"Gifts"

See the dance (lite) mix at the side. Probably two more to come.

With two $25 Borders (ie Amazon) gift cards, which must be used separately (inspiring the purchase of a $2.99 paperback to replace shipping costs), here is what I'm thinking.

• VA: Tectonic Plates
• All the King's Men or Fifth Business


• Michael Mayer: Immer
• Espers: II

Sadly, I can't order any of these until I have a new permanent address, since each shipment would probably take at least 4 weeks to be delivered, due to the import CDs.

Music 2006

One mix posted in the sidebar, three more to come.

LPs

UNQUESTIONABLY GREAT

Burial: Burial [Hyperdub]
Fujiya & Miyagi: Transparent Things [Tirk]
Junior Boys: So This Is Goodbye [Domino]
LCD Soundsystem: 45:33 [Nike+?]
Lindstrøm: It's a Feedelity Affair [Smalltown Supersound]
Six Organs of Admittance: The Sun Awakens [Drag City]
Thom Yorke: The Eraser [XL]
VA: Total 7 [Kompakt]

MIGHT BE GREAT, DON'T KNOW YET

Booka Shade: Movements [Get Physical]
Tim Hecker: Harmony in Ultraviolet [Kranky]
Jan Jelinek: Tierbeobachtungen [~scape]
Kode 9 and the Spaceape: Memories of the Future [Hyperdub]
Mylo: Destroy Rock & Roll [RCA]
Joanna Newsom: Ys [Drag City]
The Pipettes: We Are the Pipettes [Memphis Industries]
The Rapture: Pieces of the People We Love [Universal]
John Tejada: Cleaning Sounds Is a Filthy Business [Palette]
TV on the Radio: Return to Cookie Mountain [Interscope]
Keith Fullerton Whitman: Lisbon [Kranky]
Yo La Tengo: I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass [Matador]

REALLY NICE

Ellen Allien & Apparat: Orchestra of Bubbles [BPitch Control]
Klimek: Music to Fall Asleep [Kompakt]
Loscil: Plume [Kranky]
The Rapture: Pieces of the People We Love [Universal]
The Thermals: The Body, The Blood, The Machine [Sub Pop]

RESPECTED MORE THAN LOVED

Ellen Allien & Apparat: Orchestra of Bubbles [BPitch Control]
Grizzly Bear: Yellow House [Warp]
Tim Hecker: Harmony in Ultraviolet [Kranky]
Matmos: The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast [Matador]
TV on the Radio: Return to Cookie Mountain [Interscope]
Keith Fullerton Whitman: Lisbon [Kranky]
VA: Superloooongevity [Perlon]

COMMENTS

Three of the top eight are technically singles compilations, but they feel cohesive enough. I haven't been able to listen to the Junior Boys album for a few months after playing it once too often in August/September. The LCD Soundsystem entry may or may not be an album, but whatever.

Tim Hecker's Harmony in Ultraviolet fits in the "ambient" category but is not pleasant at a low volume. It's not a nice addition to your aural environment, but is great when it's loud enough to create its own space. I think the Keith Fullerton Whitman record might be in the same category. Klimek and Loscil are much more easy to love. That Mylo record has been out in the rest of the world forever, but apparently just got released here this year. It reminds me of the instant gratification of, say, Daft Punk.

"Great," of course, means great according to how much I enjoy it.

Notes on other records: I couldn't be bothered to pay much attention to yet another Bob Dylan album. Camera Obscura could have been on one list or another, but didn't fit my mood all that well this year. I'll probably keep "The Crane Wife, Pts. 1-3" and ignore the rest of that Decemberists album. I just got into Hot Chip's first album at work, and really love it, but I don't like The Warning nearly as much. Silent Shout might eventually worm its way into my brain, but some of it really grates on me. It certainly seems to be one of the few huge electronic crossover records this year, but I only enjoy about half of it. I thought I liked the new Mountain Goats at first, and then realized that I didn't at all. In another year (say, 2004) I think the Pipettes record could have been #1, but I'm not quite as excited about that particular type of music right now, at least apart from "Pull Shapes." The Thermals might be higher except that this guy at work played them at very high volume on his headphones multiple times a day for weeks, after which point I can't even stand to think about the music anymore.

