Expressive Esoterica (2004)

2003 YEAR-END BALLOT

1. "Rock Your Body," Justin Timberlake: Coinciding with Sam Phillips' death in July, a variation on his story played itself out on the pop charts: a visionary black producer experiences a moment of clarity and declares, "If I could only find a Caucasian singer with the George Michael sound and the George Michael feel, I could buy a million trucker hats." "Rock Your Body"'s a really good record for the first couple of minutes--those car horns had me checking my blind spot all summer while driving--which then becomes a really great record when the female singer begins cooing "talk to me, boy..." (bringing to mind Alice Deejay from a few years ago). Timberlake's breezy swagger about nekkid-ness and orgiastic group dancing aside--all of which is absolutely expert and highly enjoyable--that female voice takes charge of the song immediately, leaving little doubt as to who's beckoning whom to come-hither and who's the puppy dog. (You can take the boy out of the boy-band...) Add 15 seconds of "Good Times" for good measure, and, unless you were one of those rabble-rousing prairie dogs impatiently awaiting "Rain Dance" at Toronto's SARS concert, you've got the richest, most pleasurable, and--speaking as someone who's never had any use whatsoever for a single 'N Sync or Backstreet Boys song--most surprising record of the summer and of the year.

2. "Flamboyant," Pet Shop Boys, 7. "Bad Day," R.E.M., and 8. "Maria Bartiromo," Joey Ramone: I was not expecting to be voting for any of these. I didn't have more than a passing interest in the Joey Ramone album when it came out last year, and when it comes to the Pet Shop Boys and R.E.M., I'm Michael Corleone at this point: every time I think I'm out, they pull me back in. "Flamboyant" and "Bad Day" haul out tried-and-true straw men as targets--a shallow night-lifer for the Pet Shop Boys, a Republican president for R.E.M. ("Bad Day"'s typically oblique, but I assume the creepy auctioneer is Bush)--while Joey goes out on a brilliant joke-that's-not-really-a-joke: I know he wasn't rich-rich, but after 25 years of steady if unspectacular earnings as a Ramone, I'm guessing he really was in a position to be keeping tabs on Yahoo and Amazon stock. (That's how he would have stumbled over Maria Bartiromo in the first place, right?) The object of his affection should be floating on air for the rest of her life: the idea of a dying punk rock icon recording a love letter to a glamorous courtier of Wall Street is worthy of a fairy tale. (I think I always wanted to write the same song myself: to Ona Fletcher, to Gail Smith, to Thalia Assuras...) In the end, though, the subject matter of all three of these songs is almost incidental. What they're really about, and what makes them so removed from everything else that dominates popular music right now, is how each represents a very singular evocation of capital-B Beauty for the three artists in question. I don't have the words to adequately describe how they convey this beauty, but I can point to the specific moments where I hear it, and they're all embedded in the "grain of the voice" and all that ephemeral stuff: the rise and fall in Neil Tennant's voice on "you're so flamboyant," Joey when he sings "those eyes make everything OK," and the background swooning underneath "please don't take a picture" in "Bad Day" (Mike Mills always sings those parts, I think). So even though there's a part of me that realizes "Flamboyant" is a very minor song that the Pet Shop Boys have probably done a dozen times already--I feel like I'm Andrew Sarris in the mid-60s, grasping onto ghosts in Seven Women or El Dorado--I also know they're refining and deepening that song in ways that, even at their most withering, achieve a kind of majesty and serenity that continues to speak to me: "It all takes courage, you know, when just crossing the street/Well, it's almost heroic."

3. "Indian Flute," Timbaland & Magoo, and 5. "Beware of the Boys," Panjabi MC & Jay-Z: There was a point during the summer when Jay-Z must have had four or five songs on the radio. You couldn't avoid him--if I'm not mistaken, he was duetting with my mom on her answering machine through the first two weeks of August. I like his mailed-in cameo on "Beware of the Boys" best. Like Timbaland's "Indian Flute," it's a little casual about race--Jay-Z talks about "snake charmers," while Timbaland's fractured call-and-response is basically a set-up for his great "But I can't understand a word you're saying" punchline (a good match for Bill Murray's deadpan in Lost in Translation)--so I'm guessing both records exemplify the "cross-cultural misappropriation" (or however that goes) that eye's Errol Nazareth's always whining about. What should be obvious to anyone, though, is that when a Top-40 pop record introduces a wide audience to sounds and genres that they might never otherwise hear--because we're lazy, we're evil, and we're just too stupid to know any better--then that can only be a good thing, whether it's Jay-Z, the Beatles, Snow, Bobby Bloom, or anybody else. So let's all be thankful that The Black Album is Jay-Z's last one ever only until the next one. I can't think of too many people at the top of their game who voluntarily walked away from piles of money. Sandy Koufax comes to mind, but his left arm was ready to fall off, so he had good reason. How's Jay-Z's rotator cuff? As long as his rotator cuff is OK, I believe he'll be back.

4. "Hey Ya!" Outkast: My dad had one of the earliest Polaroid cameras put on the market--when he finally got rid of it sometime in the '90s, a camera store in Oakville passed it on to Kodak for their archival collection. He took hundreds upon hundreds of pictures with it through the '60s, before switching over to slides. I was in many of them, and I have no recollection at all of anybody at any point in the whole process shaking anything--not when the photos were snapped, not while we waited for the image to develop, not when I look at them now. So "Hey Ya!"'s invitation to "shake it like a Polaroid picture" is my head-scratcher of the year. On the subject of Lucy Lius, Andre 3000 and I are perfectly in sync.

6. "Gossip Folks," Missy Elliott & Ludacris: Would it be in bad taste to say that Missy Elliott has cast a very large shadow over commercial hip-hop the past few years? Her singles get weirder all the time, and I can't imagine Kelis's "Milkshake" or Ludacris's own "Stand Up" (or at least the excellent video, with its long overdue tribute to the greatest O.G. of them all, Oscar Gamble) without her having cleared the way. As Kramer once said about Frank's Festivus holiday on "Seinfeld," Missy's "a little (whirling helicopter noise) out there." Maybe too much so at this point: "Pass the Dutch" is bizarre and compelling and half-great, but it's the first time during her recent run where the weirdness feels like schtick, like it's what's expected of her now. It's also a little short on melody, the same reason I'm passing on the equally compelling "Milkshake" and "Stand Up"--I especially dislike that flat, Wizard Of Oz-like background chanting on "Pass the Dutch." "Gossip Folks"' honky-skronky jitteriness is more playful, making it the best hit song about rumours since, um, "Rumors."* Seeing as the Timex Social Club's rumor song was almost 20 years ago, it's amazing that Michael Jackson has maintained enough of a hold on the public imagination to be name-dropped on both (so coyly on "Rumors" it's quaint: "some" say "Michael" might be gay?!). Meanwhile, the poorly chosen "Jackson/rectum" near-rhyme on "Pass the Dutch" is not up for discussion at present.

9. "Got Some Teeth," Obie Trice, and 10. "21 Questions," 50 Cent: Obie once, Obie Trice, Obie three times a Shady. As Eminem's own singles get more and more weighted down by important-artist-with-something-to-say dreariness, his side projects and proteges (I include "Purple Hills" also) are where he seems to channel his early spark. He's great in the "Got Some Teeth" video as a bartender, and Obie's misadventures are pure Tone-Loc. 50 Cent's a narcoleptic mushmouth who for most of the year was one of my biggest radio irritants ("P.I.M.P." especially), but the anomalous "21 Questions" is sweet and vulnerable, a hip-hop "Ten Commandments of Love" for math-minded teenagers, highlighted by one of the great love lyrics of our time: "In the bed, if I used my tongue, would you like that?" Really, is there a shorty or a bitch alive whose heart wouldn't melt? (Grade 6 kids take their musical heroes at face value, oblivious to what is, if not absurd, at least a little bit funny about a 50 Cent ballad. Me: "Does he actually ask 21 questions? Has anyone bothered to count? I'm pretty sure he only asks 18." Class: general befuddlement. That's why the music you love when you're 11 stays with you the rest of your life, why "Let's Stay Together" and "Rainy Days and Mondays" are still of a piece for me, pure and mysterious and unmediated by anything: they are what they are.)

*Oops--forgot about "Nothing Has Been Proved" from 1989, the rumour genre's towering masterpiece whether the Dusty Springfield, the Pet Shop Boys, or even the Strings of Love version (especially the Strings of Love version, actually). Dusty's made it to #16 in the U.K., so it was a minor hit; I don't recall that it did much over here.

Blocking Out the Scenery (2003)

I started this roundup of last year's films over the Christmas break but had to abandon it. I think by now I've seen most of what holds any interest for me--I still want to see About Schmidt, and I'm sure I've overlooked some other things.

