About a month back I found this on last.fm. For those of you who don’t know, last.fm is a website that tracks all the websites subscriber’s music listens across all different music listening services and programs, such as iTunes, Spotify and Rdio. At the end of 2011 they tallied up all the listeners and put together a year end list of the most listened to artists and a year in music chart to display the music listening trends of it’s listeners. The data held within the last.fm universe gives us a great look into what people are actually listening to. In the Artist’s tab you can even play around with the settings and see the music listening habits by location and/or by music genre. Try it out at the links below and see what you think of the list. Anyone you would have thought would have or wouldn’t have been on here or anyone you think deserved to be on here and isn’t or didn’t deserve to be on here? Let us know.

http://www.last.fm/bestof/2011/yearinmusic

http://www.last.fm/bestof/2011/artists

I know that theoretically the time for a Best of 2011 list would be the beginning of January but I live in Sacramento and a lot of the artsy films that end up making this list aren’t released in Sacramento, where I live until later in January or even in February. Hell, February’s almost over and A Separation just came out TODAY. As it is, I still haven’t seen several movies that seemed like they would have been contenders such as Take Shelter, Meek’s Cutoff, or the aforementioned A Separation (not to mention Oscar contenders like The Iron Lady and Albert Nobbs). So I’m human. I can’t see everything. I just do what I can with what I got and on that note, let’s get this started…

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WORST PICTURE – Well, let’s start this shit off with the… well, shit. It’s easy to dump on Adam Sandler movies like Just Go with it or Jack and Jill (I didn’t actually see the latter; from the trailer it looks like it would have made this list) but those movies don’t really aspire to be more than what they are. This list is reserved for the movies that just pissed me off with their awfulness.

Dishonorable Mention: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close – Okay, this film had enough redeeming attributes that I can’t rightfully call it one of the worst films of the year but god damn did it make me angry. Firstly, it all hinged on the performance of a kid who doesn’t really seem to have a clue as to what “acting” entails. The most maddening thing, earning it’s unranked spot on this list is that it uses 9/11 as a cheap gimmick to wring some unearned tears out of the audience. 9/11 has a place in cinema. United 93 proved that. This is not that fucking place. The fact that this got an Oscar nomination sends the mind reeling. Like I said, not necessarily one of the worst movies of the year (though the more I talk about it, the more I reconsider that) but the dislike I bear this movie earns it a spot on here.

3.            I Am Number Four – God damn you, Twilight. By making a shitload of money with your general awfulness, you’ve inspired imitations! I Am Number Four is about an alien, who like the vampires of Twilight, decides the place he really wants to be is high school. Genocidal aliens are out to kill him and every last member of his species (in numerical order for reasons that ARE NEVER EXPLAINED) so you’d think he’d have bigger problems. This is one of the high school stereotype movies where just because a pretty blonde girl is creative and artistic the boys at her school somehow stop noticing that she is still, in fact, a pretty blonde girl. Then there’s the generic guy in the lead, whose name I could look up right now but if he failed to leave that much of an impression why even bother? The worst thing this movie does is drag down great character actors like Kevin Durand and Timothy Olyphant with it. D.J. Caruso’s first film was an awesome little neo-noir called The Salton Sea (which you should all totally check out). This movie makes me sad to see how far he’s fallen.

2.            Sucker Punch – Warner Brothers can have a very supportive relationship with some of its directors (that’s why Clint Eastwood has been with them for so many decades). After Christopher Nolan made them huge piles of money with his Batman films, they were willing to fund his passion projects. After The Dark Knight, he basically got a giant fucking budget to do whatever he felt like. That movie was Inception and was my favorite of 2010. After the successes of Dawn of the Dead, 300, and Watchmen, Warner Brothers decided to try the same thing with Zack Snyder. The result was Sucker Punch. It looked like it would be fan boy’s wet dream with hot girls, ninjas, steam punk Nazi zombies, dragon and hot girls. Instead it was an incoherent mess with too many different levels of fantasy and reality (including one completely superfluous fantasy level where the mental hospital is like a brothel?) and an ending that is supposed to be a twist or something but is really just stupid. Snyder’s next movie is The Man of Steel and I’m hoping that he can pull Superman off as long as someone else does the writing.

1.            Take Me Home Tonight – I hated this stupid movie so much more than I think is rational. The main character was an employee at Suncoast (as I used to be!) and it was set in the 1980s (as I used to be!) so really it should have been hitting all my right nostalgia buttons. The first red flag should have been that the film was made and completed in 2007 and shelved until 2011. The second red flag should be the presence of Dan Fogler… which actually ties sort of into the 2007 thing since he was in everything that year. Fogler’s career (at least in 2007) seemed to boil down to “HE’S FAT BUT HE’S COCKY! DO YOU GET IT?” I was bored to death in this movie and I’m pretty sure I never laughed. Fuck this movie.

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THE FUN FIVE – Not every movie is Citizen Kane. If you look back at some of your all-time favorites you may find that more of them are like Star Wars. They may have their share of problems but they’re great anyway. They’re FUN. Isn’t that why most people go to the movies? FUN? These are the movies that aren’t top ten material but were so damn enjoyable that I have to give them a shout-out.

5.            Captain America: The First Avenger – Not everyone responded to this one as much as I did (though it still made a ton of money anyway) but damn did I love this movie. It was action-packed. It was filled with comic geek stuff that I love. It was hopeful. It was about a good person doing good stuff. Heroism and sacrifice and all that… and it was optimistic. The Avengers might take Cap to some darker places but this movie firmly plants him in the good vs. evil of World War II. There’s kind of an optimistic feel to this movie (though the very end kind of undercuts that a bit) that I was stoked about.

4.            X-Men: First Class – Okay, so first off you have the X-Men who I have always loved. Then you put them in a movie that has the feel of a 1960s James Bond movie? We got a winner! Directed by the guy behind Stardust and Kick-Ass? YES! After the awful misfired of X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine, this is exactly the fresh start the series needed. The film is well-cast and the key characters are well-developed (though some suffer from being mostly background characters). This movie proves that the superhero comic book adaptation genre has more versatility than previously thought.

