Best of the Year

OK, I’m not proud. I’ll start:

1. Kings and Queen
2. Last Days
3. Capote
4. Walk the Line
5. Brokeback Mountain
6. Mysterious Skin
7. Palindromes
8. Howl’s Moving Castle
9. Nobody Knows
10. The Squid and the Whale

Special Mention: Look at Me, 2046, Tropical Malady, A History of Violence, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang

Best Performance Male: Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Best Performance Female: Reese Witherspoon

Best Music

1. Sufjan Stevens: “Come on Feel the Illinoise”
2. The Mountain Goats: “Sunset Tree”
3. Antony and the Johnsons: “I am a Bird Now”
4. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!: “Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!”
5. Various Artists: “Yellow Pills: Prefill Numero 004”
6. Bright Eyes: “I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning”
7. Spoon: “Gimme Fiction”
8. The New Pornographers: Twin Cinema
9. Broken Social Scene: “Broken Social Scene”
10. Final Fantasy: “Has a Good Home”
11. Death Cab for Cutie: “Plans”
12. Iron and Wine/Calexico: “In the Reins”
13. The White Stripes: “Get Behind Me Satan”
14. Okervil River: “Black Sheep Dog”
15. The Magic Numbers: “The Magic Numbers”

Best Novels

1. Daniel Clowes’ Ice Haven
2. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go
3. Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore
4. Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days: A Novel
5. Ian McEwan’s Saturday
6. Walter Kirn’s Mission to America
7. Charles Burns’ Black Hole
8. Elliot Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity
9. Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories: A Novel
10. Caryl Phillips’ Dancing in the Dark

54 thoughts on “Best of the Year”

  1. Do you know that I have not seen any of those films, but for History of Violence and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; nor have I heard any of that music or read any of those books. It’s a mark that I’m serious out of touch and obsolete when my favorite pieces of music for the last year were The Ramones’ “Merry Christmas” and “Judy is a Punk” and George Jones’ song about Elvis, Fred Flintstone and drinking “The King is Gone (so are you).” I feel like my own grandparent. whether I actually read a novel this year I’m not sure. How do you find the time and attention? I did read The Leopard which made a strong impression on me, but that’s a fifty year old book. given my debased pop cultural affinities, Sin City may be the movie that sticks with me the most—and Franju’s Eyes without a Face, along with the remarkable short Blood of the Beasts.

    I’m noting your list for future Netflix picks!

  2. OK, I’ll play. These are not in order, and I could not think of 10. I have not seen some well-reviewed prospects yet (such as History of Violence) so this is provisional. And I don’t know how to count foreign movies that appeared earlier than 2005 but were released in the US in 2005.

    Aristocrats
    Syriana
    Last Days
    Munich
    2046
    Palindromes
    Sin City
    Constant Gardner
    Lords of Dogstown
    Oldboy
    Downfall

  3. I didn’t post about it, because I didn’t have anything to say about it, but I was very disappointed in Last Days, though I loved Elephant and Gerry. On Jeff’s list I also saw Squid and Whale and Palindromes, and didn’t like either of those – though I admired the performances in the Squid and Whale.

    Among my favorites this year were Constant Gardener, Downfall, Grizzly Man and History of Violence. I still think Syriana the best of the bunch though.

    There were several older films I saw that I loved – among them Ikiru (1952) by Kurosawa and Reds. I enjoyed 40 Year Old Virgin a lot too, and would probably include it and Aristocrats – especially over the slightly disappointing Jesus is Magic.

    Jeff’s music list is quite good though – I can’t find much fault in that.

  4. Other records that came out (close to) this year that I did like also: Akron/Family – s/t, Rogue Wave – Descended Like Vultures, Michael Penn – Mr Hollywood Jr., 1947, Clem Snide – End of Love, Springsteen – Devils & Dust, Ennio Morriccone – Crimes & Dissonanace (on Ipecac – a 2 CD set of lesser known & odder stuff), Ben Lee – Awake is the New Asleep, Mike Patton / Kaada – Romances, Syriana soundtrack, Gillian Welch live covering Radiohead’s Black Star (available on her website).
    Rediscovered: Bill Withers at Carnegie Hall, Husker Du: everything, The Smithereens.

