CINEMA EXTRAVAGANZA 2010!!!!!

If you read one post this year....read this.

Ever since I forged my first list in 2002 (handwritten and illegible, with the Count of Monte Cristo coming out on top), one of my greatest and most pathetic pleasures has been the end-of-year ranking of and reflecting upon the films that came into being over the past 12 months. These year is no different, but, before I start with the orgiastic overpraise, I've got one last sentimental nugget for the year that will soon be "last year". It was my first full year of blogging, and, looking back, either my writing improved considerably or my standards for myself have lowered incalculably. Though I'd keep watching and writing about the movies even if I was trapped in an Alaskan teepee with a faulty wireless and no friends, the fact is that its you, faithful nation of readers, the instill in me the drive to do more betterer. How? By simply reading. Thank you. Also, since I'm fairly good friends with damn near everyone who reads this, I'd like to offer my immeasurable thanks for your compassion, loyalty, and, most of all, patience. It's a year that's been rough and rewarding in equal measure, but, thanks to you guys, I felt loved every step of the way. Barbra said it best; "May all your storms be weathered, and all that's good get better." I love you all! Happy New Year.

(Halloween 2010. Alvy Singer.)

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Roger Ebert summed it up best-"it was not a great year for films, but many great films were released." Instead of the deluge of minor masterworks we've had over the past few years, this was a year of almost constant mediocrity, coupled with a few MAJOR heavy-hitters. I'd consider my top 3 choices to be flat-out classics, worthy of the very best TCM marathons. In short, the bad was abundant, but the good was so good that it damn near made it worth enduring all the the shite. And so, without further ado, Cinema Extravaganza 2010....or, the official title;

THE ANNUAL END OF DECEMBER CINEMA EXTRAVAGANZA THAT I EAGERLY AWAIT ALL YEAR INSTEAD OF DOING SOMETHING ATTRACTIVE, PRODUCTIVE, OR SOCIALLY ACCEPTABLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! BYAAAAAAA!!!

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THE BEST FILMS OF 2010:

Runner Up: The Book of Eli

With The Matrix movies in the rearview mirror as the new cinematic decade dawned, we desperately needed a new studio film to shoot us through with adrenaline while serving up a hearty feast for our craniums. The Hughes Brothers, making a slam-bang return after a decade-long hiatus, provided one with this exhilarating ass-whup marathon that doubles as a serious examination of religious corruption. As Denzel Washington's titular character guards the last copy of the Bible on a journey through a brilliantly rendered, contagiously ominous nuclear wasteland, we come to understand the truly dangerous power of misbegotten faith, a concept all too relevant to our Tea Party reality. Before the credits roll there's a possible set-up for a sequel, and for once, I say bring it on.

10. Scott PIlgrim vs. the World

It came off as a guilty pleasure in the trailers, but, to paraphrase Queen Babs, nothin' to be guilty of here; this one's a masterpiece of craft, an invigorating entertainment that tweaks the conventions of event pics while getting you hooked on its Pixie-Stick energy. Michael Cera's turn as a Canadian mensch whose new GF comes with some sword-toting, grudge-bearing baggage centers the film and gives it just the right touch of earnest soulfulness, and, behind the camera, director Edgar Wright matches his boffo work on Shaun of the Dead. Cheeky references to video games, indie bands, and 00's trends abound, but what pumps through this one's veins is an unbridled love of the movies. Plus, it's got the best line of the year by far; "He punched the highlights out of her hair!"

9. 127 Hours

Danny Boyle is as good a manipulator of space as we've ever had work a camera; the guy can make the inside of a toilet into an endless underworld, and an expansive Juhu slum into a straitjacket; thus, the guy was the perfect choice for this true-story thriller about Aron Ralston (James Franco), a hiker forced to cut off his own arm when pinned to the bottom of a crevice by a stray boulder. He conveys the claustrophobia of Aron's cloistered quarters, but also invents wildly evocative imagery to display the emotional expansiveness of his hero's thought process. Franco expertly conveys the complexities of a man in the process of stripping away his own hubris, and Boyle's two ace cinematographers capture the beauty and terror of his surroundings; this is a giant, graceful trust fall between actor and director. As for those ripping the picture because it provides only sideways glances at Mr. Ralston's life prior to the incident, I fart in their general direction; this movie is in no way a biography, but instead something a hundred times more original...a study of what drives the human mind to produce such tremendous amounts of courage.

