December 2009
20 posts
So, I'm moving to LA. →
Thanks to everyone who has contacted me and/or posted and/or tweeted the news. A crazy confluence of events conspired to make this happen. The weekend after my last job ended, I went to LA for four days to cover AFI Fest, and had an expectedly great time; a week after that, Scott Foundas announced he was leaving the film editor position at the Weekly; I sent in my resume, didn’t hear...
Best Films of 2009, part 2: Top Ten
See Part 1 of this series, on the runners-up for my top ten list, here. Tomorrow I’ll post Part 3, on my favorite undistributed/yet to be distributed films of the year, and then Part 4, on my films of the decade.
This is actually a top 12, for reasons to be explained within.
10. Inglourious Basterds
9. The Hurt Locker
8. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
7. The Limits of...
Best films of 2009, part 1: honorable mentions
People have been asking me where they can find my lists of the best (or, really, more accurately, my favorite) films of the year and decade. I thought I had pimped these pretty extensively when they went up at ToNY and indieWIRE, but hell, I’ll post them here too, just for the chance to add extra bullshit/context.
First, since I already used my Tumblr to shout out my runners-up for best...
“Merkin devotes much of her nearly 8,000 word piece to analyzing Meyers’s unique...”
– Blah blah blah women, blah Manohla, Jezebel, Bigelow, blah blah stupid Nancy Meyers NYT Mag profile, blah blah blah. It IS complicated!
“It comes as no surprise that Dr.Drew writes about narcissism because he...”
– When Sex Rehab started to air, I was going to pitch a story about Dr. Drew as celebrity (and thus, an embodiment of much of what he tries to “cure” in celebrities), but then I fell into my own K-hole of post-employed narcissism and just … didn’t. I’m glad I didn’t...
Gossip Girl characters list the best of 2009 →
OF COURSE The Maid would rank high on Vanessa’s top ten, and OF COURSE Blair would love Wishful Drinking, but I can’t believe the revival of A Little Night Music wouldn’t have been a late inning contender for her top ten. I mean, it’s Sondheim + Angela Lansbury + CZ-OMG-J, so she would have known it was coming way before Scott Brown’s rave.
Am I just using a...
“I think it’s actually interesting and important to note that President...”
– A quote that somewhat seems to contradict the title of the story it’s from: Why The Simpsons No Longer Matters.
“Group votes of any kind tend to cancel out radical options on either side in...”
– Why do all the awards honor the same movies?
“Cameron, always high on his own bombast, harnesses that self-confidence into a...”
– I wrote about Avatar for Vanity Fair’s Little Gold Men blog. I’ll be posting stuff there a couple of times a week through Oscar season.
Mark Bittman's recipe for cooking pasta like... →
“But the most potent eye imagery is only in the video for a few brief seconds,...”
– From Oscar Moralde’s exhaustive study of the music videos of Lady Gaga, at The House Next Door.
“My humble advise is to not write your next BEST OF list while on the back of a...”
– Today in Creative Comment Vitriol, a response to Richard Brody’s Best Films of the Decade list at The New Yorker.