3.            Rise of the Planet of the Apes – Okay, I know I wasn’t the only one unexpectedly moved by this movie. Screw it, I’m on the apes’ side now. Fuck humanity. (More on this movie later.)

2.            Fright Night – Another one I wasn’t expecting to love near as much as I did. I wasn’t a diehard fan of the original Fright Night. In fact I only saw it a couple weeks before the remake. I was nonetheless wowed by how enjoyable the new version was. Colin Farrell was menacing as a vampire with a very rapist-like energy. David Tenant was ridiculously entertaining as a Vegas showman. Anton yelchin makes a relatable sort of everyman. Even Christopher Mintz-Plasse managed to work within his typecasting to create a memorable performance. And Imogen Poots is… just… damn… (someone with that name shouldn’t be hot, but there she is with her name-defying hotness)

1.            The Muppets – If you have a soul, how can you not love this movie? It’s just… damn, I love this movie. I had a smile on my face from ear to ear for the entire duration of the film. Deep beneath my cynical exterior beats the heart of a child who will get swept away by just about anything Muppet-relation. Jason Segel , Nicholas Stoller, Bret McKenzie, and James Bobin have updated the Muppets for 2011 in the most simple way imaginable: not really “updating” them at all, just allowing them to show us all why we’ve always loved them.

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SPECIAL ACHEIVEMENT IN DIGITAL PERFORMANCE: Andy Serkis and Weta Digital, Rise of the Planet of the Apes – Can we agree now that Andy Serkis is the Lon Chaney of our age? I suppose the main difference is that Lon did his own make-up while Serkis relies on technical wizards at Weta Digital. Still, with Lord of the Rings, King Kong, The Adventures of Tintin, and Rise of the Planet of the Apes Serkis has proven himself a master of his craft. The Oscars have yet to recognize him for this. Perhaps it’s because the Academy is made up largely of actors and they’re hesitant to embrace any technology that renders them “less essential,” but it’s precisely Serkis’s involvement that renders characters like the chimpanzee Caesar so realistic and moving to begin with. Let’s give the man his due already.

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BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN/ART DIRECTION: Dante Ferretti, Hugo – A lot of people aren’t entirely clear what Art Direction and Production Design are. They are exactly what they sound like. Production Designers and Art Directors build worlds. Dante Ferretti is among the best of them. He’s created a hellhole version of London for Sweeney Todd, an anachronistic Rome for Titus, and a 1950s madhouse for Shutter Island. For Hugo he built a magical Paris of a bygone time. He build the inner workings of clocks and a train station that captures the imagination of a young boy, and of everyone in the audience.

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BEST MUSIC: Cliff Martinez, Drive – I enjoyed Drive but didn’t geek out over it the way many others did this past year. One things that elevated beyond the level of your standard Michael Mann-homage crime thriller was Cliff Martinez’s music. Somewhat retro, but dead-on appropriate, martinez’s music gave depth to the film. Ryan Gosling’s lead performance was something of a blank (intentionally so) and I feel like the music helped fill in some of the vagaries of the character. No other movie this year was as defined by its music as Drive.

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BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY: Manuel Alberto Claro, Melancholia – Really, from the opening of this film, it’s obvious this is the only choice (although apparently not to the Academy). The end of the world has never been rendered on film in such a beautiful painterly way. The whole film is not composed so. Lars von Trier’s more handheld style takes over when it is appropriate. The more artsy slow motion stuff happens when it’s appropriate. The cinematography of the film reflect the content. That should be such a simple thing. That should be true of all movie, but alas it isn’t. Claro’s work on Melancholia is beautiful and worthy of praise.

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BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: Roman Polanski and Yasmina Reza, Carnage – This film (adapted from Reza’s play The God of Carnage) keeps moving constantly. What starts as a serious but polite conversation degrades into a shouting match over the course of the film and it all happens totally organically. Roman Polanski has helped to take what could have been an incredibly stage-y film and made it into a fine piece of cinema. The dialogue is first-rate and a top-notch cast tears into it with gusto.

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BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: Will Reiser, 50/50 – Will Reiser found himself with cancer in his 20s. He went through a lot and eventually beat it, then he did what all artists do: he channeled it into art. Now people who have only seen the trailer are probably asking “Art? Isn’t this the movie where Seth Rogen tells his buddy to use his cancer to pick up chicks?” Yes it is that movie. 50/50 is riotously funny at many parts. It’s also deeply moving. It’s a movie that runs the full spectrum of human emotion, all pulled from Reiser’s real-life experiences (though the film is technically fictionalized).

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BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

5.            Sarah Paulson, Martha Marcy May Marlene – It’s not as showy a role as those of her costars but Paulson really grounds the movie. While other characters are brainwashed cult members, charismatic cult leaders, or impatient husbands, Paulson plays the woman in the middle trying to make sense of it all.

4.            Amy Ryan, Win Win – I just like Amy Ryan. In this movie she plays a woman who may be just about the perfect mother, standing in stark contrast to her role in Gone Baby Gone a few years back. “Wife” roles traditionally aren’t the best acting showcases but Ryan shows what someone with real talent can make of one.

3.            Octavia Spencer, The Help – The words “eat my shit” are never really friendly, but Octavia Spencer belts them out like a declaration of war (which they are, in a way). “Sassy black woman” can be a stock character but every time I was afraid the character would veer into stereotype, Spencer undercut my expectations and grounded it in real character work.

2.            Shailene Woodley, The Descendants – A big bias of the Academy is against younger people. Shailene Woodley was phenomenal in The Descendants and a girl with troubled relationship with her mother who is now going to die. That’s a lot of shit to negotiate and Woodley does in the way you’d expect a smart, capable, but kind of fucked-up girl to.

