

Here are the other scenes and what they meant. In The Sopranos season 5 episode "Sentimental Education," Carmela prepares for a date with AJ's principal while she and Tony are separated. We don't quite know yet that he and Carmela quite have feelings for each other, but we do see Carmela analayzing her looks in the mirror and are drawn, perhaps for the first time in The Sopranos, to the sight of Carmela's cleavage. Yet when we see Carmela at dinner, she looks beautiful, composed. Robert, the principal, compliments her on how natural she is. We know he's not wrong, but of course, even a sense of being natural requires effort.

Another. In the superb Swedish movie Show Me Love, directed by master humanist Lukas Moodyson, we're shown, like no American movie has truly captured, the behavior of teenagers who are as fully irrational, insecure, and who have not developed into full adults yet. Show Me Love has so much love for its characters, and you share that love with them. The movie is about two young girls who develop feelings for one another, but the moment I knew how much I loved it was in the observation of Johan, who becomes, briefly, the boyfriend of Elin, the gorgeous blonde protagonist. Johan, in a mirror before meeting up with his friends, obsessively fixes his hat so that it sits at the exact right angle on his head. This simple observation, to me, defines the life of teenage boys - so much effort into the presentation of who they are.

Finally, the most notable example - Tilda Swinton in Michael Clayton. Swinton won an Oscar for her work, and I think so much of it comes back to the contrasting scene in which we're introduced to her character, Karen Crowder. In it, we see her being introduced to her company, speaking regally, keeping her act together, cross-cut with her at home, trying on her clothing, practicing her speech in the mirror, working out her professional gesturing, stumbling over her words.

When speaking to Swinton on the red carpet at the Oscars, critic Richard Roeper described this scene as showing Karen's "vulnerability." I don't think that gets at the scene exactly correctly - it doesn't show us her "other side," it shows us the mask Karen's corporate guise is hiding. It shows a person barely keeping a lid on her anxiety and panic. It shows her terrified of being "found out." This scene is, of course, longer and more intricate than the others, but it shows the same sense of consciousness. When an actor and writer combine to truly understand a scene in which a character gets changed - it understands the secrets we all keep just to do things described as "every day," the pressure to appear ordinary. Maybe as this scene becomes more recognized, it'll start to appear in works I find artificial, but for now, this scene is an indicator that I'm seeing a true work of art.

Pictured: Ting-Ting's lovely white dress in Yi Yi, Carmela's date in The Sopranos, the young women of Show Me Love, Swinton in Clayton

Massaging the History

This past weekend, in a dizzying music-festival haze, I got to watch Sonic Youth headline the Capitol Hill Block Party here in Seattle from a window in an office building just above the stage. For those of you unfamiliar with the show, the city of Seattle closes Pike between Broadway and 12th in Capitol Hill, turning one of its most bar, restaurant, and coffee shop heavy areas into what is basically a 4-square-block concert venue full of indie performers, overpriced Miller High-life tall boys, and Seatle's best hipsters wandering around (I found two people wearing my favorite Sleater-Kinney Dig Me Out t-shirt from 1997, no doubt in anticipation of a set by current screaming-girl-semi-punk reigning champs The Gossip).

Watching just above the stage in a semi-VIP stupor caps off a decade of rather insane devotion to Sonic Youth for me. I've followed every movement of their career since buying Daydream Nation as a junior in high school. I maintain that their work from 1985-1995, between Bad Moon Rising and Washing Machine is the longest, greatest streak of artistic relevance and perfection, with each record a triumph of rock's greatest not-quite-punk noise artistes. The band has now made 6 records since then, roughly one every two years, and that doesn't include any of their strict-noise-symphony SYR recordings that get them branded as pretentious.

Anyway, the career of Sonic Youth is not what I want to write about. Instead, from my office window, I found myself, in one blissful moment, yelling to Kim Gordon as she moved her immaculately chromed-out high heeled shoe to her foot pedal thing, "Kim! I Love you! And I love your dress!" She was wearing a tight chrome mini-skirty dress thing that made her look like a metal go-go girl. Kim Gordon, mind you, is 56 years old. When you look at her up close, as I was lucky to do in meeting her, briefly, 3 years ago as the band toured for Rather Ripped, you notice a few more wrinkles, and her petulant black-eyeshadow-heavy eyes that always look a little fearsome, a little unpredictable, and very very commanding.