I've seen Ricardo Villalobos's Achso on a few lists, and it was released at the very end of 2005, so I suppose it deserves a mention. It would certainly be in the top rank.

Other stuff I haven't listened to much yet: AFX Chosen Lords, Espers II, Jeff Samuel Step, Skatebaard Midnight Magic, Alex Smoke Paradolia, VA Tectonic Plates.

MIXES

Doodlebug: Doodledub
Four Tet: DJ Kicks
Andy Kellman: 061014
Sami Koivikko: Live @ Flash / Rose Garden, Helsinki 30.3.2006
Magda: She's a Dancing Machine

Andy Kellman has can do no wrong with his mixes, and apparently just posted two more this month!

Would like to hear: Cassy Panoramabar 01, Luciano Sci.Fi.Hi.Fi., Vol. 2, Alex Smoke Sci.Fi.Hi.Fi., Vol. 3.

SINGLES

These either aren't on a full-length I heard this year, or they really stand out to me in some way in relation to the other stuff on the album.

Alex Smoke "Snider" [Soma]
Band of Horses "The Funeral" [Sub Pop]
Booka Shade "In White Rooms (Elektrochemie Remix)" [Get Physical]
Delia Gonzalez & Gavin Russom "Relevee (Carl Craig Remix)" [DFA]
DJ Copy "Emotions" [CD-R]
DJ Khaled "Holla at Me" [Koch]
Escort "Love in Indigo (Extended)" [Escort]
Fedde le Grand "Put Your Hands Up for Detroit" [Ultra]
The Field "Over the Ice" [Kompakt]
Fujiya & Miyagi "Collarbone" [Tirk]
Giorgio Moroder "Utopia (Todd Terje Edit)" [Unreleased]
Gnarls Barkley "Crazy" [Warner]
The Gossip "Standing in the Way of Control (Playgroup Remix)" [Back Yard]
Hot Chip "And I Was a Boy from School (Original or Erol Alkan's Extended Re-work)" [DFA]
John Tejada "The End of It All" [Palette]
Justice "Waters of Nazareth (Erol Alkan's Dur Dur Durrr Re-Edit)" [Vice]
Justin Timberlake "My Love" [Jive/Zomba]
Kalabrese "Skamel" [Perlon]
Kode 9 and the Spaceape "Glass" [Hyperdub]
Lindstrøm "Another Station (Todd Terje Remix)" [Eskimo]
Thomas Melchior & Luciano "Solomon's Prayer/Father" [Cadenza]
Mobius Band "The Loving Sounds of Static (Junior Boys Remix)" [Ghostly]
Nelly Furtado "Promiscuous" [Geffen]
Peter Bjorn & John "Young Folks" [V2]
The Pipettes "Pull Shapes" [Memphis Industries]
The Rapture "Get Myself Into It" [Universal]
Rick Ross "Hustlin'" [Def Jam]
SCSI-9 "When She Said Goodbye" [Kompakt]
Shit Robot "Triumph" [DFA]
Simian Mobile Disco "Hustler" [Kitsuné]
Skatebaard "Data Italia" [Digitalo]
Spank Rock "Sweet Talk" [Big Dada]
Susanna and the Magical Orchestra "Love Will Tear Us Apart" [Rune Grammofon]
T.I. "What You Know" [Atlantic]
Tiga "Far From Home (DFA Remix)" [DFA]
TV on the Radio "Wolf Like Me" [Interscope]
X-Press 2 "Kill 100 (Carl Craig Remix)" [Skint]
Thom Yorke "Atoms for Peace" [XL]