1.            Charlotte Gainsbourg, Melancholia – Gainsbourg’s character has spent her life being a good wife and mother, as well as a support system for her fucked-up sister. With the imminent and unavoidable end of the world approaching, everything she has ever spent her life doing is now pointless. Needless to say, she handles it badly.

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BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Honorable mention: Corey Stoll, Midnight in Paris – Kind of a one-joke performance but I just cannot emphasized how fucking much I loved his Hemmingway.

5.            Alex Shaffer, Win Win – I’m sure there will be some people who see the movie and disagree with me on this one. It’s a very minimalist performance, but he’s a teenager. He’s a teenager from a troubled home too, but he doesn’t play that like the “angry young man” archetype that movies have run into the ground. It’s a naturalistic performance. Maybe Alex Shaffer (who was a wrestler before he started acting with this movie) only has this one great performance in him, but it’s enough.

4.            Viggo Mortensen, A Dangerous Method – Any field has its own politics, and psychology is no exception. Mortensen doesn’t only play Sigmund Freud as a wise mentor figure to Michael Fassbender’s Carl Jung. He can also be petty and dismissive to anyone who doesn’t follow exactly in his footsteps. Of course the man who pioneered psychoanalysis is going to be a complex character and Mortensen is well up to the challenge.

3.            Christopher Plummer, Beginners – I know it’s a cliché at this point: “if you want an Oscar, go gay.” Well, that’s probably going to work out for Christopher Plummer, and deservedly so. Plummer plays a man who has spent decades upon decades in the closet and is finally living openly in the twilight of his life. He knows time is short and he may not find that one true love, but he can be himself and in that he can find happiness.

2.            Patton Oswalt, Young Adult – I’ve always found Patton Oswalt amusing if not downright hilarious, but I never really had him pegged as a stand-up who’d successfully maneuver the transition to acting. I was wrong. So fucking wrong.  In Young Adult he plays the victim of a senseless crime who has been avoiding life behind a mask of cynicism. When a woman from his past shows up, he goes against his better judgment and sacrifices the detachment that’s been keeping him safe all these years.

1.            Albert Brooks, Drive – I’ve pretty much always found Albert Brooks downright hilarious, so it’s quite a change of pace to see him downright terrifying. The worst part is how subtle the difference is. Brooks’s gangster is just as affable and friendly as any other character he’s played, but will not hesitate to slice someone open. He says it’s “just business, not personal” and he MEANS it which, when murdering an old friend, is even more chilling.

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BEST ACTRESS

5.            Elizabeth Olsen, Martha Marcy May Marlene – While her older sisters may have made a fortune with cutesy kid flicks and weird fashion statement, it looks like at least one Olsen sister has some serious acting chops. The many-named heroine of the film is almost several different people: independent young woman, brainwashed cult member, traumatized escapee. Olsen pulls off the many faces of Martha/Marcy May with an eerie intensity. I had my problems with the movie but I think Olsen is a new star.

4.            Charlize Theron, Young Adult – Theron won an Oscar played a very ugly woman in Monster. Here she keeps all her physical beauty but goes about as ugly as possible on the inside. Her character has a solipsistic worldview influence by a steady diet of reality television and the shallowness of the high school beauty queen she once was. She’s had some hardships and emerged a worse person from each of them. In the movie there’s a moment when she is almost on the verge of reforming and then is given the exact wrong kind of encouragement and reverts to endless path of bitchiness she’s been on most of her life.

3.            Viola Davis, The Help – Viola Davis turned less than ten minutes of screen time in Doubt into a well-deserved Oscar nomination so it’s no surprise that given a leading role she can knock it out of the park (hell, she was even one of the redeeming things about Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close). She plays a strong woman in difficult circumstances, the kind of role that most average actresses would do okay with. She brings a warmth and gravitas to the part (two qualities that don’t always go together, but she makes them work).

2.            Kirsten Dunst, Melancholia – I’ve always though Kirsten Dunst capable enough, but nothing special. Cute, but not really hot. Likable, but not really charismatic. Okay in movies, but not a great actress. She blew me away in Melancholia (also got me to rethink the hot judgment). She gives a completely fearless performance as a woman lacking the ability to cope with daily life, who finds a kind of calm as the world around her falls apart. Dunst channeled her own history of depression into the role and worked with Lars von Trier, who’s known for putting his leading ladies through hell to get great performances out of them. The result is validation: Kirsten Dunst is a damn good actress.

1.            Michelle Williams, My Week with Marilyn – Michelle Williams is a damn good actress; that, we knew. However the pixie-like indie sensation seemed an odd choice to play buxom and full-figured sex icon Marilyn Monroe. My skepticism was foolish however and Williams turns in perhaps the definitive performance about the fucked-up neuroses that plague the brain of an actor. There’s the desire for respect, for attention, and the feeling that no matter how much people like you it isn’t really you they like. It’s a lot to convey in the breathy voice of an iconic movie star but Williams pulls it off. Her Marilyn is a woman of intelligence, but deep problems.

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BEST ACTOR

5.            Joseph Gordon-Levitt, 50/50 – When did that kid from 3rd Rock from the Sun become an accomplished actor? I guess it’s been a few years now but you know how there’s actors you always associate with a particular role (usually from TV) until one day, BAM, you see something and while you’re watching it you totally forget whatever role you had mentally typecast them in? 50/50 was that movie for my perception of Gordon-Levitt. He goes through the full range of human emotion in this movie and ends up giving a great performance grounded in reality.

4.            Paul Giamatti, Win Win – In Win Win, Paul Giamatti starts out looking to do the wrong thing and then ends up doing the right thing. We get it. Times are tough and sometimes you can’t afford to live on the straight and narrow. But then there’s some things you just have to do because they need doing and you’re the one to do them.

3.            Michael Fassbender, Shame – It’s a good thing this movie isn’t in 3D or else you’d lose an eye! There, now that we’ve gotten past the obligatory “Michael Fassbender’s penis” joke, let’s move on to the fearless performance in this film. People tend to snicker at sex addiction, but Fassbender takes us deep into the unique kind of hell that it really is. Addiction is addiction. Fassbender clearly wants out of this cycle of self-degradation but he’s powerless to escape.

