In this, the eleventh Here Comes Two Podcast, we discuss some of the issue #2s from DC’s relaunch that we didn’t talk about last time, as well as some other comics. Then we talk about the new movie Martha Marcy May Marlene. Then it’s time for zombies, as we converse about The Walking Dead and its essential talk show companion. And we finish it off with a discussion of the Paranormal Activity series. (NOTE: We openly spoil the first one and more vaguely spoil the second one, but when we talk about the third one we only have mild spoilers for it or either of the preceding films, so you can skip to there if you want.)

Here’s a breakdown of the discussion:

0:00-1:20 – Introduction
Comics: DCNU #2s
1:20-4:24 – Aquaman
4:24-8:47 – Batman
8:47-9:38 – Blackhawks
9:38-13:39 – I, Vampire
13:39-15:20 – Nightwing
15:20-17:38 – Supergirl
17:38-18:45 – Voodoo
18:45-22:36 – Wonder Woman
Comics: Other
22:36-24:29 – Penguin: Pain and Prejudice
24:29-25:35 – Ultimate Comics Spider Man
25:35-27:09 – Incredible Hulk
27:09-29:51 – Echoes
29:51-35:57 – The Death Ray
Letters: M
35:57-40:34 – Martha Marcy May Marlene
Zombies: Aaron Sorkin (Walk & Talk)
40:34-56:03 – The Walking Dead
56:03-1:04:54 – Talking Dead
Films: Paranormal Activity
1:04:54-1:13:44 – Paranormal Activity
1:13:44-1:18:31 – Paranormal Activity 2
1:18:31-1:39:14 – Paranormal Activity 3

Here Comes Two – Podcast #11

Give it a listen! And look for us on iTunes.

It’s been over a year since the last episode, but today sees the dawning of a new, rebooted Here Comes Two podcast. Robbie and I have parted ways in a bitter stream of tears and fists, so I come with two brand new co-hosts in the form of Scott Douglass and Calvin Holt. And what better way to relaunch the podcast than with a discussion of another, arguably higher-profile relaunch: the 52 new #1 issues that DC Comics released in September.

(NOTE: While we initially had planned to discuss the new 52 and then the Breaking Bad season four finale, it became clear that continuing the discussion past the 52 would make the podcast far too long. So please ignore it in the beginning when we say we’re going to talk about Breaking Bad later. We no longer intend to have that discussion, sadly.)

(SECOND NOTE: It turns out we were wrong about Action Comics being the only $3.99 title – All-Star Western and Justice League command the same price tag. Yay for not researching beforehand!)

Here’s a breakdown of the discussion:

0:00-2:29 – Introduction
2:29-11:55 – Action Comics
11:55-14:33 – Animal Man
14:33-17:11 – Aquaman
17:11-21:45 – Batman
21:45-27:17 – Batman and Robin
27:17-34:41 – Batwoman
34:41-36:48 – Blackhawks
36:48-41:27 – Demon Knights
41:27-46:57 – The Flash
46:57-54:20 – Frankenstein, Agent of S.H.A.D.E.
54:20-58:07 – Grifter
58:07-1:03:07 – I, Vampire
1:03:07-1:05:37 – Supergirl
1:05:37-1:08:44 – Swamp Thing
1:08:44-1:12:11 – Voodoo
1:12:11-1:15:33 – Wonder Woman
1:15:33-1:19:43 – Wrap up

Here Comes Two – Podcast #10

Give it a listen! And look for us on iTunes.

This is the final post of the Zach Sees Every Movie project. Previously this week, I reflected on the experience as a whole. On Wednesday, I posted a handful of finished reviews I had sitting on my computer. And in this climactic post, I host the Zach Sees Every Movie Awards. Here we go…

When I went into this project, I had no intention of publishing a year-end list in December. I had only been seeing every movie since September, which hardly qualifies me to judge the year in total, given the eight other months I neglected. Plus, it really wouldn’t make sense as part of this project, which wouldn’t allow for a logical summing-up until at least May. And now that the time has come, I certainly don’t regret not publishing a top-ten list, but I also realize how redundant a Zach Sees Every Movie one would be. Since a given year tends to be pretty back-loaded quality-wise, my list would look terribly similar to the countless lists others formulated back in December. So instead, I’ve decided to go with a group of random superlatives and write about some of the highlights and lowlights that way. Enjoy!

Best Movie with a Shit Trailer

Easy A (Gluck, ’10)

Really, this is just a mediocre trailer for the first two minutes and twenty seconds. It makes Easy A look like your run-of-the-mill dumb teen sex comedy. Then that final exchange happens – the great punchline on which this trailer ends, surely the perfect mix of wit, topicality, and edginess to sell this movie to the masses:

Amanda Bynes: There’s a higher power that will judge you for your indecency.
Emma Stone: Tom Cruise?

Booyakasha! Well, it turns out Easy A is actually a damn fine comedy. It boasts a sharp sense of humor and a handful of strong characters, even if Emma Stone (who gives a great comic performance that I’m not sure anyone saw coming) and Dan Byrd are the only memorable non-adults. And then there’s that line – bad any way you slice it, but one that could easily pass by without notice in the context of the film. Yet the trailer not only repurposes it in a short package designed to sell the movie, but gives it the greatest comedic spotlight of any other joke, turning this awkward, nonsensical, but minor misfire of a gag into the groan-inducer heard round the world. (Although it did get nominated for the MTV Movie Awards’ “Best Line from a Movie,” so maybe I’m just being an idiot. I mean, to be in the esteemed company of “I want to get chocolate wasted!” has to mean something.)

Best Bad Movie

Alpha and Omega, (Bell, Gluck* ’10)

Yeah, this was a bad, bad movie, one that I would have trouble even calling competent. But the awfulness of this story about a wolf clan divided between the esteemed alpha wolves and the lowly omegas was just plain funny. Really, howling as a metaphor for sex? Really? I wish I could have seen this movie with a friend (what, you’re surprised I couldn’t find anyone my age to see this with?), because I would have loved to share the experience of mocking this garbage.
* different Gluck

Runner Up

Beastly (Barnz, ’11)

I got to share this experience with a friend, although it was in a bustling theater compared to the dead one I saw Alpha and Omega in (there were no children, just a few Middle Eastern adults), so the mocking had to be quieter than I’d have liked it. But Beastly really was quite the amusingly bad movie. From its absurd premise delivered with no conviction to the tinier details that are amazingly ludicrous in their own right, Beastly should provide an embarrassment of riches for any so-bad-it’s-good connoisseur.

Best Movie that Was So Strange and Ridiculous I Pretty Much Have to Recommend It

The Warrior’s Way (Lee, ’10)

This is the kind of movie where you’re never quite sure just what the fuck you’re watching. It’s an over-the-top action-comedy ninja Western that takes place in a location apparently free of time, a classic 19^th century American West town on the surface, but anachronistically home to a circus and full racial integration. It’s endlessly confounding, but eventually as I was watching I began to realize that its bizarreness was actually really enjoyable. It was probably the strangest surprise of this project.

Runner Up

Drive Angry Shot in 3D (Lussier, ’11)

Since its genre elements aren’t as memorably blurred, Drive Angry isn’t quite on The Warrior’s Way’s level. But it’s still a sublimely ridiculous grindhouse-style action film that delivers the goods in some ludicrous setpieces and performances. Nicholas Cage stars as John Milton, a man who breaks out of Hell to avenge his daughter’s death at the hands of a demented cult leader (Billy Burke). He teams up with Piper, a fiery waitress played with gusto by Amber Heard. But along the way he is chased by a man known only as “The Accountant” (William Fichtner, in a performance that is as close as the film gets to true greatness), presumably Satan’s. The Accountant’s duty is to return Milton to Hell where he belongs. Drive Angry’s plot is muddled and makes absolutely no sense (a great episode of the podcast How Did This Get Made? tackles it in detail), but it’s a spectacle nonetheless. Sadly, both this and The Warrior’s Way tanked at the box office, but their noble efforts shouldn’t be overlooked.

Best “Oh My God, Is This Going to Happen? You Have to Be Kidding Me? There’s No Way This Is Going to Happen. It’s-H-Holy Shit! Holy Fucking Shit! It Just Fucking Happened!” Scene

Limitless (Burger, ’11)

[SPOILERS. Also, my memory’s not 100%, but this is basically the gist of the scene.] Limitless is about a magical drug, NZT, that gives you insane amounts of energy, focus, and skill, so that you can pretty much accomplish anything. In a showdown later on in the film, Bradley Cooper faces off against some folks in his apartment, but he’s not on NZT, which severely lowers his chances of not dying. He manages to kill two of his main opponent’s thugs, but he can’t win without the NZT. One of the thugs, who had recently injected himself with what Bradley Cooper thinks is the last dose, lies dead on the floor, blood pouring out from his gunshot wound. So Bradley Cooper does what any sane man would do in that situation – he proceeds to lap the blood up off the floor, essentially gaining NZT’s power by drinking a deceased man’s blood. It’s an absurd moment that feels a bit out of place in the movie, yet is amazing nonetheless. Unfortunately, aside from this and one strong scene between Cooper and Robert DeNiro, Limitless is only passable, but it has an odd charm in its cheesiness (and the happy ending basically comes from Cooper figuring out a way to harness the drug’s power without any of the health consequences, which is an awesomely immoral ending for a major Hollywood film), and is worth a rental for that scene alone.

Actress Who Kept Showing Up Throughout the Project and I Kept Hating Her Character, or Maybe Her Performance, or Maybe Both

Lucy Punch, Dinner for Schmucks (Roach, ’10), You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (Allen, ’10), Take Me Home Tonight (Dowse, ’11)

I gave Lucy Punch the benefit of the doubt after Dinner for Schmucks. I absolutely hated her character, to the extent that it made me want to get up and leave the theater in the two scenes she was in. She more or less completely derailed the movie each time she showed up, burying any goodwill Schmucks might have managed before her appearance. But see, maybe she just did an amazing job playing an incredibly grating character. Could be, right? Well, then Punch wound up playing my least favorite character in Woody Allen’s You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, which I rather liked (in fact, I actually liked it a bit more than his newest film Midnight in Paris, which got much better reviews). As in Schmucks, she was not exactly playing a sympathetic character. But you know what? I’ve seen plenty of unsympathetic characters played by actors who I thought gave tremendous performances. And making me consistently want to tear my hair out (even in her briefer appearance in Take Me Home Tonight, which was filmed years before the other two roles despite being released after them) is not good acting. I think.

Best Traditional 2-D Animated Movie

Oh wait.

Best First Season of a Television Show that Was a Movie for Some Reason

The Lincoln Lawyer (Furman, ’11)

The Lincoln Lawyer is a legal drama whose thirteen-episode first season tells the story of Mickey Haller, a lawyer with typically low-profile clients, who unexpectedly lands a huge case. But it soon turns out to be far more complicated and dangerous than he bargained for.

Well, actually The Lincoln Lawyer is a two-hour movie. It just happens to have enough story for a cable-sized season of television. Which is really to its detriment; it has to cram in so many plot developments that it doesn’t have time to pace itself in a way that would make you care about the characters. It also means you can’t acclimate yourself to a certain status quo long enough for the twists to really surprise you. And I’m not saying that this hypothetical show would be great. I don’t really think The Lincoln Lawyer has greatness in it. But it would certainly make for a breezy, fun series. And it’s based on a series of books (each around four hundred pages), so it would have enough source material to run for a decent amount of time. But as a movie, it feels sadly rushed.

Best Director Who Made Movies that I Liked that You Probably Assumed Were Terrible

John Chu, Step-Up 3-D (’10), Justin Bieber: Never Say Never (’11)

What can I say? Step-Up 3-D had some laughable characters, dialogue, and conflicts, but like, fun laughable characters, dialogue, and conflicts. And the dance scenes were pretty awesome, even if the third dimension took a bit away from them since, you know, it blurs motion. And the Bieber movie had a lot of issues (every person on Justin’s tour crew is introduced as his closest pal), but was a largely enjoyable piece of propaganda. So you know what I say? Bring on his next movie, G. I. Joe: Cobra Strikes. Or, uh…you know, maybe don’t.

Best Claustrophobic Movie

Buried (Cortés, ’10)

Ryan Reynolds is stuck inside a coffin. That’s the premise of the movie. Ryan Reyonlds remains inside the coffin for the entire running time. That’s right, we don’t even get an out-of-coffin setup. It’s ninety-four straight minutes of coffin-y goodness as he communicates with the terrorists who buried him alive and the supposed forces of good who are trying to rescue him, while worrying about his diminishing supplies of light, battery power, and air. It’s an intense, gripping movie, and a fascinating and impressively effective exercise.

Worst Claustrophobic Movie

127 Hours (Boyle, ’10)

The grades I gave these two are pretty close (this one a B-, Buried a B), but the gulf between them is wider than that would suggest. (For one thing, it’s quite possible that I underrated Buried, but I’d have to watch again to confirm.) While Buried takes a limiting premise and finds a way to tell an interesting story with it, 127 Hours takes a limiting premise and says “fuck off” to the limitations, an attitude that proves to be its downfall. It has enough strong scenes to bump it to a barely-positive grade, but it traffics in so much stylistic gimmickry that it usually undermines its own would-be intensity.

Best Movie that Was Made Years Ago but Wasn’t Released Until This Past Year and Was Met with Universally Bad Reviews that I Actually Liked

Case 39 (Alvart, ’10) [Rotten Tomatoes, 23%; Zach Haldeman, B+]

What can I say? Although everyone else hated this horror film about a demonic child, shot in late 2006 but not released until late 2010, I kind of dug it. Maybe it was its weird structure – I went in knowing nothing about it, and it was about a full forty minutes until I actually realized it was a horror movie, since until then it was mostly a domestic drama with the occasional tense scene – or maybe it’s that I’m a sucker for Bradley Cooper being attacked by CGI bees that crawl out from under his skin. I DON’T KNOW. In fact, I can say with absolutely no certainty that I wouldn’t reverse my opinion of this upon re-watch. All I know is that on October 5, 2010, I saw a nighttime screening of Case 39 at the AMC Loews Boston Common 19, and I enjoyed what I saw.

