2011 in Film

So, 2011 wasn't the best year for movies. I still saw a bunch – the nature of becoming increasingly engaged with pop culture is such that I typically see more movies in any given year than I did the year before, and that happened yet again this year. This year, though, I didn't have a difficult time narrowing my list to 10 movies I really loved. I'm sure I missed a lot of great shit, and I'll acknowledge some of that after the list itself, but for now, here's that:

(There's probably some slightly spoiler-y stuff in here if you're a stickler about that.)

10. Rango, dir. Gore Verbinski

It's awfully hard to get excited about American animated features without the Pixar name attached these days, but Pirates director Gore Verbinski's reunion with Johnny Depp was some of the most fun I had at the theater all year. Some of that came from simply soaking in the gorgeously rendered world that the reptilian Rango and his vermin friends inhabited, but the film's biggest strength is homage. In a way that no Western (yes, this is a Western) since Once Upon a Time in the West has, Rango nods to the canon with direct visual cues. And after all that heady nonsense, it's still a wild ride sure to please even the most impatient of school-aged moviegoers.

9. Moneyball, dir. Bennett Miller

It was an odd year. The mainstream hit of the fall was an adaptation of a book about sabermetrics. Credit Steve Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, whose screenplay managed to make Oakland Athletics GM Billy Beane's unconventional approach to scouting players the focal point a movie that was not only watchable but endlessly entertaining. Brad Pitt does his part, too, turning in an effortless performance as the iconoclastic Beane. It's easy to overthink this film's importance in a post-Social Network world, but it's probably fairer to all involved to call it the best sports movie in years and leave it at that.

8. Weekend, dir. Andrew Haigh

The narrative that's seemed to prevail in discussions of the brilliant, minimal Weekend is one about how it's irrelevant that the lovers at its center are gay. This is patently untrue, but the film is better for that. Russell and Glen (Tom Cullen and Chris New; both phenomenal) spend a passionate weekend together and very nearly fall in love in the process, and almost all their conversations center on perceptions of homosexuality and how their orientation has impacted their lives. Yes, Weekend is a heartbreaking, taut indie romance, but it's also the best treatise on being gay in the 21st century I've ever seen.

7. Super 8, dir. J.J. Abrams

In a year full of cinematic homages, no film felt more genuine than J.J. Abrams' Spielberg-worshiping Super 8. From the heart-pounding train wreck sequence to the fleeting reveal of the alien, everything in this thriller works perfectly under the deft hand of its director. If all summer popcorn movies were this good, we wouldn't have to read nearly as many think pieces about the sorry state of the Hollywood machine.

6. Meek's Cutoff, dir. Kelly Reichardt

Meek's Cutoff is a frustrating film. Almost nothing happens in its 104-minute duration. And yet, the tension remains so high throughout the movie that it seems certain something will happen at any given moment. This was life on the Oregon Trail, and Kelly Reichardt's beautiful Western channels that rugged existence more poignantly than anyone before her. A handful of virtuosic performances help to flesh out a world that, even at the film's conclusion, remains hopelessly (and intentionally) opaque.

5. The Skin I Live In, dir. Pedro Almodóvar

Given the profession of its emotionally scarred protagonist, it's fitting that the new thriller by Pedro Almodóvar is as slick and surgically precise as it is. Antonio Banderas plays a brilliant plastic surgeon who uses his gift to exact a very particular type of revenge. The Skin I Live In isn't about its plot twist – anyone paying attention will uncover it halfway through – but the lengths to which Banderas' character will go for vengeance. Your move, Chan-wook Park.