1. Pornstar: The Legend of Ron Jeremy (7.5): Automatically of interest to me, being the story of a man who started out as a teacher and ended up a porn star; I, on the other hand, spent many years working as a porn star before switching over to teaching. (If there's anyone connected to my school or my board who has stumbled onto this page, please, don't panic--I'm kidding.) Not a major work like Crumb, this was still one of the few times at the movies where I didn't feel cheated or let down last year. Whatever reviews I looked at when it passed through town early in the winter seemed to indicate that Ron Jeremy was a rather sad and forlorn figure, a lowly schlub with delusions of grandeur as oversized as his fabled "hedgehog." Maybe I misunderstood, I skim reviews quickly, but I didn't come away with the same impression at all--Jeremy seemed modest, admittedly ambitious but more or less comfortable with himself and his lot in life, and altogether likeable. I think those reviewers wanted him to be sad and frustrated, much as it angered some people that the characters in Boogie Nights were so caring and supportive of each other--the desperate, hateful pornographic worlds common to Hardcore, Star 80, Auto Focus, and the like are obviously easier to process. You'll have to judge for yourself. I do know that the obsessively detailed scrapbook that Jeremy totes around wherever he goes is a modern-day version of Joe Gould's An Oral History of Our Time, no pun intended.

2. As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (7.0): Maybe you could take a lifetime of home movies drawn from anyone's life and come up with something worth preserving, something that feels like art; that's essentially what Jonas Mekas has done here (it's like a test case for the old question of whether there's a good novel waiting to be written about anyone's life). I was never bored for the five-hour duration, and although the deep nostalgia of Mekas's childlike voiceover passages is wearing at times, it's more often engaging and moving. It helps too that every now and again a famous face flashes by. Buried somewhere in the sprawl, the most thrilling use of pop music I came across all year: Mekas's daughter learns to walk, and underneath footage of her scampering about the room, the Velvet Underground's "Run Run Run" plays full-blast.

3. Signs (6.5): For me, a surprise--I didn't like The Sixth Sense at all. (Cluing into the alleged big twist within five minutes was one problem, but its overall dragginess was much more damaging. Never saw Unbreakable.) So SIGNS had the advantage of low expectations, and also some serendipity working in its favor: I'd just finished showing The Birds to my grade 6 class for Halloween a couple of days earlier, so I was primed to appreciate how M. Night Shyamalan was playing around with Hitchcock's film, and also with Night of the Living Dead and every other apocalypse-at-the-doorstep horror movie. The deus ex machina that ultimately saves Gibson and his family is as preposterous as you may have heard, but since it only takes up three minutes of screen time, it's only 20% as damaging as the no less preposterous 15-minute resolution of Adaptation. As commercially-minded as Shyamalan is, he's also burdened with the same ponderous self-consciousness about his own artistry that's starting to overtake the two Andersons--you sometimes feel like you're in a classroom rather than watching a good scare film. But I tried not to dwell too much on Gibson's spiritual redemption and his coming-to-terms-with-the-past, and instead enjoyed the playing-around-with side of the film. Scaring me is easy but making me laugh much less so, and SIGNS made me laugh a few times, especially Rory Culkin's insane get-up as he prepares to do battle with whatever's out there.

4. Cinemania (6.5): Of the five cinemaniacs, I found the lead guy, the one who'll phone the projection booth on his cell in the middle of a film to complain about the framing, to be the most interesting. Or maybe just the most normal--he's quite articulate and self-aware, and beyond the staggering number of films he sees (1,000 in an eight-month stretch a few years ago, which he concedes was a bit much), he didn't seem all that different from myself or some of my friends. (Maybe I better not pursue that line of thinking too far.) My least favourite, the guy who takes out the book-length personal ad, seemed to be playing to the camera more than the others, and he had the most pretentious taste in films besides. The majority of viewers, I think, will be most interested in Roberta; maybe every documentary about obsessives has to have its requisite Charles Crumb nowadays. (She makes for a fairly mild version.) This should have been better than it is, the subject is so great, but it held my interest the whole way, and it does get partly inside the heads of these five people. I wonder if life has become a living hell for any of them since the film's release--the only people who will ever see it are exactly those people who attend the same screenings that Roberta and the rest do. I don't see Roberta responding very well to having her meticulous filmgoing rituals disrupted by an autograph seeker. (Whoever made Cinemania must have seen Alan Zweig's Vinyl beforehand.)

5. Donnie Darko (6.0): I watched this on video over the Christmas holidays, not the way I like to see films, least of all a mood piece like this. I think the director, Richard Kelly, was trying to make an '80s version of THE VIRGIN SUICIDES, and at least once he succeeds: the beautiful final five minutes, which, if you're going to have everything in your film coalesce into one memorable sequence, seems like as good a place as any in which to place it. (To go along with some other affinities between Donnie Darko and Magnolia, this final scene uses Tears for Fears' "Mad World"--a cover or the original, I'm honestly not sure--as dreamily and enigmatically as P.T. Anderson used "Wise Up.") I didn't know how to take a lot of the rest of Donnie Darko. The Virgin Suicides, Magnolia, Harvey, even (after the fact, since Donnie Darko came out first) Minority Report--there are allusive points of intersection everywhere, but in the end I was somewhat baffled. I'm a little baffled by the '80s in general.

6. Punch-Drunk Love (6.0): I don't know what's going on with Paul Thomas Anderson. Letterman's been doing this segment the past couple of years that involves some harebrained bit of stage business--a woman twirling a box, say, while off to the side a man shows slides of his summer vacation--followed by Dave and Paul trying to decide if what they've just seen is in fact "something" or not anything. Paul: "I don't know...I think that might be something." Dave: "It's definitely something--I mean, you wouldn't say it's not anything." That's about the most unequivocal compliment I'll give to both Punch-Drunk Love and Magnolia: I'm pretty sure they're something, though that something looks more impressive the first time you see them than if (as I unwisely have) you venture back for a second and third look. One of the biggest surprises in Francis Davis's Afterglow was finding out that Kael liked Magnolia. To me, that's Kael at her most arbitrary. Magnolia is as unrelentingly hysterical as Oliver Stone gets when he's on overdrive, as much of a freak show as Natural Born Killers or Talk Radio, so I'm not sure why she gives a pass to one but not the other. Punch-Drunk Love doesn't drive you from the theatre the way Magnolia is always threatening to, but it's dragged down by its own set of mannerisms and empty flourishes. The acclaim for Adam Sandler is an old story: a comedian reigns himself in (mannerism #1: for a while, it seems like every scene begins with an extended silence punctuated by a whispered non-sequitur from Sandler), and many reviewers trumpet a major performance. It wasn't true of Bobby Bittman in On the Waterfront Again, it's not true here. Sandler's OK, but I got a much bigger kick out of Luis Guzman's deadpan perfection. (Talking about Confessions of a Dangerous Mind with a friend recently, he declared "The Newlywed Game"'s Bob Eubanks the all-time master of the arched eyebrow; Guzman has emerged as his natural heir.) Punch-Drunk's love story is peripheral to the film that I think Anderson had right in front of him, the one that comes into focus with the phone showdown between Sandler and Philip Seymour Hoffman. As the two of them scream obscenities at each other, and you realize that Sandler has come up against his doppelganger in the anger-management department, the film gets a sudden charge of menace and urgency that makes the subsequent non-climax between the two men inside Hoffman's store all the more puzzling. In the end, so much of Punch-Drunk Love--Sandler's $500, the pudding scam, the harmonium--just fizzles away. Also disappointing to me is something most viewers won't care about: Anderson seems to have more or less abandoned his stake as the greatest pop-music director since Scorsese.

7. Domestic Violence (6.0): The best thing I saw all year by a wide margin was the Frederick Wiseman series that ran at Toronto's AGO last winter. I wish I could have seen all dozen or so films, but their length and the exigencies of work made that impossible. Of those that I did see--Welfare, one of greatest American films of the '70s; Hospital, High School, Juvenile Court, and Near Death, all excellent; and Race Track, mediocre—Domestic Violence interested me less than most. I guess it speaks to my own limitations, but I belong to that mindset that just cannot understand the peculiar dynamic that keeps a woman in a relationship where somebody's beating her up. There's a brick wall there that I cannot get past. So the women in Wiseman's film were more maddening and incomprehensible to me than anything else. Maybe they're supposed to be, I don't know—one of Wiseman's great strengths is that he never telegraphs anything. (High School excepted, where by his own admission the film wants you to laugh at the teachers.) This disconnect becomes almost surreal in Domestic Violence's final scene, where you've got a guy practically begging the police to intercede and separate him from his wife, because if they don't he's going do major harm to her, while the police counter with all sorts of reasons why the guy needs to stay where he is and, well, everything will work out fine. The wife just stands there the whole time--she's not going anywhere.