8. The King's Speech

"Broadly speaking, short words are best, and the old words, when short, are best of all", Winston Churchill once said. I think he'd be proud, then, of this efficient, crowd-pleasing chronicle of his compatriots, which takes a series of simple, done-and-done-again plot points and relays them to us with such consummate sincerity that we feel as if we're seeing them for the first time. Tom Hooper triumphantly told the story of Queen Elizabeth I in one of my favorite television mini-series of all time, and he brings the same attention to detail and utter lack of pretension to the proceedings here. Despite the sturdy ensemble and embarrassment of technical riches, what really makes The King's Speech tick are the scenes between Colin Firth's Duke of York and Geoffrey Rush's Lionel Logue, the Australian actor who helps him undo his speech impediment; their precisely tuned, deeply felt duet is a how-to exhibit for aspiring performers everywhere.

7.The Ghost Writer

After years at work on a succession of solid period dramas, the legendary Roman Polanski is back in thriller mode, but his years in across-the-pond exile have caused him to alter his directorial tone; out is the flickering-neon American seediness evident in Chinatown, and in is a distinctly European shade of gloomy ennui. But it's a change that works wonders for this phenomenally told tale of a biographer (Ewan McGregor) encountering a good deal more trouble than he expected when he signs on to ghost-author the biographer of a controversial politico (Pierce Brosnan, absolutely on fire here). Blending neo-noir with character study, and placing considerable emphasis on the particulars of his dreary setting, the director keeps us so fascinated with the constantly shifting geographical and emotional surroundings that we don't even notice the rug being carefully pulled out from under us; like the motorcyclist that mugs McGregor in the knockout opening minutes of the movie, this one sneaks up on you. Put Polanski's brush with arrest earlier this year out of your mind when experiencing The Ghost Writer, and you'll find an excellent piece of work from a man exhilarated by his artistic freedom.

6.The Social Network

I mean, what can be said about this one that hasn't already been said? Or that I haven't said in my drooling prior post a few months ago? Suffice to say that David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin have taken a single topic and expanded it to encompass our entire modern world, creating a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions and filling it with a cast of across-the-board dynamite soon-to-be-stars. A masterful exploration of who we are and what we are up to in our post-Y2K years.

5. Tiny Furniture

A spiritual successor to The Graduate, imbued with dialogue sharp enough to give Tina Fey an orgasm, this sterling indie flawlessly captures the feeling of interior inertia you get during those sprawled-out, in-between stretches of life. In a world where low-budget films tend to be cutesy exercises in mumblecore narcissism, first-time writer/director Lena Dunham startles with her frankness, particularly in her astoundingly astute rendering of a frayed mother-child dynamic. In her debut, she displays an uncanny cameraman's eye, a poet's ear, and the ceaselessly compassionate heart of a true artist. I didn't trumpet another film harder this year, and I'm proud to say that's the case.

4.Toy Story 3

Don't shank me, but, I think, in our desperation to find quality entertainment in the dog days of perhaps the worst May in movie history, we hailed a helluva cinematic good samaritan as the Messiah. With a repeat viewing, it becomes apparent that TS3 is not quite as good as the first picture, but it's better than the second, and Pixar more than delivers on the glorious promise of emotional maturity and intellectual incisiveness that they made with Up. Slyly playing on our innate connection to toys (hell, to these toys), the picture uses the guise of a fiendishly entertaining prison-break plot to explore the theme of saying goodbye to childhood. By providing a definitive ending to one of the definitive series of our time, Lee Unkrich, John Lasseter and co. remind us of the cathartic value of closure in both our moviegoing and homemaking lives; they also ensure that a generation of kids will be taking as many toys to college as possible.

3. The Fighter

In my life, I have loved exactly three sports films; Hoosiers, Any Given Sunday, and now this stirring smash about a a Boston boxer (Mark Wahlberg) torn between his domineering family and a shot at in-the-ring gold. These movies don't transcend the stereotypes of the genre; they make them irrelevant by putting the focus on the players, not the game, so that by the end we don't just want these people to win one bout; we want them to be happy and healthy for all eternity. David O. Russell has created a layered, lacerating depiction of a twisted, toxically prideful family, while not denying us the snap-crackle-pop electricity of a few damn good fight scenes; he's made a boxing picture that's less about battered bones and more about bruised souls. A flawless, fiercely talented cast sinks their teeth into a feast prepared by a cinematic master chef, and the result is a mainstream marvel for which the word "visceral" was invented.

2. Rabbit Hole

Loss is different for every family, and for every member of that family; it's a simple message, butRabbit Hole relays it with such raw, testifying power that it feels like a tear-stained epiphany. David Lindsay-Abaire has brought his stage drama of the same name (one of my personal favorites) to the screen with none of the typical boxed-in, teleplay feel you often get from adaptations, and John Cameron Mitchell of Hedwig and the Angry Inch fame does a tonal 360, displaying a heretofore unseen knack for shaping serious performances and manipulating a camera with unforced grace. The genius of the picture is its understanding that grief, in any capacity, isn't tidy; instead of using the theme of death as a clothesline on which to hang a plot, it presents us with a series of piercing, vivid, often darkly funny vignettes that probe the mysteries of the human psyche while engaging in an unsentimental celebration of its incomparable strength. As a husband and wife grieving over the four-year-old they lost in a freak accident, Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart, both giving the best and most unaffected performances of their entire careers, anchor the film beautifully, while Dianne Wiest makes a welcome comeback as Kidman's lush of a mother, and Miles Teller breathes a resonant vitality into the demanding role of the teenager who caused the fatal incident. This is a shining example of cinema fulfilling its highest purpose, using all the visual, aural, and emotional resources at its disposal to forge a passionate inquiry into issues that really matter; more to the point, this is probably the best movie ever made about the loss of a child.