  5. Yeah, that Ben Lee disc was so close to appearing on my list too but I had to cut things off at 15 (which already felt like cheating). I also rediscovered Husker Du this year which was fun. I’m not sure where my head was at back in the 80s (I listened to the Replacements and REM and the Hoodoo Gurus and others), but it was fun to hear these songs again.

  6. Okay, I was meticulously keeping a list, but I’m in Ireland, and listless. Ahem.

    Here’s what I mostly remember, from a year without enough cinema-going:

    Munich
    Breakfast on Pluto
    Kung Fu Hustle
    (Definitely the top 3; the rest any old order)

    Grizzly Man
    Aristocrats
    Squid and the Whale
    Since I saw Oldboy and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance last year, I’ll squeeze in 3 Extremes here.
    Memories of Murder
    Constant Gardener
    History of Violence
    Syriana

    Any of these might be displaced yet–I have Kings and Queen at home, and Funny Ha-Ha. I still haven’t seen Haneke’s new film Hidden/Cache, or Woody Allen, ‘though I still have trouble believing Allen has any good movies left in him.

    Books:
    I remember so few of the things I read; I ought to write ’em down. I second the McEwan, would add Kunkel’s Indecision, and didn’t much like Kirn.

    Short stories: ZZ Packer is amazing.

    I’m more interested in noting 3 great, great books I’ve read here, which don’t come out there ’til the Spring:
    Stephen Wright’s _The Amalgamation Polka_ is flat brilliant, a picaresque of astonishing grotesque beauty about the Civil War–for a while I thought it was channeling Melville, now I think it’s as good as him, in many ways.

    David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green will be compared to Nick Hornby and to Salinger, but its tale of a 13-year old boy told over 13 months is its own beast–it fits certain expected plot tropes, but the prose is amazing; it’s as good a voice of the boy as I’ve ever read.

    A.M. Homes’ This Book Will Save Your Life isn’t as brutal as her early stuff, nor as cynical as the masterpiece Music for Torching–but it’s funny, absurd, and moving–guy hits 55, suffers from unexplained pain, and wanders LA trying to get his grip.

  8. Mike, can I borrow the David Mitchell and AM Homes novels upon your return (before you start handing them out to your neighbors)??? Please, please, please.

  9. I’d agree regarding Kung Fu Hustle, though I haven’t yet been convinced by the praise of History of Violence.

    Why is Mike reading books that aren’t “out” yet–does he have some sort of Stonecutter’s secret access? what gives?

    This Book Will Save Your Life sounds like it ripped off my story while in LA–the only difference being that I hit 35 not 55. And I never did find my grip (though could you really in LA?)

    as for the year’s best, all I can do is recommend two of the things I really liked this year: boobies and them french fried ‘taters.

    next year I’ll try to read and see something.

  10. i get the books on ebay; i find out about ’em through various web publishing-buzz sites, then i go hunting. i’m a real book geek.

    yes, jeff, you can borrow them.

  12. had to go to this site to see what was released in 2005. i haven’t yet seen a number of contenders so i am going to keep it to a list of seven for now (will update as i get to more on dvd in the next few months).

    in order:

    kung-fu hustle
    a history of violence
    brokeback mountain
    munich
    old boy
    off the map
    sin city

    if 2046, broken flowers, the aristocrats, wallace and gromit, good night and good luck, breakfast on pluto, the squid and the whale, howl’s moving castle, cache, the corpse-bride, the constant gardener, sisterhood of the travelling pants et al disappoint when i get to them then the following may move into the list:

    grizzly man
    syriana
    serenity

  13. simon’s and gio’s favorite films of 2005:

    look at me
    me and you and everyone we know
    the grace lee project
    my summer of love     (simon)
    downfall (simon)
    red eye (gio)
    syriana (gio)
    brokeback mountain (gio)
    munich (gio)

    how to read this list:
    as you know, simon refused to see BBM and munich. gio refused to see downfall (boring). simon loathed syriana. altogether, we saw, like, fifteen films that were released in 2005. when you see this few, films seem both worse and better than they are. they seem worse because your standards get degraded with each new viewing — so ours are still relatively pure. they seem better because you have to eek out a 10-movie list, so you are forced to curve. you end up putting on your best-of-the-year list stuff that didn’t do anything for you when you saw it. an instance of this, for me, is syriana. i stand fully behind red eye.