8. Adaptation (5.5): For the first hour, intriguing and done with a sure hand. I liked Donald better than Charlie--it's Donald who keeps the film moving along, him and (especially) Chris Cooper, who gives the best performance I've seen since Hackman in The Royal Tenenbaums. Cooper has worked out an amazing slouch for whenever he takes the wheel of his pickup, and until the script betrays him, he never stops surprising you with the things he says. Meryl Streep's good too--her work as Susan reminded me how much I liked her in Defending Your Life. I'm surprised that in all the gushing over Adaptation's meta-this and meta-that, I didn't come across anyone who pointed out that "Seinfeld" reached a point about halfway through its run that was even more intricately self-reflexive: a fictional character writing a sitcom based on the non-experiences of himself and his friends, who are in turn based on the non-experiences of the real Jerry Seinfeld two layers removed. (Or something like that--if you know the show, you'll know what I mean.) Anyway, everything's moving along well, Charlie's still at the same impasse with his script as he was at the start, and then, shazam--the chase, the swamp, incredulity. To call Adaptation a great film, I think you have to do one of two things: overlook this very bizarre turn in the narrative, pretty difficult in that it takes a while to play out, or, what the film's admirers seem to do, rationalize it. The last third thus becomes an ironic enactment of the very Hollywood contrivances Charlie abhors, or it's a convenient way to get rid of Donald that mirrors the improbable multiple-personality gimmick of Donald's own script, or it's a comment on the real Charlie Kaufman's difficulty in coming up with an ending for Adaptation, so forth and so on. But you know, it doesn't really matter what kind of an explanation you come up with for Streep suddenly turning into Sylvester Stallone as she stalks Charlie and Donald through gator country--it's just plain dumb, and it seriously undermines the film's many other virtues, including, tacked on right at the end of all the swamp nonsense, Donald's understated recollections of high school and his explanation of why he's the way he is.

9. Blood Work (5.5): I've seen relatively few Clint Eastwood films—maybe seven or eight, and along with In The Line of Fire, this is the second time I've admired a performance of his. There's something doggedly impressive about the degree of seriousness he invests in such routine serial-killer fare. Time and again, Eastwood the director focuses the camera on Eastwood the actor as his character methodically tries to sort things out in his mind, and you really get a sense of someone groping around for the overlooked detail that will tie everything together. I also liked that Eastwood spends the film gulping down Prednisone for his heart condition, a drug that both my parents have had to take in the past (and that recently brought on the startling transformation in Jerry Lewis's appearance). I went to Blood Work out of pure boredom one Sunday night, and wasn't sorry that I did.

10. Bowling for Columbine (5.5): Always pleased with itself, shamelessly so on at least two occasions, consistently interesting anyway. The two segments that are beyond the pale, the K-Mart sojourn and the Heston interview, have been adequately ridiculed, so I don't have much to add there. (Priceless: Heston saying, "You want me to apologize to Flint?")* The blatant dishonesty that Kael attacked in Roger & Me sneaks into Bowling in a one-second clip of Chuck Eddy among a chorus of people that supposedly lays the blame for Columbine on Marilyn Manson (to be included, Moore requires footage of the person saying "Marilyn Manson"). Anyone who knows or has read Chuck will realize how laughable his inclusion is—my guess is that the full body of his quote went something like, "Marilyn Manson? Um, he reminds me a lot of the DeFranco Family, minus the horns--musical horns, not the Satanic kind." Completely inconsequential, but once you catch that, and compound it with Moore's Twilight-Zone notion that in Toronto we all keep our doors unlocked at night, you of course start wondering how much else is a fabrication. So there's a lot of frivolous stuff to wade through, some of which I enjoyed: the too-easy but funny anyway bit about "African" vs. "European" bees, the "South Park" cartoon, the great punchline to Toronto's unlocked-door policy, and, best of all, Camper Van Beethoven over the opening credits. Moore's most cogent argument, related to but more insidious than the gun issue, is laid out convincingly: that the American media treat every corner of life as a spin-off of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

*(A line that I later found out I interpreted very differently than a friend did. He heard the voice of Heston today, the NRA spokesman and right-wing moralist: "You want me to apologize to Flint? Don't you know I was Moses and Ben Hur?" I heard the echo of an earlier version of Heston, the long-gone movie star who once got to do pretty much whatever he wanted: "You want me to apologize to Flint? Don't you know I used to drink with Bogart and fuck starlets?")

11. Catch Me If You Can and Minority Report (5.5): I like the turn that Spielberg has recently taken, first with A.I. and now with these two films--they're tentative and messy, but you can feel something struggling to take shape, a synthesis of his earlier self and the director of prestige award winners, something that suggests the possibility of him making a film as good as The Sugarland Express or Jaws somewhere down the road. Catch Me If You Can is the easier and more focused of his two 2002 releases, although if you know anything about Spielberg's well-documented relationship with his father, you can see where it's as personal as anything he's ever made. J. Hoberman in the Voice had a funny dismissal of Tom Hanks's performance, but I actually thought Hanks was quite good. Minority Report is cold and efficient, though it too aspires to something more.

12. The Kid Stays in the Picture (5.5): I have this ranked too high—unless you're deeply interested in American films of the early '70s, and even then, it's basically 90 minutes of a much bigger blowhard than Ron Jeremy trying to impress you with the dimensions of his former glory. But, like a lot of people my age, that's the period that most shaped me as a filmgoer, so the inherent interest of Kid's subject battles the amateurishness of the film itself to a draw. Peter Biskind's book on the period is better, Harlan Lebo's The Godfather Legacy better still, and Deeper Into Movies, Reeling, And When the Lights Go Down even better yet. I'm guessing that 37% of Evans's bluster happened exactly as he says it did.

13. Igby Goes Down (5.5): I found it much more compelling watching Max go down in Rushmore and then Enid in Ghost World, but this wasn't bad. Not much shading to anyone, though, Igby included.

14. The Good Girl (5.5): Jennifer Aniston does all right, though her performance mostly seems to consist of her frowning a lot. It's the Adam Sandler phenomenon times three: besides being a comedienne by trade, she's a beautiful woman who's deglamourized herself, with an accent thrown in for good measure. I was with this for a while, and then, the problem with half the films I see, characters started doing things that weren't plausible at all. John C. Reilly's good, as always--he and Tim Blake Nelson are the best pair of couch potatoes since John Lurie and Richard Edson in Stranger Than Paradise. (I'm winging it here; it's a highly specialized category I don't really keep track of.)

15. 8 Mile (5.5) Another variation on the playing-against-type route to instant dramatic credibility. Whatever ambivalence I've always had about Eminem the pop star has always been rooted in the fact that his lyrics are so much more alive than his music--verbally, he's sharp and funny and engagingly profane. You get a glimpse of that right near the end of 8 Mile, in the rap that wins his showdown with Papa Doc, but for most of the film he's been carefully made over into this tortured, humourless, deadly earnest plodder, a hip-hop Barton Fink. There's a lot of screaming in 8 Mile; my least favourite scene in Boogie Nights is where Wahlberg and his mother go at it just before he clears out, and Curtis Hanson basically gives you two hours of the same.

16. Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (5.5): Pretty heavy going for the first hour--four people walked out of the screening I attended, something you don't see too often at the rep theatres. (I'm not sure what exactly those people were expecting.) Things picked up beginning with Atanarjuat's mad dash across the ice floes, and his return a few months later was stirring. But I didn't get a whole lot out of this.

17. Insomnia and One Hour Photo (5.5): With the exception of high-profile annoyances like Far from Heaven and Gangs of New York, a lot of what I saw last year starts to blur together around this point. Most of what's listed below, I saw and then immediately forget almost everything about it. These were the two Robin Williams psycho movies. Two hours of Al Pacino always feels like community service these days, so One Hour Photo gets a slight edge.

18. Lovely and Amazing (5.5): I saw this after The Good Girl, so when Jake Gyllenhaal showed up halfway through to rescue Christine Keener from her humdrum life, it was stuck-inside-of-Memphis time. This is not the kind of thing I need to see. The young black girl with the weight problem was a very unusual, forceful presence throughout.

19. 24 Hour Party People (5.5): The second half of this loosely chronicles the rise and self-destruction of Happy Mondays, who I know for many of us were at least as important as the Dead Milkmen in the grand scheme of things--you may experience the same disconnect that I did there. (To somebody's credit, director Michael Winterbottom or the screenwriter or even Tony Wilson himself may be in on the joke: my favourite line in the film has a drug-induced angel solemnly advising Wilson that a "Vin Reilly compilation is long overdue.") The first half's a little more grounded in reality, highlighted by some too-brief footage of the Buzzcocks, Siouxsie Sioux, and what appears to be an actual video for Joy Division's "Atmosphere"--very spooky. The Joy Division part of the story isn't what it could be, though: "She's Lost Control" gets buried under chatter, "Transmission" is intercut with narrated news footage, and "Love Will Tear Us Apart" is more resonant in Donnie Darko. The one thing I know about Happy Mondays is that they were "shambolic," and if I understand that term correctly, that's what this film is--better than The Claim, Winterbottom's comatose Mccabe & Mrs. Miller imitation (Mccabe & Mrs. Miller can't withstand a whole lot of slowing down), but formless and precious and ultimately all surface. I did enjoy hearing 10 seconds of Ralph Vaughan Williams' "The Lark Ascending," one of my favourite pieces of music, even though I had no idea what Wilson was doing in a field of sheep at the time. (Scott Woods, Greil Marcus, and Dennis Lim think the Joy Division scenes are strong--I didn't connect with them the way others seem to have.)

