An open letter to Stephen Spielberg

Dear Mr. Spielberg,

You've made a canon of films that stand up as some of the finest works in the history of cinema. You've redefined the expectations (for better or worse) of generations of filmmakers and moviegoers, and ensured that none of my time between Memorial Day and Labor Day will be spent in a movie theater watching some gay, artsy crap (I know, you're saving that for the Oscar season). You have more money than you can count, and a business empire that might actually rival your filmography. You had a good run there. We all had some laughs. But I saw Kingdom of the Crystal Skull this weekend, and it's clear to me that you've grown mad with power, and it's time to for you to be put out to pasture. . .

Exhibit A: The unnecessary sequels and special editions.















Maybe you' ve just been spending too much time around your friend Mr. Lucas, but this seems to be a problem that isn't going away. We looked the other way at two awful Jurassic Park sequels, but what's this I hear about another one in the works? I know that you have lots of new toys and gadgets that you wish you had when you were making movies that mattered. But, guess what? All of those movies that you made with those cheesy models and matte paintings still hold up. And War of the Worlds was shit. I don't know if that means you need to go back to using miniatures and optical mattes, but maybe it'll make you realize how bad of an idea it is to have a whole sequence of Shia LaBeouf swinging through the jungle on vines with a pack of monkeys when you see the whole thing rigged up in a studio. Like Mr. Lucas, you might think that you're introducing your stories to a whole new generation of moviegoers, but speaking from the standpoint of someone who was introduced to all your early films on home video and TV, as long as there are DVD players and parents who don't have time to raise their children themselves, your films will be watched and loved for generations to come. Not only does it destroy the cohesiveness of a film or series to interject material 20 years after the fact, it's more than a little patronizing to the people who grew up on your films to tell them that the essential experiences of their childhood were flawed and incomplete. So, just save your time, save your money, and work on putting all those classics on Blu-Ray with as little mediation as possible and we'll all pretend that ET was always a puppet and Indiana Jones never met aliens. Speaking of which. . .


Exhibit B: The aliens. What the fuck is up with all the aliens?















Now, don't get me wrong, I too had an unhealthy obsession with extraterrestrials when I was younger and fully appreciate the use of otherworldly beings as a means of exploring the meaning of human existence on Earth. I also realize that the use of aliens as a plot device is so lame that even daytime soaps avoid it like the plague. Here's a good rule of thumb, if the story of the film primarily involves aliens visiting or invading Earth, then you have full permission to geek out; but when the movie is about, I don't know, a mid-20th century archaeologist protecting biblical artifacts from fascist military leaders, it's probably best to play it safe and leave the big-eyed spacemen out. Which reminds me. . .

Exhibit C: The endings. Is it that fucking difficult to tactfully resolve a story?













I, like you, have the utmost respect for Stanley Kubrick as an artist and a filmmaker, and have often thought it would be a great tribute to the legendary master of understatement and subtlety to create an elaborate alternate ending sequence to A Clockwork Orange where aliens abduct Malcolm McDowell and show him the error of his ways, followed by a 10-minute shot (Kubrick loved long takes) of myself pissing on Kubrick's gravestone, but I think that would be somewhat redundant. While you're usually smart enough not to pen your own films, as a producer and director, you should really know better than to even sign off on any of this shit. You seem to think that the fantastical subject matter of your films gives you license to include situations that make genocidal aliens, genetically engineered dinosaurs, and self-aware robots seem totally plausible by comparison. I was totally ready to love your relentlessly dark interpretation of War of the Worlds until it ended in some fairy tale version of Boston, conveniently untouched by the swarms of bloodthirsty alien death machines that lay waste to the rest of the world, with Tom Cruise and his family miraculously all alive and intact. Which is not so different from the ridiculous coda to AI (see above), where a team of benevolent (but apparently very bored) aliens improbably arrive on Earth to give the lonely android boy the loving family he never had. Look dude. I get it. You still haven't gotten over your parents' divorce. But I don't want to pay 12 bucks a ticket to fund your 100 million-dollar therapy sessions.

So stop. Please stop. I know that legions of film critics, who are all just as deluded as you are, will continue praising all of these pathetic misfires, and small children will continue to marvel at all of the bright colors and CG fireworks, and I will long for the days when you didn't have your own studio, when you didn't have an army of visual effects artists, when you just had your ideas, and that was enough.

A little bit country. . .