OLDER STUFF

Booka Shade "Mandarine Girl" [Get Physical, 2005]
The Clientele: Strange Geometry [Merge, 2005]
International Pony "Our House" [Columbia, 2005]
Lindstrom "I Feel Space" [Feedelity, 2005]
Prins Thomas "Goettsching" [Full Pupp, 2005]
Skream "Midnight Request Line" [Tempa, 2005]
Todd Terje "Eurodans" [Full Pupp, 2005]
Ricardo Villalobos: For Disco Only 2 [For Disco Only, 2005]
Lady Sovereign, generally
Turner "After Work (Carsten Jost Dial-Remix)" [Ladomat, 2004]
Heiko Voss "I Think About You (DJ Koze Mix)" [Kompakt, 2003]
Ekkehard Ehlers "Plays John Cassavetes" [Staubgold, 2001]
Galaxie 500 "Ceremony" [Rough Trade, 1989]
The Stone Roses: The Stone Roses [Silvertone, 1989]
Gang of Four: Entertainment [EMI, 1979]
Public Image Ltd. "Public Image" [Warner, 1978]

BLOGS, SITES

Simon Reynolds' Blissblog
k-punk
Philip Sherburne
Earplug
TAPE
music (for robots)
KRLX MP3 Blog
the wirewool
sQuare Productions
Discogs
Dissensus Doubtbeat
MySpace
Textura
Wall of Sound: New Stuff in Stock
And, of course, Pitchfork

Film Notes 2006

Well, now that I've posted my copious rankings up here, maybe I can glean some insight. I've already noted that 2006 felt for me like a year of the elliptical, slow, potentially "boring" movie. At least, I personally grew to appreciate that style of filmmaking a lot more. I'm still not a huge Hou Hsiao-hsien fan, but that would seem inevitable in the near future.

Korea (and Asia more generally) was also a big discovery for me this year. That is to say, I'd been hearing about that vigorous national cinema for a while, but I actually got my hands on amazing stuff from Park Chan-wook and Kim Ki-duk this year. I'd seen a fair number of Wong Kar-wai films before, but hadn't been attracted to anything like I was to 2046.

David Bordwell is a great champion of the contemporary Asian cinema, and has probably my favorite blog of any type going right now. His writing on film style, both in the blog and in the book have gotten me watching and thinking about movies differently, especially about editing style, but also choice of aspect ratio, lens, staging, and a lot of other stuff.

Jonathan Rosenbaum is the other major film writer I've discovered this year. Movies as Politics was probably better, but I enjoyed Moving Places a lot as well. He's the first person I've come across who really advocates for filmmakers to engage their audience morally and politically without coming across as a scold; his cinephilia is great enough to accommodate acerbic criticism without sounding simply closed-minded.

Richard Linklater, obviously, is now an obsession for me. I moved beyond the Sunset/Sunrise movies, previously the only things I really enjoyed, and am fascinated by how his auteurist traits manifest themselves in the seemingly disparate projects he works on.

Thankfully, David Cronenberg was fully explicated by Sean Axmaker and the handful of superfans in attendance when I watched Videodrome, my first Cronenberg film, at Experience Music Project. None of the four movies of his I watched this year felt to me absolutely great, but the way they connect via a surreal gruesomeness was special. His experimentalism feels somehow necessary, or at least very in tune with the material in the script he's working with, so departures from reality don't seem forced or overly eccentric. Steven Soderbergh's totally weird Schizopolis, while obviously not a Cronenberg project, slots in nicely here.

I recovered from the weird intimidation of Through a Glass Darkly enough to discover two more unbelievably vital Bergman films

Béla Tarr's work is like an elemental force. I wouldn't argue that every second of Werckmeister Harmonies (145 min.) or Satantango (450 min.) is thrilling, but to create the unique moments in those films and convey certain emotions as he does, duration is key.

Memorable moments:

• Elliott Gould in The Long Goodbye
• The awesome visual spectacle of the orgy in Eyes Wide Shut (no, not that type of spectacle)
• Dennis Weaver looking for the demonic truck driver at the roadhouse in Duel
• The chase across the roofs and the bizarre climax in the mannequin room from Killer's Kiss
• The Coen brothers patenting their weird sort of lighthearted dread in Blood Simple
• The meeting in Shop Around the Corner (of course)
• Bob Saget in The Aristocrats
• The old men in Slacker
• Ryan and Tatum O'Neal in Paper Moon
• That bass hum throughout Innocence
• The sheer black-and-white beauty of Touch of Evil at the Egyptian
• The Northwest Film Forum, generally
• The food/bedtime scene with the aging gangsters in Touchez pas au grisbi
• The look and sound of 2046, not to mention Tony Leung Chiu-wai's moustachioed ladykiller
• The gallows humor of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
• The enthusiasm of the packed house for This Film Is Not Yet Rated, seen from one of the most awkward seats in the balcony of the Egyptian
• The instant messaging in Me and You and Everyone We Know
• Billy Bob Thornton, but maybe even moreso the scumbag kids, in Bad News Bears
• Thom Yorke's "Black Swan" at the end of A Scanner Darkly
• The shock of Oldboy, and rushing out to see Lady Vengeance at the Varsity the next night
• So many things in/about A Prairie Home Companion
• Junebug's rural charm, director Phil Morrison's ludicrous moustache
• The little girl in The White Balloon
• Thelma Ritter in Pickup on South Street
• Sacha Baron-Cohen in Talladega Nights
• William Hurt in A History of Violence, maybe also the "love" scene on the stairs
• Charles Coburn in To Be or Not to Be; also, the scene in which the cattle baron (Eugene Pallette) and his wife have a screaming match, unsuccessfully mediated by the butler, over the comics at Sunday breakfast (specifically, the wife spoiling a major plot point of the Katzenjammer Kids for her husband) is one of the most uproariously funny exchanges ever recorded on film, and the grudging reconciliation with their prodigal daughter immediately afterwards turns it into one of my few absolute favorite scenes ever
• The dance scenes in Werckmeister Harmonies and Satantango; the drunken tango monologue from the latter is also an extremely memorable bit of dramatic comedy
• A lot of things about My Man Godfrey, but esp. Carole Lombard
• Jim Jarmusch's foreigners: Eszter Balint in Stranger Than Paradise, the Japanese couple and Nicoletta Braschi in Mystery Train
• A litany of mostly unprintable and/or indescribable moments in Shortbus
• Hipster soundtracks: Shortbus (esp. the use of Animal Collective), Fast Food Nation, Half Nelson, Stranger Than Fiction, This Film Is Not Yet Rated (Television's "See No Evil" over the closing credits), and of course the as-yet-unseen Marie Antoinette
• The straight romantic comedy bits of Stranger Than Fiction

Films to see next year:

• Inland Empire [Lynch]
• Curse of the Golden Flower [Zhang]
• The Good German [Soderbergh]
• Pan's Labyrinth [Del Toro] NY
• Stuff by Johnnie To
• Stuff by Bong Joon-ho
• Design for Living [Lubitsch]
• Tape [Linklater]
• The Newton Boys [Linklater]
• SubUrbia [Linklater]
• Idiocracy [Judge]
• Clerks II [Smith]
• La Promesse [Dardenne]
• Rosetta [Dardenne]
• The Boss of It All [von Trier]
• Letter from Iwo Jima [Eastwood]
• Still Life [Jia]
• The Queen [Stephen Frears]
• Stage Door [La Cava]
• Persona [Bergman]
• Old Joy [Reichardt]
• Climates [Ceylan]
• What's Up, Doc? [Bogdanovich]
• Ghost Dog [Jarmusch]
• Night on Earth [Jarmusch]
• Permanent Vacation [Jarmusch]
• sex, lies and videotape [Soderbergh]
• Battle in Heaven [Reygadas]
• The Proposition [Hillcoat]
• The Science of Sleep [Gondry]
• Marie Antoinette [Coppola]
• Gabrielle [Chéreau]
• Find Me Guilty [Lumet]
• Keane [Kerrigan]
• Clean, Shaven [Kerrigan]

Films to re-watch next year:

• Waking Life [Linklater]
• Chungking Express [Wong]
• Ashes of Time [Wong]
• Kings and Queen [Desplechin]
• Tokyo Story [Ozu]

Film Lists 2006

NOTE: I included all new movies, as well as all notable old movies. I included no bad movies and some, but not all, of the one-star movies. I also only included previously seen movies if my assessment changed. There may be additions over the last two weeks of the year. The best of certain groups have been bolded.