20. Far From Heaven (5.0): As a stunt, sort of interesting, just like Douglas Sirk films are sort of interesting. The idea that Far From Heaven is a great film, though, strikes me as even sillier than ranking Sirk's movies with On the Waterfront, Sweet Smell of Success, Paths of Glory, or any of the other truly monumental American films of the '50s. What I especially find way off base is that, in view of the widespread backlash that has been heaped upon American Beauty the past couple of years, the reviewers who now dismiss Mendes's film as facile and cliched are obviously some of the very same people who are fawning over Todd Haynes's second-hand version of essentially the same story. Both films want to show you that if you lift up the veil on the middle-class American family, you'll find all sorts of simmering chaos underneath. It's a tried and true theme that goes at least as far back as Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt, and probably a lot farther back than that. That it's not an earth-shatteringly new idea should be a given, and I don't think, as the accusation has been thrown at American Beauty, that Mendes tried to pretend that it is. What he did try to do was have some fun with it--there's a lot more verve in American Beauty than it ever gets credit for, from the cheerleading Lolita who curses like Sam Jackson to the startling cut from Annette Bening's orgasm to the opening chords of "American Woman." It's a funny film, even allowing for the softheadedness of Wes Bentley's paper-bag reverie (which I'm softheaded enough myself to love anyway). Far from Heaven doesn't try for anything beyond staying religiously close to its arcane and very dubious source, and in its oppressively narrow way, it succeeds--to what purpose, I couldn't say. I'm glad Greil Marcus called the film on something that made me squirm the whole way through: Dennis Haysbert's uncannily precise resurrection of the "good Negro" role that used to belong to Sidney Poitier, complete with a martyred daughter this time around. Whether a comment on the thing or the thing itself, not my idea of a good time in 2002. Ditto Julianne Moore's acclaimed performance as Joan Allen.

21. Auto Focus (5.0): As with Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, there's a great freewheeling period piece that could be made from this material, but Paul Schrader is just about the last guy capable of making that film. (He was a good match for Affliction.) Star 80 was crucified in its day, and it is pretty lurid. But that same luridness charged it with some feeling for the subject and period at hand--I still have a vivid memory of Mariel Hemingway rollerskating to "Sing, Sing, Sing" at the Playboy Mansion, one of the emblematic goodbye-70s images of its day. Auto Focus is severe and careful and sexless; if the idea was to mirror Bob Crane's own duplicitous blandness, on those paltry terms it succeeds.

22. Bollywood/Hollywood and Monsoon Wedding (5.0): Bollywood/Hollywood is probably about two steps away from what I'm guessing My Big Fat Greek Wedding is like, but to borrow an oft-repeated joke, Lisa Ray in a sweater is the special effect of the year. She reminded me of someone I worked with last year, the kind of woman who's so comically voluptuous and beautiful she's like a total solar eclipse--you can only look at her for a couple of seconds before you have to look away. All I remember from Monsoon Wedding were more beautiful Indian women, and how tiresome the comic-relief guy was through most of the film, until he redeemed himself towards the end.

23. The Bourne Identity (5.0): Empty countrysides and farmers' fields are integral to the spy thriller: North by Northwest, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, Marathon Man, and now The Bourne Identity all end up there sooner or later.

24. CQ (5.0): The year's other 8-1/2, this one directed by Sofia Coppola's brother, the other by her husband. The Virgin Suicides is the last new film I really loved, so I hope she doesn't give in to the indecisiveness that's weighing down the men in her life. CQ’s a real novelty--I wish it had more feeling for the period than it does, but there are moments that suggest better things ahead for Roman Coppola.

25. Journeys With George (5.0): I saw this with an audience that was clearly ready to howl derisively every time George Bush opened his mouth; just for the sake of being able to hear the film, I was glad they didn't get what they came for. Five years ago, when I followed the political round-tables a lot closer than I do now, I may have found this more compelling. I don't know, though--Bush doesn't let down his facade for a second (maybe for a split-second at one point, when he appears to be all hopped up on non-alcoholic beer), and it's no great revelation that the media gets spoon-fed a lot of junk by politicians. Hearing the filmmaker field questions afterwards was interesting: she couldn't seem to decide whether she was an overdog or underdog in relation to the people she was covering, barely mentioning in passing that her mom was in the process of taking over as Democratic Leader in the House.

26. Red Dragon (5.0): I've seen both follow-ups to The Silence of the Lambs, and if they put out Hannibal Lecter Meets Abbott & Costello next year, I'll probably be dumb enough to go see that, too. Red Dragon is less gory than Hannibal, a relief, but doesn't have anything as diverting as Gary Oldman or the excellent shot of those birds that Ridley Scott devised. The whole enterprise is becoming dangerously clubby at this point: "Look, it's Barney! Hey, the original Dr. Chilton!"

27. Unfaithful (5.0): Basically A Walk on the Moon all over again, with all the modest virtues of the first run-through replaced by Adrian Lyne's heavyhanded bluster. It'd be better if they hadn't cast a French guy as Diane Lane's plaything--he's as cartoonish as Woody's old nemesis Henri on "Cheers," and Henri was supposed to be ridiculous. Sometime in the next year or two, Lane and Jake Gyllenhaal will do a film together.

28. Gangs of New York (4.5): I'm more sure about this one inevitability than anything I say anywhere else here: down the road, Gangs of New York will be viewed as one of the clumsiest, least successful films ever made by Scorsese. Part of me finds the acclaim for it inexplicable, another part understands that acclaim very well. Virtually anyone who cares about movies counts at least one of Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, or Goodfellas among the most indelible experiences of the past quarter-century--there's a lifetime of goodwill locked into those four films. Three of them were nominated for, and lost, three of the more ludicrous Academy Award votes ever, so Scorsese remains the eternal underdog as far as that kind of thing goes. Even more than any of that, though, is the graciousness of Scorsese himself: all the good work he does towards film preservation, his unfailing enthusiasm and erudition when interviewed (I don't think I've ever read or heard him say anything truly negative about another filmmaker or film), his accessibility when it comes to things like guesting on Ebert's show. More than any working director, you want his films to succeed. So now he's made the kind of film that wins Best Picture awards (not his first try--I think that was probably part of the impulse behind Age of Innocence), and after a cipher like Bringing Out the Dead, and knowing all the stories about how troubled the production for Gangs of New York was, I think the desire to see Scorsese adequately rewarded for a heroic career has reached some kind of critical mass. But it's a major disservice to him, and to the best work that he's done, for anyone to invest all that goodwill into such a misshapen mess as Gangs of New York. It goes  wrong immediately: bodies fall all over the place in the big opening showdown, gruesome close-up after gruesome close-up, the crudest sequence I can think of in a Scorsese film this side of Cape Fear's hysterical climax, and I could not have cared less. Who are these people? No one's been introduced yet, so all that death doesn't mean a thing. There's no inherent grandeur in a screenful of dead bodies, one reason I don't care much for war films, but Gangs takes that grandeur as a given and proceeds from there. The whole rest of the way, just about every scene seems two or three beats off, bottoming out with all that amazingly gimmicky knife-throwing hokum. And allowing for the possibility that I may have missed some key bit of explanatory lead-in, I was completely confused by the climactic battle between Lewis's and DiCaprio's gangs--I literally was unsure if they were facing each other from across the street or from opposite sides of the city, what with two or three other factions involved and the U.S. military firing on everyone from off to the side. As murky and befuddling as the climactic battle of Heaven's Gate, from what I remember of it. Cimino's film is viewed by some critics as a misunderstood masterpiece today; Gangs of New York, I'm positive, is headed in the opposite direction.

29. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (4.5): One great scene: Chuck Barris flips out, and, Big Lebowski-style, the set of "The Gong Show" is transformed into a Busby Berkley fantasy number set to Peter, Paul & Mary's "If I Had a Hammer." I loved that scene, although I had no idea what it had to do with anything. Otherwise, some decent bits here and there, and way too much of George Clooney and the corny spy subplot. Sam Rockwell is very good doing Barris's little ritualistic dance when the Gene-Gene music strikes up, but I'm pretty sure they goofed on Gene-Gene himself. Gene didn't really dance, he kind of stood in one spot and wiggled round just a little bit. He did the Jerry Lee Lewis.

30. Changing Lanes (4.5): I was very interested in this when I read it was about road rage. I have something of a problem with that--a few months ago I called a guy who'd cut me off a fat fuck, and he ended up following me halfway downtown before returning to his appointed rounds. (Was I nervous? Um, no, not at all...) After I saw the film, I remember being confused on a fundamental point: was it Sam Jackson or Ben Affleck who had the road rage? It was hard to tell. I'm not sure if Ben Affleck is the best choice for a movie about any kind of rage.

31. The Panic Room (4.5): Not appreciably worse than Fight Club; good Saul Bass-like credit sequence.

32. Solaris (4.5): I also saw Tarkovsky's original for the first time last year. I need for someone to have one more go at it and I'm sure I'll start to figure everything out.