Runner Up

Take Me Home Tonight (Dowse, ’11) [Rotten Tomatoes, 28%; Zach Haldeman, B]

I know, right? Such a specific category, and there are two candidates! Take Me Home Tonight, which was shot in early 2007, but not released until early 2011, tells the story of Matt Franklin (Topher Grace), a super-smart MIT graduate with no motivation stuck in a go-nowhere job at a Suncoast Video. On one fateful night, he, his sister (Anna Farris), and his best friend (Dan Fogler) go to a party in the hopes that Matt will meet up with his longtime crush (Teresa Palmer). Though steeped in cliché, Take Me Home Tonight has a certain earnestness and retro vibe that I found undeniable. (Not retro as in 2007, but as in 1988, when the film takes place.) It never surprises, but it consistently charms.

Most Overrated Oscar Winner

The King’s Speech, (Hooper, ’10)

Between the forced artsy angles in an otherwise visually and stylistically indistinctive film, and the unexceptionally constructed story that breaks no new ground while bathing in clichéd themes of the “you can do anything you set your mind to” variety, The King’s Speech was an enjoyable but deeply flawed historical drama given an almost absurdly disproportional amount of acclaim. That this led to it winning the most esteemed award in cinema over eight better nominees, not to mention plenty of superior films that weren’t nominated, is dumbfounding. But Tom Hooper’s win for Best Director is arguably even more outrageous, since the directing may have been the least remarkable and most objectively undistinguished aspect of the play-it-safe movie.

Most Frequent Trend

Demonic possession/demon-in-disguise movies, The Last Exorcism (Stamm, ’10), Devil (Dowdle, ’10), Case 39 (Alvart, ’10), My Soul to Take (Craven, ’10), Paranormal Activity 2 (Williams, ’10), Season of the Witch (Sena, ’11)

I don’t really have anything to say about this one. It was just strange. Do so many iterations of this subject pop up every year and I just skip them? (I mean, Paranormal Activity part une came out last year, so perhaps.) Since this subject for some reason seems to strike a chord with me, and I quite enjoyed three of these, I guess I can’t complain. (Also, to be fair, My Soul to Take only sort of counts.)

Best Fifth The Fast and the Furious Movie

Fast Five (Lin, ’11)

I’ve never seen The Fast and the Furious, or 2 Fast 2 Furious, or The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, or Fast & Furious. But I have seen Fast Five, the fifth entry in the infamously oddly-titled series, and I liked it. A lot. Because Fast Five was just a deliriously fun action movie. The kind of action movie I waited the entire length of the project for. There are only so many turds like The Expendables, Faster (unrelated ‘fast’-in-the-title film), and The Mechanic that you can take before you desperately need something this kick-ass to wash away the mediocrity. Fast Five’s critical success was surprising to see but totally earned. It’s not great, but for the fifth entry in a decade-old popcorn franchise, it’s far greater than it needed to be. (And to think, I went into that weekend more excited for Prom.)

Well, that’s it. I mean it. This project will never happen again. I will fucking die before I let this project happen again. Bye.

This is the second of three posts meant to conclude the Zach Sees Every Movie project. Previously, I reflected on the experience as a whole. On Friday, I’ll host the Zach Sees Every Movie Awards. But now, I dust off a handful of reviews that were finished but never saw the light of day. Enjoy.

So, as you may have noticed, the 119 movies I saw for this project doesn’t quite match up to the twenty-five reviews I wrote. But, believe it or not, despite this startling failure that should have shamed me into deleting this blog and spending a year by myself in the wilderness coming to terms with who I am, I actually wrote a handful of reviews that I never posted because fuck, why wouldn’t that be a good idea? So here they are.

Tangled (Greno, Howard, ’10)

Tangled is Disney’s latest fairytale, a loose spin on “Rapunzel” by the Brothers Grimm. It tells the story of an old woman, Mother Gothel (Donna Murphy), who finds an enchanted flower that restores her youth. She makes sure it stays hidden so that no one else can use it. But one night it is uncovered, and is used to heal a sickly queen as she gives birth. The flower is useless afterward, however the child, Rapunzel (Mandy Moore), retains its healing power in her blond hair. The old woman steals the child and takes her to the high tower in which she lives, where she raises Rapunzel from infancy to early adulthood, never once letting her step outside. But Rapunzel grows increasingly desperate to experience the world outside the tower and yearns to know the meaning of the floating lanterns that swarm over the horizon on her birthday every year. When a wanted thief, Flynn Rider (Zachary Levi), enters the tower to hide from the palace guards and former cohorts chasing him, Rapunzel blackmails him into guiding her to the kingdom to see the lanterns up close.

And so ensues an adventure tale that journeys down a familiar road, but that manages to be thoroughly charming. The two central characters are likable, with Mandy Moore doing a good job capturing Rapunzel’s spunky outgoingness and wide-eyed curiosity.  Zachary Levi does his usual goofy shtick as Flynn, the sort of movie criminal whose charisma somehow seems to exonerate his crimes. The two may not be particularly fascinating, but they are endearing enough to carry the film. Tangled is generally very entertaining if not groundbreaking, but it does have its flaws. The most noticeable one is the songs, which aren’t particularly good. I appreciate the attempt to recapture the magic of Disney’s classic animated musicals, but they really feel tacked on, and are unlikely to be remembered. The film would honestly be stronger if it subtracted them all together.

But the biggest problem is the villain. Mother Gothel has the potential to be a complex, sympathetic antagonist. Although she came into the job under pernicious circumstances, she has held the position of Rapunzel’s parental unit for eighteen years. The two should have an incredibly deep bond, especially since neither is ever so mean that the other notices. And given their reclusiveness, they have been each other’s sole companions in life for nearly two decades. These bonds shouldn’t be shattered as easily as they are here. Rapunzel’s initial rebellion makes sense. But in her efforts to track Rapunzel down, the film wastes no time turning Mother Gothel into a straightforward villain. By the end, any bond they shared at the beginning of the film seems to have disappeared entirely. Once the plot gets moving, the two simply cease to have feelings for the other. And the direction of the film wouldn’t have to be changed at all if this was amended. Gothel can act selfishly, but she could, you know, feel pangs of regret. Rapunzel could maybe, uh, be upset that she has become pitted against a person who prior to a couple days ago was the only other human she had ever known. Neither would have to make different choices at all – it would merely be that they were somewhat unhappy that they had to make these choices. I was sincerely excited about the potential that relationship offered, but it was sadly undelivered upon. (Never mind that there’s another family-related moment at the end that seems to entirely defy the nature human of behavior.)

But while this is a deep flaw, it hardly ruins the film.  Tangled rarely aims too high, but it is a fun film, and one that’s easy to enjoy. And it has some great moments. The scene where Rapunzel and Flynn watch the lanterns fly into the sky is emotionally moving, and visually it’s absolutely stunning. On a technical level it’s likely the best-animated scene I encountered in a 2010 movie. (Perhaps this can go towards explaining why Tangled is the second-most expensive film of all time. No joke.) It’s the movie’s peak, but the rest is still very good. Despite suffering from a poorly-executed villain and a mediocre soundtrack, Tangled’s good-natured energy and spirited protagonists compensate and add up to a strong family film.

The Tourist (Henckel von Donnersmarck, ’10)

The Tourist is a film with plenty to recommend it, yet it is all too confused about what it actually wants to be. It concerns Elise (Angelina Jolie), a woman engaged in a relationship with the wanted and elusive thief Alexander Pearce. Various groups are chasing her in hopes of finding him. She intends to mislead them into believing that a stranger she meets on a train, Frank Tupelo (Johnny Depp), is really Pearce. But the situation spins out of control, and the two wind up spending a good deal of time with each other, which shockingly leads to them falling in love.

The Tourist is a much more bearable film than its reputation might suggest. Jolie and Depp both give agreeable, if hardly accomplished, performances. Visually it amounts to location porn, as the film’s setpieces do their best to highlight the gorgeous Venice surroundings, and I don’t consider that a bad thing. But The Tourist suffers from some strange identity issues. It has the tone and style of a heated comedy-thriller, yet moves at a weirdly leisurely pace. (Although much of that is due to how slowly the actors speak. I’m actually positive that if they just talked at a normal speed, the film would be about twenty minutes shorter.) The movie glides so calmly into each new crisis that it has trouble building up any momentum. And when it comes time for the big finish, the quality more or less stays consistent with the rest of the film until a terrible, terrible twist ending. It’s the sort of twist that, if someone were to tell you twenty minutes into the movie that it has a twist ending, you would immediately guess what it was. But far more egregious than merely being predictable, it is a total characterization retcon. It renders any attachment to a certain character one might have somehow built up relatively meaningless. For a movie already balancing uneasily between fun popcorn flick and mediocre romantic comedy-thriller, it leaves the sort of bad taste in your mouth that it really needed to avoid.

The Dilemma (Howard, ’11)

The Dilemma is a curious, curious film. On the one hand, it assembles the ingredients of a really bad comedy, like mediocrity-symbols Vince Vaughn and Kevin James, a hammy performance by Queen Latifa, and what really appears to be an awful script. But then it hands these ingredients to Ron Howard, a director with an uneven but hardly awful résumé. And it’s almost as if Howard doesn’t realize what the ingredients he’s been given are meant for, because he takes them and he tries to cook something entirely different with them. In another director’s hands, this would be the instantly-forgettable comedy it was meant to be. But Howard turns each scene into something compelling, visually at least. He never builds up any attachment to the characters, but somehow he manages to frame scenes in such a way that you become genuinely engaged. In an early scene, where Vaughn’s character spots his best friend’s wife with another man and follows them, Howard takes a tacky setup but makes it arresting through sumptuous scenery and creative camera angles.

Throughout, Howard gives the movie a tone and pacing at odds with its unambitious script, and the effect is certainly jarring. It’s tough to say if he did a good job directing it because then wouldn’t it have been a good movie? But I’m not sure how much could really have been done with what comes off as a truly poor script. (Interestingly, it was written by Allan Loeb, who has written three of the movies I’ve seen so far for Zach Sees Every Movie, and will have written at least one more by the time it ends. Being that this is the closest I’ve come to liking any of these movies, I cannot yet explain why he has been so fruitfully employed in the past year.) There are moments where the script’s stupidity becomes so distracting that it completely overwhelms the movie – any appearance by Queen Latifa – and scenes where its stupidity retreats enough to allow for some pretty strong moments. The Dilemma isn’t a good movie overall, but a surprising amount of it is enjoyable because of Ron Howard’s directing. I’m left giving it a confused, but kind of earned, recommendation.

Country Strong (Feste, ’11)

Country Strong is one of the more frustrating films I’ve encountered thus far in the project. There is so much that I enjoyed about it, but whenever it builds some goodwill through a particular scene or development, it always does its best to completely derail itself. It tells the story of a famous fictional country singer, Kelly Canter (Gwyneth Paltrow), whose career was put on hiatus after she had an alcohol-induced meltdown while performing that caused her to fall ten feet off a stage, killing her unborn child. She enters rehab, but her husband and manager, James Canter (Tim McGraw), pulls her out of it before she’s ready to leave because she has a series of comeback shows lined up. This angers Beau Hutton (Garrett Hedlund), an aspiring country singer who befriended her while she was in rehab. Beau and fellow rising artist Chiles Stanton (Leighton Meester) are chosen to open for Kelly on her upcoming tour dates. Tension mounts between all four of them in the ensuing weeks as they perform three shows in the South.

The first chunk of the film is promising. The conflict between the characters at this point feels natural and genuinely interesting, particularly with Kelly and James, a couple whose flame has clearly dimmed, but whose true love for each other has kept them going through all the poor decisions they each have made. And Beau’s relationship with Kelly is intriguing, as he seems to have a deep connection to her and feels protective despite not actually being with her physically. Until, around thirty minutes in, it turns out he has been with her physically. That’s the moment that these complex, layered relationships take a turn for the melodramatic, and the story of this film is the story of a subtle character study competing with a rote, through-the-motions soap opera.

At Kelly’s first concert on the tour, she opens a package backstage sent by a sociopathic scorned fan that brutally reminds her of the gigantic mistake she made before. This, of course, logically leads her to immediately start drinking. One of the key problems with this character is that she badly wants this comeback tour and to put her past mistakes behind her, but anytime it’s convenient for the story she will use the slimmest of excuses to fall of the wagon. But Country Strong’s inconsistent characterization is most obvious in her husband James. In some scenes he’s a loving husband who clearly wants the best for his wife but is pushing her too hard, and in others he’s an asshole who blatantly ignores his wife’s wellbeing. He’s often a sympathetic, well-written character, and very well-played by McGraw, but he becomes a villain the moment the story needs him to be, and his contradictory behavior doesn’t seem to come from the same character at all. The worst moments are when he puts the moves on Chiles Stanton, since at no other points in the film is he the type of person who would do that.

But I give the film a huge amount of credit for the fact that these soap operatics never actually destroy any of the relationships. In fact, despite Kelly and James both being aware of the other’s indiscretions, they’re mature enough to recognize them as a character flaw in the other and not hold it against them. The budding relationship between Beau and Chiles is never challenged by the fact that each has had romantic encounters of varying degrees of intimacy with one of the Canters. This takes remarkable restraint on writer-director Shana Feste’s part, but I just wish that the relationship drama wasn’t so poorly telegraphed in the first place.

Still, much of the respect this earns is undone in the movie’s climax. It starts with snippets of Kelly’s third try at a comeback show, which show her to be a manipulative, artless performer whose melodies and subject matter are infantile. But after the concert, Country Strong delivers its final twist, which is just one of the most absurdly dumb endings I have ever seen in a movie. It’s completely unearned and it comes out of nowhere. To say that it properly laid the groundwork for this twist is to say that feeling raindrops before entering a building would prepare you for a flood when you exit it ten minutes later. It’s the moment where the film’s noble attempts to reign in its melodramatic tendencies and not completely give into insanity are finally overcome.

But there is still one final scene between two of the characters, which takes place a few months later. It’s a sweet, modest moment that manages to capture all that was good about the preceding movie. These two scenes at the end of Country Strong stand side-by-side as representatives of its best and worst tendencies. But even though the ridiculous climactic scene has more weight than the touching final one, overall the subtle emotional instincts of the film manage to win out, albeit just barely.