2.            Jean Dujardin, The Artist – Jean Dujardin can do more with an eyebrow than many actors can do with their entire body. He gives one of the greatest performances of the year and does it [mostly] without audible dialogue. Silent film acting isn’t highly in demand anymore which is a shame because Dujardin is masterful at it. He takes us through a movie star’s rise, fall, and redemption and I feel like even if the entire movie was just a close-up of his face we could still get the whole story.

1.            Gary Oldman, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – Gary Oldman tends to go big in most of his roles, but this piece of extremely minimalist acting might be his best to date. George Smiley is mostly a passive character. He observes. He calculates. He takes in information until it is time to use that information. 90% of the performance is in his eyes. His role is perfectly encapsulated in one scene. Smiley and two other spies are in a car. A fly is buzzing around. The two others swat at it to no avail. Smiley just watches it until at just the right moment, he cracks the window and the fly leaves the car.

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BEST DIRECTOR

Honorable mention: J.J. Abrams, Super 8 – The main reason this is an honorable mention instead of on the list is because it is entirely directed in the style of another director, Steven Spielberg. But it’s one hell of an homage.

5.            Martin Scorsese, Hugo – Martin Scorsese has created a love letter to early silent film pioneer Georges Méliès, and indeed cinema as a whole. He also showed the young whippersnappers in the film industry how to use 3D to build a world, rather than as a gimmick to jack up ticket prices.

4.            Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life – This marks the only appearance of The Tree of Life on this list. I, like many people, found it somewhat inaccessible. I, also like many people, also found it beautiful and spiritual… more akin to a prayer than a typical trip to the cineplex. Also, dinosaurs. I don’t fully understand it and I don’t fully appreciate it, but Malick has done something beautiful and I think it’s worthy of recognition.

3.            Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist – The last director to try a major silent film was Mel Brooks over thirty years ago. Michel Hazanavicius has outdone old Mel. Whether it’s using the latest film-making techniques or the oldest, it’s all about the craftsman wielding the tools and Hazanavicius has proven himself a master craftsman with this film.

2.            Tomas Alfredson, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – This Swede burst onto the international scene a few years back with the excellent vampire film Let the Right One In. The coldness of that film carries into Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. He crafts his visuals with the precision of jeweler and allows an incredible cast of actors to do what they do best.

1.            Lars von Trier, Melancholia – Okay, so the guy has a problem with telling bad Nazi jokes that piss off the French, but he can make one hell of a movie. He also pushed Kirsten Dunst to a career-best performance and oversaw beautiful visuals and a compelling narrative into one of the best films of the year.

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BEST PICTURE

Honorable Mention: Super 8 – From a sentimental perspective, this might be my favorite film of the year. It took me back to watching Spielberg movies like E.T. or Jaws back when I was a young child in the late 1980s and early 1990s. There were kids who seemed like real kids instead of annoying precocious movie kids. There was a real danger. There was also a profound message about coping with loss and pain. I liked this movie a lot, and while I couldn’t quite put it in my Top Ten I had to give it a shout-out.

10.          A Dangerous Method – The idea of psychoanalysts being more screwed up than the people they’re treating is not exactly a new concept, but this one uses the two fathers of the entire field of study, Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud (also its unsung mother Sabina Spielrein). David Cronenberg’s film have changed in the past decade from being about fighting a threat literally inside yourself (as in The Fly or The Brood) to a more metaphorical take on the same idea. Can we battle our impulses? Does this new-fangled “talking cure” really work? A superb cast and excellent direction explore the topic. It’s refreshing to see a movie about ideas instead of action.

9.            Win Win – Thomas McCarthy is one of the great writer-directors working today. With excellent films like The Station Agent and The Visitor under his belt (not to mention an Oscar nomination for co-writing Up) I was ready for anything he made. He didn’t disappoint. Win Win is about family, responsibility, and just the people you connect with in life. McCarthy’s films always feel real.

8.            Buck – Buck Brannaman is the real-life horse whisperer. This is a documentary about him (and also, implicitly, my pick for BEST DOCUMENTARY). Having witnessed the way horses were trained (beating them when they did something “wrong”), Buck knew there was a different way. How this ties into the way he himself was raised is adds more heartbreaking depth to the film. I can’t really point to what film-making strategies make Buck one of the best films of the year, but all I know is it tells a powerful story and tells it well.

7.            Hugo – A love letter to film history, to literature, to adventure, Hugo is a film that should be beloved of all cinephiles. There is the standard set-up of a fantasy story, a young orphan forced into unusual circumstances is confronted with a mystery and the promise of adventure. However the place this mystery and this adventure leads to isn’t to a realm of fantasy, though it does lead to a kind of magic. The film uses of film history’s most famous film-maker/magicians to blur the line between film and magic. I, for one, believe they are one and the same.

6.            Melancholia – Christopher Titus used to have a bit where he would say the advantage of being dysfunctional is that when shit goes crazy you’re prepared while all the “normal” are losing their heads. Melancholia is the story of two sisters, one incapable of functioning and the other in control of her life. Then the earth is doomed and everyone everywhere is going to die. Suddenly the role are reversed. To the dysfunctional one, the thought of total extinction is somehow comforting while the other panics over all the things she has worked for in her life.

5.            Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – It is one thing to follow the twists and turns of this film’s plot, but even more compelling is to focus on the characters. Who are these men who live in a world of secrecy and lies? What motivates them and who if anyone can they trust? Excellent direction and top notch cast (Oldman, Colin Firth, Toby Jones, Benedict Cumberbatch, Mark Strong, Tom Hardy) keep this taut thriller intriguing from beginning to end.

4.            50/50 – You know that old cliché “you’ll laugh, you’ll cry?” Well I laughed. I cried. This is a movie that has some powerful moving human drama juxtaposed with gut-bustingly funny humor. It’s all grounded in the real experiences of the screenwriter so it never feels inauthentic. Since Will Reiser survived and wrote this movie, I always knew it was a safe bet that the main character was not going to die but oddly that knowledge didn’t make the stakes of the film feel any lower. In the run time of the film I grew to care about the characters like they were old friends.