  16. I like Arnab’s list. And Arnab, Wallace and Gromit won’t disappoint. Nor will The Corpse Bride. Haven’t seen Breakfast on Pluto so I cannot say it won’t disappoint. Even so, Grizzly Man deserves a spot.

    Does 2046 count? Didn’t it come out in 2004?

    I have no interest in Mike’s “Books” list. I am beyond fiction.

  17. okay, 2046 makes the list, but constant gardener does not. (john, i’m counting 2046 and oldboy because they were both released in the u.s in 2005.)

    my updated list:

    2046
    kung-fu hustle
    a history of violence
    brokeback mountain
    munich
    old boy
    off the map
    sin city

  18. it’s taken me a bit to figure out what 2005 books i read in 2005, but these are my faves:

    Mary Gordon Pearl
    Lynn Sharon Schwartz The Writing on the Wall
    Zadie Smith On Beauty
    Francine Prose A Changed Man
    and (honorable mention for really trying and half-way succeding) Jonathan Safran Foer Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

    i wish i could put Marylin Robinson’s Gilead here, but i found it too painful to finish it. i am sorry i didn’t read Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and i’ll try to remedy as soon as i can, even though i really liked only The Remains of the Day by him. Finally, i want to record the Ian McEwan’s Saturday was intensely distasteful to me, the only interesting thing in it being the discussion of huntington disease. i’d also like to say that, after reading smith’s On Beauty, i went to read the real thing, E.M. Forster’s Howards End, which i had never read before, and i was totally and absolutely blown away.

  19. I found Gilead too painful to start but that’s another story. I very much enjoyed Francine Prose’s Blue Angel which was a fun (and fantastical) take on the novel of academia so I should give A Changed Man a shot (synopsis turned me off initially), but I do want to ask more about your response to On Beauty. I read the novel but found it to be quite slight (to be honest it struck me as the work of a novelist still finding their way). The way Smith essays the politics of academic life made me wonder if she’s ever stepped onto a college campus (yes, I know she spent a couple of years at Yale or Harvard or something of that ilk). Her little mini-Ivy felt so artificial to me (as if she’s watched Whose Afraid of Virginia Wolfe a few too many times), but I teach in the mid-west so what do I know about the important schools “back east.” I also found the way she attempted to write about race and America and higher education to be disappointing. I did like the wife of the American professor.

  20. jeff, i take you didn’t like what you saw of Gilead. i wonder why. robinson’s narrator seems, like, perfect.

    i think people ask too much of zadie, because she’s so obviously talented. with this much talent she should able to do SO MUCH BETTER… but i found that the story moved along at a good clip, and the take on Howards End was just too brilliant, On Beauty being about howard’s undoing (or end), while Howards End being really about beauty.

    but the best thing in On Beauty are the voices. ah, the voices. pitch perfect. amazing.

    smith has a sense of people and what moves them that is so deep it makes you shiver. she draws a million different characters, and they are all alive and you like them all, even the pompous and cretinous ones. her academia is a bit like fantasyland, but i didn’t care. literary academia is always a bit fantasyland-like, one way or another, because the reality is so boring, you know, so damn boring.

  21. Well, she is young and the novel did move at a clip; I simply never believed a word of it. You are obviously enamored but her voices, in this novel at least, didn’t feel very alive to me. I found most of them, with the exception of the mother who inherits the painting, to be a collection of clever yet empty pastiches masquerading as characters.

    The myth of the ACADEMY is too big for anyone to digest (and I often find myself at the ugly end of that stick as non-academics have such high expectations for a fellow like myself who’s just trying to make a living like everyone else). This is why I prefer novels like Jane Smiley’s Moo, Richard Russo’s Straight Man or Michael Chabon’s The Wonder Boys, but that’s just me.

  23. I didn’t mean to use enamored in a snarky way, but I looked it up and it does seem to mean “inflamed with love” which is a bit OTT. I’m glad you are championing Smith’s work. I think she is one of the most promising writers working in English, I just didn’t like On Beauty as much as others (many, many others).