Kim plays bass and guitar for Sonic Youth, along with her husband Thurston Moore, and Lee Ranaldo. She sings lead on roughly 30-40% of the songs on each album. Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney once called her the greatest female influence of all women in rock because Gordon was, unlike most female rockers, an equal in her band - a guitarist on other tracks, a mind coming up with ideas, etc.

The truth is, she also is essential to the personality of every Sonic Youth record. Moore may sing on more songs, but in a way, he's a sort of bellweather for each album, the anchor by which Gordon's flights of fancy return to, and where Ranaldo's poetic asides - 1 or 2 per album - jet back to as well. This year, Sonic Youth released The Eternal, their 15th proper album, and initially, I was less interested in it than in any previous record. This week at Block Party, though, Sonic Youth - as they typically do when touring in support of an album - played almost the entire thing, and only 4 songs from their back catalogue, each of which was made before 1990. They proved to me a couple of things - that the album deserved an additional listen, and that they were just as good as they ever were.

Don't get me wrong, The Eternal is not as good as their 85-95 run of perfection, but it is a well made album by good professionals. The reason that the record is not great is the same reason that the band probably won't make a full out bad album - the band approaches each record like a painting, specifying their noise and furious anarchy to each track until it sounds just off kilter enough, but not so much so that it loses all comprehension as a song (although, it should be said, it used to lose all comprehension as a song. And when it did, as in 1985's Bad Moon Rising, it was a better album. Not that they should try and make that album again). If you listen to the opening song from 2006's Rather Ripped, , "Reena," you'll hear it - it's a song that isn't actually that interesting, Gordon simply singing a refrain of "You keep me coming home again," but the music and production of it turns it into a pretty serviceable, not bad rock song.

The Eternal finds Gordon actually creating the best songs with her at the helm since Washing Machine, and it's because she again finds her defiant, childlike, petulant, shrieking, vulnerable core again. Thurston Moore's songs on the record are, almost universally, unnecessary. Not bad per se, but unnecesary. Gordon's songs are necessary. On "Anti-orgasm," she breaks out a bitchy chanting that reminded me of Washing Machine's "Panty Lies," a Gordon classic. On "Sacred Trickster," she (and the band's jangly guitars with her) commands "I want you to levitate me!" with the sort of sexual ferocity she brought to her best tracks 25 (!) years ago. I kid you not, this song could have fit in on 1987's classic Sister except she wasn't as commanding then and didn't know what she wanted to say with the same specificity.

The greatest song on the record, by all accounts even the best song of SY's Block Party set, is its final number "Massage The History," which I think is Gordon singing in a voice she's never broken out before. She sounds old, vulnerable, her voice groaningly low, like a lover before bed, exhausted, singing to a flame, "wishing you were here with me, wishing we could massage the history, the history." I have no idea if it's correct, but in my mind, it's a song to Moore, of longing for the sense of familiarity they share by experiencing the entire Sonic Youth experience together. "You're so close to me" she sings like a long string of moaning in the song's bridge (or, whatever its "middle" should be called), and it's true - she and Moore are like one entity of rock noise and expression.

How did she make a song - and, indeed, a record of songs - full of this much feeling and discovery? The truth is, I've counted her out since 1998. Here is a brief trip back through the history of Kim Gordon songs in Sonic Youth's post-Washing Machine "adult" phase.


2006 Rather Ripped
Gordon sang the album's opener "Reina," and, basically, a couple boppity songs - a love anthem "The Neutral" ("He's not a poet or a mystic... he's just neutral"), and "What A Waste", the most accurately titled song ever at Gordon's helm. Her best number on here is the slow-burning, beautiful "Turquoise Boy," but like the album around it, Gordon on Rather Ripped plays the part of a competent rock professional. Her voice is at her most Neco-esque and straightforward.