3.            Midnight in Paris – When you read of the adventures of Ernest Hemmingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald, you get a sense of a period of history that was really alive. If you could go back to that time, would you? (Not me, I like my internet access.) Nostalgia is powerful force. I know, as anyone who’s heard me go off about the 1990s (the 18-year-olds I go to school with hate it when I do that) but the here-and-now is what we got. Dissatisfaction is a given no matter where or when you are. Woody Allen’s best film in years explores all this with a sense of whimsy that prevents it from ever getting too deep into navel-gazing philosophy. A love of literature is recommended for this one…

2.            Rango – Naturally this also doubles as my pick for BEST ANIMATED FILM. It’s a spaghetti western take on Chinatown set in a desert town populated entirely by varmints. Do you need more than that? Is that not enough for you?!? If not, get off my site; we have nothing in common. I’ve been loving this trend of live action directors getting into the animation game. Gore Verbinski’s deranged energy is exactly what makes Rango into the masterpiece it is. The great cinematopher Roger Deakins also serves as a visual consultant. The combination of photorealistic computer animation and eccentric character design would be jarring in a different film, but Rango pulls it all off.

1.            The Artist – So if anyone’s known me long enough, they’ve probably heard me (or read me) mention how modern talented film-makers should tackle silent films. Well, Michel Hazanavicius listened to me and in doing so totally proved my point. He made a work of art that is setting the film world on fire. Part of me hopes this inspires a wave of copycat silent films (many of which would invariably be inferior, but some of them would probably demonstrate the creativity that silent films brought out in film-makers). By using a technique that hasn’t really been commonly done in eight decades or so, Michel Hazanavicius highlights one of the key rules in art and in indeed life in general: adapt or die. George Valentin’s reluctance to embrace new technology is almost his undoing. He survives only by adjusting to the new style of the medium. It may seem odd to technologically regress in order to make a case for advancement but it makes the whole thing even more poetic. Anyway, I know I’m hardly daring or original as pegging The Artist as the best picture of the year but it got me.

There are two intertwined stories in Hugo, Martin Scorsese’s inaugural foray into family-friendly cinema. The first — and less interesting — story is about an orphaned boy who lives in a Paris railway station in the 1930s, looking after the station’s clocks and eluding the station inspector at every turn. The second — and far more compelling — story revolves around the French cinema pioneer, Georges Méliès, living in broken-hearted obscurity and running a toy concession at that same railway station, and how he finds himself rediscovered and redeemed by a young film scholar (with the aid of the above orphan). Whenever the focus of Hugo is on Méliès, Scorsese finds his footing, the source of his passion for this material, namely the magic, heritage and history of early cinema. The Méliès story gives Scorsese an expansive avenue to wax lyrical on his affection for the magic of movies, to share with his audience his own captivation with the medium. In that sense, Hugo may be the most soulful, most personal fiction film in his career.

What links the young boy, Hugo (Asa Butterfield) to Méliès (played with world-class gusto by Ben Kingsley) is a broken-down mechanical toy — an automaton — that the filmmaker had fashioned decades earlier and gave away to collect dust in a museum. Hugo now tends to the automaton at the station, determined to carry on his late father’s wishes to repair and rebuild it. As Hugo and Méliès strike a bond with each other, the resurrection of the automaton is but one of many of the film’s resurrections: Méliès’ of course along with Hugo’s resurrection from aimless, fatherless oblivion into a future filled with purpose and the film world’s own resurrection of its own heritage.

Where Scorsese stumbles is in telling Hugo’s story, which finds the director flat-footed and at a loss to capture the pace, wit and energy of a children’s fantasy film. Scorsese has always been more at home in studies of behavior, mood and milieu. As a result, performances from child actors Butterfield and Chloë Grace Moretz — who plays Isabelle, Méliès’ goddaughter and Hugo’s spunky sidekick — have a charmless, obligatory feel about them. These are one-note performances as is a similarly troublesome turn by Sacha Baron Cohen, playing the station inspector as a queasy mishmash of Borat and Inspector Clouseau. While Cohen and Emily Mortimer, as flower vendor Lisette, have a couple of cute and amusing scenes, Cohen’s schtick never coheres into a fully realized character and in sync with this material.

Fortunately for Hugo, Scorsese and his editor Thelma Schoonmaker keep Cohen’s scenes tolerably trimmed. The filmmakers aren’t quite as shrewd with the children’s scenes, which often feel protracted and not half as interesting as Scorsese believes they are. Scenes between Hugo and Isabelle benefit from Hugo’s unsparing attention to period detail, but the direction belabors each and every dramatic beat with little regard for pacing, freshness and energy. This is one of the shortfalls in Scorsese’s approach to his material: He has never been much of a storyteller so much as an uncanny capturer of moments and details. While his gifts serve biographies and crime sagas admirably, they become hindrances to the needs of this genre, this material.

But when the movie lands in Kingsley’s hands, Hugo becomes a thing of beauty and profoundness. Méliès allows Scorsese to transport himself and his audience to the halcyon days of the film pioneer’s career, when he perfected early special-effects techniques via hundreds of fantasy and adventure short films. Hugo hits its stride (and Scorsese finds his groove) when it ventures into Méliès’ biography — sequences bursting with visual splendor and emotional beauty. When a young film scholar, Rene Tabard (played delightfully by Michael Stuhlberg), chances on Hugo and Isabelle as they thumb through pages of his film-history tome, we feel that Scorsese has found filmic extensions of his cinema-love in both Hugo, the fledgling cinephile, and Tabard, the seasoned film enthusiast, through whom the director can give voice to the issue of film preservation (the lack of which destroyed much of Méliès’ cinematic output). When Scorsese finds opportunities to lavish attention on Méliès and on early film history, Hugo becomes something special, it finds its purpose in the world, right along with its own characters.