  24. since no one seems to be posting on the golden globes, or anything else, i think i’ll prolonge this literary chat a bit. not one of the books i put in the best-of-2005 list is a book i thought very highly of, except maybe schwartz’s The Writing on the Wall. i read excellent literature all the time, but it is not often the case that i find excellence in the just-released section of the library. there are a few writers whose work makes me weep with joy, and in between recent releases, i go back to them, slowly winding my way through their miraculously large production. my 2005 discovery is A. B. Yehoshua. i think he’s amazing. i’ve read only two books by him, because i need to make them last. i think i’ll try to stick to two a year. do you know him?

  26. I need to take a look at Yehoshua. That being said, I rarely if ever read novels for anything other than base pleasure. I like a good story well told that takes me somewhere I haven’t been before and makes me see the world in a different light. Indeed, I look for those beautiful voices, but, truthfully, I tend to be only interested in those voices that speak to me. I’m not as adventurous as I should be as a reader but there seems to be more than enough decent novels out there to keep me entertained week to week so I don’t question my selfish motives as much as I should.

    I thought Walk the Line was really good. I didn’t want to see it truth be told . . . had been burned by the fatuous Ray and didn’t want to see another biopic about a dead musician whose music hovered in the background of my youth but never made it into my record collection. But my mom told me it was good, and since I do not teach during J-Term, I gave it a shot. Perhaps it was the low expectations, but I thought it to be one of the best films of the year (number 4 on my list above). It is also the best love story of the year and includes two of the best performances of the year. Phoenix’s work is probably far removed from the real Johnny Cash, but he invests so much of himself into every moment that you can’t help but walk away feeling good about Jesus and country music and the redemptive power of love and all sorts of other cliches that I’m willing to buy into if presented with genuine craft and honesty. And Reese Witherspoon is tough and sassy and vulnerable and sharp–its a career reinvention, and I fell for her every time she entered the camera’s view. It’s a red state, date-night, crowd pleaser, but it never feels bloated or self-satisfied.

  27. the reasons why you read are exactly the reasons why i read (and you put them beautifully). that is, at night. during the day i read all sorts of stuff related to “work,” such as it is. but the nights are mine. (truth be told, the stuff i read for “work” is good too. i just reread The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, which i read for the first time for gambrell’s class — anyone in it? –and i still love it. so i’m reading all sorts of criticism about it, and i love that too. i wonder when arnab is going to pull the plug on this conversation.

    you really make me wanna see Walk the Line. hope they don’t stop showing it in miami before the weekend.

  31. I think Gio means (John) 3.16 (“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”). 3.14 would make no sense in the context of this thread (“And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up”).

    Anyone seen any good movies recently?

  32. I watched one of Reynolds best of the year, Joon-ho Bong’s serial killer epic Memories of Murder, and I highly recommend it. From its very first shot of a young boy in a field of golden grain, Bong’s film offers up striking visual style coupled with an off-kilter, sardonic tone. Indeed, the first two thirds of this police procedural narrative plays like a macabre comedy. But underneath the surface lurks more compelling tensions: police corruption, national dysfunction, intuition at odds with science, eye for an eye vengeance verse the rule of law and, finally, human irrationality at odds with more modern (idealized?) notions of enlightened rationality. The final twenty-five minutes or so are quite powerful as these tensions wiggle their way to the surface. There are no easy answers or comforting solutions and the viewer is left uncertain and off-balance.

    David Walsh, writing for the World Socialist Web, captures the strengths and horrors of the film best when he writes:
    “The picture drawn is of a society so dysfunctional, so dominated by violence and the “memory” of previous violence and repression—decades of ruthless and cruel military dictatorship—that a mere serial killer disappears in its midst. The savage methods of interrogation, the backwardness in every regard, the use of the police primarily to control and oppress the population—all of these make ‘solving the crime’ an impossibility. Which crime would that be? And which criminal? Too much damage has already been done to the population and its psyche. The 10 rape-murders inevitably get lost in the shuffle.”

    Powerful stuff.

  34. I liked ‘Memories of Murder’ as well. Movie reviews on World Socialist Web? Damn, socialism is a lot cooler than when I was attending University Left meetings in England.