So far it seems that 2008 is shaping up to be a pretty decent for music. I've been enjoying the new Hot Chip and Devotchka albums immensely, and even though the Vampire Weekend CD seemed played out before it was even released, it's still a pretty solid record. Still though, my favorite album so far this year has to be Brighter Than Creation's Dark by Drive-By Truckers. The songs are catchy, the lyrics are clever, and it's just depressing enough to get me through the last stretch of winter. But for some reason, when I try to explain this to people they look at me like I'm joking or just being ironic, as if I'm one step away from telling them that I've started voting Republican and giving a shit about NASCAR.

















Of course, Drive-By Truckers are officially more alt country than they are country, which is another way of saying that they actually sell records north of the Mason-Dixon Line, but I think in their case the designation doesn't really make sense. When bands like Uncle Tupelo started writing songs about the quiet dignity of Appalachian miners and mill-workers, they got categorized as "alt" country because apparently the only people in America that care about the plight of the Appalachian miners and mill-workers are rock critics and college students. Drive-By Truckers, on the other hand, are remarkable for playing music that borrows as much from traditionalist country as it does from early Skynard-era southern rock, while still writing lyrics that are consistently current and relevant. Their most recent album lacks the high-concept hard rock of their 2000 rock opera, Southers Rock Opera, or the lo-fi grittiness of 2004's The Dirty South, but it maintains most of their themes. Brighter Than Creation's Dark is comprised mostly of 3-minute song-as-character-studies about the frustrations of life on the margins of the American South, with subjects ranging from meth addicts to soldiers stuck in Iraq to a washed-up band begrudgingly playing the opening slot on tour with an equally washed-up headlining act.

Indeed, what has always made country music so popular (and why all you white-collar blue-bloods despise it) is that it panders to and even celebrates the least-common-denominator of American society. Country music speaks to the sadness and pathos of white America in a way that whiny rock ballads just can't. The old joke about what happens when you play a country song backwards (you get your house/dog/wife back - ha ha, very funny) is sort of true, but misses the point of what this music is really about. The fact is that at some point in your life you're gonna lose your house, your dog, your wife, or something equivalent. Country music is about the tragedy of life. It's not about sex and drugs, and rock star fantasies. It's about working for a living, getting shit on by the world, and drowning your blues away in a bottle of whiskey. It's about trying your best and still coming up short. In intellectual terns, it's a whole genre devoted to commiseration and catharsis.

So why is it that whenever I ask somebody to categorize the sort of music the listen to, it seems that the most common answer I seem to get is "everything but country," or "everything but rap," or "everything but rap or country." I mean, it's no mystery that the people I hang out with are a bunch of closet racists, so it probably makes sense that they wouldn't listen to a lot of hip-hop (even if their white guilt obligates them to pretend to), but what about country music is so unappealing to urbane, college-educated white folk? Every awful one hit-wonders of the eighties is retroactively transformed into a masterpiece for its tacky earnestness, and yet anything sung with a drawl and a twang is like hipster kryptonite. I mean, why is it that everyone at the bar lights up as soon as they hear "Don't Stop Believing" come on the jukebox but nobody knows the fucking words to "Friends In Low Places"?

Before I go any further, let me first point out that I'm NOT talking about Johnny Cash. I know you probably think that because you saw Walk the Line and you've got that one album where he does the Nine Inch Nails and Depeche Mode covers, that you have a healthy appreciation for country music. But really that's not much different from a stoner college kid that picks up a Bob Marley album and decides that it's okay to grow dreadlocks and wear a dumb-ass knit cap. Johnny Cash is a great artist, and undoubtedly one of the coolest motherfuckers to ever pick up a guitar, but I feel like people have this idea that Johnny Cash is somehow better than or different from the rest of country music. I mean, Hank Williams was infinitely more self-destructive, and Merle Haggard actually did most of the outlaw shit that everybody thinks Johnny Cash is so cool for just singing about. Johnny Cash just knew what made for a great country song and knew how to execute it without letting any high-minded Nashville production get in his way.