Beastly (Barnz, ’11)

Oh, Beastly. What an excellent, terrible movie this is. I mean, it really is awful, and for so many reason that I shall happily delve into soon – but it’s the good kind of awful. The kind that leaves you stifling laughter for ninety-five straight minutes trying to figure out if this is actually happening. If someone actually wrote this, and then was given millions of dollars by a studio to make it, and then cast this group of actors, and then filmed these actors performing it, and then actually tried to get a decent chunk of the population to spend an hour’s wage to see it.

Let’s start with the premise, which is preposterous. First, the protagonist Kyle (Alex Pettyfer) gives a campaign speech at his upper-class high school condemning ugly people and encouraging physically gifted students to revel in their rightful place atop the social hierarchy. Rather than getting him in massive trouble from the school, it only seems to make him more of a lock to win the election (which is for president of the school’s green initiative, which he openly professes to have no interest in). But he finally makes the wrong move when he goes to great lengths to mortify a weird fellow student (Mary-Kate Olsen), who casts a spell on him that turns him into a beast. (That means he loses his hair, grows bizarre graphite-esque black veins all over his body, and gets a boil on his nose.) The spell can only be broken if he gets someone to say “I love you” to him within a year.

So his next step is to drop out of school and move into a house that his father (Peter Krause) gets for him since he doesn’t want to live with an unattractive son. Will (Neil Patrick Harris), a tutor, and Magda (Lisa Gay Hamilton), their maid, move in. Then Alex begins stalking a girl from his class, Lindy (Vanessa Hudgens), who he has a crush on. When her addict father endangers her life, Kyle sets up a deal with him that involves Lindy moving in with Kyle for protection. She shows up reluctantly one day, aggravated by, yet somehow content with the fact that she now has to live with people she has never met who, apart from Magda, don’t even show themselves to her. And she just kind of rolls along with it. This premise is completely unconvincing, and is unaided by the fact that the movie barely bothers to set it up. It’s as though it knows how absurd this concept is, and decides it’s best to not even attempt to have it seem like a logical procession of events. The circumstances for all of this – from the spell being cast, to Will and Magda moving in with him, to Lindy’s father putting her in danger, to Kyle essentially abducting Lindy – just occur haphazardly, with no conviction or coherence. It’s almost beautiful, a movie so aware of its stupidity that it doesn’t even try to make you believe that these events are taking place: it just announces that they are.

From there, Kyle, who renames himself Hunter to conceal his identity from Lindy, begins to awkwardly try to win her over without ever showing his hideous face. While this section of the movie is as dumb as the rest, it’s the only part where it seems to really revel in it, being in on its own joke for once. That said, it still can’t really settle on whether Hunter is trying to be caught by Lindy or keep hidden, or which one Lindy would rather he do. After a few months have passed, she finally meets Will (the fact that she hadn’t earlier, when there was no reason for her not to, just goes to show how disturbing the premise really is since she has not left this house at all and has only had contact with one person, and barely). Then she finally meets Hunter, in all his veiny glory. The two grow closer to each other, and potential relationship spoilers arise but are never developed beyond a scene or two, like her desire to be back to her old life, the fact that she has a crush on Kyle from before the spell and doesn’t know Hunter is the same person, and a medical crisis involving her father. Eventually, after some inconsistent character behavior, the movie finally stumbles into its ending, which is as satisfyingly cheesy as you could hope for.

But I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of how awful this movie is. Throughout Beastly, Lindy uses some strange Facebook-knockoff (that I don’t think really exists), where she posts mind-numbingly superficial status updates that contradict her characterization as someone who’s not mind-numbingly superficial. (She describes her feelings towards roses as “amazy crazy.”) She also barely seems to have a social life – though she communicates with a couple friends through this social networking site, they never have any presence in the movie. When Kyle is stalking her in the beginning, she is never seen in the company of others unless they are a part of her social activism. She clearly does not have a thriving social life, which is a potentially interesting thread that the movie never makes anything of.

Beastly also frequently tries to engage in snappy banter, but it all falls so horribly, horribly flat. This is due to the poor writing, but also the atrocious acting. Alex Pettyfer, unremarkable in his other leading role this year, I Am Number Four, reveals heretofore hidden shades of blandness. He doesn’t have anything but looks, and I can’t imagine his career leading anywhere. Teen stars don’t have to be good, but they have to have charm and likability; he has nice hair. Case-in-point: Vanessa Hudgens. I don’t know if she’s a legitimately good actress, but she’s easily one of the best things in this movie. She’s beautiful, yet also a charismatic performer, and I can see enjoying her presence in future dumb teen movies I might be subjected to. Neil Patrick Harris also shines, because Neil Patrick Harris is an incredibly gifted actor with great timing. His role should objectively be pretty abysmal (he’s a blind man who helps Kyle to see), but he somehow makes some of the banter work. It’s disappointing when he’s pretty much forgotten in the film’s final third. But they are the only two bright spots. Generally it’s Pettyfer who’s called upon to deliver the snappy dialogue, and lord is he incapable. Mary-Kate Olsen is also dreadful whenever she appears. Lisa Gay Hamilton doesn’t get much to do as Magda but serves a similar emotionally manipulative function to Harris’ tragically blind character since her children are in another country and don’t have citizenship in America. Peter Krause has a totally thankless role as Kyle’s father, which is depressing given how great Krause can be.

But Beastly, despite being really, really bad, is also really, really fun. If you enjoyed this outlining of its flaws, then you would probably enjoy seeing them at work in the actual film. It reminds me of my reaction to Alpha & Omega in that sense, albeit certainly a few pegs above that movie. But despite its truly low quality, I would choose it in a heartbeat over objectively better but infinitely more mediocre teen fare, such as Pettyfer’s I Am Number Four. I am happy to have spent ninety-five minutes with it stifling laughter.

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Earlier this year, I took part in AMC’s Best Picture Showcase, a marathon of every nominee for Best Picture at the Oscars. It was a great experience, and I meant to write about it but I never really got around to it. Or rather, that’s how I remembered things, until a week ago when I found a file on my computer titled “AMC Best Picture Showcase,” which was, of course, three pages of me writing about it. As it turns out, I just forgot it existed. In fact, something tells me I might have finished it if I hadn’t forgotten it so quickly. So here’s what I managed to finish writing before it slipped my mind. (Since I never finished it, I figured I might as well present it without any edits. But fair warning: some of these really could have used edits.)

AMC Best Picture Showcase

Over the past few months, you might have heard about AMC’s Best Picture Showcase, an event in which participating AMC theaters screened a marathon of the nominees for best picture at the Oscars, either across two consecutive Saturdays, or all ten films in one near-24-hour marathon starting at 10am the Saturday before the Oscars. Well, the Boston theater I frequent happened to be one of the theaters doing the 24-hour one, and if you know me, you know I paid $50 for admittance, and sat and enjoyed all ten films in a row (without sleep – go caffeine). I was lucky enough to have company for seven of the ten films from my friend Scott Douglass. Overall, it was a great experience. Although I have issues with some of the films, the vast majority of these are great movies, and viewing them all stacked up against each other painted a strong portrait of what the best of 2010 was in movies. (I also appreciated the opportunity to see the The Kids Are All Right and Winter’s Bone, the only two nominees I hadn’t seen before.) So without further ado, here are some thoughts on my experience with each film last weekend, along with comments on the Oscars (focusing on the awards themselves, as the abysmal telecast has been sufficiently trashed by the internet). [Note: I do not get to this part.]

Toy Story 3

This is the one I have the least to say about viewing again, because it was my fourth time seeing it (more than any of the others), and the last time was less than two months ago. And while I could appreciate it more with each repeated viewing, I didn’t necessarily love it more. It’s not the sort of film that I expect many people would either raise or lower their appreciation of based on repeated viewings. But I’ll still reiterate what countless others have said before, and what I myself have said: Toy Story 3 is a great movie from just about any angle. As a sequel, it evolves from the previous entries by expanding the scope of the story in an interesting direction and maintains consistent characterization. As a conclusion to this series, it perfectly encapsulates the spirit and themes of the films, and reaches an emotional climax unrivaled by anything preceding it, that works so well because it takes advantage of the attachment the other films have built towards the characters. As an individual film, it is exciting, funny, and gripping, and sets up its conclusion incredibly well to ensure maximum emotional payoff. As animation, it is skilled and often grand. As children’s movie, it does an amazing job of being accessible to kids of all ages while simultaneously being something adults can appreciate even more for its complexity, and not by relying on jokes or references that only adults could understand. As a Pixar film, it helps cement their reputation as one of the premiere sources of great filmmaking in the modern cinema landscape, not just in animation, and not just in children’s films.

Grade: (before) A/(now) A

127 Hours

I never discussed 127 Hours on this blog, but I was not terribly happy with it. It’s the astonishing true story of Aron Ralston (played by James Franco), a reckless mountain climber whose arm is pinned down by a boulder, leading him to resort to drastic measures to free himself. The film promises to be a claustrophobic, narrow narrative with a brutally exclusive focus on Ralston’s attempts to put an end to his predicament. But Boyle’s instincts as a director fail him in telling this story. He implements excessive stylization, in the form of split screens, fast editing, and a large number of meaningful but hollow flashbacks and hallucinations. But these impulses serve to blunt the impact of the story. They create a pillow of sorts, protecting the audience from feeling the sheer disparity of the situation. A set of flashbacks involve Ralston’s “one that got away,” played by Clémence Poésy. We come to know nearly nothing about her as a human, but the fracturing of their relationship does blatantly underline the theme that Ralston’s detachment from others is what led him to this crossroads. I could call Poésy’s role thankless, but it’s nothing compared to Lizzy Caplan and Treat Williams, who play Ralston’s sister and father, respectively, and have nothing to do but sit on a couch in a hallucination. (Though Caplan does get to leave a phone message off-screen earlier.) It wouldn’t be so objectionable if these weren’t two individuals with a history of strong performances who should never be cast in something to just sit still for probably less than a minute of screen time.

127 Hours ultimately feels like a candied version of the story it’s telling. Some scenes work really well, such as when Ralston’s mind, slipping from reality, enacts both sides of a radio talk show interview. (Here the fast editing is an asset, although I still wonder if it would be better to just let Franco play out the scene without cutting to a new shot every time he changes character.) The climactic scene where he frees himself is good too, largely because Boyle lets the event play out on screen without unrelentingly fast editing and narrative distractions. But the thing is, while Boyle’s predilection for these techniques diminishes the effect of the film, I’m not convinced there was a great movie here at all. The film looks especially weak compared to 2010’s most claustrophobic film, Buried, which really did manage to tell a compelling story with an even more limited setting, although there the character could move and interact with other objects in the setting. Plus, it wasn’t based on a true story, so the writer was free to include as much as his imagination would allow him. The story of Aron Ralston might just be too simple for it to make a good movie. So maybe Boyle decided that he simply needed the flashbacks and hallucinations to make this work, but it still doesn’t. 127 Hours still entertains in many parts, features a strong (if overrated, albeit with some great moments) lead performance from Franco, and in the end is quite uplifting. But it seems misguided in the first place, and if it ever did have potential to be great, its own stylistic trickery undermines it. It has strengths, but it’s one of the most disappointing films of the year, and for my money the worst of the Oscar contenders.

Grade: (before) B-/(now) B-

The Kids Are All Right*

The Kids Are All Right might have had the strangest position going in to the Oscars, because there didn’t seem to be anybody that actually thought it was the best film of the year. The other nine films all had their diehard advocates, but at the very least I couldn’t detect any for Kids. And that’s not something I take issue with – I would be very interested in hearing someone explain how this could be better than all the other candidates. This was the first time I saw it, and I was interested in what my reaction to it would be, since I had certainly read some opinions proclaiming it to be overrated.

It focuses on a lesbian couple, Nic and Jules, played respectively by Annette Bening and Julianne Moore, both giving excellent performances. They are in love with each other, but still experiencing trouble with their relationship. Their children, Joni (Mia Wasikowska), eighteen and preparing for college, and Laser (Josh Hutcherson), fifteen and involved in a misguided friendship, become interested in finding the sperm donor their mothers used to conceive them. They eventually contact Paul (Mark Ruffalo), a man whose life is relaxed and easy-going, but a tad unfulfilling, who agrees to meet with the two. The meeting is relatively successful, and Paul becomes a deeper part of the family’s life. Joni and Jules in particular are accepting of him, but Nic is uncomfortable with his looming presence. Eventually his integration into their lives goes too far, and the walls start to peel away from the family’s close bonds.

What really makes the movie click is the characters. They all make bad, destructive choices, but remain sympathetic throughout and are winning in moments of levity. The dialogue is believable and often quite funny. It enhances the light tone, which is very modest but effective, and can deftly support dramatic moments. The only character I wasn’t entirely sold on was Laser, whose subplot about his troublemaking friend never connects emotionally with the other characters. The movie is also a tad awkwardly structured. The beginning and especially the ending have a heavy focus on Joni, but the rest of the film relies far more on the adults. To balance it out it should have focused more on her relationship with Paul throughout, which was interesting and certainly had the potential for further exploration. (And more Mia Wasikowska is never a bad thing – as one of the many who was riveted by her performance in the first season of the great HBO series In Treatment, I can’t express enough how happy I am that Hollywood is giving her a career.) A final scene between her and Paul would have aided the movie in more ways than one. But despite these flaws, and despite not being a great movie, The Kids Are All Right is a strong film that left me very satisfied. To me it’s not really a contender for best film of the year, but I appreciated its presence in this movie marathon.

* I should note that regarding the two movies I saw for the first time here, this and Winter’s Bone, I decided that they didn’t count as part of this project because it wasn’t an official re-release and their time in theaters had passed.