And my pick for the BEST FILM OF 2010

is....

is.....

ISSSSSSSSSSS....................

1. Inception

When The Dark Knight hit theaters, it was Woodstock, it was the Super Bowl, it was an all-stops-out event that rode a wave of deafening critical and commercial hosannas all the way to the bank. Looking back, it's not the film we thought it was, and that's not an insult--it's still probably the best superhero film ever made, but those who hailed it as a psychodrama, character study, or post-9-11 parable simply got a bit too excited; the psychological theories bandied about here are well-known to a high schooler, the characters are more or less commendably well-drawncaricatures, and just because the film plugged into America's zeitgeist doesn't mean it diagrammed the country's angst. In short, TDK remains a damn good piece of inventive popcorn entertainment, but I think within a few months we all knew we'd overhyped it just a bit. Inceptionhad the opposite effect; in the minds of many (including this wannabe Yid-critic), it mushroomed from a gotta-see-it-twice hot-months phenom into a bona fide masterpiece that stands as the best science fiction film made in my lifetime.

Christopher Nolan should be lauded for creating a dazzlingly intricate maze the likes of which we've never seen on screen before, but his true triumph lies in creating a string of fully imagined, thrillingly complex characters to comprise his team of dream-thieves; the massive labyrinth of the plot would amount to nothing if we weren't presented with people whom we were willing to follow through it. Make no mistake about it; while the film shines in every regard, from the flawless performances (DiCaprio and Marion Cotillard deserve Oscar attention they sadly won't get) to the seamless special effects, this is Nolan's victory. He's effortlessly straddled the line between bang-bang pulp and thinking-man's prestige, providing an extremely well-done popcorn picture for those who just want their adrenaline fix, and a truly compelling allegory for those who'd like to get their brains into the game, too.

The fact is, when you peel away the bajillions of different dream levels and the fun-house mirror streets and the totems and the Edith Piaf song and the zero-gravity fights, Inception is really about the cinema itself. Filmmakers, much like Dom Cobb and his dream thieves, have the dangerous ability to plant ideas in our heads-through their work, they can exaggerate fantasies about getting the girl, further inflame pre-existing prejudices about beliefs, cultures, and events, or even, in some cases, start entirely new social networks, be they protest groups or midnight-movie clubs.

It's an action movie by Fellini, a philosophical manifesto by John Woo. Ah, fuck the comparisons. It's in a category all too itself. A crackingly good event movie, an accomplished feat of storytelling, an expedition into our intellect, the proof positive that Christopher Nolan will be one of the iconic auteurs of the new millennium, and a cautionary tale that reminds artists of the remarkable power and responsibility that comes with being granted unconditional access to our dreams. BRAAAAAAAAAAAHM!!!!

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Performances of the Year:

Female:

Lead: Hye-Ja Kim, Mother-If 2009 was the year of comedy warhorses like Mo'nique and Sandra Bullock trading wish-upon-a-star escapism for raw (or, in Bullock's case, "raw") naturalism, 2010 found actresses respected for their restraint diving into their inner diva for a series of galvanizing, highly dramatic performances that played like berserk but intricately choreographed tightrope dances, with the dancer never too far away from the precarious flaming pit of parody. Halle Berry, Natalie Portman and Jacki Weaver all hit grand-slams with their unflinching portrayals of women on the verge, but for me, this years standout in the seemingly never-ending parade of dauntless dames was Hye Ja-kim, South Korea's favorite leading lady and star of Boon Jong-Ho's Mother. As the mother of a mentally retarded boy framed for a rare murder in a quiet Korean province, Ja-Kim singlehandedly carries a film often in danger of collapsing under the weight of its self-imposed avant-garde wonkiness. Initially off-putting in its bruising bluntness, the complexity-and, indeed, the genius-of this performance reveals itself as the plot thickens, and by the end of the film we come to know this woman, and to understand her tragedy; the abundance of love that runs through her veins does so not as a virtue, but as a venom.