Grade: B+

Directed by: Martin Scorsese
Written by: John Logan
Cast: Ben Kingsley, Sacha Baron Cohen, Asa Butterfield, Chloë Grace Moretz, Michael Stuhlbarg, Ray Winstone, Emily Mortimer, Christopher Lee, Jude Law, Richard Griffiths, Helen McCory

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Tha Trickas – Kill it Fuck it Eat It
D Cals and Maksim – Jump
High Rankin – Reincarnation
Dodge and Fuski feat Tigerlight – Adrenaline
Skism and Flux Pavillion – Jump Back
High Rankin feat Tigerlight – Lift Me Up
Porter Robinson – The State (Skism Remix)
Skrillex – First Of The Year
Killagraham – Silence
Temper D – Face The Door
Mojo – Carnival
Knife Party – Fire Hive
Document One – Ace In The Pack
Doctor P – Watch Out
J Majik -In Pieces (Mike Delinquent Remix)
Kavinsky – Nightcall
Nero – Promises (Nero and Skrillex Remix)
Document One – Tears
Zomboy – Organ Donor
Dodge and Fuski – Aerophobia
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Knife Party – Internet Friends
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Kriss Kross – Jump (TBMA Remix)
Skrillex – Bangarang

We should probably talk about The Clientele for a minute.

At some point in the life of this blog there’ll probably be a 5,000+ word post on why I find them so incredibly fascinating but for our purposes here today, take the following ingredients:

60’s British psychedelic pop. Late 80’s American college rock. Nelson Riddle and Paul Verlaine. Spanish guitar and Belgian surrealism. Romanticism with a capital and lowercase r. Psychogeography and the old weird England. Lots and lots of reverb. And the slightly sinister tension lurking in the suburban outskirts of major cities as concrete and steel mesh uneasily with wood and dale.

Now take all of that, mix it up for three minutes and this is what you get:

https://embed.spotify.com/?uri=spotify:track:72Ki0oJMVL026L3TNtB8MU

Two things: First, apologies for the Spotify link; it’s a B-side and that’s the only place online I could find it. I supposed I could have just uploaded the mp3 myself and posted it, but I try not to piss off Merge Records until I’ve had my second cup of coffee.

Second, HOW GREAT IS THAT SONG YOU GUYS. Those bright, jangly guitars? The swelling, multi-tracked vocals that sound like falling in love? The way lead singer/songwriter/guitarist Alasdair MacLean absent-mindedly hums the melody under his breath right before the bridge? And then the bridge, THAT BRIDGE, when shadows fall across the song as the lyrics become fraught with terror and we begin to realize that maybe this is not quite the jolly tune we thought it was and then it drops into waltz time because WHY NOT? And then we return to the second verse and we realize that, in light of the bridge, those shadows were there in the lyrics all along, warning us? “Faces in the avenues / Faces in the trees / Faces in the shapes behind the blinds?” But the guitars still sparkle and the vocals still shine and we still feel lifted and hopeful, now more than ever, as if we’ve now earned this feeling, as if we’ve found our way out of the woods at night and we walk out once more beneath the stars? YOU GUYS. THAT. SONG.

Nevertheless, when The Clientele announced in 2010 that they were going on indefinite hiatus, I was a bit relieved.

It’s not that their last (final?) album, 2009’s Bonfires on the Heath wasn’t stunning. The phrase “autumnal” tends to be attached to any introspective down tempo record with a lot of fingerpicking, but no album owns the season more than Bonfires. I put it on every year in late September and don’t listen to anything else until Thanksgiving. It’s a potent mix of contemplative pastorals shot through with the uneasy sense that Winter is creeping ever closer with its cold dark knives and the occasional Spanish inflected toe tapper to make you miss Summer all over again.

However, two of the 12 songs on the album (“Share the Night” and “Graven Wood”) had already appeared in slightly different forms on other Clientele records. “Tonight” is a cover of an Evergreen Daze Days song. “Harvest Time” was swiped from MacLean’s secret side project, of which we’ll have more to say in a bit. “Sketch” is just a minute and a half of vamping while MacLean whispers disconnected words that relate to the theme of the album. And the last track ends with MacLean singing “I don’t know what more I can say” while the band winds down behind him. You can practically hear the pages flipping as they run through years of journals and sketchbooks, frantically searching for enough discarded ideas and abandoned B-sides to make it to the finish line. It’s a testament to the band’s skill that they’re able to pull it off brilliantly, and a testament to their self-awareness that they knew it was time to turn out the lights.

But MacLean wasn’t out of ideas. He was just moving on to something else.

Photo by Shoko Ishikawa, courtesy Merge Records

Which brings us to Amor de Días, the aforementioned secret side project, a collaboration with Lupe Núñez-Fernández from Pipas. MacLean and Núñez-Fernández have a lot in common. They both have backgrounds as visual artists. They share a love of both the cloudy British pop of Felt and the sunny freewheeling Tropicália of Tom Zé. And they both have a knack for writing gorgeous pop songs whose darker undercurrents could completely drift by you unless you’re paying attention.

Pipas – yrrkdbk

(Again, sorry for the Spotify link, but we’re talking about a band so obscure they don’t even have a Wikipedia page.)

Street of the Love of Days, named after a translation error, was released last Spring to unenthusiastically polite reviews. Reviews that said the album was pretty good, very enjoyable, but nothing memorable. The kind of agreeable album they put on in a coffee shop because everyone will like it, but no one will love it so much that they run out to buy the album instead of staying put and ordering more coffee and maybe one of those fancy scones with all the walnuts.

But this is not an album that gives up its secrets easily. Sure, you could put it on as background music and listen to it for months without paying attention, and not without enjoyment. You could also spend months walking around the pleasant London suburb of Islington, strolling along the A501, past the banks and offices, and not notice anything out of the ordinary. Then one day you make a wrong turn, stumble into an alley, notice a random wrought iron gate beside the garages and dumpsters, and discover a whole new world.

