Top Ten Lists 2008: Music and Movies

Everyone's been bitching about how very "meh" a year 2008 was for music, and I am forced to agree. I think it was a long-tail year: lots of interesting new artists and quirky new sounds that caught the attention well-tuned ears throughout the intertubes, but not too many knockout champions or shoe-ins for No. 1. Idolator sums it up in reviewing Pitchfork's list today, which placed Fleet Foxes in the No. 1 spot:

I will just chalk its absurdly high placement up to "yet another reason why this year needs to be put out to pasture ASAP.

There's a bit of variation on most of the lists this year, save for a few staples. But there is something that needs to be said, so I'm going to say it: TV on the Radio can eat my ass. They're just okay . Got it? They're certainly not the new goddamned Radiohead where they can do no wrong.
Rolling Stone, Spin, and everyone else who fawned over Dear Science and Return to Cookie Mountain: please let's all just relax, take a breath, have a Fresca, and calm down. Hell, I liked "Dear Science," and the band is fine with me overall, especially if you're into listening to songs that sound like they're the intro to other songs and you like staying rivetted to the speakers as you keep waiting for the damn thing to kick in already.
They can be just okay. We forgot somewhere along the way that bands are allowed to be decent musicians without either being the second coming of Hipster Jesus or a tragedy to all sounds ever made that warrants cutting off your ears and shutting down iTunes.

That said, here's my completely unscientific, unreliable, poorly vetted, terribly thought out and ultimately indefensible list.


10.MGMT - Oracular Spectacular*










9. Lupe Fiasco - The Cool











8. Fleet Foxes - s/t











7. Lil Wayne - Tha Carter III










6. Bitzen Trapper - Furr










5. Okkervil River - Stand Ins










4 Santogold - s/t










3. She and Him - Vol. 1











2. Cut Copy - In Ghost Colours








1. Vampire Weekend - s/t

I was reluctant to put VW at the top of the list, but it's hard not to argue that it's the most innovative album that came out this year, with afro-pop sounds and undeniably catchy rhythms that managed to maintain replay value even in the face of all the hype. The [ed not: as I'm typing this, they started playing Mansard Roof at Gorilla Coffee in Park Slope. Point illustrated] album is summery party music for the neo-Paul Simon set, and I don't see any problem with that. Also, the Columbia boys are helping to stem our nation's tragic dearth of songs about esoteric punctuation terms, and I think we should be grateful.

*Also hesitant to put this on the list since we all got it back in 07, but I guess we aren't counting non-Radiohead digital releases yet.

Movies- In which I realize I didn't see nearly enough good movies this year:

1. The Dark Knight
2. Wall -E
3. Slumdog Millionaire
4. Forgetting Sarah Marshall
5 Iron Man
6. Frost/Nixon
7. Pineapple Express
8. Cloverfield
9. Zack and Miri Make a Porno

I was really tempted to call Wall-E the best movie of the year. It certainly was the most endearing love story movie since Before Sunset, and it didn't even have any damned speaking for half the film. But Dark Knight was just too jawesome to deny.


[RELATED: here's the column I wrote last year about the rules for making a top 10 list. Follow it or be subject to weeks of angry sneering glances shrouded in ironic mustache coming at you from under American Apparel hoodies.]

The Dark Bailout

"Nobody panics when things go according to plan. Even if the plan is horrifying."

How did people seeks solace from the chaos of political absurdity in the era before the advent of the mashup, back when we were forced to relive a John McCain speech on cable news over and over without the added benefit of watching him be Barack Roll'd all up and down the screen?

So regardless of your political views, this is just enjoyable. Mainly because it reminds me of how much The Dark Knight rocked the brick sh*thouse. So I guess Batman is the subprime mortgage crisis in this situation? Or maybe Batman is Fannie Mae? I'm sure lots of people are dying to use the pencil trick on some investment bankers these days.

(via Wonkette)

Firefoxy Lady

Firefox 3, I think I love you. If I could marry you and have many, Google-ready babies, I would. It would be so simple to take care of these babies, because they would be easily locatable. "Hey, where's Moz Jr. run off to?" Then I'd hit ctrl F, and BAM, he'd be located before I even finished typing.
Who are these people still using Internet Explorer? Do they also ride trains to the grocery store and wash their clothes on a scrub board down by the creek? Maybe they even work at newspapers (self-zing!).

Foxy 3, your tabbed browsing and improved bookmarking have done wonders for my ADD. I can hardly write a story these days without simultaneously flipping through my Facebook, Gmail, RSS feed and Digg pages at least several times an hour. I just did it three times during that sentence. And once again while I edited that sentence. There were no new e-mails or responses to read, of course. But there might have been, and Google forbid I miss one a second after it arrives. I just can't take that chance in this day and age. ("Jonathan Cribbs has also commented on my photo?!? That son of a bitch...")