33. Spider-Man (4.5): I liked Superman, and I liked Batman; the initiative to treat such projects as opportunities rather than empty events seems to have gone by the wayside.

34. 13 Conversations About One Thing (4.5): There were four or five stories going on here, and I can't remember a single thing beyond Alan Arkin's.

35. Secretary (4.0): S&M creeps me out enough that I should have skipped this altogether.

36. Spy Kids 2 (4.0): Instinct always kept me away from Robert Rodriguez movies—he looked like the most obvious beneficiary of the mad rush 10 years ago to jump on anything that seemed sufficiently Tarantino-like. It was an instinct that served me well, but then, handing over first choice to a kid I do some volunteer driving for and occasionally take to a movie, the whole stay-clear-of-Robert-Rodriguez system broke down.

37. Ted Bundy (4.0): A suitable bookend to my #1, I suppose. In the timeless words of Kyle MacLachlan in Blue Velvet, it's a strange world out there.

I Need a Glass of Water (2003)

2002 Year-End Ballot

1. "Work It," Missy Elliott: The heroic weirdness of this leaves me awestruck, bringing to mind the entry in Stranded for Moldy Goldies: Colonel Jubilation B. Johnston and His Mystic Knights Band and Street Singers Attack the Hits, a record I've never even laid eyes on: "Cut right after the sessions for 'Get Ur Freak On,' when Missy and her pals were still glued to the ceiling." It's hard to know even where to begin trying to unravel it, other than to observe that all the backwards looping and oh-yessa-massas ("NO!") and gadunka-dunk-dunks/toing-tanga-tang-tangs share something else with mid-'60s Dylan, a supreme confidence that amounts to getting away with anything and everything you care to try. Like all my favourite hip-hop, some of it just confuses me: "If you got a big _______, let me search it"--um, website? In the wake of "Work It," "Get Ur Freak On" sounded somewhat conventional the last couple of times I heard it, and "Get Ur Freak On" is not a conventional record. I love discombobulating kids at my school by throwing out anomalous "Work It" quotes: 

"Can I go in and get my hat?"

"That depends--don't I look like a Halle Berry poster?"

2. "Hot in Herre," Nelly: "Work It" supplanted "Hot in Herre" as my song of the year almost immediately; Nelly was much slower in edging ahead of Brandy, but at a certain point over the summer, one of those days where, in true melodramatic Greil Marcus fashion, it seemed as if every station you flipped to was playing "Hot in Herre," Nelly took over top spot. That it was the hottest summer I can remember in a long time surely contributed to his ubiquity--if you were to assemble some data, I bet you could track a clear correlation between airplay and fluctuations in temperature. I'll get to work on that right away--in any event, once I began to fall under the sway of "Hot in Herre"'s spare, almost ambient jitteriness, some great lines came into focus: "Me and the rest of my heathens" always kills me (concurrent with a Bowie album named Heathen, no less--there's probably a Nelly and Ziggy duet in the works already), and Neptune/Sassoon/restroom is the kind of rhyme that, if I sat down and tried to write myself a poem tomorrow, would just never occur to me.

3. "What About Us," Brandy: I was amazed to find out this was Brandy after having heard it a few times--the Shanice-like girl who put out those innocuous ballads a few years ago? "What About Us" makes for a much more striking transformation to me than anything involving Kylie Minogue, LeAnn Rimes, or Adam Sandler. I could listen to "whataboutallabout" on loop for 30 or 40 minutes.

4. "Sugar," Imperial Teen: "Work It" notwithstanding, the most pleasure I got from music this year was catching up with all three Imperial Teen albums. When they get it right, they're an even better Yo La Tengo than Yo La Tengo (whom I recently saw alphabetized in an Indigo as "Tengo, Yo La," which is obviously Yo-Yo Ma's fault). And, allowing for the fact that I've taken a crash course, they seem to get it right more and more often every time out: twice on Seasick ("You're One"--still maybe their best song, though very different from where they're at six years later--and "Pig Latin"), almost half the time on What Is Not to Love ("Lipstick," "Crucible," and the great "Seven"/"Hooray"/"Beauty" finale), and just about everywhere on this year's On. I checked and there doesn't seem to be an actual single from On ("Ivanka," one of the two or three songs I don't care for, came out four years ago), so I'll narrow it down to "Sugar," "Millions & Man," "Captain," "Undone," and "My Spy," and give the nod to "Sugar" because I always felt that "sugar, sugar" would make a good pop-song lyric and now someone has finally put that to the test. Besides their inexhaustible inventiveness when it comes to reconfiguring the same perfect melody again and again, I think the two things that characterize Imperial Teen are 1) strategic delay (the way the drums tend not to kick in until 30 seconds into their best songs, and also how each album doesn't start peaking until the third or fourth song) and 2) a sixth sense for idiom: "catch me while you can," "can I have a show of hands," "the only game in town," "partners in crime," "we like the cars that go boom," ordinary little everyday phrases they rejuvenate in context. I'm voting for "Sugar," but the best line they've ever written comes in "Undone": "Put your ear up to the radio/You know more than you think you know." I have my own interpretation of what that means, but it's such a beautifully allusive thought, better just to leave it there to linger.

5. "Fell in Love With a Girl," White Stripes: I'm late on this one, too, but I can't imagine feeling its impact any more viscerally than hearing it for the first time clear out of the blue on Toronto's creaky old modern-rock station, CFNY, one day. "What was that? CFNY's historical roots go back to Ultravox--there's no way that's Ultravox..." I'm sure I'm not the first person to say this, but it bears repeating: "I said it once before but it bears repeating" is incomparably fine punk-rock erudition.

6. "When the Last Time," Clipse: Most of the hip-hop I hear that's preoccupied with scaring me barely even registers anymore, but these guys really do sound as heedless and as criminal as they set out to. They've got 5, 10, 15 girls jammed into their limo, everyone's all liquored and drugged up, and even though the girls are ready and willing, the nasal vocal and sinister blips make it sound like gang-rape anyway. In the middle of all the chaos, two lovers' eyes meet: "Her head's spinnin' and my head's spinnin'/Mine from juice-and-ginnin', hers from neck-and-chinnin'."

7. "Happy," Ashanti: Reminiscent of Mary J. Blige's "Be Happy" from a few years ago, with every line a fragmentary rumination that trails off into the deep calm of the music. On the evidence of "Happy" alone (though whatever else I've heard of Ashanti's has sounded OK too), I'd love to know how those protesters of the Soul Train Awards came to the conclusion that Ashanti was somehow insufficiently soulful to win anything. Are 3rd Bass back in business or something?

8.  "The Samurai in Autumn," Pet Shop Boys: Not the single (I like "Home and Dry," too), but really, when the last time you heard it like this? 1990, I guess--Behaviour's very autumnal too, and that side of the Pet Shop Boys has been there since the beginning. I also like two or three songs on the Beck album, and almost put "All in Your Mind" on my list. This will happen to you too, Eminem: one day your "moment" will have passed (the quotations because the true value of such alleged moments is highly overrated), and you'll emerge on the other side with a wistful and pretty set of songs that serves to assure your remaining audience that everything's OK, you're still around and still making music.

9. "My Place," Tweet: I believe Tweet's one of the girls riding around with Clipse—the opening lines of "My Place" find her in love and spinning around like a merry-go-round, and on "Oops! (Oh My)," her clothes keep falling off of their own volition. She's just like the Shirelles, in other words, except for the part about the clothes falling off.

10. "Without Me," Eminem: "It feels so empty without me"--I've been trying and trying my hardest to remember what the world was like without Eminem, back to the early months of 2002, and I'm sorry, it's just not possible anymore...All I do is make fun of or complain about Eminem, but this is the third time I've voted for him, so obviously he gets to me (and just as obviously, I have some new jokes and complaints). Unless I missed something, the self-proclaimed King of Controversy was AWOL during the months after Sept. 11, so I don't know if putting Osama bin Laden in a video at a safe remove quite ranks with John Lennon or Sinead O'Connor in the annals of pop-star heresy. Which is fine, I get a charge out of "Without Me"'s Pied Piper-like invitation to "follow me" anyway, the little history lesson about Elvis and black music is ingenious, and "Fuck you, Debbie" is a great way to reintroduce yourself and shift your lead single into overdrive. Even the wildly misplaced attack on Moby is hilarious--I don't have strong feelings about Moby one way or the other, but I do know that middle-school kids, who make up a sizeable part of Eminem's core audience, have never even heard of Moby! He may as well have gone after Klaus Voormann or Edgar Froese. The story's been kind of gruesome since "Without Me," though. "Cleanin' Out My Closet" was just awful, and "Lose Yourself" is a synthesis of at least three different kinds of bad ideas: the Eagles on the travails of stardom, Destiny's Child on surviving, too many to name on the importance of believing in yourself. If it had something going for it in the vocal or the music it could maybe get a pass on such banality, but it has nothing--it's a leadfooted white elephant as oversized as Frank Howard. So at the precise moment when Eminem seems clunkier and less vital than ever, he's half the world's number-one concern. He's the Madonna of "Justify My Love" and Sex all over again.