Bunhill Fields refers to the fields just north of central London that have been used as a burial ground of last resort since at least the time of the Saxons. It was a graveyard for those who had nowhere else to go: The poor, plague victims, and Nonconformists who did not want to be buried in a consecrated church yard. William Blake is there, as is John Bunyan and Daniel Defoe. As London crept north throughout the centuries, buildings began popping up around the Fields like mushrooms. Eventually, the Fields were squared off and worked into the grid. Today it’s essentially a courtyard and almost completely hemmed off from the neighborhood. You could walk by it for years and never know it was there.

So when Núñez-Fernández sings about wanting to “let it go” every time she sees someone on the Bunhill Fields, it’s possible she’s singing to someone who no longer walks among the living. Or if ghost stories are not your thing, you could view the Fields of being a metaphor for a relationship that has grown cold and needs to be laid to rest. “Words are geographical” she sings, neatly summing up the theme of the whole record. This is a world where birds are harbingers of the future, where God’s face appears in the street grid and the countryside is alive with hidden voices at twilight.

But not all the alleys in this world lead to hidden, fog enshrouded fields of the dead. Some of them lead you, miraculously, to the sea. And then you dance.

This is a world of hushed reverence that we, as listeners, are richer for having visited and poorer for having left. I do hope that at some point The Clientele get back together, recharged and ready for more adventures. But if not, I’m more than happy to spend the years ahead walking down the streets of the city that Amor de Días are just beginning to build. It is, shadows and all, a beautiful place to visit.

After a few days of putting this off, I thought it was about time for me to name my favorite movies of this past year. Better late than never, right?

Without further ado…

10. Barney’s Version

This movie REALLY went under the radar, as it was put into limited release during the Oscar season last year. For whatever reason, “Barney’s Version” got buried. It’s a shame because this movie was incredibly well-acted by Paul Giamatti, Dustin Hoffman and a host of other supporting characters. What probably didn’t help the movie was a horrible trailer that made it look like a weird romantic comedy instead of the lifelong character study of Barney Panofsky. Although the actors are spot on and the writing is enjoyable, the one thing that kept this from being higher on my list was that the film, based on a novel of the same name, just felt waaay too long. Still, “Barney’s Version” ended up being my sleeper favorite of 2011.

9. Attack the Block

There’s something to be saild for filmmakers with real imagination. Although writer/director Joe Cornish shouldn’t be considered an elite director yet, this little sci-fi film of his was a real surprise. The story follows a group of young hoodlums who must band together when an alien species lands in their government housing area. For a genre that has seen pretty much everything, it’s always nice to experience a fresh take. A strong protagonist and some imaginative creatures make the premise work.

8. Margin Call

Another surprise favorite of mine was this take on the Wall street crisis which stars Zachary Quinto, Kevin Spacey, Stanley Tucci, Demi Moore, Jeremy Irons, Paul Bettany and Simon Baker (tell me that casting list doesn’t give you goosebumps).

At the end of a long workday, an analyst at a financial firm discovers certain discrepancies that threaten to bring down the company. This begins a mad dash to fix the company’s bottom line before business resumes the next day.

What I loved about “Margin Call” was that its incredible cast was able to live up to the hype. Most times when a film like this comes along, big-name actors tend to get in each other’s way and the film feels a little disappointing. Each of this characters are fleshed out and everyone gets their time to shine. Combined with great pacing and a smart script, it’s a real winner.

7. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

I was wondering whether or not to include this since it’s a remake of a recent film, but I think its quality makes up for that fact. Besides, everything these days is based off a book, video game or TV show.

What made me love this one so much was the duo of Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara. They really sold their characters from the Stieg Larsson novel. Throw in some great directing from David Fincher and a good score by Trent Reznor and you’ve got yourself a great movie.

6. Warrior

I’m not sure if there was another movie this year that surprised me as much as this one did. I went in expecting something marginally better than 2008′s “Never Back Down,” but found myself loving this film.

What on the surface appears to be a movie about mixed martial arts unfolds to be a compelling family drama. The scenes in the ring are great, but what really sells the film is the family dynamic. The recovering alcoholic (Nick Nolte, whose performance is an Oscar nominee) and his two estranged sons (Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton) steal the show in what could have been a very forgettable movie.

And now for the top 5…..

5. Drive

Some people found this movie very slow and boring. I am very glad to not be part of that group.

Is it a little slow? Yes. Boring? Not in the least. The film had my attention by the end of the first car chase. What I really liked about “Drive” was the way each scene was shot. It seemed like everyone took their time and milked each moment for what it was worth. Films these days can be in too much of a hurry and I appreciate the careful craftsmanship of director Nicholas Winding Refn.

On top of that there are some great performances in the film. Most notably Ryan Gosling, Bryan Cranston and Oscar nominee Albert Brooks.

4. The Artist

Yes, it’s supposed to win all the Oscars and I have it at number 4. I don’t really care. Even though I gave the film a near-perfect review myself, I still wouldn’t say it was my favorite movie of the year.

“The Artist” checks all the boxes for award material and it IS a great little film. However, I don’t think it hit me at the core like any of the films in my top 3 did.

3. The Descendants

When I first saw the trailer for this movie, I wasn’t too interested. It looked it was trying too hard to be quirky and George Clooney films are often overrated. The film turned out to be a bit of a surprise for me when I left the theatre, though.

I’ve said before that family is one of the most powerful elements a film can have and this film really explored the family dynamic. Clooney does a great job of playing the patriach trying to keep his head above water after his wife falls into a coma. Between hospitals, visiting family members and trying to raise his daughter his character is given a lot of wiggle room (which he does very well with).

Alexander Payne is also a very gifted writer/director and the film works wonders with him at the helm.

2. 50/50

I almost have to call the decision between this film and my number one a tie. They are both great and really made an impact on me.

“50/50″ is about a twenty-something (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who is diagnosed with cancer and everything that comes after this revelation.