Now, anybody that's known me for a while probably knows that I haven't always held my current appreciation for twang and honky-tonk, and I still think that most of the country music that gets played on the radio is pretty awful (but certainly no worse than any of the other crap on the top 40). It probably helps that I live in a city where people don't actually listen to country (at least publicly), so I can freely dissociate the music from its typical listeners, who I tend to disagree with on pretty much every major social or political issue. But living in a place like New York has given me an appreciation for just how little people actually pay attention to the lyrics of the music they listen to. Rock music listeners (and indie rock fans in particular) seem to be so desperate for their music to be deep and meaningful that they're willing to disregard lyrics that are, at best, nonsensical, and, at worst, trite, melodramatic crap. Though metaphor has always been a strong part of country songwriting, it's always essential that any country song still works on the most literal possible level. Kenny Rogers might have been using gambling as a metaphor for life, but it's also possible that he was just talking to a guy on a train about how to screw his buddies out of their money next time poker night rolls around. Country is also the only genre (give or take hip-hop) where there's still a premium on wordplay. And while this has certainly led to numerous songwriting travesties ("Save a Horse / Ride a Cowbow" comes to mind most immediately), Roger Miller's "King of the Road" contains about as perfect a combination of wit, irony, self-deprecation, and understatement as anyone could have conceived, and Willie Nelson's "Sad Songs and Waltzes" is not only one of the funniest songs ever written (again, understatement is key), but also a modernist work on par with Fellini's 8 1/2 or Magritte's "This Is Not a Pipe". With all of his clever turns of phrase, you get the sense that if Willie Neson wasn't playing music (and maybe layed off the bong every now and then), he would have been the best copywriter on Madison Avenue.



Now, I'm not suggesting that anybody run out tomorrow and buy Toby Keith's Shock'n Y'all (though really there are much worse music purchases you can make), but for all of his ignorant right-wing jingoism, even Toby understands that a broken heart and a busted liver with just the right amount of lazy slide guitar droning in the background is a recipe for pop music gold that's scarcely been improved upon.

Wrong turn. . .

In terms of it's pop cultural significance, my home town of Albuquerque, New Mexico, has very few and very odd claims to fame. For instance, Mike Judge was so inspired by the ineptitude of Albuquerque's public education system that he named the high school in Beavis and Butthead after our very own Highland High. For Nicholas Roeg's cult classic film The Man Who Fell to Earth, in which David Bowie plays a space alien sent to Earth on a mission to find a way to send water back to his dying planet, he chose to set the film in Albuquerque because of the surreal, otherworldly quality of the downtown and university area, as well as the state's notoriously lax labor laws. In addition to being the place where rapper/automobile enthusiast Xzibit spent most of his formative years, Albuquerque is also the birthplace of a bevy of B- and C-list actors including Freddie Prinz Jr., French Stewart, Annabeth Gish, and Neil Patrick Harris. However, the city is probably most famous for being the place where Bugs Bunny consistently makes wrong turns as he traverses the globe via his endless network of burrowed tunnels. And while this probably had less to do with the geography or culture of the city and more to do with the inherent humor of Mel Blanc making that "koykee" sound at the end, it always made sense to me that Albuquerque was always the stopping-off point and not the destination for the wascally wabbit.








Recently though, the city has found its own little pop cultural niche in a new show on AMC called Breaking Bad, set and shot on location almost entirely in Albuquerque. In the past year AMC has set about reinventing itself as a sort of cable version of HBO, and given how unequivocally awesome Mad Men is and how terrible HBO's recent crop of original series have been, it should maybe be the other way around. Breaking Bad is their second original series, which they wedge in between extended marathons of forgettable action movie of the 80s, and the show is, in most regards, just a darker, grittier, more macho version of Weeds, following the story of a high school chemistry teacher (played by the dad from Malcolm in the Middle) that decides to start selling crystal meth to support his family after he finds out he's been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. But whereas Weeds works from the idea that its titular drug is basically benign and primarily serves to illustrate the squareness and hypocrisy of the community's uptight, conservative residents, Breaking Bad goes to lengths to illustrate the most abject features of meth culture in Central New Mexico. The show feels a little gimmicky at times (I mean, how often can you use some clever chemistry trick make stuff blow up before it just becomes schtick), but it's surprisingly well done. It's edgy without being obnoxious, it's grim without being bleak, and Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul are like an original dark-comic, meth-cooking odd couple. But more than anything I just enjoy seeing my hometown rendered on-screen with such frightening accuracy.