Count Five (2002)

Anyone looking at this site probably knows this already, but over at rockcritics.com, readers are invited to submit their picks for a wide variety of music-related lists. I think the idea was inspired by either Alanis or High Fidelity--no, wait a minute, High Fidelity was inspired by people like us. There are a few dozen lists archived at present, with four or five new ones added every month. If you have any good list ideas yourself, e-mail Scott Woods: "Five Most Underrated Del-Lords Tracks," "Five Best Songs About Fire Hydrants," that kind of thing.

Here are the lists I've submitted myself. Whenever there's a reference to a list posted below mine on the original page, I left it alone. It's not rocket science; I'm sure you'll figure everything out fine.

-------------------------

Five Favourite Movie Lines

1. Sidney Falco: "I know Manny Davis." / J.J. Hunsecker: "Everyone knows Manny Davis--except Mrs. Manny Davis." (Sweet Smell Of Success, 1957)
2. Nameless Stooge: "If I tell you, how do I know you won't kill me?" / Eddie the Dane: "Because if you told me and I killed you and you were lying, then I wouldn't get to kill you then." (Miller's Crossing, 1990)
3. Jack Woltz: "Johnny Fontane will never get that movie! I don't care how many Dago-Guinea-Wop-greaseball-goombahs come out of the woodwork!" / Tom Hagen: "I'm German-Irish." / Woltz: "Well, let me tell you something my Kraut-Mick friend..." (The Godfather, 1972)
4. Haven Hamilton: "I will not tolerate rudeness in the presence of a star--two stars." (Nashville, 1975)

5. Philip Marlowe: "Is he any good?" / Eddie Mars: "Who, Sydney? He's company for Pete." (The Big Sleep, 1946)

I picked all laugh-lines--just thinking about any one of them gets me giddy. I seem to remember that Bogart's mincing around with Sonia Darrin (Agnes) in The Big Sleep was included in The Celluloid Closet, but they missed the exchange above. Every rep house I've ever seen The Godfather in erupts after John Marley's tirade. Marley fairly hisses his "Kraut-Mick friend" line, but in a different context you can almost imagine it as a term of endearment: My Kraut-Mick Friend, an ABC Movie of the Week circa 1978, starring Kristy McNichol as a misfit teenager and Mickey Rooney as the old man down the street she befriends. I haven't listed maybe my favourite line ever, Burt Reynolds' reaction to Mark Wahlberg when he pitches his concept for the Brock Landers films in Boogie Nights: "Those are great names!" It doesn't translate well on the page; as delivered by Reynolds in the film, punctuated by "Magnet and Steel" on the soundtrack, it's just about the most inexplicably joyous movie moment I can think of.

 

Five Best Uses of "Fuck" in a Song

1. "Divorce Song," Liz Phair (1993)
2. "Compton's in the House," N.W.A. (1989)
3. "Everything Falls Apart," Hüsker Dü (1982)
4. "Working Class Hero," John Lennon (1970)
5. "We Should Be Together," Jefferson Airplane (1969)

As you can see, I'm somewhat of a sentimental traditionalist when it comes to the word "fuck"...At first I was going to keep punk and hip-hop out of it, where "fuck" often functions like "is," "to," and "the." That would artificially eliminate about 97% of the field, though. In the immortal words of N.W.A., "With a fucked-up style and a fucked-up show/Hey yo, Ren, what about the scratchin', is it def?/Fuck no!"--those guys were crazy for "fuck," it was the very life- blood of their art, and they need to be properly commemorated. So Hüsker Dü's on there too, with Flipper ("Get Away"), Minor Threat ("Straight Edge"), and Schoolly-D ("Signifying Rapper") close. Lennon and Jefferson Airplane were the first times I ever encountered the word on a record, probably the case with a lot of people, giving them a position of historical privilege. Like Henry Miller and Lenny Bruce before them, they’re ESOFs: Elder Statesmen of “Fuck.” I didn't hear either till the mid-70s, when I bought The Worst of Jefferson Airplane and Plastic Ono Band--"We Can Be Together" was thrilling, "Working Class Hero" shocking, and they still are. That leaves Liz Phair at #1. "Fuck and Run" and "Flower" got more attention as songs and as obscenity, but for me "Divorce Song" is Exile in Guyville’s masterpiece on both counts. I've always heard it as "Rayette's Revenge," in which the Karen Black character in Five Easy Pieces finally gets to tell Jack Nicholson to go fuck himself.

Five Favourite Covers

1. "I Say a Little Prayer," Aretha Franklin (1968)
2. "Love Is All Around," Husker Du (1985)
3. "I'll Keep It With Mine," Nico (1967)
4. "Only Love Can Break Your Heart," St. Etienne (1992)
5. "Where the Streets Have No Name/Can't Take My Eyes Off You," Pet Shop Boys (1991)

1) I doubt that Aretha Franklin set out to cover Dionne Warwick (whose version made the charts a few months earlier) as much as she just wanted to get something written by the then-very-marketable Burt Bacharach onto one of her albums. Given the choice between a show-offy soul version and a sweet pop version of the same song (the difference between Otis Redding and Al Green, roughly speaking), the pop version will sound better to me almost every time. This is the exception, and it's not even close. I can barely even remember Dionne Warwick's "Say a Little Prayer" anymore.

2) I'd compare this to "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35": a joyous romp, a work of supreme confidence, appearing at the end of a masterful run. Outside of a perfectly placed "doo-doo-doo" at the end, I never thought there was even a trace of jokiness about it, just a bunch of guys my age (and from Minnesota, besides) swooning nostalgically for that slow-motion image of Mary Richards tossing her hat into the air. You could probably just as easily hear nothing but jokiness, and that'd be fine too.

3) Speaking of Bob Dylan, I've been listening to certain songs from the '65-66 period a lot recently: "She Belongs to Me," "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues," "Desolation Row." I have five songs from Love and Theft on tape; they must be the wrong five, because I'm at a complete loss to understand how anyone who loves the former can consider the latter to be in the same stratosphere. I was used to Nico's "I'll Keep It With Mine" by the time I got the original on a bootleg; comparing the two, hers is sufficiently different and just as beautiful.

4) A rebuke to the eternally pointless Trans, where Neil Young had the idea that using machines meant he had to make his music sound inhuman.

5) I like this a lot, but just on the merits, I'd rather hear the Turtles' "You Showed Me," SWV's "Right Here (Human Nature)" (which may not really count as a cover), Sinead O'Connor's "Nothing Compares 2 U," Ace of Base's "Cruel Summer" (eligible under the sufficiently-different-unless-it's-virtually-identical rule), and probably a few dozen other things I missed. I couldn't think of any way to round up candidates beyond just scanning my record shelves, and with at least a thousand covers buried in there, I know I must have missed something. Anyway, I love the story behind the Pet Shop Boys record. Neil Tennant used to ridicule U2 every chance he got around the time of The Joshua Tree--for good reason, as it must have dismayed him to see the singles from that album finish higher in critics' polls than "What Have I Done to Deserve This?". Tennant was really funny about it, too, but in a way he came across as a different version of the same purist Bono is: one wanted you to believe that the Pet Shop Boys could never make a record as good as B.B. King, the other was unable to con- cede that U2 might have it in them to write a pop song as good as Rick Astley. To Tennant's credit, he did admit as much with "Where the Streets Have No Name." I don't think Bono would ever be able to make the same imaginative leap with a cover of "West End Girls" or "Being Boring."

 

Five Favourite Songs Under 60 Seconds

1."Lights Out," Angry Samoans (1982)
2. "Wasted," Black Flag (1978)
3. "Homo-sexual," Angry Samoans (1982)
4. "The Todd Killings," Angry Samoans (1982)
5. "Her Majesty," Beatles (1969)

Samoans dominate, Beatles a distant fifth.

Five Favourite Songs Over 10 Minutes

1. "Cowgirl in the Sand," Neil Young (1969)
2. "My Favorite Things," John Coltrane (1960)

3. "Desolation Row," Bob Dylan (1965)
4. "Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now" 12-inch, McFadden & Whitehead (1979)
5. "Dark Star," Grateful Dead (1969)

1) and 2) I've played these two so many times over the years that, even though I have no knowledge of musical form whatsoever--chords, notes, all that stuff Sid Vicious liked to say he found surprisingly simple--I've internalized the ebb and flow of both to a point where I can "sing along" with all the extended solos. It's more like a strange whistling/malfunctioning-human-beatbox kind of noise, but I know where every last note belongs. I think I've voted Neil Young #1 on at least three of these top-five lists. 3) Not to put any bad karma into the air, but if I'm still teaching grade school the day Bob Dylan dies, I'm going to fill both blackboards with the complete lyrics to this and make the kids sit through all 12 minutes.

4) Maybe this is cheating a bit--it does run 10:45. The 9:39 version of the O'Jays' "I Love Music" found on Philadelphia Classics is even better. I know what I'm getting Scott when he gets married this summer: *a watch*.