Best New Movies¹

1. Mutual Appreciation [Andrew Bujalski]
2. L'enfant [Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne]
3. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada [Tommy Lee Jones]
4. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu [Cristi Puiu]
5. Half Nelson [Ryan Fleck]
6. Lady Vengeance [Park Chan-wook]
7. This Film Is Not Yet Rated [Kirby Dick]
8. Shortbus [John Cameron Mitchell]
9. Innocence [Lucile Hadzihalilovic]
10. Why We Fight [Eugene Jarecki]

Other New Movies

• Brick [Rian Johnson]
• Fast Food Nation [Richard Linklater]
• A Scanner Darkly [Richard Linklater]²
• Jonestown [Stanley Nelson]
• Match Point [Woody Allen]
• Volver [Pedro Almodovar]
• A Prairie Home Companion [Robert Altman]
• A Comedy of Power [Claude Chabrol]
• Police Beat [Robinson Devor]
• Flags of Our Fathers [Clint Eastwood]
• Seven Swords [Tsui Hark]
• Three Times [Hou Hsiao-hsien]
• The New World [Terence Malick]
• Capote [Bennett Miller]
• Tristram Shandy [Michael Winterbottom]
---

• The Bridesmaid [Claude Chabrol]
• The Intruder [Claire Denis]
• Stranger than Fiction [Marc Forster]
• Talladega Nights [Adam McKay]
• The Prestige [Christopher Nolan]
• Murderball [Henry Alex Rubin & Dana Shapiro]
• The Departed [Martin Scorsese]
• Maxed Out [James Scurlock]
• Bubble [Steven Soderbergh]
• Transamerica [Duncan Tucker]

Best Old Movies

• My Man Godfrey [Gregory La Cava, 1936]
• Rear Window [Alfred Hitchcock, 1954]
• Touchez pas au grisbi [Jacques Becker, 1956]
• Night and Fog [Alain Resnais, 1956]
• Touch of Evil [Orson Welles, 1958]
• Le Trou [Jacques Becker, 1960]
• Winter Light [Ingmar Bergman, 1962]
• The Last Picture Show [Peter Bogdanovich, 1971]
• The Long Goodbye [Robert Altman, 1973]
• Fanny & Alexander [Ingmar Bergman, 1983]
• Stranger than Paradise [Jim Jarmusch, 1984]
• Slacker [Richard Linklater, 1991]
• Satantango [Bela Tarr, 1994]
• The White Balloon [Jafar Panahi, 1995]
• La Ciénaga [Lucrecia Martel, 2000]
• J.S.A. [Park Chan-wook, 2000]
• Werckmeister Harmonies [Bela Tarr, 2000]
• Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring [Kim Ki-duk, 2003]
• Oldboy [Park Chan-wook, 2003]
• 2046 [Wong Kar-wai, 2004]
• Broken Flowers [Jim Jarmusch, 2005]
• 3-Iron [Kim Ki-duk, 2005]
• Junebug [Phil Morrison, 2005]

Other Old Movies

• Head-On [Fatih Akin, 2004]
• Paper Moon [Peter Bogdanovich, 1973]
• Port of Shadows [Marcel Carné, 1938]
• The Conversation [Francis Ford Coppola, 1974]
• Holiday [George Cukor, 1938]
• Band of Outsiders [Jean-Luc Godard, 1964]
• Mystery Train [Jim Jarmusch, 1989]
• In the Mood for Love [Wong Kar-wai, 2000]
• Where Is the Friend's Home? [Abbas Kiarostami, 1987]
• Harlan County U.S.A. [Barbara Kopple, 1976]
• The Shining [Stanley Kubrick, 1980]
• Vera Drake [Mike Leigh, 2004]
• Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle [Danny Leiner, 2004]
• The Shop Around the Corner [Ernst Lubitsch, 1940]
• Heaven Can Wait [Ernst Lubitsch, 1943]
• Eraserhead [David Lynch, 1977]
• La Jetée [Chris Marker, 1962]
• Le Samourai [Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967]
• Howl's Moving Castle [Hayao Miyazaki, 2004]
• Floating Weeds [Yasujiro Ozu, 1959]
• Oldboy [Park Chan-wook, 2003]
• The Killers [Robert Siodmak, 1946]
• Sunset Boulevard [Billy Wilder, 1950]
• Days of Being Wild [Wong Kar-Wai, 1990]
---