True Grit

The Coen Brothers’ latest, based on a novel by Charles Portis, True Grit tells the story of a fourteen-year-old girl, Mattie (Haley Steinfeld), who enlists a US Marshall, Reuben “Rooster” Cogburn (Jeff Bridges), and a Texas Ranger, LaBoeuf (Matt Damon), to help her track down Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), the man who killed her father. When I first saw it, I felt like the film seemed to be a triumph in many aspects. The only nagging complaint was that it’s not the level of greatness many have come to expect from The Coen Brothers. It left me somewhat on the fence when I was initially grading it, but ultimately I settled with an A. But seeing it a second time, its strengths were only amplified, and I came to hold much more conviction in my original grade. Perhaps when not expecting it to be something it’s simply not, it’s easier to revel in what it is. The three pillars upon which the rest of the film hangs are its characters, performances, and dialogue. It’s not as philosophically fascinating as the Coen usually strive for, but those three qualities make it a pure delight to watch, especially as Steinfeld and Bridges chew into the script. If you’ve seen and enjoyed True Grit, I can’t recommend enough watching it again, because it stresses just what an exceptional film it is.

Grade: (before) A/(now) A

And…that’s as far as I got. The before/now thing with grades was to reflect if my opinion had shifted at all. In the ones I finished, it hadn’t, so it looks pretty useless. In fact, The Fighter’s the only one I adjusted (decided that while it’s damned good, it wasn’t quite an A), so it would have been 90% useless even if I had finished. For the record, my grades for the ten Best Picture nominees:

Toy Story 3: A
127 Hours: B-
The Kids Are All Right: B+
True Grit: A
The Fighter: A-
Winter’s Bone: A
Black Swan: A
Inception: A-
The Social Network: A (yeah, it was kind of amazing seeing these all in a row)
The King’s Speech: B

This is the first of threes posts meant to conclude the Zach Sees Every Movie project. This one will focus on assessing the entire project in retrospect. The one on Wednesday will collect a handful of reviews I never published. Finally, Friday’s post will be the Zach Sees Every Movie Awards, in which titles like “Best Bad Movie” and “Best Director Who Made Movies that I Liked that You Probably Assumed Were Terrible” will be given to the most deserving recipients. Stay tuned.

So…I saw every movie. 119 movies to be exact.

Well, to be honest, I didn’t actually see every movie that played from September 6, 2010, to April 30, 2011. It got to be too hard to keep up with towards the end, and in the last month or so I missed about twelve movies, in addition to the ten movies I had missed before that. (Though some were beyond my control, like Hatchet II, which was pulled from theaters after three days.) So the project kind of petered out near the end. Of course, for anyone reading these posts, the project petered out in the first month, which was about as long as I could sustain seeing every movie, writing about every movie, taking four college classes (three of which were difficult), and maintaining a functional social life. Something had to give.

Since I was no longer publishing my thoughts on every movie to this blog (which hasn’t seen an update since, oh…February. Great.), the purpose of this project was called into question, and this question was never answered. Because it really didn’t provide any external value once I started keeping my opinions strictly internal. (It also didn’t provide any external value the most recent time I did share my opinions, in that one dreadful podcast.) But despite the urging of many friends to give up the project, along with my mother, whose unenviable duty it was to refill my bank account after I blew my funds on another week of cinema, I pushed forward. My devotion to the project was too strong. If I ever missed a movie when it played at the AMC Loews Boston Common 19, I would venture out of Boston to whichever obscure theater was still showing it. (And as a result, I have some amusing stories.) Seeing every movie gave me a weird sense of focus, and I had plenty of energy that first semester. It wasn’t until the last two weeks of December when I had to focus on finals that I first let a few slip by.

When I returned to Boston after winter break, I got things off to strong start, seeing four movies in one night. But my plans to see even more films the following day evaporated when I was just too tired. That proved to be the last time I saw more than two movies in one day, a regular and, most importantly, necessary occurrence first semester. Somehow, even without ever really writing much, juggling the various aspects of my life with Zach Sees Every Movie was too difficult this spring. I still saw fifty movies, which I suppose is an impressive number, but it’s little compared to the sixty-nine I saw in the fall, especially considering the amount of movies I missed. My schedule was simply less accommodating. My only free weekday was Monday, and I usually slept into the afternoon and then had to focus on homework.

I didn’t even get to see a “last movie,” in that when I went into the last movie I wound up seeing, Fast Five, it was with the expectation that I would see at least a few more in the week before I went home. Again, finals interfered with that plan. But as I mull it over, I realize that not seeing a “last movie” was kind of the point of this project. I started it when I realized that in my freshman year of college, despite having a large movie theater with nineteen screens a mere two-minute walk from my dorm, I had only managed to see four movies (Inglourious Basterds, Paranormal Activity, The Invention of Lying, and Where the Wild Things Are) the entire year, and they had all been in the fall. This project was a response to that, a way to get myself to go to the movies on a more regular basis and see everything I wanted to see, rather than missing anticipated film after anticipated film for exactly no apparent reason.

So no, the project does not end. That is, I will hardly be seeing every movie going forward, but I will make much more of an effort to see the ones I want to see, or the ones I’m curious about, while allowing myself to miss Yogi Bear 2. And more importantly, I will motivate myself to go beyond the local mainstream movie theater. Already in the last two months I’ve seen Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins, a strong samurai film from a director I regard fondly; Meeks’ Cutoff, a slow, tense historical drama; Midnight in Paris, the latest trifle from my all-time favorite director; Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, a strangely beautiful movie that continued to dance around in my brain long after I left the theater; and The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick’s ambitious attempt to wrestle with man’s place in the universe, so magnificent that each time seeing it I left the theater awestruck, breathing in my surroundings as if I had stepped out into the world for the first time. I haven’t left the mainstream behind, of course; I’ve already seen X-Men: First Class, a strong superhero movie; Green Lantern, an awful superhero movie; Transformers: Dark of the Moon, an utter mess; The Hangover Part II, a mediocre sequel; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2, a strong finish to the great story’s uneven film adaptation; and the upcoming Friends with Benefits, one of the must-avoid movies of the summer, and 30 Minutes or Less, a solid comedy with a really good performance from Aziz Ansari.

And that’s not to mention the various cult and classic offerings from the same venues I saw those, like Steven Spielberg’s masterpieces Close Encounters of the Third Kind (my first time seeing it) and Jaws (a film that looms large in my upbringing but that I hadn’t seen in full for a long time); the 1981 slasher flick The Burning, which has its pleasures despite a debilitating devotion to the genre’s histrionics (namely an unnecessary avoidance of showing the killer’s disfigured face until the end, which sends some potentially scary scenes into disorienting and clumsy abstraction in a movie otherwise stylistically straightforward); or Alice, Jan Svankmajer’s nightmarish, stop motion-heavy take on Alice in Wonderland.

The goal of the project was to get myself to go to the movies more often. And it’s difficult to say if I would have seen all of these if Zach Sees Every Movie hadn’t drilled in me the pleasures of seeing perhaps not every, but many movies. I doubt that I would have, although it’s impossible be completely certainty. In a simpler way though, Zach Sees Every Movie was undeniably successful: for all the stress, for all the time-consumption, for all the pieces of shit I allowed (or, rather, paid) Hollywood to thrust at me, I’m quite glad I did it. When this enormous undertaking of an idea popped into my mind at the tail end of last summer, I had no idea how far I would go, how dedicated I would be, or if I would have scrapped the whole thing before I even got to Boston (undoubtedly the sanest route). But I surprised even myself by continuing this project for the entire planned amount of time, even as my commitment slowly faded. And I can say with 20/20 hindsight that this project was misguided, irresponsible, demanding, unnecessary, and deeply rewarding.

Hey guys. So you remember when I did one of these back in November? Maybe you do. Well, here’s another one. It’s just me talking about movies I’ve seen recently. Also, it’s a little bit weird at times. And it has a brand new theme song!

0:00-2:23 – Introduction
2:23-7:36 – Yogi Bear (F) and other stuff
7:36-10:21 – The Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader (C+)
10:21-15:11 – The King’s Speech (B)
15:11-19:01 – Sanctum (C)
19:01-22:30 – Blue Valentine (B+)
22:30-23:44 – The Way Back (B)
23:44-25:38 – The Green Hornet (B)
25:38-27:06 – The Mechanic (C)
27:06-31:18 – Just Go with It (C+)
31:18-32:25 – The Company Men (C-)
32:25-35:38 – I Am Number Four (D+)
35:38-40:56 – Paul (B+)
40:56-44:41 – Exit notes

Zach Sees Every Movie – Podcast #2

Also, we’re on iTunes.

So I clearly fell behind on writing these reviews last year. It just got difficult. Whatever. And given how few reviews I published in the last couple months of 2010 (uh, zero) and how embarrassed I was by that, you’d think I might have bothered to post some of the reviews that I actually had finished. Apparently not. So here are four reviews that I wrote months ago but never published. On the bright side, these movies are starting to trickle out onto DVD and OnDemand, so these reviews are probably more relevant now than they would have been in December. Anyway, enjoy!

Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole

Finally, a movie the sets out to fix the biggest problem people seemed to have with Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy – not enough owls. Those movies represent an unbelievable synthesis of both filmmaking and technical mastery, but it was all undone by Jackson’s embarrassingly shortsighted mistake. Oh sure, he’s promised to include owls in at least 40% of The Hobbit, but in the annals of film history, it will be too little, too late.  (And with the way production on that film is going, I half-expect he’ll wind up settling for pigeons.)

Zack Snyder, on the other hand, should have no such fear.  Between this and Watchmen, he has boldly announced himself as a director who takes the demand for strigiform-oriented genre stories seriously.  Any and all “Hooters,” as owl-lovers call themselves, should eagerly await his future projects.  But how does the world’s first, but hopefully not last, All-Owls-All-the-Time-100%-Owls-Nothing-but-Owls (I’m hoping to coin the term for this budding genre) movie turn out?

Well, to be blunt (and to stop kidding around), it’s basically what the previews indicate.  It’s a competent, but not particularly strong, fantasy story with owls instead of people.  Honestly, forget the trailer.  Just look at the title. Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole.  It’s an unseemly mess of fantasy clichés.  There’s some sort of legend, there’s a big, dramatic word like “guardians,” and then the gibberish name of some fictional place.  (Too bad they went with Ga’Hoole; my favorite location in the movie was the even more ridiculous “Sea of Hoolemere.”  You know, the one that connects to the Atlantic from the north?)  So unlike, say, Catfish, the marketing for this film makes no attempt to mislead in any way.

To briefly highlight the positive aspects of the film, I will point out that the animation, done by effects company Animal Logic (they previously stirred controversy when their work on the film Happy Feet led to rampant toe-tapping in inner cities), is excellent.  Well, not entirely.  I mean, it might have been nice if the owls were actually distinguishable from one another, but individually they’re terrifically realized.  Beyond that, the best I can say is that it’s certainly not a terrible film.  It’s fun to mock just because of how absurd its conception is, but its execution is adequate. (Although I should note that it’s based on a book, so the actual story isn’t new, but some studio did have the silly idea to make a movie of it.) After all, Zack Snyder is a slightly gifted, if very limited, director.  (Um…yeah, there’s a lot of slow motion.)  But flat characterization and limp storytelling aside, an epic (if frankly quite ordinary), straight-forward fantasy tale about owls is going to seem stupid the moment you take a step back and consider what it is.  Perhaps the key problem is that it does take itself so seriously.  It probably wouldn’t make it any better, but if Guardians seemed to acknowledge the inherent ridiculousness, it might be slightly less laughable.  (It comes close when it scores a training montage to the Owl City song “To the Sky,” but I fear that honestly wasn’t intended as a joke.)

And as for the All-Owls-All-the-Time-100%-Owls-Nothing-but-Owls filmmaking movement, I have concerns over its future.  Legend of the Guardians made a decent amount of money, but perhaps not enough.  So for any actual “Hooters” out there, stay strong.  Your day may someday come.  But in the meantime, just enjoy what comes your way, even if it isn’t particularly good.

Secretariat

This is basically a dull political drama but with horses.  (Have we already taken such a step back from Legend of the Guardians – don’t they know it should have been with owls?)  Based on a true story, it stars Diane Lane as Penny Chenery, a housewife who winds up with her father’s stable of horses after his death.  She takes a particular interest in a foal she thinks has potential to be a great racehorse.  Well, she’s right.  With the help of trainer Lucien Lauren (John Malkovich), they raise Secretariat to be a stunning racehorse.

The trouble with Secretariat is that there’s very little actually interesting about it.  The extremely affluent characters, due to the nature of their environment, all behave with such focus on being polite that there’s rarely a moment of intimacy between them.  The best character is Lucien Lauren, but that’s largely due to John Malkovich’s performance.  I couldn’t decide if it was great or terrible, but it entertained me either way.  Yet for the most part, the characters aren’t very well developed.  And their lives are driven intensely by raising and training horses, something fairly alien to the vast majority of audiences.  So with nothing to which to attach as far as characterization or relatable situations, the entire film feels completely disconnected from emotion.

I will admit to finding horseracing morally objectionable, but I’m fairly confident my feelings towards that didn’t interfere with my thoughts on the film.  (I really never thought about that at all while I was watching.)  In fact, I found the actual racing scenes to be the best moments in the film.  The execution is solid, but there’s just something innate about competition that makes the audience root for the protagonist, whether or not they would particularly care about her otherwise, as long as it’s filmed well.  Secretariat works in those scenes, but it spends most of its running time in mediocre territory.

Buried

Obviously, I have a deep interest in film and storytelling in general.  And seeing all these movies has only made me appreciate the ones that don’t follow the beaten path even more.  They don’t all work, but when, say, Takers heads in a surprisingly unconventional direction in its final act, I’m likely to have a lot more respect for it than I would had it followed the traditional heist/action movie beats.  So before I discuss this film critically, I just want to commend it for being so boldly, wildly unusual and ambitious.

Buried is about a truck driver, Paul Conroy (Ryan Reynolds), who wakes up in a casket, buried alive in Iraq.  All he has is a partially charged cell phone to communicate with the outside world, a lighter, and some other tools he uncovers later.  It’s an average-sized casket.  He can’t stand up or even bend very well.  There’s no artificial lighting.  And the entire film takes place in this casket with him.  Every single shot of this movie is in the casket.  There are no flashbacks or dream sequences or teasers or anything that would take the camera outside this setting.  Ryan Reynolds is the only actor to physically appear in the movie, aside from some footage on a phone.  So for ninety minutes, this film is going to try to tell a tight, gripping thriller, with only one small, claustrophobic set.  Buried is, at the very least, stunning in its intent.