Supporting: Melissa Leo, The Fighter-Take off your hats folks, and pay your respects to the most underrated actress working in Hollywood today. After years of dynamite work in cable TV (Treme) and indie cinema (Confess, Frozen River), she broke into the mainstream this year with an indelibly truthful, uninhibited performance as the aggressively domineering mother-manager of two Beantown boxers. She takes an often unforgivably barbarous woman and makes us fear, hate, pity, and understand her all at once, showing us buried reserves of jealousy and desperation without ever explaining her actions verbally; rarely have a pair of eyes said so much. Leo: A fitting surname for a woman whose feral intensity, unwavering self-possession, and guileless emotional honesty have catapulted her to commercial success at last, and had damn well better send her to the Kodak stage this Oscar season.

Male:

Lead: Jesse Eisenberg,The Social Network-Portraying detachment ain't easy. You have to give off the impression of a person who's constructed a dam around their soul, yet also convey to us the magnitude of what's building up behind it. Eisenberg finds just the right note of icy dissonance here, firing shrapnel from the corners of his slackened mouth, but letting hangdog hurt and childish neediness leak out of his eyes. In its very lack of hugeness, it is monumental.

Supporting: Christian Bale, The Fighter-Ever since his apocalyptic Terminator freak-out, we all knew there was a volcanic mania in Bale, waiting patiently to erupt; here, playing a washed-up pugilist and cocaine addict, he puts his inbred craziness to work, exuding a nervous energy that really sears the screen. This is such a committed, crackling portrayal that you half-expect the character to be panhandling on the street when you walk out of the theatre. It's a performance that hinges around the infinite subtleties of human body language; when his character experiences a major epiphany, notice how he responds not with words, but with movement, and how that movement is so clear and certain and true that it's as if he'd just let loose with a five-page monologue. There's no surer thing at the Oscars this year.

Director:

Danny Boyle, 127 Hours-Most films seem made; Danny Boyle's work appears to spontaneously spew out from the depths of his giddy, unchained imagination, rarely moreso than in his latest creative output. While his qualifications are perfect for adapting the Aron Ralston story, what helps him bring a possibly cliche incident successfully to the silver screen is what he lacks: any hint of lugubriousness or self-consciousness, and a fear of substantial risk-taking.

Cinematographer:

Matthew Libatique, Black Swan-Ever since Requiem For A Dream, Darren Aronofsky's been fascinated with the demands the human psyche impinges on the body in its ill-advised quest for perfection, and here, ace lenser Libatique mounts of army of handheld cameras to serve his director's vision. Diving, ducking, and bobbing around the dancers with the kind of wiry intensity generally reserved for action pictures, he reminds us that, while ballet is all lotus-blossom grace on the outside, it's also an internal inferno, with each stretch of the ligament and arch of the bone nothing less than a small, hard-won miracle.

Score:

Trent Reznor, The Social Network-Steiner and Tiomkin would roll over in their graves if they heard these cuts, all heavy on electronic instrumentation and light on propulsive dramatic energy. But, in the context of the movie, Reznor's work, especially the spare, six-note piano melody that serves as the movie's central motif, is just right; brilliant, beautiful, sad, and slightly removed...just like The Social Network's haunted, haunting anti-hero.

Screenplay:

Aaron Sorkin, The Social Network-Yes, there's an unusual verbal fecundity to be found in this screenplay-you almost wonder if the characters have to speak so fast so that they can fit all these great lines in-but the screenwriter never once mistakes quantity for quality, letting loose when needed but also well aware of the infinite value of silence and simplicity; for me, the most affecting, unforgettable line in the picture is a mere two words long; "It's raining." Because of Sorkin's conductor's sense of energy, tension, noise, release, rhythm and motion, this line, and every other one big or small, sings.

Filmic Fails:

Alice in Wonderland-This joins Nine and the last two Ocean's flicks as one of the great missed opportunities of the new millennium. But while those movies sputtered shamefully to the finish line by making use of their few precious joules of star wattage, this shoulda-been-great melding of Lewis Caroll and Tim Burton's psycho psyches is dead in the water from scene one, thanks to its oppressively gloomy production design, half-assed attempts at Narnia-esque sword n' shield banging, and shockingly dim-witted script, which strips the story of all its ubiquitous prepubescent awe by warping the titular character into a sexually frustrated, chronically whiny china-doll teen. Day by day I hate it more, so much so that I wrote a detailed deconstruction of the thing as one of my college essays.

I Am Love-Look up pretension in the dictionary and you'll find either some pictures of certain people from my synagogue or the post for this arsty-fartsy mess. Best known around Hollywood as Tilda Swinton's pet project (she produces and stars), I Am Love makes an appallingly shabby attempt to camouflage a soapy wreck of a story (woman discovers daughter is a lesbian, starts experimenting herself) with ardently extravagant photography, ritzy wardrobes, and the most obnoxious music this side of Bjork's worst releases. At least in between the almost comically random lingering shots of food, facial expressions, furniture, shop windows, and foliage, the filmmakers manage to sprinkle in a couple of lengthy sex scenes; incompetently photographed, yes, but they keep you awake.