I've certainly watched enough episodes of Cops: In Albuquerque to know that the city has no shortage of ridiculous stories involving the meth trade, but I have to give the show's creators credit for never turning the city into a cartoon, like the fictitious community in Weeds, or making it seem like just some generic drug-addled Southwestern city. Though it's difficult to understate the poverty and dark underbelly of the city of Albuquerque and the state of New Mexico as a whole, it's not without its whitewashed suburbs, and everything in between. In addition to being the city where most of the mechanical components of our nation's nuclear stockpile were made, Albuquerque is also notably the city where Bill Gates chose to start Microsoft (who, like Bugs Bunny, felt no need to stick around). And what better metaphor for the duality of the city than a brilliant chemist coming together with an enterprising tweaker to cook batches ultra-pure crystal meth.

Still though, my favorite part of the show is the way it uses the minute details of the city that probably go unnoticed by anyone that didn't grow up there, but, at least for me, add a whole other level of humor to the show. Indeed one of the strongest memories I have of the city is the lower-middle-class 70s-era houses with washed-out color-schemes, shag carpeting, and wood paneling on the walls, like the houses that I grew up in, that Breaking Bad uses in much the same way Little Miss Sunshine (also set in Albuquerque) does, as a way of illustrating the stagnation and downward social mobility of the family. In the first episode of the show, when the main character is working at a car wash after school to make ends meet, it should just be sad and pathetic, but the fact that he's working at that one weird car wash on Eubank and Menaul with wood-chip siding that kind of looks like an airplane hangar actually makes it funny. Also, I don't think I've seen a more perfect once-scene description of the city of Albuquerque than a middle-aged white guy buying crystal meth out in front of the Dog House (mmmm. . . Dog House). Of course, the scene in one of the more recent episodes where the main character has sex with his wife in his car outside of his high school's science building (which is, in fact, the Eldorado High School science building, built during my freshman year there) is nothing short of surreal.

Who gives a fuck about an oxford comma?

I remember it was last May sometime, and I was gorging myself on free mp3s from various indie music blogs, as I often do, when I stumbled across two songs on the Stereogum home page called "Oxford Comma" and "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" from an obscure band of ex-Columbia students called Vampire Weekend. Before I heard one note of the music, the first thing I noticed about this band was simply that their name is fucking terrible, and how could any decent, self-respecting band give themselves a name that bad. I mean, even if they were a second-rate local goth band, as the name clearly suggests, it would still be an awful name. But then I thought about it some more, and I figured a band with a name this awful had to have something else going for them to gain any kind of cred on a music elitist mainstay like Stereogum. So I gave it a listen. There was no doubt that this band was a bit unseasoned (the mp3s I downloaded had "Blue CD-R" listed as the album title), but I had to give it up to them. This was some seriously catchy shit.

Of course, classifying this band gets a little hairy. The band plays what essentially amounts to a hipstered-out version of the world-beat adult-contemporary that Paul Simon and Peter Gabriel made baby-boomers swoon over in the mid-80s. The singer, and principal song-writer for the band, Ezra Koenig, even inflects a faux-Afro-English patois in the same way Sting used to do on early Police records (but in a notably less obnoxious way). Though the bands use of afro-pop sounds and rhythms indicate an earnest appreciation and broad understanding of the genre, this is still the white man's blues. They're still primarily singing songs about the lives of prepped-out, over-privileged college students in the Northeast, and their lyrics are loaded with the kinds of references that speak to an obscene overabundance of multi-cultural exposure (though I do totally enjoy the Khyber Pass/Man Who Who Would Be King reference in "M79" - my favorite of their songs by far).

In a lot of ways they're exactly the kind of band critics love to buzz and blog about. Like Interpol and the Strokes before them, they've got a style that seems fresh and unique, but also catchy and familiar, and, more importantly, also very easy to break down into its component musical influences. On the other hand, they're a band that's distinctly uncool. There's no disaffected posturing, no vintage Italian leather boots, no hundred-dollar-haircuts. Even in their cover-photo for Spin they don't look like much more than four nerdy college kids that spent a little too much time digging through their parents closets and record collections. On some level, their style of music makes sense, blending the makeshift, DIY ethos of Third World pop music with the makeshift, DIY eithos of American indie rock. Vampire Weekend gives us the spirit of Paul Simon's Graceland without all the fancy, over-priced productions or cadre of multi-national studio musicians - which is to say, brought down to the level of the blogging and blog-reading public.