4. Martha Marcy May Marlene, dir. Sean Durkin

"After his Oscar-nominated turn as the meth-addicted Teardrop in last year’s Winter’s Bone, the Charles Manson-like cult leader John Hawkes portrays in Martha Marcy May Marlene should feel more familiar and less terrifying but, of course, it doesn’t. With manipulative cuts that force us to see the world through the eyes of cult escapee Martha (Elizabeth Olsen), first-time director Sean Durkin paints a scarred existence from which there is no escape or refuge." (Originally printed in WEEKEND, Dec. 7)

3. War Horse, dir. Steven Spielberg

I tweeted shortly after seeing War Horse that it was the only movie to make me cry all year. As an addendum, I thought about War Horse yesterday and choked up a little. Spielberg packs an unbelievable amount of emotional punch into every scene in his World War I epic. The film is also a bigger visual delight than any other this year, with frame upon gorgeous frame suitable for printing and hanging. Spielberg's tribute to John Ford feels like a magnum opus, and for most directors, it would be. For the man behind Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan, it's more evidence than we've had in a long time that, yes, he's one of the modern masters.

2. Drive, dir. Nicolas Winding Refn

In the opening sequence to Nicolas Winding Refn's dark noir Drive, Ryan Gosling listens to a Los Angeles Clippers game on his car radio. Blake Griffin is playing. This is the only way we know it is 2011 and not, say, 1983. The costuming, colors and soundtrack to Refn's film are anachronistic, but it somehow makes the surreal experience feel all the realer. The approach to violence is patient and methodical, but when it does rain, it pours. It's too weird and too brutal for awards-show folks to pay it much attention, but it's likely to go down as the movie that broke a director we'll eventually call an auteur.

1. Midnight in Paris, dir. Woody Allen

"It’s been said that the real star of a Woody Allen picture isn’t a leading actor, but whatever city he chooses for the movie’s setting. That’s never been truer than in Midnight in Paris, a beautifully rendered, cautionary ode to nostalgia seen through the eyes of a Lost Generation-obsessed Owen Wilson. When Wilson’s character concludes that we must live for the present, not the past, it’s a fitting reflection of Allen himself, who at 76 years of age has made what may be his masterpiece." (Originally printed in WEEKEND, Dec. 7)

Last five films to be cut from this list:
Hugo, The Arbor, The Trip, Certified Copy, Senna

Five films I didn't see that I probably will like once I do:
The Artist, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, A Separation, Beginners, A Dangerous Method

Five films I didn't see that some people really like that I probably won't ever see:
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, The Help, The Muppets, The Future, Submarine

The Best Songs and Live Performances of 2011

January 1st isn't too late to finish this stuff, is it? No additional writer thoughts with these just so I can save some effort for my soon forthcoming film roundup.

Songs:

1. Hammers of Misfortune, "The Grain"

2. Fucked Up, "The Other Shoe"

3. Jay-Z and Kanye West, "Niggas in Paris"

4. Tyler, the Creator, "Yonkers"

5. Wolves in the Throne Room, "Thuja Magus Imperium"

6. Bon Iver, "Holocene"

7. Fleet Foxes, "The Shrine/An Argument"

8. Touché Amoré, "The Great Repetition"

9. PJ Harvey, "Written on the Forehead"

10. Kate Bush, "Snowed in at Wheeler Street"

Live Performances:

1. Fucked Up, Nov. 14, New York

2. My Dying Bride, May 18, London

3. Katatonia, Sep. 25, Cleveland

4. Arcade Fire, Apr. 24, Chicago

5. Judas Priest, Nov. 8, Cincinnati

6. Fucked Up, May 20, London

7. Wolves in the Throne Room, Sep. 2, Louisville

8. Mayhem, Dec. 9, Louisville

9. Immortal, Feb. 22, Chicago

10. Coffinworm, Apr. 16, Bloomington

The Best Albums of 2011: 5-1

5. Altar of Plagues, Mammal

Pitchfork's Grayson Currin couldn't have hit the nail much more on the head when he wrote that "Altar of Plagues suggest a Wolves in the Throne Room cousin more focused on frailty and struggle than majesty and grandeur." The atmosphere the Irish quartet creates on Mammal is just as massive as that of their Cascadian brethren, but instead of ancient oaks looming like gods over a pastoral landscape, their trees are all dead, casualties of humankind's obsession with conquest. The post-apocalyptic world isn't celebrated here; it's mourned. Each of the four long songs on Mammal is a funerary march, and the polarizing "When the Sun Drowns in the Ocean" includes a field recording of a Gaelic keening ritual – the sound of a woman wailing into the sky in bereavement. Beowulf's funeral pyre is called to mind, where a Geat woman keens over the burning corpse of her nation's mythic hero. Our poet's response is simply "Heaven swallowed the smoke." Altar of Plagues embraces this uncaring natural order, even while placing the blame on human shoulders ("We create this death, we create this entity"). They swallow the smoke without reflecting any of it back as light. Monolithic riffs, pained vocals, and a dark, filthy production job help the band undermine the positive black metal vibes emanating from American shores. The darkest album of the year is also one of its best.

Best Tracks: "Neptune Is Dead," "Feather and Bone," "All Life Converges to Some Centre"
Best Moment: The riff at 8:15 in "Neptune Is Dead." Ho-ly fuck.

4. PJ Harvey, Let England Shake

"It’s a little ironic that the PJ Harvey record with the mellowest instrumentation is also the darkest one. These 12 harrowing tales of World War I lyrically recall the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, and in what may be her best performance ever, Harvey’s clarion vocals soar above the mix like an artillery shell over no-man’s-land." (Originally printed in WEEKEND, Dec. 7, 2011)

Best Songs: "Written on the Forehead," "The Glorious Land," "All & Everyone"
Best Moment: The disruptive battlefield fanfare at 0:19 in "The Glorious Land" that does to the song's beat what war does to life.

3. Hammers of Misfortune, 17th Street

No one was sadder than me when Ludicra, the excellent USBM band behind my favorite album of 2010, The Tenant, broke up earlier this year. Had I known that the next album John Cobbett had up his sleeve was 17th Street, I wouldn't have shed a tear. This is simply the best traditional heavy metal album of the last decade. Just as he did on The Tenant, Cobbett has successfully channeled a whole slew of 99-percenter problems into the kind of productive frustration that makes for great metal. By combining the prog-rock elements only semi-successfully integrated into 2008's Fields/Church of Broken Glass with rollicking, Slough Feg-infused metal guitar, the San Francisco natives forge something that feels, if not altogether unique, wonderfully inspired and – most importantly – more fun than almost anything else to come out all year. There's a shortage of modern metal that causes listeners to throw the horns without a hint of irony, but Hammers of Misfortune stands at the forefront of the small movement.

Best Tracks: "The Grain," "Summer Tears," "Going Somewhere"
Best Moment: The emotive twin guitar leads that take over for the piano at 0:14 in "Summer Tears."

2. Wolves in the Throne Room, Celestial Lineage

2011 may go down as the Year Black Metal Broke, and Washington's Wolves in the Throne Room has as much to do with that as anyone. Celestial Lineage, the band's fourth and best full-length album, was the first black metal album to earn the Best New Music tag on Pitchfork, and the rarely metal-enthused A.V. Club gave it an unprecedented "A" rating. Critics rightly praised its expansiveness, its unparalleled ability to create an atmosphere and its potential to bring neophytes into black metal's fold. What was missing from the narrative of its importance was how incredibly good the damn thing is, and what it means within the context of an already impressive career. Wolves in the Throne Room's Weaver brothers have been toiling in relative obscurity since a little-heard 2004 demo, and Lineage is a culmination of all they've worked toward rather than a sudden flash of greatness coming out of a void. This album is the band's best because they pull out all the stops, choosing to not only focus on hypnotic riffs (Black Cascade), progressive song structures (Diadem of 12 Stars) or atmospheric flair (Two Hunters) but all three at once. What could have come off as ambition overcoming ability turned out to be the best black metal album of the year, not to mention – Liturgy be damned – its most important.

Best Tracks: "Thuja Magus Imperium," "Astral Blood," "Woodland Cathedral"
Best Moment: The emotive groundswell of lead guitar at 5:05 in "Thuja Magus Imperium" that slips back to the ether from whence it came almost as quickly as it erupts.