2, 4, 6, 8, This Is How We Overrate:

The Kids Are All Right-Look, I have absolutely nothing against homosexuality-Jesus, this is the guy who picked Brokeback Mountain as the best film of the past 10 years! But I'm no fan of this wife-and-wife domestic dramedy; here's a film that takes slightly above average material, salts it with liberal doses of topicality, and then demands that we love it. The cast is uniformly strong (Bening's radiant lionness-in-early-winter work indeed merits a little awards attention), but whatever work they do is in service of a fundamentally flawed script; for two hours, the movie hammers home the legitimate but ball-numbingly obvious message that same-sex partners deal with marital strife, too. The kids are all right, I suppose, but, in this case, the buzz is all wrong.

Never Let Me Go-A true disappointment for a Mark Romanek fan like myself, this underwritten and overdirected sci-fi adaptation about three youngsters swapping beds and shedding tears in the aftermath of a life-limiting, world-widening discovery slathers author Kazuo Ishiguro's simple prose with a generous and wholly unnecessary glaze of arthouse pretension; too often this picture uses ambient music and designed to the nth-degree camera angles to disguise gaping holes in character development and simple logic. Only Carey Mulligan prevails, taking the few grace notes afforded her in the role and whipping up a virtuoso's symphony of keening loneliness and hot-blooded confusion; too little, too late.

Won't You Please Remember Me?:

It's Kind of A Funny Story-Cliches are a bit like Liza Minelli; marry them to the right people and they can really work. In that vein, any wrung-out platitude or fatigued plot point should plotz with gratitude to land in the able hands of Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, who have speedily established a solid reputation for successfully making the old new again, and do so once again with this refreshingly unprepossessing chronicle of blossoming teen-luv in an asylum. Everything from the performances to the score to the look of the thing is pleasingly understated yet carefully designed, and even if the darker aspects of the story are occasionally subject to some unsavory PG-13-ification, the emotions that are on display are as real as it gets.

Poster of the Year

Trend of the Year: Leo's Relationship Fails (SPOILERFEST!)

Let us recount; after marrying a manic depressive mess in 2008's Revolutionary Road, he got hitched to a deranged child-killer in Shutter Island, followed by a suicidal dream-temptress inInception. At least he outlived his beloveds in his most recent go-rounds-remember, Jack Dawson wasn't so lucky. Plus, things are looking up for L-D-Cap. As the titular character in The Great Gatsby, he finally nets his true love....oh....wait.....

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Questions? Comments? Fury that Burlesque didn't make an appearance on my list? Comment away. Hell, make a list of your own. Sayonara, my friends. And onward to 2011!

10 from '10: Moments

These last two weeks of the year provide a multitude of opportunities for me to let my drooly sentimentality and migraine-inducing writerly energy run rampant and unchecked. No, this article isn't about the moviefilms, which will get some supreme lovin' next week, when I post my ANNUAL END OF DECEMBER CINEMA EXTRAVAGANZA THAT I EAGERLY AWAIT ALL YEAR INSTEAD OF DOING SOMETHING ATTRACTIVE, PRODUCTIVE, OR SOCIALLY ACCEPTABLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! BYAAAAAAA!!!

However, this post is less about evaluating the merits of Jesse Eisenberg or discussing the budding career of that renaissance boi, Biebs. No pop culture here; this post is about ten moments, big and small that I was a part of this year. I do this mainly for myself, so that, when I'm 80, drooling, still unmarried, and coping with the knowledge that I did indeed outlive Barbra Streisand, I'll be able to recall the details of the madness that was my childhood. This one's also about gratitude. If I write six paragraphs thanking a man I've never met for a movie he doesn't even know I've seen (ohai, Woodmeister), the least I can do is throw some metaphorical roses to those who've impacted my life in a more immediate way. Here goes:

10 Misty Water-Colored Memories:
10. Dead And Alive: Playing the paterfamilias wouldn't seem to be my cup of tea, but I was nonetheless cast as a distinguished gray in my school's production of Frankenstein. As Papa Frankenstein, I outlived my son, so we blocked the entire show as a flashback through my old-fart eyes, with me ruffling through my kid's diaries, lab reports, baby books, etc. That was when I realized something; though the script didn't say the words "Herr Frankenstein dies", I did in fact spend the final scene unconscious. In a burning building. Alone. I went up to our director, and kindly informed him that, unless someone had called the fire brigade, I was, in fact, quite dead. He furrowed his brow, straightened his tie, and said; "Let me think....no, you're fine. NO. Wait. Yeah. You're dead. We need to adjust your blocking accordingly." Only in the theatre, kids.