They've certainly come a long way way since I saw them last summer at a sparsely-populated free gig at East River Park, coming off a tour of house parties and holes-in-the-wall across the East Coast. While most of the songs on their just-released album were available as free mp3s or on an iTunes-released EP, they've definitely cleaned up their sound a bit, and probably gotten a little extra money money with which to hire a real studio engineer and insert the thumping bass and soaring string sections that were notably missing from their previous efforts. Aside from the obvious attention from bloggers, they made the cover of Spin this month, and their album is slated to debut at #17 on the Billboard chart next week. Hell, I even saw a little blurb on them the other day in OK! magazine (along with Goldfrapp and Hot Chip??). Which, if nothing else, just further serves to point out the slowness and inefficiency of the record industry and mainstream print media. So if record companies want to know why they're doomed to die a slow, painful death, buried in a mountain of unsold Herbie Hancock albums, it's because bands of scrappy college kids with awful names and mediocre lyrics are now doing a better job promoting themselves and giving the music-buying public what they want than any record company could possibly hope, and I couldn't be happier.

Blogging the Oscars

8:35 - Jon Stewart nails opening monologue, gives writers credit that they clearly deserve.

8:39 - Jon Stewart makes Obama joke. In obligatory cutaway, Wesley Snipes mocks IRS with apparent freedom.

8:50 - First retrospective montage of the night starts funny, degenerates quickly into sappy Celine Dion-fueled crap.

8:54 - Anne Hathaway sucks the humor from the stage and confirms my worst fears for Get Smart movie.

8:58 - Ratatouille expectedly wins Animated Feature award. Brilliant wordsmith Brad Bird unexpectedly botches speech.

9:05 - For 68th year in a row, a bunch of nerds win FX award.

9:10 - Luigi from the Simpsons wins award for art direction.

9:22 - Javier Bardem wins, sounds like he's rallying troops in leftist Central American militia.

9:25 - Mock retrospective montages prove more compelling than real ones.

9:30 - My strategy of picking the silliest sounding title nets me live-action short award on my ballot.

9:35 - Seinfeld delivers intentionally (?) awful jokes as character from Bee Movie. I cry a tear for the Dreamworks animators that probably had to give up a weekend for this crap.

9:40 - Tilda Swinton wins for supporting actress, is replaced by an alien. Oh wait, she's just not wearing makeup.

9:49 - 4-minute-long PriceWaterHouseCoopers commercial fails to educate me about the Oscar voting process.

10:02 - Jonah Hill and Seth Rogen are disappointingly unfunny for first time in their careers.

10:11 - Marion Cotillard wins best actress. A beleaguered Julie Christie contemplates suicide. Oh, also Marion Cotillard is hot. Note to self: rent a movie with her where they don't have to ugly her up.

10:18 - Disney show-stopper totally gets owned by song from "Once".

10:35 - Nicole Kidman pesents honorary award, funds all African civil wars for next ten years with necklace.

10:37 - Robert Boyle montage fails to convince audience that art directors deserve same reverence for senile, rambling speeches as directors do.

10:52 - Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova win for best song. Nation of Ireland cries collective tears of joy. I join them.

11:02 - RIP Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antoinini, Heath Ledger. Burn in hell, Jack Valenti.

11:13 - Lesbian movie wins for short documentary. Director totally not a lesbian.

11:23 - Jon Stewart makes joke about Harrison Ford sharing a name with a car dealership. Are the writers on strike again?

11:25 - Juno wins for screenplay. Diablo Cody brings shame to strippers everywhere by accepting award in outfit apparently from straight-to-video Flintstones sequel.

11:35 - Daniel Day-Lewis gets all poetic and shit.

11:44 - Coen Bros win for directing a profoundly bleak, blood-soaked thriller, are adorably gracious and humble.

11:46 - No Country wins best picture. Everything is right in the world. What is Cormac McCarthy so pissed about?

2nd Annual Oscar Pre-Game Extravaganza

Sure, the economy may be in the shitter, the music industry is all but kaput, and the WGA strike has stripped me of countless hours of quality TV (which is the closest thing in my life to a sense of malaise), but 2008 seems to be shaping up to be a pretty good year. The Patriots lost the Super Bowl. All of the presidential candidates seem to be competent, reasonable people, with the front-runner being a bad-asssss black dude with policies and ideas to match his mad orating skillz. Plus, the list of Academy Awards nominees is (for once) populated almost exclusively by worthy films. I can't guarantee that I can maintain a solid level of humor under these odd circumstances, but at least until that stupid Crash TV show comes out, I'm gonna sit back and enjoy it.