1. Fucked Up, David Comes to Life

"In a genre as ostensibly bent on upsetting the system as punk rock, the most subversive act of all is revolting against punk itself. Toronto’s Fucked Up did just that with the brilliant rock opera David Comes to Life, which sees the band’s knacks for wall-of-guitars melody and abrasive D.C. hardcore colliding more effectively than ever." (Originally printed in WEEKEND, Dec. 7, 2011)

Best Tracks: "The Other Shoe," "Remember My Name," "Serve Me Right"
Best Moment: Seriously, dude? All of them. Read my post about how this is my favorite album of all time if you don't believe me.

The Best Albums of 2011 (10-6)

I truly believe that 2011 was the best year for music I've ever participated in, but that's probably only because every year feels that way as I dive deeper and deeper into my personal abyss of musical obsession. Like every year, most of what I heard was underwhelming, but the things that I loved – the things that challenged my thinking the most and made me the most uncomfortable– were more enriching than ever. Black metal, my favorite genre, still mostly reigned supreme, but for the first time since 2008's self-titled Fleet Foxes debut blew my mind, a black metal album did not top my list.

If you know me, thank you for putting up with conversations about all ten of these albums, for hearing them nonstop in my car, for helping me work my way through my thoughts about them, for reading what I've written about them already, and for helping me decide once and for all that, yes, these were the ten best albums released in 2011.

10. Leviathan, True Traitor, True Whore

I've never had a harder time convincing myself that it's acceptable to like a record than I had with this one. Sure, Varg Vikernes is a convicted arsonist and murderer, in addition to being an anti-Semite, homophobe and racist, but at least Burzum lyrics are in Norwegian and about The Lord of the Rings. Here, we have Leviathan's lone member Jef Whitehead (aka Wrest), a man arrested less than a year ago on sexual assault charges leveled by his girlfriend, releasing what might be black metal's most misogynistic (and personal) statement to date. And try as I may to hate songs with titles like "Every Orifice Yawning Her Price" and "Her Circle Is the Noose," I can't. Whitehead is too skilled at his craft, too aware of how crucial he is to the entirety of USBM and too willing to push its boundaries. This is a psychedelic album ("Not very black metal at all," Whitehead told Decibel), but unlike the more recent Nachtmystium releases, that atmosphere isn't forced with Pink Floyd puns and saxophone solos. It's found in the way Whitehead constructs his riffs, layers them in relation to one another, emits his trance-like vocals into the musical ether and, most importantly, lets producer Sanford Parker arrange it all. Some of the songs are so abstract they barely qualify as musical, but there always seems to be some subtle hook lurking in the darkness. I've never had too hard a time with the art/artist debate, but when the most morality-taxing album I've ever consumed is this good, it's that much easier to make an ethical listening decision. Hate Wrest because he's a woman-hater and possibly a rapist, but hear True Traitor, True Whore because it's one of the most maddeningly beautiful black metal albums of the last decade.

Best Tracks: "Every Orifice Yawning Her Price," "Contrary Pulse," "Brought Up to This Bottom"
Best Moment: The longing, seemingly infinite spaces between the notes at 0:35 in "Contrary Pulse"

9. Rwake, Rest

I bought my first pair of hi-fi, over-the-ear headphones in 2007 in the same transaction that saw me bring home Rwake's Voices of Omens, so naturally, the two converged in my first-ever truly high-quality listening experience. It was a revelation, partly because of the quality of the sound, but mostly because I'd never heard anything quite like Rwake before. The Little Rock sextet's take on sludge metal is fucked up in a way that has nothing to do with the way Eyehategod is fucked up. It's a backwoods acid trip in audio, the band's sound equal parts terrified and terrifying. Rest adheres to the same self-constructed formula as Voices of Omens – Skynyrd-fried guitar leads, shouted-from-the-top-of-the-Ozarks vocals, gnarly, winding riffs – but is arguably an even better record thanks to its penchant for long-form songwriting. Apart from two interludes, everything clocks in at more than eight minutes, with centerpiece "The Culling" destroying minds and reaping souls for a punishing 16. This is a career-defining record by a band unmatched in its ability to create an unsettling atmosphere and a very distinct understanding of what that atmosphere can be.

