Once a year this family blog allows me to divulge in twitter length political and cultural commentary through the ubiquitous best-of-the-year list (for past end-of-year failures see
2008,
2007, and
2006). Call it holiday excess or call it too much graduate student free time, but I'm willing to wager that not all will agree with me that The Dark Night is the most overrated film of the decade As a bonus kicker I'm offering the best of the Aughts--or is it the zeros, the double-ohs, or the nils?
BBB Rated 2009 Year In Review:
Buzzword: Beer Summit.
If the President has failed to accomplish much in his first year at least we all know how to solve that pesky problem from time immemorial of what to do when one says the police have "acted stupidly."
Best Song: Two Weeks by Grizzly Bear.
Some people will hear "Two Weeks" and instantly feel better about their day, some will want to join a boys' choir, and most will feel the urge to share this exceptional thing with those close to them.TV Show: Mad Men (again).
If you're looking for a show where a pompous British office boss horribly and hilariously losses a foot in an indoor riding-mower mishap, then Mad Men is for you.
Phrase that will never be the same: Hiking along the Appalachian Trail.
Last year I did indeed hike the AP Trail, but I swear I have an alibi (Silas you hear me?)
History Book: Protestant Empire By Carla Gardina Pestana.
Britain was the world's mightiest empire, but it was also a Protestant empire of striking religious diversity and fragmentation. Pestana lucidly shows how religion joined the various parts of that world into a bounded whole yet introduced deep divisions whose consequences remain with us today.
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Best Film: White Ribbon (Michael Haneke). Honorable Mention: The Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson), Munyurangabo (Lee Isaac Chung), In the Loop (Armando Iannucci)
This magnificently photographed film is a detailed examination of the rotten soul of a north German agricultural village just before World War I. We are invited to consider the psychological preconditions of fascism, looking at the clues in culture and custom to see what led the German children in 1913 to grow up to lead their nation through its darkest hours of fascist hate and Nazi terror.
Coolest Politician besides BHO: Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
Rudd may be the first politician since Franklin Roosevelt to win national power for a center-left party by attacking the conservative establishment from the right, in the name of family security and family values (i.e. Hayek/Reagan/Bush neoliberal materialism destroys families and communities). The chap has a 75% approval rating.
Quote of the year: Sarah Palin on the virtues of the Alaskan wilderness
"It is as throughout all Alaska that big wild good life teeming along the road that is north to the future."
Still being cited as transformative in the Muslim world, the speech at Cairo University last spring was widely viewed as a contrast to the approach of previous administrations. During his talk, Obama invoked the Qur’an, Talmud and the Bible while declaring that America was not at war with Islam.
Evangelicals being smart award: Robert Park
Perhaps it is foolish for an individual to get involved in geopolitics as this 28 year old Korean-American missionary did by illegally walking into North Korea with a letter calling for release of all political prisoners from the country's notorious concentration camps and saying "I am coming here to deliver God's love." But perhaps the newly imprisoned Park is getting at the heart of what otherworldly faith is all about. Evangelicals being dumb award: The Manhattan Declaration.
Manifesto argues for religious liberty for Christians to dissent from views they don’t like, and argues that their views on abortion, euthanasia, marriage, etc. should be enshrined in U.S. law. It says nothing about the liberty of those who would dissent from those views except to assert that because these Christian views are 'right', they should be the law of the land. Once again, evangelicals forget that the U.S. is not and has never been exclusively a "Christian Nation." (hat tip John Stackhouse) Board Game of the Year: Dominion (Rio Grande Games)
It is high time American's give up their love of incredibly poorly designed board games like Monopoly and Risk and embrace the shorter and more intense European games like Settler's of Catan and Ticket to Ride. New this year, Dominion is just a forty minute card game, but one that will keep you not just thrilled but in the company of friends.
Best Books of the Aughts
Memoir: Blue like Jazz by Donald Miller (Thomas Nelson, 2003)
Subtitled “Non-religious thoughts on Christian Spirituality,” Miller admits that Christianity involves quite a few paradoxes but argues that the faith is still relevant in a post-modern world. “Sooner or later," he writes, "you just figure out there are some guys who don’t believe in God and they can prove He doesn’t exist, and some other guys who do believe in God and they can prove He does exist, and the argument stopped being about God a long time ago and now it’s about who is smarter, and honestly I don’t care.”
History: A Nation Among Nations by Tom Bender (Hill and Wang, 2006)
This book capstones a quarter century of thinking on American Exceptionalism, which encouraged Americans to think of themselves as separate from the world, unique, and perhaps even more special than everyone else. As it turns out, America is not unique and it acts very similar to the rest of the world. The whole world is not "other than the US."
Theology: End of Memory by Miroslav Volf (Eerdmans, 2006)
In a world where memory of the past so often leads to violence--see for example the recent history of Yugoslavia and Israel/Palestine--Croatian theologian Volf reminds us that resentment, even in the name of justice, is not for those who expect God's final reconciliation.
Politics: The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria (Norton, 2008)Zakaria describes a world in which the United States will no longer dominate the global economy, orchestrate geopolitics, or overwhelm cultures. He sees the "rise of the rest"—the growth of countries like China, India, Brazil, Russia, and many others—as the great story of our time, and one that will reshape the world. And my fellow citizens, relax, this is ok.
Religion/Philosophy: A Secular Age by Charles Taylor (Harvard, 2007)Massive and erudite, yet moving. Offers a powerful historical analysis of secularization, secularity, and secularism in the modern West. The best book ever written on the West's transition “from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and, indeed, unproblematic to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace.”