• Blood Simple [Joel and Ethan Coen, 1984]
• A History of Violence [David Cronenberg, 2005]
• Kings and Queen [Arnaud Desplechin, 2005]
• Histoire(s) du Cinema [Jean-Luc Godard, 1997]
• Dazed & Confused [Richard Linklater, 1993]
• The Corporation [Mark Achbar & Jennifer Abbott, 2003]
• The Purple Rose of Cairo [Woody Allen, 1985]
• The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie [Luis Buñuel, 1972]
• Videodrome [David Cronenberg, 1982]
• Dead Ringers [David Cronenberg, 1988]
• Naked Lunch [David Cronenberg, 1991]
• Casablanca [Michael Curtiz, 1942]
• Night and the City [Jules Dassin, 1950]
• Unforgiven [Clint Eastwood, 1992]
• Pickup on South Street [Samuel Fuller, 1952]
• Pierrot le fou [Jean-Luc Godard, 1965]
• Week-End [Jean-Luc Godard, 1967]
• 21 Grams [Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu, 2003]
• Caché [Michael Haneke, 2004]
• Scarface [Howard Hawks, 1932]
• Grizzly Man [Werner Herzog, 2005]
• The 39 Steps [Alfred Hitchcock, 1935]
• Shadow of a Doubt [Alfred Hitchcock, 1942]
• Millennium Mambo [Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2001]
• Dead Man [Jim Jarmusch, 1995]
• Me and You and Everyone We Know [Miranda July, 2005]
• Donnie Darko: The Director's Cut [Richard Kelly, 2001]
• Infernal Affairs [Andrew Lau, 2002]
• To Be or Not to Be [Ernst Lubitsch, 1942]
• Days of Heaven [Terrence Malick, 1978]
• The Awful Truth [Leo McCarey, 1937]
• Charleen [Ross McElwee, 1978]
• Army of Shadows [Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969]
• The Thin Blue Line [Errol Morris, 1988]
• When a Woman Ascends the Stairs [Mikio Naruse, 1960]
• The Story of Floating Weeds [Yasujiro Ozu, 1934]
• Monterey Pop [D.A. Pennebaker, 1968]
• Force of Evil [Abraham Polonsky, 1948]
• The River [Jean Renoir, 1951]
• Schizopolis [Steven Soderbergh, 1996]
• Duel [Steven Spielberg, 1971]
• The Five Obstructions [Lars von Trier, 2004]
• Picnic at Hanging Rock [Peter Weir, 1975]
• Tristram Shandy [Michael Winterbottom, 2005]
• Fallen Angels [Wong Kar-wai, 1995]
• How to Steal a Million [William Wyler, 1966]
• Crumb [Terry Zwigoff, 1994]
---

• Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room [Alex Gibney, 2005]
• Eyes Wide Shut [Stanley Kubrick, 1999]
• The 40 Year-Old Virgin [Judd Apatow, 2005]
• Grosse Pointe Blank [George Armitage, 1997]
• Au Hasard Balthazar [Robert Bresson, 1966]
• The Intruder [Claire Denis, 2004]
• Wedding Crashers [David Dobkin, 2005]
• Days of Wine and Roses [Blake Edwards, 1962]
• Nanook of the North [Robert Flaherty, 1922]
• Nine Lives [Rodrigo Garcia, 2004]
• Every Man for Himself [Jean-Luc Godard, 1979]
• In Praise of Love [Jean-Luc Godard, 2001]
• Crash [Paul Haggis, 2005]
• The Aristocrats [Penn Jillette & Paul Provenza, 2005]
• My Architect [Nathaniel Kahn, 2003]
• The Ice Storm [Ang Lee, 1997]
• It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books [Richard Linklater, 1988]
• Bad News Bears [Richard Linklater, 2005]
• Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me [David Lynch, 1992]
• Sans Soleil [Chris Marker, 1982]
• Backyard [Ross McElwee, 1976]
• Beyond the Valley of the Dolls [Russ Meyer, 1970]
• Vernon, Florida [Errol Morris, 1981]
• Control Room [Jehane Noujaim, 2004]
• Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance [Park Chan-wook, 2002]
• Johnny Guitar [Nicholas Ray, 1954]
• Classe Tous Risques [Claude Sautet, 1960]
• Off the Map [Campbell Scott, 2005]
• Stella Dallas [King Vidor, 1937]