9. Welcome to the War Room: Infuriated that Blockbuster didn't have a copy of Kick-Ass (later I found out this was because that film didn't hit shelves for another 8 weeks), I picked up this Kubrick masterpiece on a lark. I planned to watch a short snippet to see if I liked what I saw, then write an essay. Needless to say, the Microsoft Word cursor had to hold the phone for two glorious hours, while Merkin Muffley, Buck Turgidson, and the good Doctor himself (heil!) did a tap dance on my funny bone and a dizzying waltz around my psyche. An exhilarating experience that reminded me why I love the movies.

8. Shalom, Sayonara: Hanukkah's always been an odd holiday for me; we've never been able to convince our Baptist half of the family to sit around the Menorah, our brothers and sisters in Streisand have their own holiday plans, and the few temple-goers I keep in touch with are solid acquaintances, nothing more. This year, I made a radical decision; invite some Catholic school kids to a night of Dreidel spinning, Latke munching, and, apparently, shimmying and shaking to the early hits of the Beatles. I was initially ambivalent about the idea (as was Mama Walker), but I ultimately saw just how perfect it was; in a life that's been all about the mastery of blending beliefs (have you met my family?), exposing a couple Christmas-light hangers to my religious tradition was the perfect way to say goodbye to my Hanukkahs at home.

7. Caffeine Scene-I am at Cindi's. I am tired and delusional after a long day at school. On a whim, I order coffee for the first time in my life. An eternal love affair begins. Speaking of coffee shop nights...

6. A Special Kind of People...: At the risk of sounding conceited, I guess I should probably tell you that I was the first person in the state of Texas to play the role of Lt. Frank Cioffi, one of the most demanding ever penned for a Kander-and-Ebb musicals, in my school's production of Curtains. The part itself? Looking back, I cringe at the realization of how much I overplayed it all, though I am proud of certain individual moments (my last scene with Belling, that vein-popping, mile-a-minute final monologue that ties the show together), but there are still two things I'll value about this show forever. There's the boys dressing room, by far the most fun of any I've ever called home for two hours every night; in addition to the brolicious camaraderie, they was a genuine and overwhelming love for showbiz, summed up best by our ritualistic pre-show hoedown to the Chicago soundtrack each night. But for me, the real thrill of the show was that, because the chorus was onstage 98% of the time, and I was onstage 99%, in a roundabout way, I got to play opposite every single one of my castmates. It's a privilege I'll be eternally grateful for; "I miss the music", indeed.

5. Lessons to Be Learned: So we're at Jew-party (oxymoron much?), and a few of my parents friends decide to ride the pretension horse, culminating in a lengthy discussion about Marxist philosophy and legal mumbo-jumbo that wasn't exactly welcome territory for an insurance-man-turned-photographer and florist-turned-schoolteacher. I felt awful for both my parents, who were basically put out to sea while a bunch of lawyers and doctors talked shop. Does all that bother you?, I asked Papa Walker on the way home. 'They know more than I do when it comes to those topics", he said. "I know more than they do about, say, how to light someone or airbrush a blemish. That's just how it goes." Yet another reminder of the thing I admire most about my father, a quality I hope to imbibe by proximity; his ability to marry unshakable confidence with refreshing unpretentiousness.

4. State Fail: Another parental memory. We're in rural Ohio, mid-CollegeQuest 2010. My appointment with the Oberlin admissions staff is it 9:15. It is 9:10. The rickety rental Oldsmobile is galumphing down the asphalt. My dad is eating a banana while steering with one hand, his go-to late-for-an-important-date food choice. He's giving the gas pedal some pretty generous love. My mom is huffing while slapping him on the shoulder repeatedly, my personal favorite of her many nervous habits. Somewhere in this Dante's Inferno of a morning, a cop pulled us over for doing 80 in a 60. "Let me see your license", he asks. My dad pulls it out. The cop looks it over. "Oh. From Texas, I see?" "Yes." "Ya'll drive like idiots down there. You don't know no better. Keep driving, but drive like the rest of America does, 'kay?" Truth=stranger than fiction.

3. The Magic Schoolbus: I can't describe this bus ride, nor do I remember much of it-you'd think I'd been drinking heavily or something. What I can say is that in the 4 hours it took a small group of my theatre friends and I to get from our competition in Austin back to Dallas, something happened. Something besides faux-sexting competition, Queen sing-offs, heart-to-hearts, and sight-seeing ("adult video store on the left!"). The quiet, crucial realization that we'd never get tired of each other. Nothing terribly important happened externally on that bus. But I think, in the time it took us to sail from the Capital City to Le Big D, we all realized that we'd formed bonds that'd last well beyond graduation day.