5) I'm a bigger Jefferson Airplane fan, but I don't think they got much past five or six minutes. I have an Angry Samoans box set that's shorter than "Dark Star."

Five Favourite Moments in Canadian Musical History

1. Everybody Know This Is Nowhere (1969) and After the Gold Rush (1970), Neil Young (tie)
2. "Rain Dance," the Guess Who (1971)
3. "Big Town Boy," Shirley Matthews (1964) and "Beautiful Second Hand Man," Ginette Reno (1970) (tie)
4. "Get Up, Get Out and Move On," Fludd (1972)
5. "Attack of the 50 Ft. Teletubbies," Galaxy Twins (1999) and "Chariots of Foam," Surfin' Tapeworms from Venus (1983) (tie)

1) The "nowhere" that Neil sings about is obviously L.A., which must also be where he is when he wires mom for money in "Cinnamon Girl." He's wishing he were back in Winnipeg, forgetting that he got out of there as quick as he could just a few years earlier. If you're a teenager growing up in a small Canadian town, you intuitively understand what he's really singing about: nowhere is nowhere else except where you are.

2) The lament of the Cherokee Reservation Indian, as performed by a bunch of schlubs from Winnipeg under the direction of Burton Cummings. As enigmatic to me today as when I first heard it on 1050 CHUM as a 10-year-old. Part of the post-Little Big Man cycle of early-70s Native American radio novelties--"Indian Reservation," "Half Breed," Redbone, Buffy Saint-Marie--but who's John and, my sentiments exactly, where'd he get the gun? It's more like an echo of Charles Whitman, or an omen of that guy who opened fire in a San Diego McDonald's a few years later. There's also some stuff about a bakery, and it all sounds as poppy as the Osmonds. Summing up: ???

3) The first can hold its own against anything by the Ronettes or the Shangri-Las--there's a Canadian band from the mid-60s named after it whom I don't *think* I've ever heard, although they charted four songs on CHUM. "Beautiful Second Hand Man" is an amazing "Wedding Bell Blues" rip that I'd take over anything by the (quite good) Michel Pagliaro, Quebec's big rock star of the era.

4) There's stuff on Tim's and Scott's lists that could just as easily go here, but for the sake of avoiding repetition I'll go with another Dazed and Canadian favourite, a one-of-a-kind extravaganza by a group that just located the wah-wah pedal on their amplifier and got a little carried away.

5) I only know three rock stars in the world personally, and two of them are behind these records. (I also occasionally play darts with Charlie Watts.) For reasons of security, I can't reveal their identities. But "Chariots of Foam" is just what you think it is, done up Ventures-style, and it once served as bumper music for my overnight campus radio show. "Teletubbies" measures the cost of Mike Harris's "Common Sense Revolution" as subtly as Our Lady Peace's "Naveed" exposed the nihilism of SCTV's "Maudlin's Eleven" sketch. (If anybody's interested in decoding this really annoying in-joke, please e-mail me for footnotes.)

Five Funniest Pop Musicians

1. Bob Dylan

2. Randy Newman
3. Chuck Berry
4. Tracy Chapman
5. Neil Tenant

I'm one of the five funniest list-makers in the world, so one of these is meant as a joke.

 

Five Bands You Hate for Their Name Alone

1. You're a Four-Eyes!
2. Baseball's for Wusses
3. Ignore That Teacher
4. I'll Wait Till I'm Positive He Has a Crush on Me, Then I'll Suddenly Get All Weird and Distant
5. Phil Dellio Must Die

Early-80s hardcore bands, all of them pretty obscure.

Five Most Questionable Pazz & Jop Winners

1:  Squeezing Out Sparks, Graham Parker (1979)
2:  Little Creatures, Talking Heads (1985)
3:  "Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick," Ian Dury (1979)/"The Breaks," Kurtis Blow (1980)/"O Superman," Laurie Anderson (1981)
4:  "Gangsta's Paradise," Coolio (1995)
5:  "C'mon N' Ride It (The Train)," Quad City DJs (1996)

My list is redundant after Scott's--I don't really remember the two of us discussing some of these records, but I guess we must have compared notes somewhere along the way. One of the first dozen new wave records I ever bought was by Graham Parker...The Up Escalator! I remember trying very hard to like it, and sort of succeeding with the Bruce Springsteen collaboration; working backwards from there, Parker's more famous earlier albums required pretty much the same amount of effort. Without checking, I can't remember a song off Little Creatures. I bought it five years ago and played it once. "Home," which I know from Wall Street, must be on there--that one's not bad, but the Talking Heads' decade-long hold on critics was always completely baffling to me. Ian Dury, Kurtis Blow, and Laurie Anderson are three novelties that go right past me. Rap's another thing I came late to, and some of the early stuff that's so revered--"The Breaks," especially, which I heard for the first time in a long while on the radio last month--sounds really tame to me next to the best of what came much later. I was immersed in X, Black Flag, and the Cramps in 1981, and I think my reaction to hearing "O Superman" after having read all the fuss about it was something on the order of Beavis & Butt-head confronted by a Bjork video. "Gangsta's Paradise" was simply a big letdown after "Fantastic Voyage," my favourite single of 1994 (#3 in Pazz & Jop but behind "Seether," another unsolvable mystery), and the choo-choo song is pure seventh-inning-stretch. Some winners I've never heard: Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, Time Out of Mind, To Bring You My Love. From what I have heard of P.J. Harvey, she might have been a contender. I haven't heard much of Play, Ragged Glory, 3 Feet High and Rising, or the Arrested Development album, either, but "Porcelain," "Over and Over," "Eye Know" (I think it was "Eye Know" that I liked), and "People Everyday" would be enough to keep them off the list no matter what. Even Sandinista! gets a pass because of "Police on My Back"; one great song on a triple-album and I'm happy. And I think Who's Next was an excellent inaugural winner--Every Picture Tells a Story or Led Zeppelin IV might have been better choices, but song-for-song, I'm glad it finished ahead of Sticky Fingers, There's a Riot Goin' On, or anything else on the '71 list.

Five Favourite Songs Not Sung in English

1. "Sukiyaki," Kyu Sakamoto (1961)
2. Live at the Royal Albert Hall, Bob Dylan -- the long spoken intro that ends with "If you only wouldn't clap so hard" (1966)
3. Casey Stengel, testimony before the Senate Anti-Trust Committee (mid-'50s)

4. Benicio del Toro in The Usual Suspects (1995)
5."Sway," Rolling Stones (1971)

I'm a little slack in the world-music department, but any one of these could use a little translation. You can find the lyrics for "Sukiyaki" at japanorama.com. I would love to have been a reporter in the Yankee clubhouse during the '50s whenever Stengel and Berra got together. I imagine a scene like Michael and Sollozzo in The Godfather. Casey: "I'm gonna speak incomprehensible gibberish to Yogi." Reporter: "Go ahead..."

Five Favourite Years for Pop Music

1. 1972
2. 1982
3. 1979
4. 1994
5. 1986

I'm approaching this as a list of years where my connection to music was at its deepest, regardless of whether or not I was connecting with music released in that year. Usually I was, but in 1979 and 1986 I was playing catch-up to a degree. I like Michaelangelo's description of 1969 a lot, and he almost makes me want to make room for that (I'd add Volunteers to his list of I-want-to-spoil-the-party downers), but it was past the statute of limitations when I first heard some of the stuff he mentions. I'm leaving out 1965 and 1966, home of more music that I love than any of the years above except #1, for the same reason--my dim four-year-old memories of 1965 pretty much begin and end with "Downtown" in the back seat of the family car. So, chronologically:

1) As I've related to many people already, the origin of the universe, the be-all and end-all, my own private Rosebud. I remember an old "Real Life" column where Greil Marcus called 1972 "the least scary year ever" for pop music. Maybe, but at age 11 it was awash in mystery for me, and that initial sense of discovery has never abated. The highwater mark of singer-songwriters as hitmakers: "Doctor My Eyes," "Without You" and "Coconut," "Anticipation" (which I've always preferred to "You're So Vain," same year), "Mother and Child Reunion," all the Harvest singles, "Sweet Seasons," weird epics like "American Pie" and "Taxi" and "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face." Exquisite neoclassical soul: "Let's Stay Together" and "I'm Still in Love With You" (like getting "Eight Days a Week" and "Ticket to Ride" in the same year), "Betcha By Golly, Wow," "I'll Be Around," "Oh Girl." Bleaker Nixon hangovers from War ("The World Is a Ghetto"), the Staple Singers ("I'll Take You There"), Curtis Mayfield ("Freddie's Dead"), and Stevie Wonder ("Superstition"). Brilliance scattered all over the Top 40: "I Saw the Light," "You Wear It Well," "Rocket Man," "I Can See Clearly Now," "Tumbling Dice," "Black Dog," "Everything I Own," "Rock and Roll Lullaby," Badfinger's "Day After Day." The five Lisbon girls: Pauline Boone, Yolanda Sluik, Anita Woychesko, Lee Johnston, Susan Dey. And, of course, "Hurting Each Other," the last great Carpenters single.