¹I tried to include films that played most or all of their opening theatrical engagement in Seattle in 2006.
²Taken separately, I don't feel either of Richard Linklater's films this year are as good as those in the top ten. As a combined work, though, they certainly deserve some sort of extremely honorable mention.

NBA Statistics

After accidentally sending my laptop's power supply via UPS last Saturday, I finally received it today, so maybe blogging will increase.

Maybe I will have more to add to this post, but at any rate: I noticed Grant Hill on the bench Wednesday night during the Magic/Bobcats game, and asked myself just how often he's on the injured list. Today, after ESPN mentioned that Mo Vaughn got $17 million for not playing in 2004, I looked at Basketball-Reference.com and discovered that Hill has been paid around $76 million by the Orlando Magic for his first six seasons on that team. During that time he's played 135 games. Given his season game average over six years with Detroit (77 per full season played), he has "earned" $43 million per seasons played with the Magic.

MORE: Biggest surprises on the list of the 50 active players with the most career games:

• Jalen Rose: Even though I know he's as old as Webber and Howard, somehow he remains young in my mind.
• Stacey Augmon: I guess I thought he retired but he's just been playing reduced minutes down south since leaving that Portland.
• Jim Jackson has been around for a good while, but I'm always vaguely uncertain that he's still in the league. I don't know why.
• Calbert Cheaney: He played multiple years for the Bullets and the Warriors, in between he missed nearly a full season in Denver.
• Toni Kukoc: I seriously have not seen this guy in a highlight since he left Chicago in 2000.

Also, you can count the (at least one-time) superstars on one hand: Payton, O'Neal, Mutombo, Kidd, Garnett. I wonder if that's always true, or if we're seeing a lull in talent among older veterans right now. If you look at the minutes played list, those five are in the top six along with current iron man Clifford Robinson. You lose some of the journeymen and add Iverson, Duncan, Kobe, Dirk(?). Garnett seems like the type of guy who could just burn himself out or go insane as intense as he is with a team like the Timberwolves. Kidd I could see playing a good long time if he stays healthy. Kobe should be around forever.

Of course, it all comes back to Lebron for me. He is indeed a remarkable physical specimen, and he played something like 11,000 minutes before turning 22--Payton is the current leader at 45,000. But if you watch a Cavs game the opposing team will probably commit at least one called intentional, flagrant, or technical foul on him, and he will crash to the floor very hard as many as a dozen times. He enjoys playing like a running back, but is his body taking running back-type punishment from which it will become able to recover less and less quickly?

Nebulously Omnipresent

Max posted today about A Scanner Darkly, The Science of Sleep, and Caché. I responded about the first:

Particularly paired with Fast Food Nation, Linklater's films this year felt to me like mood pieces to further unsettle the already unsettled. Thom Yorke's Eraser is then the obvious and perfect musical counterpart*. It's not truly effective protest art because the dark forces that could/should be opposed seem so nebulously omnipresent.

See it all at mushroom or toadstool?.

*"Black Swan" plays over the end credits of A Scanner Darkly.

Mutual Appreciation

As expected, this will be my favorite new movie this year. Andrew Bujalski's Funny Ha Ha is one of those movies that looms larger in my memory as time passes--even though I liked it a lot to begin with. I think this also fits well as a sort of Film of My Year since I feel like I've been discovering, understanding, and enjoying a lot of slower and "emptier" films this year: Slacker, Jim Jarmusch stuff, Ozu's Floating Weeds, Bergman's Winter Light, Satantango and Werckmeister Harmonies, etc.