2. The Good, The Bad, and the Prop Guns: Ah, Seven Keys to Baldpate. Dickens sums it up: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." It was a nightmarish rehearsal process and demanding run, filled with prop malfunctions (murders are hard to commit with faulty guns), offstage catfighting, and almost supernaturally difficult blocking. It was a hugely gratifying show when we got it right, and the last couple of shows, we really got it right. It provided me with a role in which I never felt entirely comfortable. It provided me with a set of requirements that uncorked a slimier, more sinister side of me that I didn't know I could convey onstage. It seriously swayed my opinions of some. It was a merciless maelstrom of a piece that did something miraculous; it took an indescribably close group of people and made them even closer. From people I already considered my best friends, I found new reserves of compassion, integrity, and energy as we faced seemingly insurmountable odds. One of life's unique pleasures, and one this show provided in spades, is getting to know people better and, instead of uncovering flaws, finding even more to like.

1. The Jew's Speech: All false modesty aside, I honestly didn't think my senior retreat speech would go over very well. I mean, I wrote it in three hours on Yom Kippur Eve after listening to a sermon about Yehuda Amichai and feeling a faint lightbulb go off in the outskirts of my manbrain. I knew I'd hit something with that final line ("Boy Meets World" never goes out of style), but the rest looked like motivational mush to me. Imagine my surprise at the standing ovation(s). I won an award in front of the entire school earlier this year, but someone, this outpouring of love felt a hundred times more organic and a thousand times more enthusiastic. I hope I vomited a little love back, and that that vomit reached further than the front row. I'd laid a lot bare-my initial transfer-kid discomfort, my crazed religious heritage, and, potentially worst of all, my tear-stained gratitude to all those who inhabit the square footage known as the arts hallway. It's not hyperbole when I say that these people saved me, and I wanted to let that entire room know. For all of this unmanly mess to be greeted with resounding applause turbocharged my confidence as a writer, student, and human being. I am who I am. And apparently that's not such a bad thing. Building a speech around quotes was a willfully wacky idea, a rhetorical stone's throw. The ripples from that stone's throw resound to this day-I've formed at least eight major friendships as a result of comments I received about The Speech. Yet another quote sums it up best;
"Only connect."-EM Forster.
QUOTE OF THE YEAR:
"I will not wait to love as best as I can. We thought we were young and that there would be time to love well sometime in the future. This is a terrible way to think. It is no way to live, to wait to love."-Dave Eggers

10 from '10: Muzeek

For someone like me, who would gladly make a list at the drop of the hat (followed by a list of my favorite dropped hats), December truly is the most wonderful time of the year. Not because of communal outpouring of love and charity and stomach cramps and all that, but because we're at another marking period on the cultural calendar; it's time to put the artistic year in perspective, to look back upon what worked, what didn't, and what featured "and starring Cher" in the end credits. We begin with a look at this year's musical output. Now let's make one thing clear; though I'm a pretty decent singer, I can't tell a fermata from a frittata, so I'm eschewing any technical analysis when reviewing the works listed below. Instead, when choosing my 10 Favorite Albums from 2010, I looked for music that refused to let me be impartial; that, through some mixture of rhythm, melody, lyric, phrasing, production, and flat-out creative chutzpah got me out of my seat and into the game, stroking my figurative beard in deep-thought, wiping tears from eyes, or whipping my hair back and forth with youthful abandon. May this list also serve as a sizable helping of middle-finger to those who have my musical tastes pinned down to Barbra Streisand and her only equal, Barbra Streisand. I like that music them youngsters listen to as well. Plus, Barbra didn't release any new work this year.....bitches and hoes. Bitches and hoes. Anywho...

MAH TEN FAV'RIT ALBUMZ OF TWENNY TEN AH!!!:

10. Drake, Thank Me Later-Here's proof positive that you can blend hip-hop and bubblegum pop without dulling your aural edge. Thank Me Later is a rap album refreshingly free of anger and heavy-handed misogyny, one that presents its creator as a suave fly-by-nighter (the crushed-velvet synths of "Karaoke", the Prince-esque earnestness of "Find Your Love), albeit one with a dark side that rears its gloriously anarchic head in cuts like the sober-faced Nicki Minaj duet "Up All Night" and the inarguable highlight of the album, "Over", where Drake layers his partied-out paranoia over a thundering snare sample. The result is, like the rest of the album, both a product of and a good-natured jab at the world of hip-hop post-Hova."Karaoke"

9.Raya Yarbrough, December Songs-If the Raya Yarbrough that shows up on this sophomore effort isn't the stunning jazz songwriter showcased on her self-titled 2007 debut, that's a caveat I'm willing to dismiss when faced with such tremendous evidence of her skills as an ace interpreter. That silken voice soars on lushly rendered standards like "Midnight Sun" and "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas", and she shows off a newfound knack for cunning orchestration, placing 70's folk chestnut "River" and Danny Elfman curio "Sally's Song" in torch-ballad settings with resounding success. My advice to this burgeoning songbird: do what you're doing, only more often!