    Speaking of the Left, I haven’t seen any Haneke movies yet (‘Code Unknown’ is in my Netflix queue), but does anyone have a reaction to Stuart Klawans’ review of ‘Cache’ in the latest ‘The Nation’ magazine: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060130/klawans

  35. Can’t read any reviews until I see the film. Time of the Wolf, Code Unknown, The Piano Lesson, Funny Games: all amazing and amazingly discomforting films. Smart and scary and provocative. I still think Time of the Wolf to be one the greatest films I’ve ever seen. So I’ll check this link out as soon as Cache arrives in Minneapolis (let it be soon). Now what I really want to get my hands on is Benny’s Video. Anybody know where I can find a copy?

  36. It doesn’t look like anyone else has seen another of my favorites–Breakfast on Pluto–but I saw it again (with students, on this Irish trip), and I’ve seen nothing else, so I’ll add to my very cursory comments from earlier. (Any future posts, go to the heading on Pluto, which was titled:)

    Serious, serious–what Patrick Kitten Braden, the protagonist, murmurs as a complaint and comment on all that’s going on around him. I was tempted to talk about this film–with its final hommage to Oscar Wilde, and its hero/heroine’s persistent struggles against the IRA and catholic narratives so prevalent, omnipresent–as another version of politics on film. But this time a politics of comedy, where the goal is to not just write back at the powers that be but to rewrite the narrative anew, in a different key. I think the film is powerfully, playfully political. Discuss.

    I was also tempted to tack this into the straight-playing-gay discussion, because I think Murphy’s is my favorite performance of the year–his inhabitation of the lurid stereotypes Kitten favors (with a mommy/Mitzi Gaynor obsession) retains what some reviewers have called a little chilly distance, but what I’d call a spine of steel, a vibrant refutation of sentimentality that might attach itself to the conventions of the melodramatic orphan/gay-bashing/IRA narrative. Discuss.

    Or to think about music, a la the post Bruns made about apposite soundtracks. This film exploits glam rock and Harry Nilsson to great but not unexpected effect; even better, it has a cameo with “Feelings” (coincident with a very creepy cameo by Bryan Ferry) and a rousing piece of pop crap called “Sugar Love Baby” that opens and closes, to glorious effect.

    I also would make a pitch for Neil Jordan’s brilliance with color, light/shadow, and composition. The film isn’t just a narrative wonder, it looks dazzling. There’s a lovely shot of Brendan Gleeson up to his head in a circular fuzzy white costume, beating the crap out of some poor English sot; Stephen Rea’s face gets these dazzling close-ups, so we can watch the muscles in his cheek or eyebrow creep higher–the man does more with no words than 95% of other actors do with extended soliloquies.

    I really relished the film. Somebody needs to fucking see it so we can talk about it.

  37. I don’t know about Mike giving orders to see movies–I mean, what’s next, he’ll tell us to go see Grandma’s Boy??
    but in any case the discussion of Neil Jordan gives me the opportunity to recommend In Dreams–a really haunting and underrated movie he made about 10 years ago–the early scenes of the town underwater are especially good.

  39. i just noticed on metacritic that one newpaper puts alice munro’s Runaway as one of the year’s best, even though it came out in 2004. okay, so this is was my most favorite book of 2005 too!

    and i just don’t understand the great love Saturday is receiving. i thought it was a nasty little book. why so much enthusiasm?

  40. Nasty in what way (the big climatic scene at the doctor’s house)? For me the least entertaining elements of the novel (lower middle-class thug getting even with over-privileged doctor) were the very elements that will probably earn McEwan a handsome check for a big Oscar-happy cinematic adaptation (directed, perhaps, by Stephen Daldry). What I loved were the sentences, the scene between the father and son in the kitchen, the way the novel poetically evoked a sense of international cultural dread and anxiety, the sense that the main characters understood their privilege and wrestled with it but also accepted it because in the end that’s what most people do, the urgent sense of responsibility that sends the main character to the hospital in the final moments, the way everything is contained in one 24 hour period, the fact that I couldn’t stop reading (selfish reader once again).