It is also very, very good.  It’s remarkable that a full movie’s worth of story was found for this premise, but it was, and credit to Chris Sparling’s script for that.  There’s rarely a slow moment, and the tension and suspense never subside.  Ryan Reynolds gives a strong performance at the center, and he has to – the film would fall apart without one.  Rodrigo Cortés’ direction is great at capturing the claustrophobia of the situation, though occasionally becomes a tad too stylized.  In particular, there are shots where Ryan Reynolds and the coffin become the center of the shot while a wealth of black space consumes them from the sides as the camera zooms out.  These moments, though rare, do break from the reality in a distracting way.

But for the most part, Buried works.  It never really becomes a great movie, possibly because of the extraordinary limitations imposed by the plot.  Still, the fact that it does manage to be a damn good one despite those limitations is amazing in its own right.

Alpha and Omega

Okay, I’m conflicted about this one.  On the one hand, it’s completely fucking terrible.  I mean, this film is horrendous.  But I’m not giving it an F.  Why?  Well, because it is hilariously awful.  It was entertaining to be so continuously baffled by the stupidity on display in every single aspect of a movie.  I was laughing because of how awful it was, but hey, I was laughing, so this movie can’t really be an F, can it?

Alpha and Omega is about a society of wolves (first mistake – seriously guys, owls are the way to go) that is broken up into two groups.  The alpha wolves are the superior wolves in the pack, and the omega wolves are the lesser kind for some reason.  (This distinction has something to do with genetics, not proven ability, because wolves are classified as one or the other from birth.)  The alphas and omegas socialize as pups, but then the alphas go into alpha training, and they’re forever segregated afterwards.  Protagonist Humphrey (Justin Long), an omega, is friendly with Kate (Hayden Panettiere), who is destined to become an alpha.   He has feelings for her but knows that alphas aren’t allowed to be with omegas.  Then the two are abducted by humans and taken to a national park.  With the help of a goose and a duck, they try to get back home before a feud between their pack and a rival pack explodes and along the way become closer than their society ever intended.

Sometimes movies don’t always looks as bad as they wind up being: the script is good or has potential; the director has a strong, interesting vision; the cast is great and will work wonders with the material.  But somehow, something gets lost in translation with the finished product.  The dialogue falls flat, the director’s ambitions get the best of him, or the actors don’t have chemistry.  It just goes wrong somewhere.

But that isn’t true for Alpha and Omega.  I really can’t imagine this movie looking good at any stage.  Every single aspect of it is just lazy.  That plot?  Lazy.  The jokes?  You don’t want to know.  (Humphrey, as a group of caribou tauntingly shakes their butts towards the wolves: “Now that’s not a moon I want to howl to.”)  The characters?  Nope.  The directing?  Completely uninspired.  The animation?  Mediocre.  The cast?  Not to blame, but not especially noteworthy.  It’s just an assemblage of bad, recycled ideas thrown into one movie.

The animals in it are astoundingly flexible and strong, with no attempt made to understand the actual physics of movement.  The wolves have agility that goes beyond any creature really found in the animal kingdom.  And it’s not just them – at one point the goose flies while carrying one of the wolves.  I don’t think geese can do that.

The wolves have “Moonlight Howls,” in which wolf-couples howl at the moon in song.  Yes, in song.  The other wolves dance to this music.  It gets worse: the film uses howling as a metaphor for sex.  At one point Humphrey remarks about him and Kate, “We can eat together but we can’t, you know…howl together.”  When Kate howls for the first time with the wolf she is arranged to marry, he is completely out of tune.  Afterwards, he turns to her and asks, “Was it good for you?” as she awkwardly weasels away.  It takes a staggering amount of contempt for its audience to include something like this. It’s the usual Shrek-inspired level of condescension towards its young audience, delivering jokes they’re intended to not understand, but also towards its adult audience, due to what a truly lazy punch line it is.

Okay, I’m getting angry thinking about it now because this really is a horrible film with no effort put into it.  And I’ve written before about how I find laziness to be far more aggravating than just awfulness.  But there was something a bit different here.  Maybe it’s because this is a light children’s movie, as opposed to something dark and violent like The Expendables, which makes it easier to just sit back and laugh.  Perhaps it’s because the movie is so lazy that it truly doesn’t even manage general competence.  But I found something about how completely devoid of inspiration it is was hilarious.  If you’re ever hanging out with friends and you see this playing on cable, I highly advise you to watch because you will have a great time mocking it.  But I would feel ashamed of myself if I had made it.

Well, this is a bit later than I’d have liked, but I wound up writing way more than expected about each entry. Still, I hope you remain somewhat interested in reflecting on this past year in music, because this took a long, long time to put together. If you’ll recall, in my top songs list I mentioned that there’s no crossover between that list and this one. This holds true, but I stress that the rule only impacted the songs list, not the albums list. There is one bit of crossover though, where an album here is by an artist I gave props to on the songs list, for a song from a different 2010 release of theirs. Although this isn’t necessarily restricted by that rule, I still likely would have avoided it if that album wasn’t so stylistically different from this one.

I’m not going to include an “honorable mentions” list here, however, there are some albums that I couldn’t figure out a way to put on either list. I would distinguish this from an honorable mentions list because many of these I don’t actually feel like I could give a proper assessment of, and in some cases it might be on the list if I could (rather than not being on the list because it’s not good enough to be on it). Also, a true honorable mentions list for me would include many albums that I highlighted a song from instead. So anyway, here are my notable omissions:

How to Dress Well, Love Remains
This didn’t make my top albums list, but it came close. I wanted to put a song from it on the songs list to compensate, but ultimately just couldn’t really find one that I felt comfortable including on that list. But it is very good, and worth checking out.

Gorilliaz, Plastic Beach
My only previous exposure to Gorillaz was adoring the still-great “Clint Eastwood” in elementary school and just kind of ignoring the rest of that self-titled album. So I wasn’t as excited for Plastic Beach as everyone else I knew seemed to be, and I didn’t check it out when it was released. I recently decided to correct that error, and while I’ve actually found myself liking it a ton, it was just too late in the game to really think about it in terms of this list. My fault, yo.

Deerhunter, Halcyon Digest
I like Deerhunter and Bradford Cox quite a bit, but I just never was able to make a lot of time for this album, sadly. I’ve listened to it a couple of times, but not enough to have much of an opinion on the whole thing. So far, there are some parts I really, really enjoy, and some parts I may just need more time with. Still, I can’t really do anything about not being able to put it on a list at this point.

Sharon van Etten, Epic
Another one I only recently got into, although I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have made my top albums list. Still, had I been listening to this album for longer I likely would have made room for a song from it (probably “DsharpG”) in the other list.

Avey Tare, Down There
Although I’m an Animal Collective obsessive, I didn’t listen to this too much. I liked it from the few times I did listen to it, but I couldn’t help but find it to be a disappointment, mainly because Avey Tare is capable of so much more. Still, it’s not a bad album at all, and if it wasn’t coming so soon after Merriweather Post Pavilion I might have made more time for it, enough to at least find something worthy of the top songs list.

And finally, in a given year I obviously miss a whole lot of good music. These are some of the albums that I straight-up just never listened to, regrettably:

Beach House, Teen Dream
Broken Social Scene, Forgiveness Rock Record
Caribou, Swim
Crystal Castles, Crystal Castles
Gil Scott-Heron, I’m New Here
Liars, Sisterworld
Local Natives, Gorilla Manor
No Age, Everything in Between
Owen Pallett, Heartland
The-Dream, Love King
Titus Andronicus, The Monitor

And now, here are my top fifteen albums of 2010. After each entry is an “audio collage” if you will, which contains around two minutes of clips from the album to give you a sense of whether it’s up your alley. Anyway, without further ado…

Back in August, we hadn’t heard a true album from Sufjan since 2005’s masterpiece Illinois. We’d heard outtakes, compilations of unofficially released Christmas-themed EPs, and experimental orchestral compositions, but not an actual follow-up. Then one day, there it was on his Bandcamp page – completely unannounced – an EP of brand new Sufjan songs.  An hour-long EP of brand new Sufjan songs. That’s longer than all but a few of the albums on this list. (Twice as long, in some cases.) It was tough to know what to make of it at first, and as the dust settled, some people decided that they didn’t like it. But despite the mixed reviews, I’ve found All Delighted People to a rewarding release, and in many ways what I wish Age of Adz, his actual album that was released two months later, had been. The EP is held together by two versions of the title track, both around ten minutes long. They each start modestly, but eventually soar to great, idiosyncratic heights in a surge of booming instrumentation. The closing track, “Djohariah,” is seventeen minutes long, a length that bothered the same people eventually turned off by “Impossible Soul,” the even longer final track on Age of Adz. It doesn’t add up to as much as “Soul,” but is respectable in its boldness. Aside from the title, which is chanted in a tremendous gush of human voice, no actual words are sung until twelve minutes in, and then Sufjan stuffs about four hundred of them into the final five minutes. The other songs, despite not taking place on as grand a scale as those three, are hardly duds. “Heirloom” and “Enchanted Ghosts” are primo-Sufjan, and “The Owl and the Tanager” is one of the best songs in his discography. The lyrics to it are the kind you can’t quite parse definitive meaning out of, but that are deeply affecting anyway. “From the Mouth of Gabriel” is the only song here I could do without, but it’s at least notable for pointing the way (not that we noticed) to the type of experimentation he would indulge on Age of Adz. And even if I was disappointed by that eventual release, I still take great pleasure out of this EP, which shows Sufjan sitting comfortably in his usual terrain, but still restless enough that he needs to spread his arms.

Choice tracks: “All Delighted People” (“Original” and “Classic Rock” versions), “The Owl and the Tanager”

The Scissor Sisters’ third album, the first in four long years, is the kind of thing that shouldn’t be any good. Their self-titled debut release was a terrific glam-rock/disco hybrid, the rare album that works as a throwback and as a terrific set of songs in its own right. But it didn’t exactly herald a band that would last the ages. The Scissor Sisters were burning bright, but in the way that usually burns out sooner than later. Their second album, Ta-Dah, seemed to confirm this direction. It had their best song (“I Don’t Feel Like Dancing”), but was more uneven and simply lacked the impact. And this year I was ready to have to dismiss Night Work, as much as it would pain me to do so. But fortunately, no such dismissal is required. The band succeeds with Night Work largely because they don’t attempt a repeat but also avoids some hollow plea to be taken seriously as artists. Instead, this album works because it’s drenched in atmosphere, meant to emulate the sort of skeazy nightclub environment the band loves. It helps that the band is working with a strong set of songs. They start things on high note (because, well, it wouldn’t be a Scissor Sisters album otherwise) with the title track, but the quality doesn’t subside as it moves along. Rather, it simply grows more experimental, but also more endearing. Behold the final three songs, starting with a bitter ode to self-destructive sex, then swinging to an album-, perhaps artist-defining anthem about the thrill of giving your body away to the fulfilling self-destructiveness of nightlife culture. Finally, the album closes with “Invisible Light,” a musically ambitious track that climaxes in a spoken-word segment from none other than Sir Ian McKellan. Like the rest of Night Work, it’s sounds fresh and weirdly innovative. That’s a description I never thought I’d bestow upon The Scissor Sisters, but I am immensely happy to do so.

Choice tracks: “Sex and Violence,” “Night Work,” “Night Life”

Glasser’s first release was 2009’s Apply EP, which contained three original tracks and three remixes of them by artists like John Talabot and Tanlines (and later with additional digital-only remixes by Delorean, YACHT, and others). The promising EP was composed entirely by Cameron Mesirow using GarageBand. For her full-length debut, she worked with producer Ariel Rechtshaid to bring out the most in the songs, breathing air into the arrangements. “Apply” and “Glad” are the two holdovers from the EP, and the newer recordings are unquestionably superior. They are given new dimensions here, coursing with an energy and liveliness denied them on the comparatively flatter original compositions. And the new songs match these two in every way. The highlight is “Home,” a track about the emotional framework of a relationship falling apart. The layers of Mesirow’s voice shouting “home” in the chorus is pure spectacle. Throughout Ring, Mesirow uses quiet, instrumentally minimalist endings to lay each song to rest while clearing the field for the next one. In particular, the way the final song ends with a distorted version of “Apply”’s opening percussion gives the album a subtle circular quality, making it feel like a complete whole in a way that no individual piece quite does. That’s where Ring draws its title from, because in its in full state, it’s nothing short of a thing of beauty.

Choice tracks: “Home,” “Apply,” “Plane Temp”

Das Racist (“Das” like “that’s”) emerged last year with the single “Combination Pizza Hut & Taco Bell” (link goes to the excellent wallpaper. remix), which was either completely brilliant or completely stupid, depending on who you asked. And even fans of the song, such as me, were pretty confident that Das Racist would not really be a band worth looking out for. Well, I think both sides gladly ate their words this year. First with the good Shut Up, Dude mixtape and then the great Sit Down, Man, Das Racist were one of the most interesting hip hop acts of the year. Das Racist act as cultural, social, and music critics, splicing clever pop culture references with cutting societal observations. But the mixtape doesn’t really get off to a good start, with most of the first four songs sounding flat production-wise. Every time I’ve listened to the album, I spend the first fifth growing increasingly bored, with the exception of the standout “hahahaha jk,” which includes a summation of Das Racist’s entire attitude: “We’re not joking/Just joking, we are joking/Just joking, we’re not joking.” But Das Racist enlisted an impressive roster of producers, and “Commercial” is where this recruitment starts to pay off. It has fun, colorful production, and that level of craftsmanship maintains itself for most subsequent tracks. The peak comes with “Amazing,” produced by Brooklyn band Keepaway (who got mentioned in my top songs list), who make the entire song sound like it’s floating on a glittery cloud. (Weirdly, the two artists’ collaboration on Keepaway’s Kompetitor EP is mediocre.) Das Racist, of course, match the production on the album at every turn. Their references are funny (including ones to the two pillars of ’90s comedy: “Choo-choo-choose to be half-Lisa Simpson, half-Ralphie”; “Haters mad ‘cause they got Costanza dicks”), but they also allow Das Racist to increase the depths of their own characterization. In “Amazing,” they drop a reference to the Bible, of all things (“Wait, are you able to/Give of the flesh like Abel do?/Not able?/Cain’ll do”). But their cultural critiques are just as impressive, mocking the free-[Insert Artist Here] movements (“But free Weezy too though and Max B too yo/Free the whole prison system, what they did to you, bro?”), the fashion industry (“I’m at the fashion party, I’m wearing fashion clothes/I’m putting fashionable powders up inside my nose”), and racism (“Older white women say I’m very articulate”). Sit Down, Man is a bold announcement of vision and skill, and put Das Racist in a position to become one of the most vital artists today.