8. Robyn, Body Talk-If Stieg Larsson was Sweden's answer to Stephen King, Robyn is their resounding reply to all Americans going gaga over Gaga. All dancefloor requirements are more than satisfied; the beats are frequent and fat enough to tear through speakers, the choruses are unshakable, and every lyric is delivered in a teasing purr that all but sanctions prom-night hookups. Still, what makes the album stick is it's special dollop of darkness, the distinctly European melancholy present in spurned-sweet-pea anthems like "Dancing On My Own" and "Love Kills".

7.The National, High Violet-Unlike the above record, this is not a set of songs that begs to be blasted over a stereo. It's a sonically intoxicating set of buzzy, angular musical tone poems best appreciated when you're stewing in a dark room with your eyes closed and your headphones on (think Leonard Cohen, plugged in but mellowed out). Uberfans may fall victim to overpraise (one iTunes reviewer notes that "If a sphere were a sound, it would sound like this"....sweet life), but underestimating this consistently brilliant, wholly original group would be a much greater mistake, indeed. "Terrible Love"

6. Kanye West, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy-Separating the man from the music is damn near impossible, especially on this sprawling album, where Kanye veers with whiplash intensity from ruthless self-flagellation to boozy boasts and back again. This one lacks the tight, one-grand-slam-after-another feeling of Late Registration. However, if that was his Abbey Road, this is his White Album, a melodically adventurous, dizzingly diverse, ideologically robust, occasionally overindulgent reminder of the fact that, for all his behavior both erratic and erotic, we keep returning to his work because, in terms of flow, of force, of sheer lyrical fire, Kanye's the greatest talent in his chosen genre today; to paraphrase the album's strongest cut, "no one man should have this much power."

5. Anthony D'Amato, Down Wires-Remember what a ramshackle riot Bob Dylan's first few albums were? How the guy penetrated the patriotic put-ons of our swiftly changing country and the nooks and crannies of his own aching heart with just a guitar, a harmonica, and an abundance of vicious verbosity-and seemed to be having a hella good time doing it? Well, some of the work on this compendium of socially conscious blues-rock rave-ups ("Ballad of the Undecided" and "Never Grow Old") is so great it actually approaches that same cathartic peak of ragged, throaty energy.

4. Local Natives, Gorilla Manor-If Fleet Foxes, David Byrne and George Harrison banded together and blessed us with a musical lovechild, the result would sound something like Gorilla Manor, an ebullient hybrid of angsty indie and jubilant Afropop that, before it is anything else, is an extremely generous helping of ear-candy. Nothing dissonant, spacey, or inaccessible to be found here-the hooks are clean and catchy, the harmonies subdued and sweet, and the lyrics endearingly cheeky ("Memory tells me that these times are worth working for..."). Some albums go notoriously well with addictive substances; this one is it's own addictive substance. "Airplanes"

3. Peter Gabriel, Scratch My Back-Truly great songs sound as if they've been around forever. That was clearly the former Genesis singer's rationale when he was creating this esoteric but highly emotional collection of indie covers (Arcade Fire, Talking Heads) set to classical chamber orchestrations. The highly traditional presentation of these songs allows us to the heretofore unavailable privilege to experience Gabriel as a vocal interpreter instead of a pop performer; his voice, while not as supple as it once was, still drips with a deeply affecting mixture of vulnerability and hope, particularly in a surging version of Bon Iver's "Flume" that happens to be the only standalone track released this year that moved me to tears.

2. Aloe Blacc, Good Things-Ever since Amy Winehouse hit the charts, everyone and their cousin Vinny has been at work on a good ol' fashioned album of R&B. But Soul with a capital S is a unique quality you can't manufacture, so few of these efforts have really hit the spot. Blacc's prophetically titled debut is the exception to the rule, a traditionalist triumph that's as warm and satisfying as a plate full of soul food; wah-wah-meets-big-brass anthems like "I Need A Dollar" and "Hey Brother" would fit in effortlessly on an R&B compilation with the likes of Bill Withers and Marvin Gaye.

1. Anais Mitchell w/guests, Hadestown-If you read my blog on a regular basis, you've already seen me spill my love and my ink over Anais Mitchell's knockout concept album that re-tells the Orpheus legend against the volatile backdrop of Depression-era Lousiana. Suffice to say that Mitchell's the best songwriter of her generation, and guest artists like Ani DiFranco and Bon Iver invest her mystical, musing lyrics with every ounce of urgency they deserve. Worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as concept greats like Dark Side of the Moon and Sgt'. Pepper's, this boundary-bursting concoction is part zydeco, part folk, part rock, part soul, and all heart. Like all great albums, it takes you places. "Wedding Song"