3) Early in the year, my high-school Neil Young obsession reached critical mass with Rust Never Sleeps, which he'd previewed a few months before at Maple Leaf Gardens; in the summer, just before starting university, my new friend Peter introduced me to The Ramones and The Clash. I loved the first and didn't much care for the second. In the fall, after a few months of going to punk shows, I shared the mike for a few seconds of "White Riot" with Joe Strummer.

2) Album Generic, Back from Samoa, The Fire of Love, Wild Gift and Under the Big Black Sun, Damaged, The Days of Wine and Roses, Fear's The Record--if it came from California, we loved it (except for the Minutemen, who were just confusing). I didn't hear Husker Du, the Replacements, or R.E.M. until the following year, and thanks to them and some others, '83 and '84 were just as momentous for me. But '82 looks more exciting from here. There was still such a thing as Top 40, I think; I hardly noticed until…

5) I started working at a downtown record store, where, much to my Rip Van Winkle-like disorientation, the manager made it clear that the great majority of customers didn't want to hear Psychocandy at 11:00 in the morning. So we played True Blue and Please and "Rumors" instead, and a part of the musical landscape I'd more or less ignored for a long time--the biggest part--came into full view once again. It wasn't quite Emerald City: there was also Europe's "The Final Countdown" to contend with.

4) I wanted to include one year from Radio On's lifetime, when I was keeping up with the radio and videos like I kept up with Slash and SST in the early '80s. Scanning my year-ends, '94 looks like a good choice: "Fantastic Voyage," "Miss World," "Cut Your Hair," "Gin and Juice," "At Your Best (You Are Love)," "Self Esteem," "Do You Wanna Get Funky," "Worker Man," and "Pay No Mind" all made my Top 10, a representative mix of the big hits and underground heroes I've bounced back and forth between the past 30 years, except that in 1994 they were sometimes one and the same.

Five Poppiest Art Rock Songs

1. "Roundabout," Yes (1971)
2. "Teacher," Jethro Tull (1970)
3. "Can't Get It Out of My Head," Electric Light Orchestra (1974)
4. "Tubular Bells," Mike Oldfield (1973)
5. "Back in N.Y.C.," Genesis (1974)

I was going over candidates for this list a couple of weeks ago with my friend Brent, one of seven people in the world who owns the Kansas album from last year (assuming everyone in Kansas has a copy too). Of course, right away you have to contend with the age-old problem of what does and doesn't count as art rock. We were very inclusive: "Yeah, that's sort of art-wave." "I guess you'd call that art-glam." "The Feelies? They're art-jangle." In the end, we decided that everyone who's ever made a record counts as art rock, with the possible exception of Freddie & the Dreamers and Pink Floyd. There may still be a few bugs to work out in the eight-step screening process we used...#1's easy, although the chorus of "I've Seen All Good People" might even be better (dragged down by the "Your Move" prologue). Picking one Jethro Tull entry is difficult: "Fat Man," "Living in the Past," "Nothing Is Easy," they're all castaways from some medieval version of The Fabulous Bubblegum Years. I limited myself to pre-A New World Record for Electric Light Orchestra, after which it's like shooting giant hogweeds in a barrel. With "Tubular Bells," I'm voting for the last five minutes or so of side one--the part where Mike Oldfield does his roll-call of instruments, a surprising homage to Sly & the Family Stone. And I hadn't intended to vote for Genesis until the list below reactivated long-dormant memories of that synthesizer...Which still leaves lots of also-rans unacknowledged, so let me hereby issue history's first-ever shout-out to Gentle Giant.

Five Favourite Television Theme Songs

1. "Love Is All Around" (The Mary Tyler Moore Show)
2. Room 222 theme
3. "Come On Get Happy" (The Partridge Family)
4. The Honeymooners theme
5. Twin Peaks theme

Last summer I sat in a room with 20 other grade-school teachers, ranging in age from early-20s up to about 50, trying to mark standardized provincial math tests as Television's Greatest Hits played three-times-too-loudly and everyone tried to outdo everyone else in how effortless their lyrical recall was. A traumatizing experience ("Quiet, everybody--Phil's trying to *concentrate*"), but I've recovered sufficiently to fill out a list..."Love Is All Around" will romp to victory; it's a key song if you're anywhere close to my age (39), as indelible as "I'll Be There" or "Close to You." I can't conjure up how the Room 222 theme went, but I know there was a calming kind of simplicity to it, as pure as the halo-like Afro that Bernie sported. The Partridge Family theme hasn't been drained of life the way the Monkees theme has, though maybe Bobby Sherman deserves the some-assembly-required vote instead. The Twin Peaks theme is an anomaly, like casting a vote for The Seventh Seal as your favourite sports movie.

Five Favourite Instrumental Songs of All Time

1. "Raised Eyebrows," the Feelies (1980)
2. "Little Martha," the Allman Brothers Band (1972)
3. "New Orleans Instrumental No. 1," R.E.M. (1992)
4. "Run in the Green and Tangerine Flaked Forest," Factotums (1965)
5. "The Lonely Surfer," Jack Nitzsche (1963)

I'm cheating on #1--I hope the rules committee doesn't get on my case. I've always thought of "Raised Eyebrows" as an instrumental, and for most of the way, it is. Near the end, the Feelies break out into song: "Said 'Oh!' Said 'Oh!' Said 'Oh!'" They're seized by the memory of that time they said "Oh." It's joyous enough for Beatles for Sale. The Factotums and R.E.M. tracks are separated by decades, but they share exactly the same slow-motion shimmer--they melt into each other, as do many of the following near-misses: Fleetwood Mac's "Albatross" (1968), Neil Young's "The Emperor of Wyoming" (1969), Brian Eno's "Another Green World" (1976), Television Personalities' "The Crying Room" (1981), Yo La Tengo's "Return to Hot Chicken" (1997), Air's "Ce Matin La" (1998).

Five Songs You Would Put in a Movie About Yourself

1. "Cinnamon Girl," Neil Young (1969)
2. "Downed," Cheap Trick (1977)
3. "I Can't Reach You," the Who (1967)
4. "Going Nowhere," Dumptruck (1987)
5. "It's Getting Harder All the Time," the Mindbenders (1967)

I think I started subconsciously soundtracking my movie when I was 8. The song over the opening credits just depends on what year it is: if it's 1969 and grade 3, "Crimson and Clover"; 1972, "Hello It's Me"; 1977, "Downed"; 1984, "I Will Dare." That takes me to the end of university. I don't have anything picked out for teachers' college six years later, though I recall that the Ninja Turtle song was very big at the time. (Man bites dog: there was something in NOW a couple of weeks ago that actually moved me. Ingrid Randoja wrote a short piece on how movies had shaped the way she conducted herself at various points in her life. She mentioned trying to imitate Sidney Poitier doing his goofy dance to the Mindbenders in To Sir with Love, one of my favourite scenes ever. I've always envisioned a scene in my own movie where I'm visiting my sister and my 5-year-old niece asks me to "do the Sidney Poitier!" The Mindbenders strike up out of nowhere, and my letter-perfect rendition holds everyone spellbound.)

Five Favourite Pop Music Reviews or Articles

1. "Nashville," in Reeling
2. "Circles and Squares," in I Lost It at the Movies
3. "Mean Streets," in Reeling
4. McCabe & Mrs. Miller," in Deeper Into Movies
5. "The Godfather Part II," in Reeling

There's enough film-related stuff on this site that it seems relevant to do a list of my favourite Pauline Kael pieces. Four of them are reviews (which all have actual titles that I can't look up at the moment; "Everyday Inferno" is the easy-to-remember Mean Streets title), "Circles and Squares" is her whirlwind dismantling of everything that was and is (whatever its virtues--it influenced me too) empty provocation in Andrew Sarris's auteur theory. Deeper Into Movies and Reeling contain all of Kael's key early-70s reviews, a perfect match of critic and moment; Kael is so attuned to Nashville's rhythms, she's the only person I've ever come across to make mention of a throwaway Bergman joke that might be the funniest line in the film. There are probably things just as momentous in her earlier and later books (her review of Casualties of War comes to mind), but it's those two that influenced me the most.

Five Favourite Uses of Pop Music in the Movies

1. "Making Time," Creation in Rushmore (Wes Anderson)
2. "Spill the Wine," Eric Burdon & War in Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson)
3. "Late for the Sky," Jackson Browne in Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese)
4. "Magic Man," Heart in The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola)

5. "Happy Together," Turtles in Heart Like a Wheel (Jonathan Kaplan)

This is the only thing I ever write about! But I don't want to vote in any of the other categories because I'd have to vote or not-vote for people I know. Like with the sampling question--I'm good friends with both Moby and Terminator X, and I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. My #1 above might actually be the four-song phone sequence in The Virgin Suicides, but I don't know if there's room enough to list them all.

(Originally published in rockcritics.com)