Best Tracks: "It Was Beautiful But Now It's Sour," "Was Only a Dream," "An Invisible Thread"
Best Moment: 8:07 in "Was Only a Dream," when everything but a lonely acoustic guitar and CT's distorted roar drops out of the mix for nearly 90 glorious seconds.

8. Bon Iver, Bon Iver, Bon Iver

Bon Iver's Bon Iver, Bon Iver. Just say it. Listen to the poetry in it, the sound of the language. That's the core of this gorgeous record, an album full of lyrics like "Armour let it through borne the arboretic truth you kept posing" and synthesizers lifted straight from dentist's office soft rock radio. Justin Vernon followed up the deeply personal For Emma, Forever Ago with what may well end up going down as his grandest gesture. Each of Bon Iver, Bon Iver's ten tracks is a tableau in which specific reminiscences of youth coexist with beautiful vagueness and where anything goes so long as it contributes to the album's unofficial mission statement of expressing inexpressible beauty. These aren't songs rife with conflict; they're vignettes for Vernon and his ever-growing crew of hired hands to give life to emotions more complex than post-breakup agony. Make no mistake, this is still an album built for heartache, but it's a longing for the past and for attaining something just out of reach ("Climb is all we know") that Vernon concerns himself with here, not Emma. It's less personal for him, but better for the rest of us.

Best Tracks: "Holocene," "Calgary," "Minnesota, WI"
Best Moment: The '80s Bolton/Collins intro to "Beth/Rest," when we realize that even on album where the songs are this different from one another, we're in for something really different.

7. SubRosa, No Help for the Mighty Ones

Apart from the seemingly limitless bounds of black metal, the metal subgenre with the most room for innovation is undoubtedly doom. While still nodding to the bands they're supposed to nod to (Sabbath and Sleep, mainly), the Salt Lake City natives in SubRosa have taken the genre in a direction that has never been explored before. Call it rebellion against the repression of living in Utah, but this majority-female doom crew with two (!) lead electric violinists is pushing doom metal somewhere truly bold. The band simultaneously embraces and rejects what makes them so strange, playing up the female presence with songs like the darkly idyllic a cappella number "House Carpenter" and granting the violins main melodies throughout the record while still remaining more or less subservient to the doom canon in their approach to songwriting. Even if some of the best tracks are familiar in structure, they're wildly unique in execution, with vocals harmonizing with violins in a way that seems more typical of opera than heavy metal. Profound Lore Records (responsible for two other albums on this very list) has been a bastion for forward-thinking heavy music from the day it was founded, and label head Chris Bruni's discovery of SubRosa shows that he hasn't lost his touch. No Help for the Mighty Ones will rock the Latter-Day Saints right out of you.

Best Tracks: "Whippoorwill," "Borrowed Time, Borrowed Eyes," "The Inheritance"
Best Moment: The last vocal hook to the Cormac McCarthy-inspired "Borrowed Time, Borrowed Eyes" that kicks in around 4:30 and rides the song to its epic conclusion.