Though it may not seem like it at first glance, 2007 was a remarkably good year for movies, and I'm glad to see the Academy actually celebrating it properly. Of course, it may seem ridiculous to point this out, since the Oscars are all selected by the industry itself, but it's amazing how often they get this shit wrong. I'm especially glad that the Hollywood establishment gave the highest number of nominations to two gruesome ruminations on the difficulty of life in West Texas and the merits of hating humanity. Also, considering that Pixar has put out the animation equivalent of the Sistine Chapel at least half a dozen times, I'm glad to see the Academy give them some love in categories where they can actually compete with the grown-ups.


NOTE: while I have not seen Atonement, I have taken the liberty of assuming that it's exactly like The English Patient in every way, and will treat it as such.


Best Picture

Cynical Prediction: Michael Clayton
Idealistic Prediction: No Country For Old Men

While it's difficult for Hollywood to pass up a chance to pat itself on the back for calling out nonexistent corporations for fictitious scandals, I would hope that they know enough to recognize that No Country is a fucking masterpiece.


Best Director

Cynical Prediction: The Coen Bros for No Country for Old Men
Idealistic Prediction: Julian Schnabel for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

I guess I'm sort of splitting hairs on this one. No matter who wins, there will be at least two worthy nominees getting screwed. Though the fact that Schnabel could potentially accept the award in his jammies tips the scales towards him in my eyes.


Best Actor

Cynical Prediction: Daniel Day-Lewis for There Will Be Blood
Idealistic Prediction: Daniel Day-Lewis for There Will Be Blood

In any other year, Johnny Depp might have been a shoo-in as Hollywood's most lovably vengeful misanthrope, but this year he should consider himself lucky the Golden Globes don't make musicals compete in the same category as real films.


Best Actress

Cynical Prediction: Julie Christie for Away From Her
Idealistic Prediction: Marion Cotillard for La Vie En Rose

It'll be interesting to see if the Academy can reconcile it's love for musical biopics with its apparent disdain for movies with subtitles.


Best Supporting Actor

Cynical Prediction: Javier Bardem for No Country For Old Men
Idealistic Prediction: Javier Bardem for No Country For Old Men

If I ever get brutally murdered with a cattle bolt, I just hope it's done with the dignity and professionalism of Bardem's character in this film.


Best Supporting Actress

Cynical Prediction: Tilda Swinton for Michael Clayton
Idealistic Prediction: Cate Blanchett for I'm Not There

I'm not sure if you've noticed, but it looks like the Academy has lost it's taste for heroic, likable, or otherwise sympathetic characters, so odds are looking good for Tilda, but as I mentioned earlier, they loves them some musical biopics.


Best Original Screenplay

Cynical Prediction: Juno
Idealistic Prediction: Ratatouille

This seems to be about the only category where the Academy is gonna give any love to quirky indie films, but they may find it a bit obvious to give the same award Little Miss Sunshine won last year to "this year's Little Miss Sunshine!" In any case, Brad Bird is a genius, and I suppose I'm just glad he's getting a nomination.


Best Adapted Screenplay

Cynical Prediction: No Country For Old Men
Idealistic Prediction: There Will Be Blood

The Coen's did a brilliant job adapting what was already a brilliant novel, but I think P.T. Anderson deserves some credit for taking a schlocky muckraking novel and making one of the best art films in recent memory.


Best Cinematography

Cynical Prediction: No Country For Old Men
Idealistic Prediction: There Will Be Blood

A category like this opens it up for a dark horse, like The English Patient or The Diving Bell and he Butterfly, but in all likelihood, it'll probably come down to who the Academy thinks did a better job photographing the Texas (or, in truth, New Mexico and California) desert. And as much as all of those wide shots in No Country make me homesick, the oil-fire scenes in TWBB are just ridiculous.


Best Editing

Cynical Prediction: No Country for Old Men
Idealistic Prediction: There Will Be Blood

Which do I love more, the claustrophobic long takes and surreal montages of TWBB, or the tense pacing and the pensive lack of resolution in No Country. Don't make me choose.


Best Art Direction

Cynical Prediction: The English Patient
Idealistic Prediction: Sweeney Todd

If it comes down to sweeping period drama versus cartoonishly over-the-top violence, you know which one I'm gonna go with.