Digg is particularly structred for the attention-deficit, tabbed-browsing age. Digg seduces me into opening upwards of 10 tabs at a time to look at the latest geek art or some top ten list of Most Awesomely Awesome Dark Knight Related Topics We Haven't Written About Yet.

So does this mean my attention span is parsed so thin it can barely read a Panera menu without wanting to Google exactly what "artisan breads" means? (a search you can do in Firefox with a right click into a new tab, fyi). Probably. The Atlantic seems to think so.

I did, at least, read all of that article in one sitting. In print form, nonetheless. Now, where did I park my train?

A Hero for Our Times

Meet Matt Griffin. He's the hero we need, not the hero we deserve:


Matt Griffin is an on-the-ground serviceman for Media Merge, a Chelsea, Ala.-based high-tech service company. And he's a certified IMAX repair technician.

We located Matt Griffin on The Internet Saturday afternoon in a fit of blinding desperation after hearing that the IMAX projector at the Mall of Georgia was continually overheating and cutting showings of The Dark Knight short or cancelling them all together, ruining the experience for hundreds of moviegoers who (like us) had been frothing at the mouth for weeks at the potential of seeing an 8-story tall Ennis Del Mar.

As Josh Thompson, who drove from Augusta only to have his 3:40 show scrubbed, told the AJC that day: "I'm beyond bummed. I'm really [angry]!" (Sources assume that [angry]! actually meant "pissed!").

The situation was dire. Our 10:20 p.m. show was fast approaching. Either we could sit on the floor of Pouya's Atlanta apartment and lament our woes while taking out aggression by firing a machine gun at the heart of the Statue of Liberty, or we could take action.

Like Batman, we sought justice. Justice through the utility belt of our age: Google. A search for IMAX repair companies brought only one real result in the form of Media Merge.

We called. The voice mail picked up. "For emergency service, please press 1 now." Well hell, if this isn't an emergency in the world of gigantic projector screens, nothing is.

Pouya and I made the plea. Hello, we're calling to leave a message for Matt Griffin. Matt, we need help. The IMAX in Atlanta is down and we've got people who drove from South Carolina just to attend it. This is supposed to be the big coming out weekend for IMAX, and it's in trouble.
We know you can do this. We see that you began your career in the mid-1980s as a systems integration manager. In the 1990s, you honed your professional and technical skills before becoming IMAX certified. This is some serious shit, Matt Griffin. You may hear us laughing in the background, but we're deadly serious. This is the 9/11 for the IMAX industry, and you need to be the hero. You're two hours away, you can be here in time. We will purchase you one large diet Coke and a package of Jujubees if we see you in the theater. Matt, please, get here, you're the only one with the skills to repair our broken dreams. This is it, this is the time to shine, to make your industry, your parents and yourself proud and fix our IMAX.

Help us Matt Griffin. You're our only hope.

And then we hung up. There was a sudden flash of hope in the small loft apartment as we all had a collective vision that somewhere, in an office park in Chelsea, Alabama, a goateed man in a button-down shirt had just hit a big red "GO" button on his desk and slid down a chute hundreds of feet below ground, landing in the seat of a rocket-propelled Honda Civic with a "PWNED" sticker on the back, zooming eastward to the rescue.

The rest of our day was nervousness and terror. What if Matt Griffin had already been called out to another job in another city? Did he have the superhero endurance to make it to Atlanta on time? Sure, he's IMAX certified, but the human body can only be pushed so far.

Shows were still being cancelled in Atlanta and we were unsure if we should even make the trip to the mall theater that night. When we arrived two hours before the show, the staff was still unsure if the overheated projector had been repaired.

In line under the hot lamps of the IMAX waiting room, we kept hoping to see a bearded fat man storming into the projector room with a sense of heroic purpose, a box of IMAX repair tools jangling noisily by his side. When we told the theater suits we had contacted the repair company in Chelsea, they nodded politely and said "that's nice," the way you'd turn away a child who told you they had collected 30 pennies to help save your house from foreclosure.

What if Matt Griffin truly wasn't the hero we had hoped all along?

After pushing the movie start time back half an hour, the fever broke and we were allowed in to the IMAX theater to claim our seats for The Dark Knight. The show went off without a hitch, except for the guys sitting next to me who kept talking about how balls awesome it would be to watch pornography in IMAX vision.

We stood up to leave, brains reeling from Christopher Nolan's stunning cinematic achievement. Surely Matt Griffin had come this night; why hadn't he sought us to claim his Diet Coke and revel in his triumph?