6. Burzum, Fallen

The last decade or so of black metal has been its finest thanks mostly to a crop of bands who have challenged the very notion of what it is to be black metal. Burzum's Varg Vikernes does not do that with Fallen. It is no more radical today than it would have been in 1996, and it's so good that that's perfectly alright. If anything, Fallen may be Exhibit A in Vikernes' prolonged case that he doesn't make black metal but fuzzed-out European folk music. His pseudo-Gregorian chants are brought to the front of the mix here, making the Norwegian language catchier than it has any right to be, and the acoustic instrumentation of bookends "Fra Verdenstreet" and "Til Hel Og Tilbake Igjen" is anything but metal, but unlike Burzum's past non-metal experiments, also not ambient electronics. There's also a case against him, however, as the riffs on this album are as black metal as the riffs on any other 2011 release. The monster that opens album highlight "Jeg Faller" could be the best pure blackened riff of Varg's storied career, and the chaos that drowns the middle section of "Vanvidd" practically begs him to start going by Count Grishnackh again and burn some churches. As the questionable From the Depths of Darkness compilation suggests, Varg Vikernes is interested in revisiting his past for the first time in a long time. Fallen marks a serious progression for Burzum, but it's also a tribute to its creator's own legacy. He burned some churches, he killed a dude, and he isn't the biggest fan of Jews and gays, but releases like this ensure that the focus stay where it belongs – on the music, man.

Best Tracks: "Jeg Faller," "Enhver til Sitt," "Valen"
Best Moment: The stark raving madness at 3:42 in "Vanvidd" that would make even Deathspell Omega shit their collective pants.

Tomorrow, my top five albums of 2011, followed by my favorite songs, live performances, and movies of the year.

On 2011's Important Albums

I don't usually do this whole "rebut someone else's thinkpiece" thing, because I figure if you're bothering to publish a thinkpiece, you've put more thought into its topic while writing it than I did while reading it. But I can't leave this one alone.

Steven Hyden is one of my favorite music critics. Top five in the world for my money. His thinkpieces are generally excellent and do what only the best can do – they present me with an idea I'd never thought about before and convince me that it's unequivocally true. That's what was so disturbing about Tuesday's "The year of no Important Albums (and many Good Records)" on the A.V. Club. To boil it down to its essence, Hyden posited that unlike the past few years, 2011 lacked a truly important album, defined as such:

"What’s an Important Album? It’s an album that is perceived to be a momentous work of ambition, invention, and high artistic credibility before it is released, and then proves to actually be so, planting itself in a highly visible place in the culture and acting as a signifier for the year in retrospect. It's the one album you can't avoid hearing about at the end of the year to an almost annoying degree; 'Important' in this context can be taken to mean 'legitimately great' or 'incredibly gas-baggy.' But either way, an Important Album stands apart from the pack as a year-defining work."

He went on to say PJ Harvey's Let England Shake felt like homework, explain how this year lacked a Merriweather Post Pavilion or a My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, and, while he stopped well short of hating on years without important albums, he steadfastly stood behind the idea that 2011 was one.

I have some problems with this. First of all, the criteria for Important Album is pretty weak here. It's based largely on the idea that lots of critics agreeing that an album is great makes it matter, which even as a critic is a little weird to me. Sure, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is important, but the answer to why it is shouldn't be "Because we all liked it a lot and everyone heard it." That's a start, but there has to be more to it than that. I don't think there should be any standard criterion for what makes an album important. All albums carry the potential to matter, and what they bring to the table that we haven't seen brought before, combined with how they're received and talked about, can create a thousand unique paths to importance.

At the crux of my beef with Hyden's suggestion that there are no important 2011 albums is my belief that there are. For the sake of illustrating my point, here's just a few, with my quick takes why they matter:

Lou Reed & Metallica, Lulu and Jay-Z and Kanye West, Watch the Throne

In two very different ways, Lulu and Watch the Throne taught us about something my colleague Steven Arroyo and I coined "collaboratorial hubris" in a podcast we did a couple months ago. Lulu was two past-their-prime-but-once-legendary acts colliding, with all involved calling it their proudest moment. Watch the Throne was two top-tier rappers getting together to have some fun. Both revealed that high-profile collabs are usually ego trips and not artistic revelations. Watch the Throne gave us "Niggas in Paris" and "No Church in the Wild;" Lulu gave us "Junior Dad;" both gave us a reason to never want our heroes to collaborate and hype said collaborations through the roof.

