Favorite Movie Moments of 2006

I don't feel like I saw enough first-run movies this year to be able to confidently make a top-anything list, so, instead, I'll just talk about my favorite moments in the movies this year.

Abigail Breslin and Alan Arkin in Little Miss Sunshine. We're talking the heart of the movie here. Perhaps the best (and unlikeliest?) comedy duo since Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock in Nurse Betty?

Penelope Cruz singing flamenco in Volver. I tend to be really lukewarm on Almodovar (despite which fact, I think I've seen everything he's done since Todo sobre mi madre mainly because Benji likes to bring me along so we can fight afterwards), and, sure enough, I thought Volver was really overrated. Esp. Cruz's pretty much universally lauded performance. But, the few moments when she sings at the restaurant with tears in her eyes is the real deal.

Anything and everything Sacha Baron Cohen touched this year. Yes, including his performance in the otherwise not-my-taste Talladega Nights.

Cameron Diaz's hair in The Holiday. I don't know what movie she was performing in because it certainly wasn't the one I was watching. No matter--her shiny, lustrous perfect shade of champagne blonde hair was so unspeakably beautiful to behold it more than made up for her general lack of character development and successfully held my interest in her plot line even when her acting, um, didn't.

Christian Bale's one-note symphony of a performance in The Prestige. The anonymous commenter to my original post about the flick says Hugh Jackman's performance is superior because he changes. In any other movie, opposite any other actor, I'd be willing to concede the point. But, Bale's sustained monomania is what this movie is about. His psychotic commitment to being right, to being the best, forces him to chisel away at anything that made him human until he's transformed himself into an avatar of his own ideas and theories of magic, until he's a beautiful, noxious flame burning with the fury of self-righteousness and vindication. And, it's even more thrilling because he knows what he's done. He knows that he's trapped himself in a cage of his own devising, and the variations in the "glowering" that he can't prevent from seeping out while he strains with frustration against the bonds of his own creation make him completely pathetic, and the performance absolutely riveting.

Being reminded of why Keanu Reeves belongs in movies in A Scanner Darkly. Somehow the feline elegance of his charisma is allowed to burn more purely when his physical self is abstracted through Linklater's animation technique. I'd never be tempted to defend him as an "actor," but I'm beginning to understand how he's built a career on being used as a vital element of the mise en scene, as the specialest special effect of them all.

Matt Damon in The Departed. Absolutely the best thing I've ever seen him do. There's much to love in this movie (Alec Baldwin commanding all and sundry to fuck themselves, being reminded of just how good DiCaprio--not to mention Scorsese--can be, Mark Wahlberg's hair), but this performance of Damon's has finally lived up to the promise and potential I'd seen in him at least since Good Will Hunting but never felt was completely actualized until now. I get chills thinking about the way he subverts, with such ease and economy, the usual function of that million dollar smile of his when he flashes it, charming as hell, in the first dinner date scene with the psychiatrist. That was the scene that really hooked me into the movie and announced that Damon has officially catapulted himself into the next level as an actor. (Anybody seen The Good Shepherd yet and care to weigh in on his progress?)

The music in Shortbus: the Animal Collective songs, Justin Bond, Scott Matthew, Jay Brannan, the Hungry March Band at the end--I'm getting a little teary-eyed just thinking about all of it. In anyone else's hands, a movie as charming but uneven as this one should have been memorable mostly for all the unsimulated sex and nudity, but JCM's finely honed musical sensibilities somehow create nearly miraculous poignancy out of the chaos without ever slipping into the maudlin. Much like Shortbus the club in the world of the movie, Shortbus the film, imperfect though it may be, manages to sanctify the longing for connection harbored by the misfits and fuckups who come to it with an open, honest heart, while, y'know, humping yr leg.

The actors who universally improve mediocre movies, temporatily redeem bad ones, and provide extra but unlooked for zest to good ones. This year I hail and salute Steve Coogan in Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story and Marie Antoinette, Danny Huston in The Proposition and Marie Antoinette as well, and Stanley Tucci in The Devil Wears Prada. There's really not much that unites them as actors other than their exquisite ease in front of the camera, but that ease is an oasis of good taste for me in the midst of all the over-acting, under-writing, and general actorly attention-grabbing that so often goes on around them. It's not that each of them is not capable of a fair bit of scenery chewing on their own from time to time, but their subtly left-of-center choices, clear respect for the craft, and seeming immunity to hype keep even their boldest performances aligned with the frequency that tickles my brain and delights my imagination.