Choice tracks: “Amazing,” “Rapping to You,” “hahahaha jk”

ceo, aka Eric Berglund, is familiar to music fans as one half of the great Tough Alliance, the band that started the Sincerely Yours label in Sweden. His debut as a solo artist started cryptically, like most things Sincerely Yours-related, but this time with an added dose of possible mental illness. (Some highlights from the initial press release: “ceo is the photosynthesis and a an aria [sic], it is silence and virginity lost in a gang bang”; “ceo is raspberries and chlamydia [sic], it is the shadow and it is a clapping game”; “ceo is the ashanti [sic] and ceo is seinfeld [sic].” Really, the whole thing’s amazing, especially because there’s a 90% chance it is not a joke.) But if ceo was a failure, it would have been the first Eric Berglund project to have that distinction. And thankfully it does not. Berglund remains as great a songwriter as he ever was, and songs like “Illuminata” and “No Mercy” display a flair for melody few possess. On “Come with Me” he sings of wanting to escape with a person he loves, while simultaneously crafting the perfect song for them to escape into. I hope to hell The Tough Alliance isn’t over, as increasingly feels likely, but I won’t be heartbroken if it is as long as Berglund keeps releasing music on par with White Magic.

Choice tracks: “No Mercy,” “Come with Me,” “Illuminata”

Highlife (aka Sleepy Doug Shaw), named after a popular African style of music (and apparently emulating it as well, although I’ve never personally listened to any highlife), released this EP at the end of September, and I was blown away when I heard it. Not by the first track, which is good, but slight due to its length (less than a minute). No, it was when I got to the second track, “F Kenya RIP,” that I knew I was listening to something great. It essentially repeats the same melodic hook for nearly six minutes, but it seems to grow more and more candescent as it moves along. The song is exuberant and captivating, aided by the busy but not distracting production. The next two songs smartly don’t try to emulate it, but they use similar techniques to create something just as grand. The fourth one, “Tuareg Dancehall” is more relaxed than what precedes it but exquisite anyway. It’s the rare song that captures the spirit and emotion of dancing without actually being a dance track. I find it impossible not to be moved by Highlife’s music, and of all the new artists that emerged this year, he’s the one I will be most excited about watching in 2011.

Choice tracks: “F Kenya RIP,” “Tuareg Dancehall”

Wavves’ 2009 album, Wavvves, was adored by some and criticized by others for being lo-fi at its most murky. And if it wasn’t obvious then that these critics were writing it off too quickly, the band’s follow-up, King of the Beach, should answer that definitively. It cleans up the production considerably, but it beefs up the songwriting just as much. Nathan Williams’ lyrics are simple, but by no means bad. The way they document his thoughts seems almost refreshingly spare, focusing on his feelings about weed, love, and himself. Williams is almost unapologetically a brat, and his lyrics convey this with accuracy and surprising charm. But it’s his songwriting that impresses the most here, the sound of a kid who grew up on the mainstream pop-punk of Blink-182 (of which he is an unabashed fan, and I promise, that’s only one of the reasons I love him so much) trying his hand at actual punk. And the result is punk, at its catchiest and most blissfully meaningless. When he pouts, “My own friends hate me/But I don’t give a shit,” he couldn’t sound more likable.

Choice tracks: “Baby Say Goodbye,” “Post Acid,” “King of the Beach”

Reverb. Echoes. Distorted vocal loops. It’s amazing that with the presence of those elements rarely heard in the music of Neil Young, what’s most notable about the legendary musician’s latest album is what’s missing – namely, every instrument except an electric guitar and his voice, two amazing tools that haven’t lost their haunting power with time. But what’s more surprising is that, for the first time in sixteen years, Neil Young has recorded a great album. He had some strong albums in the 2000s, and even a few great songs, but 1994’s Sleeps with Angels was the last time he released something this consistent and noteworthy. It’s tough to say for sure if “Neil’s back for good,” but it’s a relief that he returned at all. The uptick in quality is immediately noticeable on the opener, “Walk with Me.” About the pleasure of heading into old age with a loved one, it’s one of the most hard-hitting rock songs he’s recorded in a long time. In “Love and War,” he tackles the grand subjects of his career (you know, besides cars), yet confesses, “When I sing about love and war/I don’t really know what I’m saying.” On “Hitchhiker,” one of the first looks fans got of the album, he chronicles the highs and lows of his entire career, while encapsulating the musical style of the album. He recounts the drugs, the paranoia, the lost loves, and, because it wouldn’t be Young otherwise, the Aztecs. “Peaceful Boulevard” is the most traditionally Young-esque song on here. He trades an electric guitar for an acoustic, and, in a vocal performance proving that yeah, he still has that voice, details the way devastation results in massive change, starting with the first European settlers in North America and ending in present day. Though heavy-handed at times (particularly the final verse), it’s still breathtaking in its sweep. I had come to wonder recently if Neil, my favorite artist of all time, would ever do something surprising and great again. Le Noise gives the assuring answer that, as he sings in “Sign of Love,” “When we both have silver hair and a little less time,” well, “there still are roses on the vine.”

Choice tracks: “Walk with Me,” “Hitchhiker,” “Peaceful Valley Boulevard”

Janelle Monáe’s first full-length album, The ArchAndroid, came out in May, but its weight has been felt deep into the winter. It’s an incredible exercise in genre hopping, very few songs being cut from the same cloth. The album is split into two suites, the second and third in a thematically-linked series about an android named Cindi Mayweather that started with Monáe’s 2007 EP Metropolis. The second suite comprises the first thirty-seven minutes of the album, and it’s the stronger of the two. It starts well with “Dance or Die” (the second track after an overture), which features poet Saul Williams, but then the album just lets loose. In the span of seventeen minutes, we get “Faster,” “Locked Inside,” “Cold War,” and “Tightrope.” (The comparatively slight, but still good, “Sir Greendown” sits in the middle of the four songs.) These are probably the best straight seventeen minutes of music on any album this year outside of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. It’s an incomparable rush of creativity and energy. And it’s a marvel that “Faster” and “Locked Inside,” which easily could have been the best moments on many other albums, get their asses handed to them by “Cold War” and “Tightrope,” a one-two punch that tops last year’s best one-two punch, Phoenix’s “Lisztomania” and “1901.” “Cold War” is a rush of energy and force, as Monáe sings subtly scary lines like “I’m trying to find my peace/I was made to believe there’s something wrong with me.” “Tightrope,” which guests Big Boi, is an awesome mix of funk and hip hop about the necessity of artistic perseverance.

But the album doesn’t slide into irrelevance after this stretch. The rest of the first suite is still strong, with standouts like “Oh, Maker” and “Come Alive (War of the Roses).” The second suite, a shorter thirty minutes, sees Monáe trying on less accessible genres, but still emerging with a great song more often than not. “57821,” which features Deep Cotton, is a slow, lilting track that’s one of the best on the album. “Wondaland” is one of the weirder stylistic exercises, but is strangely effective. The ArchAndroid isn’t entirely consistent (I can’t for the life of me figure out how Kevin Barnes was essentially allowed to sneak an Of Montreal song onto here in “Make the Bus”), because that would be almost impossible for an album of its scope and length. But it’s a triumph anyway, and while it may not work as a whole quite as well as Sleigh Bells’ Treats, to me Janelle Monáe is the most promising breakthrough artist of the year.

Choice tracks: “Tightrope (feat. Big Boi), “Cold War,” “57821 (feat. Deep Cotton)”

Barcelona-based group Delorean seemingly came out of nowhere last year with the Ayrton Senna EP (which made my top-10 list last year), although in fact they had been releasing music since 2004. Ayrton Senna was a glorious collection of sunny, ecstatic dance music, particularly the single “Seasun” and the even better “Deli.” Their first full-length album following the breakthrough, Subiza, naturally had a lot of expectation built up for it, and when it finally came out, shrugs of disappointment could be heard from a few fans. True, these songs don’t feel like as much of a radiant eruption as the ones on Senna, but as it turns out, that’s not really a flaw. Instead, the songs here are more like particularly sunny soundscapes, less immediately rewarding but no less remarkable. They lay blissful melodies over spirited compositions, of which the most distinguishing element may be that the human voice appears to play a role in each one (although sometimes it’s so distorted that it’s hard to be sure). Every track is a winner, which is why claims that the album is frontloaded ring of laziness to me. My personal favorite is the exact middle track, “Simple Graces,” which could have been as much of a summer anthem as “Seasun” if people were paying attention. I was enormously excited for this album, and as far as I’m concerned, my excitement proved completely deserving.

Choice tracks: “Simple Graces,” “Warmer Places,” and “Real Love”

On this, the third Los Campesinos! album, the jubilant sound of their first two releases continues its descent into something darker and reaches its apex. Gareth Campesinos! (for those unfamiliar with the band, each member uses Campesinos! as a surname) has developed into a lyricist capable of purging his emotions in devastating ways while maintaining the pure cleverness that he practically flaunted on the group’s still-amazing debut, Hold on Now, Youngster. There, even the album’s weakest song could have possibly its best line (as in, “Since we became accelerated readers we never leave the house”). On Romance, Gareth sorts through the baggage of his past relationships (not unusual), but often with a ferocity heretofore unseen in him. In “Straight in a 101,” he knocks off one of the best lines of the year with “I think we need more post-coital and less post-rock,” but immediately follows it with an explicit condemnation of his ex-girlfriend’s tendency to stimulate him but “never get me off” (or, later on, “never touch my cock”). And the song ends with vicious self-deprecation as Gareth comes to the realization of just how little his petty romantic disasters really matter. When he shifts through the pieces of a woman’s misery (probably another ex-girlfriend) on “The Sea Is a Good Place to Think of the Future,” what could be a listless dirge is instead undeniably moving because, well, he earned it.

And also because the music itself is great. It’s a step up from the previous Campesinos! release, the short We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed, which was often brilliant but also uneven. The songs are simply fuller this time, implementing the sensational turbulence that they once used at their most fun to create something abrasive, intense, and visceral. They resist anything as joyfully anthemic as “Death to Los Campesinos!” or “You! Me! Dancing!”  Instead, they allow the bigger moments on the record to become piercingly poignant. It’s the sound of a band evolving, not letting any one technique define them but maintaining a consistency in style and vision. It was already easy to love Los Campesinos!, but Romance with Boring made it even easier.

Choice tracks: “The Sea Is a Good Place to Think of the Future,” “Romance Is Boring,” “Straight in at 101”

When mixing songs, careful attention must be paid to the noise level. In any mixing program, the color red is used to mark the point where the sounds get too loud and will likely start to bleed together, diminishing the quality of the recording. Sleigh Bells gleefully gives this rule the middle finger. Their aesthetic is all red, all the time, letting the production bleed so far into the danger zone that it feels like being punched in the face.

Sleigh Bells is a duo, comprised of Derek E. Miller and Alexis Krauss. Miller used to be a member of hardcore band Poison the Well, while Krauss was in a girl group Rubyblue that never got off the ground. And though it’s a simplification, imagining a fusion of those two genres should give you a rough idea of what the band’s up to. Miller writes the songs and develops the beats, a mix of well-worn guitar hooks with blasted drums, all executed as violently as possible. Krauss is the vocalist, and her girly voice, equally capable of charming “ohs” and ear-deafening screams, is an ideal complement to the production. She makes every song her own, managing to sell bizarre lyrics like “You form a tarot pack and I’m aware of that/But we could fistfight drunk like The Parent Trap” and “Got my A machines on the table/Got my B machines in the drawer” (which are the only two lines in “A/B Machines”). The fusion of these two styles allows songs like “Tell ‘Em” and “Crown on the Ground” to form an almost hallucinatory orgy of noise.

But for any who question their actual talent, given that their music is founded on what is admittedly a gimmick, “Rill Rill” should put those fears to doubt. Though the production technique remains similar to the rest of the album, ignoring intricate mixing and letting sounds blend together, and the effect is reminiscent of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound production. It isn’t a rush of noise so much as a smooth-as-silk pop song, with Krauss’ voice at its most effervescent, singing hazy lines about braces, telephones, and “new trends.” The song functions both as a necessary peaceful respite from the chaos of the rest of the album, and also as a helpful hint for where Sleigh Bells might take their music in the future. While I highly doubt they’re heading towards an album of completely “Rill Rill”-esque songs, it answers definitively that no, they don’t have to do loud to do great. But for now, it’s just more fun that way.

Choice tracks: “Rill Rill,” “Crown on the Ground,” “Tell ‘Em”

James Murphy has been doing this for a while. Hell, he made that clear on LCD Soundsystem’s first single, “Losing My Edge,” which came out in 2002. If he was already a veteran then, God knows what he is now. Over the past decade, Murphy has been using LCD Soundsystem as a means to explore the potential of electronic music to delight, inspire, and unite. Since 2002, the project has had its highs, and, well, higher highs. Their debut album, which came out in 2005, featured two discs, one of new material and one of previously released singles. It was justly acclaimed, particularly for its standout tracks like “Daft Punk Is Playing at My House,” “Tribulations,” and the aforementioned “Losing My Edge.”  Their 2007 follow-up, Sound of Silver, was even more rapturously received, particularly for “All My Friends,” which was one of the defining songs of the decade. But in 2010, Murphy seems ready to hang up the LCD Soundsystem project, at least in its current incarnation as a big band with massive tours and an intense pressure to create good music. And with This Is Happening, the band’s third and purported final album, Murphy has let LCD Soundsystem bid farewell at the top of its game.