PJ Harvey, Let England Shake

Along with the unequivocally unimportant Bon Iver, Bon Iver, this was 2011's best-loved album. It's important for England. I want to leave it at that. What better album can England stand behind as a piece of the national canon? London Calling? Anything else? The West's asleep. Let England shake.

Fucked Up, David Comes to Life

An A.V. Club commenter with some pent-up snark argued on Hyden's article that this album was so acclaimed because it was important, and while I don't see that as a problem, they're probably right. I've said it a million times, but this punk-as-revolt-against-punk thing matters in 2011, as well as being the best record of the year.

Adele, 21

I don't particularly like that this album matters, but the fact that it sold better than any other album in 2011 says a lot about our priorities as a worldwide music-consuming community. The canon now must be revered. Subversiveness is not rewarded at the record store like it is on Pitchfork, plain and simple. Congratulations, Adele. You've dethroned autotune pop sleaze, but you've also dethroned innovation.

Liturgy, Aesthethica, Wolves in the Throne Room, Celestial Lineage, and Leviathan, True Traitor, True Whore

Three American black metal releases this year matter. Aesthethica was the ultimate debate-starter and apparently the album with the biggest crossover appeal. Celestial Lineage got an A.V. Club "A" and a Pitchfork Best New Music but sadly lost steam at year-end list time. Doesn't matter. It showed a band operating relatively within genre-safe limitations and still appealing to more than just the usual suspects. True Traitor, True Whore matters because it pushes art/artist separation to a whole new level. It's like Roman Polanski making a child rape movie or Michael Vick comparing his on-field performance to a dogfight. Making this violent, angry, brilliant album after being accused of sexual abuse was boneheaded but bold, and it made a lot of us grapple with issues we'd rather not grapple with. Well done, I guess, Wrest.

Terriers and The Arbor

Sorry for the silence on here the past couple of days. I've been working long hours and not really having the urge to write in my time off. I do have some time before I go in today and some stuff to write about, so here's something.


I watched Terriers, the canceled FX buddy cop drama (they're PIs, not cops, but come on, it's in the genre) over the course of about a week, and I absolutely loved it. I hate myself for not watching it when it was on the air and helping to delay its demise. It's not exactly groundbreaking, but it's effortless fun, and when the stakes get high, they get just as high as they do on, say, Breaking Bad. Donal Logue is great as a highly competent, ex-alcoholic Dude-like slacker – although the fact that he looks just like a 1998 Jeff Bridges may be helping me see the similarities in the characters. Michael Raymond James is equally impressive as ex-con Britt Pollack, the partner to Logue's Hank Dolworth. The supporting cast is all excellent, too, with my personal favorite performance coming from Rockmond Dunbar as Detective Mark Gustafson, Hank's partner from when he was still on the force.

Whereas Breaking Bad has intensified so much from season to season that the funny moments have all but disappeared, Terriers is essentially a comedy in which dramatic things happen, or at the very least a truly hilarious drama. Logue and James' chemistry as they exchange one-liners –albeit sometimes painfully Sorkin-y ones – is natural and endlessly entertaining. To keep bringing Breaking Bad into it (and only because I consider it the gold standard for dramatic television, mind you, not necessarily because there's any deep similarities between it and Terriers), Aaron Paul and Bryan Cranston are a great leading duo, but riding around with them is never fun. The tension is too real.

What sucks most about Terriers' cancellation is how long it could have continued to be good. When Arrested Development was canceled, it was starting to recycle too many jokes and needed the impetus of cancellation to make its last few episodes as great as they were. The Netflix deal threatens this nearly perfect comedy series. Community's shelving earlier this year was a blessing in disguise. It's a mostly great show, but it was going to run out of cute episode ideas by halfway through S4 and realize that it hadn't developed its characters enough to build the remainder of the series around them. I, for one, hope it doesn't come back, at least not unless Dan Harmon radically reimagines the show. But Terriers could have kept being Terriers for four, five, six seasons without losing steam. They must have felt the network's breath on their necks, considering how neatly the overarching plot of the first season is tied up by the end of the last episode, but that moment as the credits roll and we don't know whether Britt and Hank are going to prison or Mexico, while a beautiful exercise in open-endedness, left me wanting to hit "next episode" on Netflix. Alas, I'll never be able to. R.I.P., Terriers. You could have been the best show on TV.