Best Costume Design

Cynical Prediction: Sweeney Todd
Idealistic Prediction: La Vie En Rose

I'm in a gritty, real mood right now, so I'm gonna go with La Vie En Rose. But that doesn't mean I have any less appreciation for Burton's grim surrealism.


Best Original Score

Cynical Prediction: The English Patient
Idealistic Prediction: Ratatouille

For the record, this award should really go to Jonny Greenwood's unexpectedly brilliant and eclectic score for There Will Be Blood, but due to a technicality in Academy rules exempting scores that include previously written material, these are the choices we're left with. I pretty much want Ratatouille to win as many awards as it can, but I'll probably feel cheated no matter who wins this one.


Best Song

Cynical Prediction: something from Enchanted
Idealistic Prediction: "Falling Slowly" from Once

While I realize that this category is really sort of a relic from the time when Hollywood was pumping out musicals the same way they churn out bad horror films starring washed up ex-teen actors, I don't think that the one musical movie released in a given year should automatically dominate the nominations. I do strangely feel like "Pop Goes My Heart" from Music and Lyrics is an obvious snub in this category, but I can't imagine anyone seriously thinking that any of the songs from the mediocre simulacrum of a Disney soundtrack from Enchanted should trump the well-crafted, earnestly moving Irish folk-pop of Once.


Best Makeup

Cynical Prediction: Pirates of the Caribbean
Idealistic Prediction: La Vie En Rose

As humorous as I find it that Norbit joins Click in that prestigious group of fat-suit comedies that get a token nod in this category, I can't rationalize the fact that horror movie gore-makeup almost always gets shut out. I guess I'd prefer La Vie En Rose to win this, but basically I could care less.


Best Sound

Cynical Prediction: No Country For Old Men
Idealistic Prediction: Ratatouille

I'm not gonna argue that I know the first thing about sound recording, but I won't let get in the way of my overriding bias towards Pixar films.


Best Sound Editing

Cynical Prediction: No Country For Old Men
Idealistic Prediction: Ratatouille

Ditto.


Best Animated Film

Cynical Prediction: Ratatouille
Idealistic Prediction: Ratatouille

You may not have noticed, but I sort of enjoyed this movie.


Best Foreign Language Film

Cynical Prediction: The Counterfeiters
Idealistic Prediction: The Counterfeiters

Considering most of these movies haven't even been given a limited release in the US, I'm not gonna pretend like I know how this one's gonna swing. The Counterfeiters is the only one I've even remotely heard of, and seems like a pretty awesome premise, so I'll go with it.


Best Documentary

Cynical Prediction: No End In Sight
Idealistic Prediction: War Dance

I'm hoping that the Academy is as sick of Iraq/Afghanistan docs as I am, but it seems like redundant political commentary is the bread and butter of this category, so I'm not expecting much.

Pretentious Music 2007

I remember reading this Robert Christgau article where he talks about how ridiculous it is that music critics are expected to do year-end "best" lists in the middle of December, because inevitably there's always something that comes out too late in the year or you don't hear until early the next year and ends up in this critical no-man's-land because of an arbitrary time stipulation. Malajube's Tromp L'Oleil was easily one of my favorite albums of last year, but it actually came out in 2006. The album I listened to the most last year was probably DeVotchKa's How It Ends, which came out in 2004. But if I let myself put any album from any time period that I happened to listen to a lot in the past year, that would just set a bad precedent. So, while it seems a little anti-climactic to be doing a best of '07 list in mid-January of 2008, I felt it best to at least give myself a chance to digest as much of the music of 2007 as possible before making any final decisions (and, let's be honest, poach from other people's "best of" lists to see if there's anything I missed). In tribute to Nick Hornby and my own short attention span, I've decided to limit this to the top 5 albums and top 5 singles. Enjoy.



ALBUMS. . .

I'd first like to point out that, contrary to belief of much of the music press, Radiohead did not put out the best album of 2007. For the zero pounds sterling I paid for In Rainbows, it is probably the best bargain of an album in 2007, and I would say they definitely put out the best albums of 1997 and 2000 respectively. But I've been paying nothing for CDs for years, and I'm not about to pat Radiohead on the back for being the first to realize that the current record company business model is a crock of shit and belongs on a shelf with my VHS collection, and I'm not gonna give them a plug for putting out an album of material that, at best, just sounds like better-than-average B-sides off OK Computer and Hail to the Theif. So I appreciate your efforts guys, but I'm not gonna give you top marks for second-rate work, especially when bands like the Arcade Fire and the Shins are all still bringing their A-game. (On a related note, I saw There Will Be Blood the other night, and Johnny Greenwood's score for that film is nothing short of amazing).