  41. jeff, i wish i could remember it better. i read it this summer in england before it came out in the US. one thing i remember disliking is the emphasis on upper-middle class family life. it’s all about the family, isn’t it? father and mother and kids, loving each other, having sex (in appropriate way with appropriate partners), staving off chaos with delightful family cohesion. even the scene at the end, the grandfather remembering that poem and the daughter reciting it at the right moment… so fucking cheap. so the world is going to shit, but if you can keep your neat and wholesome middle class value, you know, exercise at the gym, drive your expensive car, love you kids, fuck your wife, buy the fish, and keep the hippocratic oath, everything will be all right.

    give me a fucking break. and you know, i don’t care about the poetic language. i want language to be coupled with intellectual depth. so ian mcewan can write: big deal. i also could not stop reading, but that is always a bad sing for me. i read good book slowly: i luxuriate in them.

  42. So where does the nasty part come in? Or is it simply representations of upper-middle class, heteronormative privilege which are nasty? I did find the novel to be more critical and more ambivalent about its characters than you did. Still, any work that can generate so much anger (and yes I do read a measure of anger in your post) has to be doing something right, yes? Save this blog, I don’t luxuriate in much of anything truth be told so I’m jealous.

  44. yeah, the nasty bit was the privilege masquerading as depth.

    don’t take my anger too seriously (thought i was pissed at Saturday). i’m italian. i get angry easily.

  46. did i actually say in this blog that i have an interest in trauma and war??? i don’t remember having done so. or do we know each other from a previous life? were you a student at USC?

    i couldn’t finish Atonement. i read, like, 10 pages and i found it so objectionable i had to stop. (please don’t ask me why i found it objectionable: those brain cells are long gone). and then, a few days later, i was chatting with a colleague of simon’s in the philosophy dept., and he said: “of course you didn’t like it: one needs to have a philosophically-inclined mind to appreciate such literature. i’m sure simon will love it.” if you know me a bit, you can just imagine the rage this comment caused in me. i have found it hard to talk to this guy ever since.

    of course, simon loved it.

  47. If you can push through the extended first section, I think you might find Atonement very intriguing. I do not have a philosophically inclined mind, by the by.

  48. I think my key to loving McEwan is having read early McEwan, with their pervasive sense of dread, leavened by a mordant, bleak humor. In _The Comfort of Strangers_, privileged Europeans wanting to travel (in Italy–more for you to hate, Gio!) in a way that goes beyond the ‘normal’ tourist tracks make the unfortunate acquaintance of two decadent Americans, and things end perfectly, which is to say poorly. The beautiful _The Child in Time_ is told by a man mourning his dead child–yet it is so far from sentimental or mournfully somberly “important,” it struck me–still yet far from my own experience of close-to-hand death–as finally a clear understanding of what such grief might be like. I could go on; _The Innocent_ is John Le Carre reimagined by Patricia Highsmith, politics a veil for a bitterly funny examination of moral philosophy. I always found his narration/prose pitched exactly at the right angle to engage the pleasures of suspense & plot while coolly, critically surveying the intellectual landscapes opened up by the subject at hand. (Another: _Enduring Love_ is as much a meditation on the philosophy of science as it is a suspense thriller on obsession.)

    So I came at _Atonement_ and then _Saturday_ expecting–and seeing–not the ‘return’ to more classical narrative that so many critics were thankful of (dispatching and dismissing all that tedious “postmodern” “detachment” blah blah), but a reinvigoration of some of those central concerns: the nature of storytelling, the problems of history, the persistent failure of people to understand one another. For me, the protagonist of _Saturday_ is a precise updating of Mrs. Dalloway, whose privileged distance from politics is EXACTLY what McEwan is interested in revealing and critiquing, albeit sympathetically. I see his surgeon (who, wink wink, doesn’t care much for fiction, and his daughter’s interests in the arts) as a blind man who, by novel’s end, can see shadows; his ‘heroism’ is like his literary predecessor’s quite limited and too individualized. Yet–again, as with Woolf–our own experience of the characters’ ‘awakenings’ is much broader, more complicated; we see more than anyone in the novel. And that struck me as McEwan’s enduring premise, the promise of his fiction. That and it’s riveting, and often slyly funny.

  49. having not read McEwan, let me blunder blindly into the discussion.