This Is Happening opens with the second-longest song on the album, “Dance Yrself Clean.” The mix is surprisingly quiet, and one can be forgiven for turning the speakers up to hear the vocals better, backed by a percussive beat and a catchy synth loop. The song takes a while to rev up, but when it finally gets loud, it makes for an awesome moment. The second song, which was also the first single, is the deliriously stupid “Drunk Girls.” It is structured essentially as a series of alleged facts about drunk girls and boys (drunk girls, apparently, “get invitations from nations,” “like to file complaints,” and “wait an hour to pee,” while drunk boys “steal from the cupboards” and “walk like pedestrians”), but it reaches a strangely moving note as Murphy starts to show his age. Without casting aspersions on it, he demonstrates his distance from this lifestyle with a desperate attempt to defend his behavior, followed by a proclamation of his belief in “waking up together,” “making up,” and honesty. Only Murphy could write a four-minute pop song so seemingly stupid at first, but then turn it into something profound.

Elsewhere, he engages in his signature music-as-music-criticism with “You Wanted a Hit” (“You wanted the time/But maybe I can’t do time/Oh, we both know that’s an awful line/But it doesn’t make it wrong”), bemoans his inability to objectively perceive conflict in relationships on “Pow Pow,” romanticizes the idea of friends and family as an emotional center in the face of hardship on “Home,” and on the standout “I Can Change,” pledges to change so he can prolong a relationship clearly on its last legs. It’s probably the most traditionally pretty song on the record, one that showcases Murphy’s splendid falsetto. But the true peak comes with “All I Want,” the fourth song, which might be my favorite song in LCD Soundsystem’s catalogue. Murphy describes the bleak scenario of returning home one day to find your partner has abandoned you due to neglect, and the onslaught of depression and longing it causes. The song is produced tremendously, with the vocals mixed slightly below the music in a way that allows the melody to be dazzling but subtle. The instrumentation grows more and more mesmerizing as the song pushes forward, and the final series of pleas to “take me home” are a painful but emotional release. Like I said before, if this is the last LCD Soundsystem album, James Murphy has led the project to a perfect conclusion.

Choice tracks: “All I Want,” “I Can Change,” “Home”

Starting in June, Swedish star Robyn began the Body Talk series, a planned three mini-albums that would roll out over the course of 2010. The first two came out in a timely fashion, each containing eight songs, and they garnered strong reviews. But when it came time to end the series in late November, rather than release a new mini-album, she decided to release a full album called Body Talk (not fashioned to any qualifier like “Part 3,” as the first two releases were), a single disc containing five songs each from parts one and two and five new songs. The hour-long Body Talk stands as a summation of Robyn’s music from the past year, and, despite some unfortunate omissions (namely the great “Cry When You Get Older” from Part 1), is a glorious artifact of her mastery of pop music.

It’s been written many times that Robyn’s absence from mainstream American radio is an injustice, and it couldn’t be truer. She and collaborator Klas Åhlund have a deft understanding of pop songwriting, both in structure and melody. These songs are as accessible as anything at the top of the charts, yet, for the most part, infinitely superior. What makes Robyn’s music so strong, despite an undeniable relation to mainstream pop, is its pure originality. These songs have a perspective and style missing in the manufactured world of most popular music, and it allows them to flourish. To listen to Body Talk is to hear fifteen songs that could be #1 hits for countless artists, yet are so much better for being bound to Robyn and Åhlund’s sense of musicianship.

But no one today besides Robyn and Åhlund could sit down and write this many exceptional pop songs on one album. The level of pure catchiness is off the charts. Robyn also understands the secret to pop music lyrics, weaving simple lines to create a sentiment easy to understand but emotionally sincere and affecting, be it the anguish of heartbreak or the incomparable joy of dancing. The beats on the album are uniformly terrific, thanks to Åhlund and guest producers like Diplo, Max Martin, Shelbcak, and Kleerup. Body Talk is just pure pop perfection. Individually or taken together, the songs on it are just some of the most thrilling and blissful music released this year.

Choice tracks: “Call Your Girlfriend,” “Dancing on My Own,” “Hang with Me,” “Stars 4-Ever”

I don’t really want to get too heavily into the Kanye myth here, in part because I already did that, and in part because everyone else has done so more than adequately. But to summarize: ego Twitter genius moving painting SNL G.O.O.D. Fridays Matt Lauer VMAs (2009 and 2010 versions) dick photo ballerinas #itsaprocess. Did I get everything? I hope so, because although I found all of that entertaining (and at times fascinating), they have little to do with this album taking the top slot here.

Simply, no other album pushed as hard as this one. No other artist tried to do as much as Kanye did with Fantasy, and if they had, they couldn’t have dreamed of succeeding so fully. Kanye’s goal in life is nothing short of trying to be the greatest artist of all time, and this album is a statement that even if that goal is impossible, he’s not gonna half-ass trying to achieve it.

No two songs on Fantasy are alike. The album begins with “Dark Fantasy,” which is as fitting an opening as could be. It pinballs from medieval-sounding narration by Nicki Minaj to a hook lifted (but deeply improved) from Mike Oldfield’s “In Higher Places,” to two strong verses by West to indie folk singer Bon Iver singing a verse through Auto-Tune, despite possessing a great voice, and finally to a cascading wall of voices singing the hook. The structure makes no sense, and might even be completely insane, but it comes together impeccably. On the second song “Gorgeous,” his flow is fiercer than elsewhere on the album as he raps about institutional racism and the criticisms people aim at him. (On comparisons to The Beatles: “What’s a black Beatle anyway, a fucking roach?”)

Then there’s “Power,” an anthem of earth-shattering proportions. Working with a killer sample from King Crimson’s “21^st Century Schizoid Man,” West delivers one amazing moment after another, simultaneously allowing this song to be self-mythologizing and the reason for the self-mythologizing. Right from the start he treats himself like a superhero, calling the song his “theme music” and facetiously stating in the chorus, “No one man should have all that power.” He goes on to bait SNL (on which he performed this song), insult the institutions of a “white-man world,” display awareness of his ego one second and praise how “fucking gifted” he is the next, and brag about driving while intoxicated. It’s an explosion of personality, braggadocio, pomposity, and genius that no other artist today could manage, and it works amazingly.

“Power” defines the album for me, but that doesn’t mean Fantasy is even remotely short of similarly brilliant moments. On “All of the Lights” he enlists eleven different artist, including Rihanna, Alicia Keys, Elton John, and Fergie, to create the most forcefully poppy song on the record. On “Devil with a New Dress,” he delivers two excellent verses before letting the beat stand out alone for a bit as it slowly morphs, building to a verse by Rick Ross that could have the worst lyrics in the world (though it doesn’t), but simply sounds great the way it mixes with the production. “Blame Game” is one of the most emotional tracks on the record, as West and John Legend spin a moving story about a relationship decaying into hatred and betrayal. It ends with what many consider the album’s most questionable moment, a two-minute sketch with Chris Rock praising his girlfriend’s renewed sexual energy and abilities, which she credits Kanye for. Although I admit the album would probably be better without it, I like it because, well, it actually is a little funny (mostly when Rock describes his plans to thank Kanye), but primarily because the way it meshes with the production just works so well. It sounds great, even if it may not be that great at all.

But the album’s biggest triumph is the single “Runaway.” It starts with spare piano notes, taking a leisurely forty seconds before a true beat finally emerges. Kanye sings on this one, recalling his underrated 2008 album 808s and Heartbreaks, but this time he eschews Auto-Tune and lets his uneven but emotive voice carry the song by its fragile self. In the lyrics, he stops trying to defend himself from the media’s criticisms of his character and concedes that maybe he does resemble the image they paint of him. He sympathizes with the women in his life who “[put] up with my shit just way too long.” In the chorus, he toasts to douchebags, assholes, scumbags, and jerkoffs, and acknowledges that he is one when he tells a woman to run away from him for her own sake. Pusha T does the only rapping on the track in a purposefully superficial and casually misogynistic verse meant to embody the faux-celebration of douchiness. Eventually the song proper ends, but rather than finish it at just under six minutes like the single version, Kanye does something else. He starts singing into a vocoder, letting it distort his voice to the point where it no longer even sounds like it emanates from a real human being. He proceeds to hum and sing, mostly unintelligibly, producing a soothing yet haunting effect  It goes on for three minutes, allowing the song to clock in at just over nine minutes total, and it’s absolutely mesmerizing. It’s one of the most unusual but gorgeous things I’ve ever heard on an album, and I am certain that no one else in the industry would have tried or even thought to attempt anything like it.

“Lost in the World,” the final song, samples and increases the tempo of Bon Iver’s “Woods,” a lovely, heavily Auto-Tuned track from his Blood Bank EP. The production builds gracefully before the beat enters and Bon Iver’s slow, tender voice seamlessly becomes the focus of a propulsive, infectious track. Kanye delivers a verse about getting lost in the moment with a woman he has conflicting feelings for, and afterwards slowly adds layers and layers to the production, until Bon Iver’s quiet song about escaping the tumultuousness of life becomes something huge, loud, and in every way transcendent. It’s an effect similar to the entire record: West, almost as a challenge, takes elements that shouldn’t work, whether it be the soaring chant of the hook to “Dark Fantasy,” a minute-long Elton John paino-based interlude, a verse from widely-hated rapper Rick Ross or the questionably talented Fergie, the tremendous voice of Bon Iver filtered through Auto-Tune, his comparatively weaker voice not filtered through Auto-Tune in a nine-minute song about self-hatred that climaxes with three minutes of distorted, mumbled vocals, or a rant by a young Gil Scott-Heron, and works it into a musical fabric in a way that adds up to something stylistically schizophrenic, emotionally draining, unfailingly ribald, stunningly ambitious, and, in the end, truly wonderful.

Choice tracks: “Runaway (feat. Pusha T),” “Power,” “Lost in the World,” “Devil in a New Dress (feat. Rick Ross)”

As the title indicates, these are my top twenty-five songs of 2010.  This list had just two major rules: no artist can be on it twice, and no crossover between it and the top fifteen albums list I’ll be writing later in the month (update: now posted).  That is, any song on an album from that list was disqualified from this list.  Otherwise it would become cluttered, and I’d wind up writing way too much about Robyn and Janelle Monáe while completely ignoring bands like School of Seven Bells or Cults.  Doing it this way lets me spread the accolades around.  As for this list specifically, I decided from the outset that I wasn’t going to write something for all of these songs, just the ones where I felt like I had something to say (can anyone say something new about “Fuck You” at this point?), which is why a small number of these are left blank.  At the end of the list is a ten-song Honorable Mention, listed in alphabetical order.

And here’s the obvious disclaimer that this list is more or less arbitrary.  Other than my number one choice, which I’m pretty settled on, not a single one of these songs is in the same spot it was when I first threw together a rough list, and items were moved around as recently as Saturday.  That is to say, I will smack the shit out of anyone who argues with me about how “Go Outside” is better than “Bloodbuzz Ohio,” because they clearly put more value in the rankings of this list than I do.  So, without further ado…

1. Arcade Fire, “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)”

“Sprawl II” is an affirmation of what an impressive, at times astonishing, band The Arcade Fire has been since they released their monster debut in 2004.  It’s the sound of them taking a risk with a song wildly different from the rest of the work, and still having it feel in complete alignment.  And then, of course, having it be better than anything anyone else wrote in the same year.

As much dance music as rock music, “Sprawl II,” from 2010’s The Suburbs, chooses all the right places to pull back, swell, and explode.  The track stars Régine Chassagne with a vocal performance made of equal parts fragility and swagger.  She carries the song in a way that Win Butler can’t quite manage to elsewhere on the album.  This song is about the relationship the protagonist has to the city lights in the distance, longing for them at times and loathing them at others.  She wants the freedom of creativity the city promises, but can’t help but see the endless sprawl of buildings as oppressive.  The lyrics brilliantly capture her suburban experience, one moment overcome by a sense of purposelessness, the next running away from police cars with her friends for no real reason.  There is no better moment on record this year than when the music rises just before Chassagne delivers the final verse, and then she belts it out from the bottom of her chest.  It catapults the song to that extra level to become something simultaneously moving, joyous, and exhilarating.

–See also: “Rococo”

2. Panda Bear, “Alsatian Darn”

Okay, let’s get this out of the way – Tomboy is probably not going to be the best album of 2011.  Person Pitch was the best album of 2007, and one of the best albums of the last decade.  It’s second only to Merriweather Post Pavilion in Animal Collective’s extended discography.  And even though he wrote “My Girls,” the best song on MPP and maybe the best song of last year, it’s a tad unreasonable to expect any artist to match those standards so consistently.  So while I’ve enjoyed every song Panda has released this fall to some extent, I’d be surprised if they add up to an album as astonishing as Person Pitch.  (There is hope – Animal Collective members Avey Tare and Deakin will be making the final mixes of the songs for the album, which could be a very good thing.)  But although I don’t think it necessarily stands up to most of Person Pitch, there are very few songs I’ve loved more this year than “Alsatian Darn,” the b-side to his second 2010 single, “You Can Count on Me.”

It starts simply enough, with spare percussion that sounds like frantic footsteps, but in no time a guitar loop and his signature spiraling melodies take over.  His warm vocals are as soothing as they’ve ever been.  The song builds gracefully, steadily gaining power and impact.  Then he shifts directions, and his vocals begin to spin around each other before settling in with an emotional question that Panda proceeds to ask over and over again – “Can I make a bad mistake?”  It speaks to the theme that seems to perennially drive his music: the need to take care of one’s family and the insecurities of not always being able to.  There’s always a complexity driving his at-first-glance facile lyrics, and that applies to his music, too.  Plenty is going on in this song, and if you can find a way to take it all in at once, Panda Bear’s true human decency and musical genius will become overwhelming.

–See also: “Slow Motion,” from the “Tomboy” single

3. Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, “Round and Round”

I’d never listened to Ariel Pink prior to their new record, Before Today, and I don’t know that I’m particularly compelled to.  He is certainly an interesting artist, but maybe not the type that I would really find personally rewarding to explore further.  In fact, I’m not completely in love with Before Today.  At its best, it’s like great lost pop songs from the ’60s filtered through a post-modern lens.  But at times it drifts aimlessly, not sure how to surround a song’s prettier moments to make it work as a whole.  This song has a little of that (break down, break-break, break down), sure, but for the most part it’s just a lush pop song adorned with rough edges and an endearing playfulness.  And its chorus, in which Ariel Pink sings about wanting to “dazzle them all,” is gorgeous, and somehow seems to grow even more so each time it’s repeated.