The Arcade Fire - Neon Bible

In the world of independent music, the Arcade Fire are the closest equivalent we have to the New England Patriots. They're ridiculously overhyped and ambitious to the point of hubris. So you really want to hate them. The problem is, at the end of the day, if the Patriots can get that perfect season and win the Superbowl, everybody just has to sit down and accept that they really are just that fucking good. And when the Arcade Fire put out an album of material this well-produced and fully-realized, you just have to shut up and enjoy it.



The Shins - Wincing The Night Away

After the whole Garden State thing I was ready to just write the Shins off as just another quirky indie pop band that hipster guys use to put on mix CDs and prove how sensitive and tasteful they are. But even if the Shins won't change my life, I have to give it up to them with this one. "Turn On Me" is about as good a psychedelic pop song as anyone has ever written, and they still prove to me that music can be catchy and accessible, while still being intelligent and experimental. Plus I have to give any band from the Q the benefit of the doubt.



Jens Lekman - Night Falls Over Kortedala

Nordic countries seem to have all found different ways of musically coping with the blistering cold and months without sunlight. The Norwegians have channeled their frustration into extremely dark, yet melodic death metal; the nation of Iceland seems to have found some way of communicating with aliens; and the Swedes find comfort in simply making the catchiest, most saccharine pop music the world has ever known. Jens Lekman is no exception. His combination of overproduced string arrangements, embarrassingly earnest lyrics, and Stephen Merritt-style crooning, is like a big bowl of ice cream for my jaded, cynical hipster soul.



Lucky Soul - The Great Unwanted

The Pipettes might be more fun, and Bat For Lashes might be artier, but as British 1960s girl-group revival bands go, Lucky Soul is definitely the best. Between the lush production, sultry vocals, and botched English grammar, my only complaint is that Ali Howard isn't singing any of these songs about me.



Beirut - The Flying Cup Club

Maybe it's because Zach Condon and I both used to share a 505 area code (this is clearly not the first instance of this sort of bias on this list) or maybe it's because he succeeded in finding a way to make Balkan folk music seem cool in a way that my mother has tried and failed for years, so I'm willing to forgive Beirut their lazy, meandering song structures, because basically they're music makes me feel like I'm home.




SONGS. . .


Black Lips - "Cold Hands"

Despite always looking like one huge ad for Urban Outfitters (where you can, not surprisingly, also buy their CD), this is as close as I've heard anyone come to a perfect late-seventies pop-punk (or is it mid-sixties garage rock?) song as I've heard in a long time.



Kanye West - "Can't Tell Me Nothing"

I have to admit that it took Zach Galifianakis's over-the-top, yet strangely poingnant Bubba Sparxxx-esque video tribute to this song to properly appreciate it's greatness (in contrast to the overpriced snooze-fest of an "official" video that Hype Williams made for the song). I've always respected Kanye's ability to stay above the thuggish fray of mainstream hip-hop while still being unapologetically arrogant, so I was glad to hear him putting out a chest-pumping song where he's literally laughing at his critics. With that said, I still wish he would quit whining like a bitch every time a journalist puts a microphone in front of his face.



MGMT - "Time To Pretend"

Speaking of obnoxious self-involvement, it's easy to hate MGMT for indulging so readily in this whimsical rock star fantasy, but it's important to acknowledge that it's not just a song about getting rich, doing drugs, and marrying supermodels. It's really about the tragedy of the children left behind when you knock up the models, divorce them to find more models, and leave you children fatherless after choking on your own vomit. Did I mention that the guys from Ween love this band? Shocker.



Grinderman - "No Pussy Blues"

Nick Cave is one of the few musicians, like Tom Waits or Johnny Cash, that actually becomes cooler the older and more haggard he becomes. He also somehow manages to sound like a huge badass while singing about his total dearth of a sex life and comparing himself to celebrity French mimes.



Electrelane - "To The East"

This is one of those songs where the whole time you're listening to this girl sing about being sad and brokenhearted in a beautifully haunting voice that makes you just want find the guy who made her feel like this and kick him square in the balls for being such an idiot.