    Is there anything suspect or odd about the upper middle classes frequently being the central figures in narratives of inexplicable dread and sinister suggestion? Since they are estranged already from the conditions that affect others, they are free (through the graces of their authors) to wallow in conditions of supernatural estrangement. I think of the Henry James story “The Jolly Corner” in which a wealthy American who has spent most of his time in Europe returns to his family home only to experience supernatural encounters with doubles of himself. to what extent is the experience rooted in the nature of domestic property itself–does the abstraction of the supernatural experience highlight or obscure the abstraction that is already at the heart of the ownership relationship, and does James–and other authors working in this kind of “sub-genre” like McEwan (and I’d include Pinter here to some degree)–demonstrate more interest in the psychological effects of this class-bound estrangement or does he clarify the real conditions from which this estrangement arises? “Love”–of the particularly celibate and somewhat idealist kind he favors–seems to be the “antidote” to strangeness for James’ characters, rather than the “ruthless critique of all things existing” (Marx); strong connection to another human, particularly the patient and long-suffering woman, cuts off the source for the supernatural estrangement; however it does not in any way allow that estrangement to be tracked down to its original sources, the making of the world into a set of class-specific dominating fictions.

    These and other obscure and ill said observations can be found in the recent issue of my newsletter “Hey, Mrs. Medical Person Lady!” available at most newstands or by a subscription rate of $22/year—nearly half off the regular price!!!

  50. Listomania. My best of the year (I know you’ve been anxiously awaiting this). A lot of the films that I want to see (Capote and Breakfast on Pluto, for instance) never came to town or disappeared before I could see them, so I’ll have to wait until they’re out on DVD.

    Syriana
    Munich
    The Aristocrats
    Brokeback Mountain
    A History of Violence
    Kung fu Hustle
    Sin City
    Grizzly Man
    Good Night, and Good Luck
    2046

    Not good enough (aka “special mention”):
    The Corpse Bride
    Batman Begins
    War of the Worlds
    The 40-Year-Old Virgin
    Broken Flowers
    Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit

  51. A quick note for anyone who didn’t see it in theaters – Syriana is out now on disc, and it’s a smart, complex film about our world. It was my favorite film of last year, and though John didn’t use numbers it’s at the top of his as well.

    Many here found problems with it, and there’s legitimacy to them, but flaws and all, nothing beat it for me. Great soundtrack too.

  52. I just watched it again on DVD, and I was even more impressed by its intelligence and its pacing. In the interview with Clooney on the DVD he explicitly makes the link to the 1970s political films that we all noted above. It was in my top 2-3 films with Munich and Last Days the other contenders.

  53. On a side-Syriana note, I’m reading a novel by Robert Baer, the guy whose work (_See No Evil_) underpins the movie, and who is sort-of semi-depicted by George Clooney in the flick. It’s pitched as an “alternate history” of the events leading up to 9/11…. it reads like a kind of feverish, almost wry/sardonic thriller–in the vein of Robert Littell. Not unserious for all of its dark wit, and its action, yet–also a surprising take on the Big Somber that no one knows how to approach. (I can only say that its plot hinges on tracking a series of strange connections between Bin Laden, Beirut politics, the Iranian Shia underpinning of much extremist violence in the Middle East, the Sunni-Saudi counter-underpinning of much extremist violence, and on and on–in the way espionage novels often do, reading so inside the inside that it often seems like characters are speaking Esperanto.) I’m digging it–and it’s an interesting corollary to Syriana‘s dark vision of causes and complicity. (The novel ends with an interview with Seymour Hersh, that I haven’t yet read, but which obviously begs the question that inspires readers to pick the thing up: what’s true, and what’s fabulation?)

    Baer also has a documentary making the rounds about suicide bombers… it hasn’t been getting great reviews, but–again, it seems like it’d be an interesting complement.

    Baer will also have a sitcom–single-camera–on Fox next season called “That’s Some Real Bull, Shi’ite!”.

  54. We watched Syriana last night and it does benefit from a second viewing as Chris mentioned. I think I enjoyed it even more because I didn’t have to think so hard. I was able to notice more details. My wife, however, was mostly baffled (though after it was over it seemed to me she understood the way the pieces fit together pretty well). I’ll admit, however, that I still don’t understand the Mussawi character; the guy that tortures Clooney. He’s a double agent working for the DOD or National security and _________? The Emir stops him from killing Clooney? Clooney is being tortured because ___________ knows that he’s going to assisinate the Prince. Someone explain. thanks

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