An early happy new year to you, my kittens! You guys are fucking peaches for sticking with my ramblings, and I look forward to the privilege of being allowed to metaphorically barf all over your computer screens in 2007.

Best Music of 2006

Well, my bebes, as 2006's year-end list-making extravaganza swells to positively orgiastic proportions, I simply cannot withhold the track listing of my third annual best-of mix CD any longer. The physical copies of the disks are slow in coming on account of my lamentable slothiness in getting the liner notes text to Mr. monkey.press for typesetting this month, but, rest assured, they are in the works and will be spectacular. Also, for those of you who have changed mailing addresses in '06, this gives you some extra time to pass the updated info along to me so as to ensure receipt of said disk.

All right. On with it then. Inspired by a conversation I had with CTLA earlier this week, I'll also include hyperlinks, where appropriate/available, to blog posts (and other assorted ephemera) wherein the song, the album, or the band in question is discussed.

I'm calling the comp O Unfathomable Firmament:

1. When You Wasn’t Famous--The Streets
(click for my report on seeing the Streets live at this summer's Intonation Music Festival)

2. We Used to Vacation--Cold War Kids
(click to revisit the play-by-play of my mind being blown after seeing them live for the first time, not to mention the second or third)

3. Province--TV on the Radio
(click for my regret over failing to procure a ticket for their sold-out show at the Metro)

4. Fire Island, AK--The Long Winters
(click for the afterglow of seeing the El-Dubs in concert for the first time in two years or click for the week this track first leaked to the interweb)

5. Déjà Vu--Beyonce, feat. Jay-Z
(it's not my link, but click for the write-up on Green Pea-ness that turned me on to the song in the first place; because I can't stump for him enough, I just have to state for the record that I never attempted to write anything about this song this year because James officially said pretty much everything there is to say about it back in June--please do click through and marvel at the way he matches the energy of B. and Jay's performances on the track with his own performance in pixels)

6. European Oils--Destroyer
(click for the moment I allowed myself to fall completely in love with Destroyer's Rubies)

7. Count Grassi’s Passage Over Piedmont--The Divine Comedy
(click for my review of Victory for the Comic Muse and an early indication that this track would appear on my year-end mix)

8. Ta douleur--Camille
(again, not my links, but click for David Byrne's review of both the Cat Power and Camille shows in NYC this summer or click for the sheer comedy of watching S/FJ go from Camille to Lordi in three sentences)

9. Cowbell--Tapes ’n Tapes
(click for what basically amounts to the blog equivalent of a modest, flirtatious, behind-the-fan geisha-giggle of appreciation for T’nT on the day I first downloaded the album from iTunes)

10. White Collar Boy--Belle and Sebastian
(click for my post-concert reassessment of my entire relationship with Belle and Sebastian's music)

11. Laugh/Love/Fuck--The Coup
(rather than link to my post from earlier this month, click for Boots Riley's more in-depth explanation of what exactly happened during the Coup's nearly fatal bus crash on December 2)

12. Made-Up Lovesong #43--Guillemots
(click for my declaration that listening to this track feels like falling in love or click for a link to the video of the song being performed on Top of the Pops)

13. All the Wine--The National
(click for my post, from almost exactly a year ago, when I first started getting into Alligator or click for my big holy-fuck moment at the Pitchfork Music Festival this summer)

14. Weekend--Aloha
(click to read me wank for a bit, after seeing them live one late-summer Sunday, about the "improbability" of Aloha)

15. Requiem--M. Ward
(not my link, but click for the best sentence I've read about M. Ward since Post-War's August release, the sentence that comes closest to articulating my own sentiments about this nearly perfect album: Sean Moeller's assertion that "Ward turns us all slutty, but slutty in love and that’s somehow something to be so happy about")

16. Party Pit--The Hold Steady
(click for a link to the Pitchfork interview that finds front man Craig Finn, presumably with a straight face, citing his desire for Boys and Girls in America to be "a little more Ang Lee" than Separation Sunday)

17. Kick Push--Lupe Fiasco
(click for the early days of my obsession with this track or click for my casual certainty that "this guy's gonna be huge" after catching a portion of his set at Intonation)