That's when we realized: a real hero doesn't need your reward or accolades. He can be the outcast.

Back in Chelsea, we hope Matt Griffin realizes the symbol of hope he is for us as he lies in wait, a bag of Cheetos at his side, listening for the call of citizens who need their hero again.

Matt Griffin, seen here refusing to pay for valet parking at the Mall of Georgia.

Weather You Like Adam Carroll, It Will Still Rain

Starting in about, say, late May it becomes beyond irrelevant to check the weather forecast for here, because it does not change one iota from day to day. It's a product of the oppressively hot Lowcountry summers, which mix with the air off the water and lead to sporadic, often intense, thunderstorms that will pop up at least once a day toward the latter part of the summer. My weather.com tab on Firefox gets dusty during this period, except when I occasionally check the radar map and see if a large blob of easy green or violent red is headed our way.

To illustrate:



Pretty much steady all week long. This is why I never get too bent out of shape when people worry about weekend plans being scrubbed due to rain, as it will reliably rain almost every day, and will usually clear up and return to surface-of-the-sun baking temperatures promptly. Except, of course, for Friday, when the torrential rains of heaven opened up conspiring to both make us miss out on ironically playing the Jesus-themed mini-golf course and laying the groundwork for an impressive, incapacitating hangover Saturday morning.

This was all part of the Adam Carroll (pictured below right) birthday plan, but only a small part. The real adventure comes this weekend on a seven-person adventure to the city of Hotlanta, where upon our eyes will feast on the wonder that is The Dark Knight in IMAX, then feast our bodies upon the nausea that is Six Flags. Meanwhile, his actual birthday is today, though unless I'm watching Christian Bale tower eight stories over me, I don't think it counts yet.

And maybe Heath Ledger's ghost will sing to Adam at some point. Anyway, happy birthday Adam. Let this image be your internet posterity that will forever haunt Google searches of you.

"I am vengence. I am straight-to-DVD promotional release."

Well, this alone significantly improves the Freaking Awesome rating for the week by itself (a week sorely in need of a Freaking Awesome improvement, in case you didn't know):



It's a clip from the new Batman: Gotham Knight DVD that will be released on July 8 and will be in my DVD player shortly afterward, assuming I get away with my plan to call out sick from work that day with a case of the joe chills. It's six animated shorts that take place in the gap between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, written by some pretty big deal screenwriters (including Josh Olson, who wrote A History of Violence) and put together by anime directors. Very similar to the whole Animatrix thing, though hopefully it hypes up, um, a good movie and not an overly convoluted and unsatisfying sequel.

(WARNING: MAJOR FANBOY-GASM AHEAD)
The best part about this DVD is that Batman is voiced again by Kevin Conroy, the man who I will proudly argue here is the best actor to be attached to the Caped Crusader. Conroy helmed the Batmouth for an impressive 14 years through every incarnation of the Batman animated series, right up through the recent Justice League series. His voice has the appropriate range of bubbly bachelorism needed for playboy Bruce Wayne to the angry gruff growl needed to surge fear through the cowl, a spectrum neither Michael Keaton nor Christian Bale ever achieved (Bale, who is a very good Batman, don't get me wrong, sounds more like he's growling through a dirty sock when he's Bat-voicing).

They brought in a different bat voice for the new DVD release Justice League: The New Frontier, and it didn't click. It was like hearing your older brother try to do Bruce Willis' voice. Oh, and the guy they brought in? Jeremy Sisto, who you might remember as Elliot from Clueless. Roll with the homeys on out of here, please.

Conroy was also part of what many critics (not just geeky fanboys with blogs) consider the single best Batman movie made, 1993's Mask of the Phantasm. "But, that's an animated movie!" you say, fingers stuck to your mouse in horrified disbelief. Yeah, an animated movie with heart, not to mention mystery and intrigue and some damn fine acting to boot. It's practically a tear jerker by the end. That movie captured the essence of the tortured, conflicted nature of Batman, while Joel Schumacher was in a closet somewhere attaching nipples and codpieces to the Batsuit.

And through all of the animated serieses, Conroy is acting opposite Mark Hamill as the voice of the Joker. What more can you ask for?

Here's what Conroy looks like, and the squareness of his jaw should be enough to convince you to never commit another crime again out of fear for what lurks in the night:



Oh, also, that new animated series The Batman Cartoon Network is campy and terrible. Why do we keep going back and messing with things when they were already successful to begin with? I suspect George Lucas is involved.


PS: Warner Bros, please feel free to send me a free copy of the DVD for the selfless promotion mentioned above.