I also recently watched The Arbor, which may be the strangest film I've ever seen in terms of its approach to storytelling. It's a documentary. Sort of. Director Clio Bernard tells the story of British playwright Andrea Dunbar, her relationships with men, and the lives of the three children she left behind by conducting interviews with Dunbar's family and people who know her work and then having actors lip-synch their answers while aimlessly wandering locations relevant to the material. This is cut with a small amount of archive footage of Dunbar herself and snippets of a public performance of The Arbor, her first play, staged by Bernard himself. Once you get used to the film's conceit, it's just a harrowing narrative film that happens to be entirely true. Relative newcomer Manjinder Virk gives a performance as Dunbar's daughter Lorraine that, if the Academy had any idea what to do with such a strange film, would be garnering awards buzz. She's haunting as a mixed-race outcast who was 10 when her mother died and fell into a life of prostitution and drug abuse. The central discussions about The Arbor all center on Bernard's technique, and I feel like there's almost nothing I can say that hasn't been said, but know that beneath the veneer of a very cleverly told story, the story itself is strong enough to survive a more traditional approach to documentary filmmaking.

Some overstatements regarding Kate Bush's "The Kick Inside"

I haven't written about a film in a while on here, and that's because I'm working my way through Terriers. After that, I'm going to catch up on Justified. I still intend on seeing a few 2011 films I haven't seen yet before I wrap up that year-end list, but for now, expect some more music posts.

Tonight, I intend on asserting totally ridiculous things and barely defending them and asking you to go along with it. Okay, not exactly true. It's pretty widely accepted that The Kick Inside, the first album by Kate Bush, has grown to be thought of as a crucial entry in the canon of rock history. But I think it's responsible for an entire movement – not all of which I can defend – that I'll roughly define as "female auteur music." It's not a wholly accurate label, but it's useful.

Basically, if you're a fan of PJ Harvey, tUnE-yArDs, Joanna Newsom, Florence + the Machine, St. Vincent, or really any other musical act that's a) just a little odd and b) dominated by a female vocalist whose influence pervades every fiber of the music, you need to let The Kick Inside into your life.

Yeah, "Wuthering Heights" is the highlight here, an airy retelling of Heathcliff and Cathy's story brought to life by Bush's falsetto and a powerful David Gilmour-esque guitar solo. It remains Bush's only #1 hit in the UK, and it may hold up as her best song – although the 53 year old behind the excellent 50 Words for Snow probably hates hearing that about something she wrote when she was 19.

Beyond "Wuthering Heights" is a full album of boundary-breaking art rock at a time when that pseudo-genre was still being defined. There's things here that wouldn't be alien on a David Bowie or Peter Gabriel album from the same decade, but it's doing so much more. Before Kate Bush, there wasn't really a female voice doing something so avant-garde and so uniquely herself as The Kick Inside. Perhaps people like Joan Baez, Billie Holiday, Yoko Ono came close, but where the former two stuck to closely to the canon and the latter was too much of a weirdo to garner much crossover appeal without the presence of John Lennon, Bush brought prog rock's survivors and casual radio listeners and girl-power advocates under a banner that was both hummable and genre-defying. "Moving," "Feel It," "Oh to Be in Love," and "Them Heavy People" (to almost randomly name four high points) were challenging in four totally different ways but still managed to have devastating hooks that bury their way into the listener's brain after a single listen.

In some ways, The Kick Inside is the most important album to come out since the dawn of punk. If it had never happened, year-end lists would look might different not just this year but most every year since its 1978 release. So play "Wuthering Heights" one more time, remember why it kicks so much ass and, for God's sake, thank Kate Bush for her contributions.