SYNOPSIS Alan (Justin Rice), a musician whose band has just broken up, shows up in New York to pursue his burgeoning rock and roll career. He starts by searching for a drummer for a show he’s already lined up, and otherwise goes about the mechanics of self-promotion. He finds a champion in Sara (Seung-Min Lee), a radio DJ who sets her sights on a submissive but uninterested Alan—and finds him a drummer. In his down time, Alan drinks and strategizes with his old friend Lawrence (Bujalski), a grad student, and Lawrence’s girlfriend Ellie (Rachel Clift), a journalist. Alan endeavors to keep his shoulder to the wheel, while Ellie finds herself compelled by him. The attraction is mutual, but both parties are reluctant to take a next step.

Bujalski was there tonight at the Northwest Film Forum for a Q&A afterwards, and one of the most interesting parts for me was a comment by this guy a few rows in front of me, probably 50, who said that even though the film is often tapped as a great document of current post-collegiate social life, he was reminded of exactly how things were back in his day. This interested me particularly because in discussing Mutual Appreciation, critics love to namecheck John Cassavetes, whose work has seemed to me, at least when I saw a few things in early- to mid-2005, full of weirdly off-kilter improvisational performances that don't imitate any experience of life that I have. The disconnect for me between Cassavetes and Bujalski, which I took for a generational difference, may therefore not be well-founded. I'll have to watch and rewatch Shadows, Faces, et al. when I get to Iowa and see if my opinion has changed.

Another thing I got out of the Q&A was when Bujalski mentioned how much he loved the lengthy party scenes, including one in which Alan goes to this party he's told about while very drunk, and very much by himself. It consists of three young ladies sitting on the couch having some sort of discussion. He spends much of the scene nearly mute, possibly close to passing out. The director commented that while he would have loved even more of the scene, which he didn't hesitate to tag as potentially "boring." That got me to thinking about what it is I enjoy, functionally rather than just aesthetically, about films like this. It could be that without an overstuffed script, the experience becomes much more ruminative, as the audience can potentially contemplate the oblique dialogue and unclear gestures, impossible at a more hurried pace. If the actors were reading lines at a Howard Hawks-like speed, the story would be totally incomprehensible, but since we are able--within the running time of the film--to puzzle over the remarks made by the awkward and cryptic characters, with reinforcement from their physical gestures and glances which are more noticeable during the silence, the work coheres by the end.

See the Mutual Appreciation home page for a trailer and more. Here's an interview with Scott Foundas published in CinemaScope last year.

Bujalski says he's at work on an adaptation of a novel for Hollywood. In a perfect world that novel would be Indecision.

Film Favorites

EDIT: While I was watching the superlong Satantango today (450 min.) I was reminded of Belfast, Maine (245 min.) which I hadn't remembered while making the list initially.

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I was recently required to make three lists of favorites. I may have made some omissions. The 1950 list had the most candidates, and the 1970 list was most difficult I think because the cultural zeitgeist of the decade just sort of creeps me out. Also, I found it much easier to limit each director to only one entry per decade.

1950-59
Sunset Blvd. (Billy Wilder, 1950)
Ugetsu monogatari (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953)
Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954)
Rififi (Jules Dassin, 1955)
Touchez pas au grisbi (Jacques Becker, 1956)
The Killing (Stanley Kubrick, 1956)
The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)
Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958)
Floating Weeds (Yasujiro Ozu, 1959)
Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais, 1959)

1970-79
The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971)
Get Carter (Mike Hodges, 1971)
The Ruling Class (Peter Medak, 1972)
The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973)
Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Milos Forman, 1975)
Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975)
Animal House (John Landis, 1978)
Being There (Hal Ashby, 1979)
Life of Brian (Terry Jones, 1979)

1990-99
Days of Being Wild (Wong Kar-wai, 1990)
Slacker (Richard Linklater, 1991)
Clerks (Kevin Smith, 1994)
Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)
Satantango (Béla Tarr, 1994)
The White Balloon (Jafar Panahi, 1995)
Histoire(s) du cinema (Jean-Luc Godard, 1997)
L.A. Confidential (Curtis Hanson, 1997)
Rushmore (Wes Anderson, 1998)
The Big Lebowski (Joel Coen, 1998)
Magnolia (P.T. Anderson, 1999)
Belfast, Maine (Frederick Wiseman, 1999)