Novel: The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon (Random House, 2000)
This book is more than just a tale of two cousins in the comic book business. It's about the comic-book formula as an exaggerated Technicolor recasting of the American ideal, a world of perfect moral clarity where Good and Evil wear legibly written nametags, and a world in which sheer determination can propel a man to skyscraper-leaping heights. Chabon's heroes, a pair of mere mortals, spackle over their crippling insecurities by writing and drawing men of steel. A modern classic.
Television and Music
1. The Wire (2002-2008)
This modern day Greek tragedy will teach you more about the American city and the human condition than any other cultural enterprise. The Wire shows us precisely how Baltimore's infrastructure collapsed, and forces us to consider the impossible decisions required for repair.
2. Mad Men (2007-present)
Unless you worked on Madison Avenue in the early 1960s, AMC’s first foray into original drama has all the otherworldliness of a foreign film. This show reminds us how quickly our world changes, but how similar our hearts are.
3. Friday Night Lights (2006-present)
“Tender” and “nuanced” aren’t words usually applicable to the gridiron, but they fit the bill in this heart-wrenching show with shattering setbacks and grand triumphs. Also, my wife, loves Tim Riggins.4. Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009)
Because this brilliant sci-fi show in outer space featured no aliens, it was free to free to pit religion against science, freedom against security and family against conscience—tensions with no easy answers.
5. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (1999-present)
The old arc of a news story went like this: News happens. Media covers news. Audience reacts, then turns in for the night. In the Aughts, however, there's been another step added to the end of the process: being held to account for faults by a comedy show. Meet Jon Stewart, media's sharp tongued ombudsman. Also worth a look, the revamped PBS Newshour.
Album of the Decade: Takk by Sigur Rós. Honorable Mention: Funeral by Arcade Fire, Illinois by Sufjan Stevens
Perhaps the most astounding thing to non-Icelandic natives here is that the group has made people fall in love with things they can't even decipher, a monumental achievement for an avant-leaning band in a song-by-song age that's led around by ringtone-sized hooks.
Honorable Mention: Paper Planes by M.I.A., Hurt by Johnny Cash
Top Ten Films of the Aughts
1. There Will be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2008)
There Will Be Blood is an American masterpiece–a Citizen Kane for the postmodern Net-generation. It paints a stark picture of what happens when greedy capitalism and power-mongering is bedfellow with something so contrary as Christianity. Though not a political film in the traditional sense, Blood nevertheless acutely captures the blood-oil-Iraq-evangelicals-capitalism zeitgeist of Aughts-era America.
2. The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006)
In a Communist dictatorship, the government spies on its own citizens. An East German official (the late, great Ulrich Mü who's real life wife was a DDR spy) is assigned to bug the home of some theater people and in the process gets a dose of conscience. Best Cold War film ever.
3. The New World (Terrence Malick, 2005)
Terrence Malick’s film, though set in the earliest days of the American republic, has a lot to say about how we view the world now. The film is an elegiac tone poem for a paradise lost— ecologically, spiritually, and culturally. Its fluid images and hushed voiceover fragments create one long, cathartic purge for our collective, world-weary soul.
4. Best in Show (Christopher Guest, 2000)
Maybe this ranks so high just because I am a new Weimaraner owner, but Best in Show is definitely one of the best flat-out comedies of the decade. This mockumentary perfectly tackles the zeitgeist of the Nineties at the dawn the next century.
5. Pan's Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2005) Mexican director Guillermo del Toro’s vision of what’s, ostensibly, a childhood fable hews closer to the dark corners of the young mind--think the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen--than any squeaky-clean Disney version.
6. Lord of the Rings Trilogy (Peter Jackson, 2001-2003)
The Lord of the Rings film trilogy took the work J.R.R. Tolkien himself described as “unsuitable for dramatic or semi-dramatic representation” and translated its epic story in a far more literal manner than could’ve ever been guessed. What comes across in Jackson’s adaptation is a passion not just for telling the epic tale, but for telling it correctly.
7. The Departed/Infernal Affairs (Martin Scorsese, 2006) This is a thoroughly contemporary film in both obvious ways--the importance of cell phones for the script--and on more subtle levels--the transnational migration of the film from the Hong Kong original, Infernal Affairs, is a decidedly recent phenomenon in cinema. The film’s urban, unrepentant nihilism feels quite authentic in the context of our current cultural quagmire.8. White Ribbon (Michael Haneke, 2009)
See above.
9. Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006) This futuristic sci-fi epic provides an exceptionally dour vision of the not-too-distant future. The film deals not so much with technology, however, as with the consequences of politics, war, terrorism, immigration, and environmental disintegration. Like much of the doomsday rhetoric in society today, however, there are some glimpses of hope within the chaos.
10. Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, 2005) This profile of nature lover Timothy Treadwell, who unwisely tried to live among wild bears in Alaska until he was devoured, cuts a Herzogian swath across the hillside: A man attempts to find harmony with nature but instead finds, as Herzog puts it, “chaos, hostility and murder.”
Most Overrated Film of the Decade: The Dark Night (Christopher Nolan, 2006)
The Aughts were the decade of the comic book film, and while I enjoyed Chabon's novel about comic books, I deplored the film subgenre. Even at its very best--The Dark Night--the boundaries of good and evil are still clearly drawn, the suspense utterly unrealistic, not to mention that Bruce Wayne and his military industrial complex day job is the main problem in the first place. I'm beginning to look fondly at Bruce Willis' Armageddon.