2004, Sonic Nurse
"Pattern Recognition" is a strong album opener, but like the Ripped songs, is fairly straighforward. That's true even of wannabe wacky tracks "Dude Ranch Nurse" and "Kim Gordon and the Arthur Doyle Hand Cream," a giddy love fest for Mariah Carey, its chorus of "Hey hey little baby breakdown." That song is at least fun, but Gordon's squeaky-girl delivery is just a pose to contrast with the material. The truth is, I believed these good times much less than the good times of "Panty Lies" or Goo's "My Friend Goo," which are just as off-kilter, but you believed them. The album's beautiful penultimate number "I Love You, Golden Blue" is one of the best SY songs of this decade, but is as close as SY has ever come to a slow dance.

2002, Murray Street
I do believe Murray Street to be the great album of Sonic Youth's "adult," post-1995 phase - it's warm and happy, and you feel happy for them for being in a place to produce it. The Gordon songs are good - "Plastic Sun" is bitchy and loud, and "Sympathy For The Strawberry," at 8 minutes, is a build to be proud of. Still, are they as good as Gordon as her most unhinged? I can't say they are.

2000, NYC Ghosts and Flowers
NYC Ghosts and Flowers is perhaps the most underrated of all of Youth's albums ever - immediately dismissed by most, it's the last of their conceptually driven records, each of Moore and Gordon and Ranaldo's tracks aligned on the same notion of regret, mystery, ghostliness. The album is the most claningly abstract of the Sonic Youth recordings that aren't labeled SYR, but Ghosts and Flowers is mournful and haunting. Gordon has one No Wave ramble, "Lightning," that I never listen to. There's "Side2side" which is sorta neat, but is mostly a joke. Her real contribution (it's a short album) is "Nevermind (What Was It Anyway)," which is at its core the heart of the record - dismissive of her, if not the entire alternative movement (it is titled Nevermind, after all). I love it, but in its petulant half-growl, I'll just say I believe her more now.

1998, A Thousand Leaves
And this is where we lost her. A Thousand Leaves is the first Sonic Youth record to fail at its intentions and ushered in this modern, half-way there era of who they are. Lee Ranaldo's songs are extraordinary on the record, Moore's are solid, but from a different, melodic planet. The song "Hits of Sunshine (For Allen Ginsburg)" hints at who they are now - it's an 11 minute ode to a poet. Now Sonic Youth had become elder statesmen of the fine art community, so, they sing about fine art. Gordon to me on this record lost her mind, and not in an appealing way. "French Tickler" and "Female Mechanic Now on Duty" molest her themes of female subjugation and start to verge on caricature. "Female Mechanic" especially sounds to me like Gordon trying to call a do-over on "Washing Machine," arguably her greatest song, ne, work of art. The album begins and ends with more noise rambles - "Contre Le Sexisme" and "Heather, Angel." But mostly, the curious element is "The Ineffable Me," full of shrieks and spoken word and outre "shock" cussing: "A cushy job/ a pussy's job/ a cumjunkie's job/ makes my dick throb." Gordon has always pushed the sexual nature of her songs, and that's fine, but this seems like either a climax of all of her work, or producing those elements that borders on tedium. In Washing Machine, their previous record and last great work, Gordon's songs climaxed in "Little Trouble Girl," a song of sexual vulnerability (its teenage character finds herself pregnant), and you imagined leaving the teen of Gordon's subconscious lost and wandering to adulthood.

What was there, then, to make of "The Ineffable Me" (maybe it can take the best-titled song award from "What A Waste")? In a way, that song, pushing Gordon's approach so far forward made her lose it. Her songs are for the most part, until The Eternal, seviceable, good songs by a good person and a talented artist. Sonic Youth has always managed to be an incredibly stable band living incredibly stable lives (Moore and Gordon have been married for 25 years!), perhaps because they get their noise and confusion out through their music. Yet "The Ineffable Me" was too noisy and too confusing, too ineffable, and ultimately, too untrue. It's not until "Massage The History" that I truly glimpsed the Gordon that was left behind at the end of Washing Machine, and I marvelled at how truthfully she grew up into an adult.

Pictured: Gordon, and my head from our spot above the Block Party on Pike, Gordon sorta visible in the Silver Lamme thing in the middle of the stage.