18. Wild Sage--The Mountain Goats
(click for the Mountain Goats post that was so cathartic to write that I pretty much haven't wanted to blog at all since then)

19. Bandits--Midlake
(it's not an internal Wrestling Entropy link, but click for my Audioscrobbler, which claims, credibly, that Midlake's The Trials of Van Occupanther is my second third-most-listened-to album of the year)

20. Sons and Daughters--The Decemberists
(click for the day I didn't receive The Crane Wife in the mail or--perhaps slightly more interestingly--click to read me wax rhapsodic about seeing Colin Meloy play solo again at the beginning of the year)

And there you have it, kittens! Standard hipster fare, to be sure (how many did you guess right, J.Ward?), but it's nonetheless a pretty accurate representation of the stuff that soundtracked my life (or, at very least, my commute) this year. I think a favorite-album top 10 list would probably be overkill at this point, but I will say that Destroyer's Rubies definitely would clock in at number one. It has several things going for it: it debuted early enough in the year to get its hooks in me when I still had a relatively clean mental/musical slate for '06, I didn't get burned out on it after a week of heavy rotation because it was rich enough to sustain repeated listens throughout the year, it had novelty in its favor (I didn't own any of Destroyer's previous albums at that point, and, no, the New Pornos don't count), and I was able to see a good handful of these songs performed live at the Pitchfork Festival. I realize that's all slightly precious, even overly deliberate, criteria, but the mathematics of it feel right. It's still a stunner of an album, one that's still doing a lyrical fan-dance for me, revealing a little bit more of itself to my ears every time I lean in to it with rapt attention.

We've got new Spoon, new Shins, and new National to look forward to in 2007, but it's the previously undiscovered goodies that I'll really be waiting for, without even knowing it.

Treat each other right this weekend, kittens. A happy merry all around.

Music Notes and a Dear, Departed Monster

Squee! There's a new Clientele album in the works! Even though most of their back catalog is available on eMusic, I haven't really explored any of it yet because I'm still pretty stuck on Strange Geometry. It's just such a beautiful collection of songs. I'm not alarmed about the prospect of their doing a "groovy, disco song" at all; it's probably just going to be, like, bouzouki with beats. Sign me up.

"Casino Noel"? Oh, Mikey Skinner. Why are you so effortlessly witty?

The Onion A.V. Club has released their best music of 2006 list, and . . . it locks up pretty neatly with mine. I didn't give Fishscale the fair shake it deserved this year, and Jenny Lewis doesn't really interest me at all, but Midlake, the Hold Steady, the Decemberists--it looks like a typical recently played smart playlist on my iPod!

RIP, Peter Boyle. Everybody Loves Raymond kind of bugs the crap out of me, but it's nearly impossible not to love the "Puttin' on the Ritz" sequence in Young Frankenstein.

The Coup

Chris C. turned me on to the awesome sounds of The Coup earlier this year (their "Laugh/Love/Fuck" from Pick a Bigger Weapon will appear on my year-end best-of mix), and, as many of you may have read on the 'Fork last week, they got into a huge bus crash with touring partner Mr. Lif earlier this month and pretty much lost everything. The rest of their tour, which would have stopped through Chicago last night, has been canceled, and, as professional musicians, that means they will have no way of making a living for the time being. Via S/FJ, I discovered they have a PayPal account now set up to help them defray some of the costs of getting back on their feet. Check their MySpace page for the donation link and for a note from front man Boots Riley about the situation. The proprietress of the House That Entropy Built considers the amount of money she sent a mere pittance in comparison to the great quantity of joy they have brought her this year and wishes these revolutionaries all the best during this challenging time.

Hoboes, Rabbits, and Santa Claus

Get load of the hawt new design at Tiny Mix Tapes.

Are hoboes the new pirates?

The Rabbit is back and full of information about manufacturing humans.

It's been a while since anything has made me laugh as hard as these (via) pictures of kids screaming with fear in the face of Santa Claus. (The humor comes from the same place that got me absolutely hysterical about this last year.)

The P'Fork has hit us with some fantastically great interviews recently. If you haven't done so already, be sure to check out what wonderful things Tom Waits and Craig Finn have to say.

Q: Are We Not Snowmen?

Q: Are We Not Snowmen?
Originally uploaded by wrestlingentropy.

A: We Are Devo!

(Seen on Leland between Rockwell and Western.)