–See also: “Menopause Man”

4. Joker, “Tron”

Dubstep superstar Joker was responsible for one of the most exciting songs of the year with this single.  I wish I had anything to say about it really, but all I can do is point to just about every second and gush about how awesome it sounds.  (SERIOUSLY, DO YOU HEAR HOW CRAZY IT GETS HERE?  AND OH MY GOD, HERE IT COMES – WAIT – OH SHIT – HOLY SHIT YESSSSS!  THIS SONG IS AMAZING!!!!)  That wouldn’t be very constructive, so I’ll just let the song do the talking.  (Seriously, go hear it now.)

5. Julian Lynch, “Just Enough”

6. Big Boi, “Daddy Fat Sax”

7. Jónsi, “Go Do”

I’m strangely tempted to write that there isn’t much I can say that hasn’t already been said, but I’m not sure much has really been said, all things considered.  Perhaps I mean that there’s nothing I can say that hasn’t been felt, simply by listening to this song.  If your circle of friends is anything like mine, then you probably heard “Go Do” played an excessive amount of times over the past eight months without the expected burnout.  But few songs would have made me happier to hear so often, because few were as stomping, infectious, and memorable as this highlight from Go, Jónsi’s strong solo debut.

–See also: “Boy Lilikoi”

8. Tallest Man on Earth, “King of Spain”

9. Keepaway, “Yellow Wings”

Brooklyn-based band Keepaway so far hasn’t managed to live up to this, its debut song.  They came close on “Family of the Sun,” and other brilliant moments have been strewn across their two 2010 EPs, but nothing they’ve produced since has had the impact of “Yellow Wings.”  Opening with a distinctive drum+vocal loop, the busy and engaging production builds before giving way to what is really just a great song.  The lyrics are vague but deeply intriguing.  “I think I finally know what I want/I want to be two places at once/I want to stretch until I split/Fall back graciously into the wind.”  Oddly, it makes a perfect metaphor for Keepaway themselves.  They have struggled to find their voice, stretched evenly between the infectious but experimental and the experimental but tiresome.  If they can learn to consistently write songs as direct and ambitious – yet exuberant – as this one, they could be huge next year.

–See also: “Family of the Son

10. Joanna Newsom, “Baby Birch”

11. Sufjan Stevens, “Impossible Soul”

Sufjan’s long-awaited new album, Age of Adz, had some issues.  The songwriting, as always, was fantastic.  But by experimenting with electronic arrangements, Stevens finally found something he just couldn’t really do.  Great songs on Adz are frequently cluttered by lifeless, clunky electronic beats that seem to swallow their charm.  But “Impossible Soul” is where all the unseemly experimentation of the first two-thirds of the album comes together to create something breathtaking, a twenty-five minute suite that’s as stunning a song as Stevens has ever composed.  At that length, it’s a lot harder for the electronic production to swallow the song, and in fact, it strengthens it.  Songs this long are allowed to go batshit at times – how else are they going to take up so much time without becoming tiresome?  And because the arrangement constantly shifts styles, even within the different sections of the song, it never wears out its welcome (including his use of Auto-Tune).  Parts of “Impossible Soul” are ambient, and parts are downright propulsive and thrilling.  Later portions even feature gorgeous sing-along chanting reminiscent of Stevens’ glorious “Chicago.”  And against all odds, it adds up to something astonishing.  Even though he’s lately been compelled to experiment in styles ill befitting to his music, this song cements the fact that he still has as much inherent talent as ever.

–See also: “Futile Devices”

12. Tanlines, “Real Life”

Synth/pop/dance/whatever duo the Tanlines released a pretty strong debut EP earlier this year, the Settings EP (from which all six tracks were recently incorporated into a compilation album Volume On).  It’s quite good in general, but the second song, “Real Life,” is the one that stands out.  It layers synths and keyboards over an African rhythm and boasts a deep but universal lyrical sentiment about regret over past actions, giving it the emotional edge to make the music really connect.

–See also: “Three Trees”

13. Here We Go Magic, “Collector”

Although I quite liked “Flangela,” for the most part Here We Go Magic didn’t completely click for me on record.  I enjoyed their debut album, but it wasn’t something that really made me want to dig in.  It wasn’t until I saw them live for the first time that I became convinced there was something to this band, and hearing this track, off their new album Pigeons, confirmed it.  Oh sure, it’s nice at first.  They clearly have a good sense of what makes for a catchy tune, and they put that on fine display here.  But as is the case for all their songs in concert, what truly makes “Collector” memorable is the way it keeps going and going.  It doesn’t really build in the conventional sense, in that what makes it work isn’t the addition of new parts.  What makes it effective is that it pushes, hard, and it doesn’t stop when it would probably make sense to stop.   Because of this, even though I’ve listened to it twenty-three times, I’m still never prepared for when it actually ends.  And while that could potentially be annoying, it’s not.  In fact, it’s what makes it so special.

–See also: “Casual”

14. Four Tet, “Angel Echoes”

15. Vampire Weekend, “White Sky”

I like Vampire Weekend a lot, although I wouldn’t call myself one of their biggest defenders.  I didn’t get as much out of Contra as their self-titled debut, but “White Sky” has been one of my deepest pleasures of 2010.  The verses are bouncy but relaxed, and the sublime “oohs” of the chorus are intoxicating.

–See also: “Giving Up the Gun”

16. Major Lazer feat. Collie Buddz & Lindi Ortegi, “Good Enuf (Cash Flow Dub)”

17. Best Coast, “Our Deal”

I was a pretty big Best Coast fan earlier in the year, tracking down just about all of their pre-debut album EPs and singles.  But even though I listened to them quite a bit, I honestly only really liked six of those sixteen songs (trust me, replaying them all so much gave me a lot of time to think about it).  It just became what I would put on whenever I wanted to listen to music but didn’t feel like thinking about what I wanted to listen to – basically, it was kind of propelled by laziness.  Which is fitting because as I’ve come to take a more critical approach to Best Coast, I’ve found the thing that kind of rubs me the wrong way about them is, if not exactly laziness, that it just doesn’t feel like there was a ton of effort put into the songs.

Instrumentally they sound completely amateurish, clearly composed by people who aren’t terribly good musicians. But Best Coast’s melodies are sweet, if not always memorable, and Bethany Cosentino’s voice, although not particularly great on its own, fits them snugly.  Lyrically, Cosentino has been widely criticized for just singing straightforwardly about men, namely how she feels like shit without them around.  Personally, on the one hand, yeah, it’s a little discomforting to hear a prominent female indie artist sing so unapologetically about being helpless without men.  But I’ve always been moved by sincerity of expression, and simple lyrics that convey simple yet emotionally sincere thoughts have a tendency to win me over.

But I recognize that there’s a glut of these kinds of lyrics on Crazy for You, and Cosentino seems pretty incapable of writing ones that are genuinely clever or intelligent, at least right now.  While every song is more or less listenable, and I do enjoy the album, only occasionally do the elements at play in Best Coast really come together to produce something great.  Their finest moment remains the one that first put them in the spotlight, last year’s “Sun Was High (So Was I),” but “Our Deal” now places a close second.  It puts all the focus on Cosentino’s voice, which is reverbed at just the right amount.  It lends the song a sort of distant quality that makes its emotional core seem wistful rather than whiny.  (Every Best Coast song has heavy reverb, but only a few of them use it this well.)  The lyrics are stronger than usual, with Cosentino coming off as less dependent on men than she often does, or at least less blunt about it.  It’s unclear if the man in this song is leaving her or just leaving to go on tour, which is a good thing.  And I kind of just prefer a song that ends with her repeating something vague like “That’s not our deal” as opposed to “Maybe I’m just crazy for you.”

–See also: “When I’m with You”

18. Cee Lo Green, “Fuck You”

19. Girls, “The Oh So Protective One”

20. The National, “Bloodbuzz Ohio”

High Violet was my first National album, and as often happens when I get into a highly esteemed indie artist late in the game, I didn’t really bother to familiarize myself with the rest of their discography.  I’m sure The National has made plenty of music on par with this album (the last to be cut from my top albums list), but which I’ll likely never hear.  It helps that High Violet isn’t the kind of thing I usually go for, although I deeply enjoy it anyway.  And you don’t need to hear it repeated again what a strong single “Bloodbuzz Ohio” is, but what really blows me away is how the song itself sounds like it could be from almost any period of music from the ’40s to the present.  “I still owe money to the money to the money I owe” even sounds like the kind of short, brilliant lyric Robert Hunter used to write.  But rather than merely adopting old styles, “Bloodbuzz Ohio” inhabits them in a way that feels completely natural.

–See also: “Runaway”

21. Cults, “Go Outside”

22. Sunglasses, “Whiplash”

This brilliant psych-pop single by up-and-comers Sunglasses boasts some of the catchiest songwriting I heard in 2010.  The poppy but demented production is great as well.  This song positions Sunglasses as a band to watch out for in 2011.

–See also: “Referee”

23. Weezer, “Time Flies”

I’ve come to believe that a new Weezer album these days guarantees at least one highlight.  On Raditude, it was the embarrassingly underrated lead single “(If You’re Wondering If I Want You to) I Want You To,” as stomping and catchy a song as latter-day Weezer has made, and with vastly more intelligent lyrics than found elsewhere on the mostly terrible album.  Before that, The Red Album had “Pork and Beans” and “The Greatest Man that Ever Lived,” and Make Believe had “Perfect Situation,” which, come on, is a pretty awesome song.  But Hurley’s lead single, “Memories,” was a disappointment.  It had a strong chorus, and I can’t completely hate any song that gives Rivers the rare opportunity to scream, but the verses and production are so obnoxious that they significantly damage it.  I was worried when “Memories” was first released, because the singles from their last two albums were both strong.  Would this be the first Weezer album…ever to not have at least one damn good track?

Well, fortunately there is one song that qualifies for the position on Hurley, “Time Flies,” the final track (and Weezer’s first great album closer in nine years).  There’s a few reasons “Time Flies” is so superior to the rest of the album.  First, I really can’t praise the production enough.  Elsewhere on Hurley, and, fuck, the last six albums Weezer recorded, the production has been so polished and clean that it distracts from the songs.  Sometimes it’s less unbearable than others, like on The Green Album and “I Want You To,” but it’s still a distressing trend.  Raditude for the most part was a gigantic leap in the wrong direction, and while Hurley represents an improvement, it still favors robotic sheen, clean guitars, and punchy, stilted drums.  But “Time Flies” is cut from a different cloth.  It’s driven by an elegant drum beat surrounded by acoustic guitars and distorted to just the right degree to really make it sound interesting.  The melody is the strongest found on the record.  But it’s the lyrics that truly drive this song home.

The chorus begins, “Time flies when you’re having fun,” a well-worn platitude that doesn’t really make for much of a profound thought on its own.  But Rivers means it to be a positive statement as much as a sad one.  “Time Flies” is about Cuomo realizing he’s getting older, and all the feelings that arise from it.  Between noticing lines around his eyes and feeling so miserable on his birthday that he drinks too much, he can’t deny that his best days are likely behind him.  But he observes, “The harder I go the more I realize time flies.”  The fact that his best days are behind him is a product of how fully he has lived his life, and he knows that the worst thing he can do is regret it.  Even though his life was such a ride that it seems to have moved by too quickly, this result is infinitely preferable to the alternative.

In the end he decides that his life won’t end in death, because “even when I’m gone this stupid damn song will be in your head.”  And though it might ring truer if he hadn’t buried it at the end of a mediocre album, this sentiment is personal, honest, and best of all, wise.

–See also: The second-best song from Hurley, “Where’s My Sex?” “Unspoken”

24. School of Seven Bells, “Heart Is Strange”

School of Seven Bells are pros at employing enchanting synths and alluring vocals in a way that’s enough to lull the listener into a dream, except it will probably be a dream about dancing.  With “Heart Is Strange,” from their 2010 album Disconnect from Desire, SVIIB has a new finest moment.  I was already a fan of this group, but I still felt blown away when I first heard this.  The songwriting is as catchy as “Half Asleep,” the highlight of their debut Alpinisms, but somehow more intelligent.  Better yet, it may be the most downright pretty dance track of the year.  SVIIB grows more promising by the album, and if this is any indication, there’s a lot to look forward to.

–See also: “I L U”

25. Pains of Being Pure at Heart, “Heart in Your Heartbreak”

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart were one of 2009’s best discoveries.  Their debut album’s mix of sincere songwriting with reverbed-but-clear production made it one of the most satisfying albums of the year.  Their new single “Heart in Your Heartbreak” is as catchy, sweet, and earnest as anything on their debut.  If it’s any indication, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart will again be one of the most satisfying bands of the year in 2011.

Honorable Mention

• Active Child, “She Was a Vision”
• Fang Island, “Daisy”
• Free Energy, “All I Know”
• Magic Man, “Monster”
• Katy Perry, “Teenage Dream”
• She & Him, “Thieves”
• Spoon, “Written in Reverse”
• TV Girl, “If You Want It”
• Twin Sister, “All Around and Away We Go”
• The Walkmen, “While I Shovel the Snow”

So it’s come to this…  Swamped with homework and regular work and essays about Grey’s Anatomy, I haven’t had much time to write about the many movies I’ve been seeing recently.  So, to save some time, I recorded the first of probably many podcasts in which I share my opinion of some films I’m not going to write about.  Hopefully there will be a regular Here Comes Two podcast at some point in the future, in which I will talk back-and-forth with another human being, but until then, enjoy.

0:00-2:40 – Takers (C+)
2:40-5:48 – Case 39 (B+)
5:48-8:11 – Devil (C)
8:11-8:28 – It’s Kind of a Funny Story (C+)
8:28-12:21 – Hereafter (B-)
12:21-14:18 – Easy A (A-)
14:18- 15:03 – Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (C-)
15:03-17:50 – You Again (D-) (a.k.a. Zach Rants About Kristen Bell’s Career)
17:50-20:26 – Waiting for Superman (B-)
20:26-22:10 – You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (B)
22:10-23:52 – My Soul to Take (D+)
23:52-25:53 – The Town (B)

Zach Sees Every Movie – Podcast #1

Also, it’s on iTunes.  But you already knew that, didn’t you?