The film dances on the difficult line of mixing comedy and tragedy and walks away unscathed. Part of how it does this so well is the smart script by newbie writer Will Reiser. The rest can be found with the film’s very good cast – Levitt, Seth Rogen, Anna Kendrick, Bryce Dallas Howard, Anjelica Huston and Philip Baker Hall.

And for my top choice….

1. Hugo

If you had told me a year ago that my favorite movie of the year was going to be a 3D movie, I would have laughed in your face.

Some people say it feels too long or that it can’t decide what it’s about, and I get that. There are few times that a movie actually feels magical and this was one of those times for me. I was swept away by pretty much every minute of this film.

Asa Butterfield and Chloe Grace Moretz are great together onscreen and the supporting performance by Ben Kingsley is fantastic. His scenes in both the present and his early filmmaking years are probably the best parts of the movie.

As for the directing, Martin Scorsese delivers a well-crafted love letter to cinema which can be enjoyed by anyone who has ever fallen head over heels while sitting in a theater chair.

That’s it for my ten favorite films of 2011. Did I miss your favorite? Let me know.

Check back on Sunday for my Oscar picks and follow along on Twitter as I’ll be covering the show at @VC_Reviews.

Happy viewing.

Best Look – Katy Perry’s Smurfette Dress

Best Viral Videos
1. Today Now! Interviews the 5-Year-Old Screenwriter of Fast Five

2. Funny or Die’s Audio Tour

Best National Anthem Performance – Zooey Deschanel at Game 4 of the World Series

Late Night Talk Show Musical Guest MVP’s
St. Vincent

St. Vincent – “She is Beyond Good and Evil” on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon

Childish Gambino

Childish Gambino – “Bonfire” on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon

Best Single Dance Move in a Music Video – The Tofo Tofo dancers and Beyoncé  drop to their knees and kick back up in the “Run the World (Girls)” music video.

Best Hip-Shaking – Ellie Goulding in the “Lights” Music Video

Bridesmaids – Dress Fitting
“I can’t believe I ate the whole thing.”

Best Death Scenes
1. Final Destination 5 - Worst Dismount Ever
The most creative and surpising of the FD series’ deaths had tension to match the bomb in Touch of Evil.

2. X-Men: First Class – Show Me the Money
My friend Walt asked if the makers of X-Men: First Class were guilty of stereotyping by having Magneto, a Jewish man, kill someone with a coin.  I responded that it would have been truly offensive if they showed him picking up the coin.

Best Action Scenes
1. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol – Scaling the Burj Khalifa
I have literally been rendered speechless.

2. Final Destination 5 – Highway Bridge Collapse
As Rajeesh Koothrappali would say, “Oh, snap.”

3. Fast Five – Cars vs. Trains
“I believe I can fly.”

Best Scene in an Otherwise Bad Movie:
Another Earth – Space Strawberries
A member of NASA makes contact with her counterpart on the other Earth, and in a WTF?! moment to match any of the revelations on Lost, they simultaneously reveal that they both bought space strawberries during a childhood vacation to Cape Canaveral.

Best On-Screen Chemistry:
Matt Damon and Emily Blunt in The Adjustment Bureau
 

Dogs
1. Uggie as The Dog in The Artist
 

2. Arthur as Cosmo in Beginners
 

3. Snowy in The Adventures of Tintin
 

Best Film
Bridesmaids
Moneyball
Crazy, Stupid, Love.
The Muppets
The Descendants
Midnight in Paris
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Margin Call
Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

Director
Alexander Payne, The Descendants
Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris
Paul Feig, Bridesmaids
Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life
Martin Scorcese, Hugo

Lead Actor
Tom Hardy, Warrior
Brad Pitt, Moneyball
George Clooney, The Descendants
Mel Gibson, The Beaver
Brad Pitt, The Tree of Life

Lead Actress
Charlize Theron, Young Adult
Viola Davis, The Help
Kristen Wiig, Bridesmaids
Keira Knightley, A Dangerous Method
Michelle Williams, My Week with Marilyn

Supporting Actor
Corey Stoll, Midnight in Paris
Jonah Hill, Moneyball
Ryan Gosling, Crazy, Stupid, Love.
Patton Oswalt, Young Adult
Kevin Spacey, Margin Call

Supporting Actress
Melissa McCarthy, Bridesmaids
Jessica Chastain, The Help
Octavia Spencer, The Help
Mélanie Laurent, Beginners
Judy Greer, The Descendants

Adapted Screenplay
Stan Chervin, Aaron Sorkin, and Steven Zaillian, Moneyball
Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller, The Muppets
Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon, and Jim Rash, The Descendants
John Logan, Hugo
Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Original Screenplay
Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, Bridesmaids
Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris
Dan Fogelman, Crazy, Stupid, Love.
J.C. Chandor, Margin Call
Diablo Cody, Young Adult

Editing
Christopher Tellefsen, Moneyball
Lee Haxall, Crazy, Stupid, Love.
Conrad Buff and Mark Goldblatt, Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Matthew Newman, Drive
Paul Hirsch, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

Cinematography
Emmanuel Lubezki, The Tree of Life
Manuel Alberto Claro, Melancholia
Robert Richardson, Hugo
Brendan Galvin, Immortals
Janusz Kaminski, War Horse

Art Direction
Melancholia
The Tree of Life
Immortals
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
The Muppets

Sound Mixing
Hugo
Drive
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
The Muppets
Real Steel

Sound Editing
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Drive
Hugo
Real Steel
Thor

Costume Design
Midnight in Paris
Hugo
Bridesmaids
Thor
The Muppets

Score
Cliff Martinez, Drive
Michael Andrews, Bad Teacher
The Chemical Brothers, Hanna
Cliff Martinez, Contagion
Roger Neill, David Palmer, and Brian Reitzell, Beginners

Original Song
“Man or Muppet,” written by Bret McKenzie, The Muppets
“I Didn’t Mean It,” written by Barbara and Ethan Gruska, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1
“Life’s a Happy Song,” written by Bret McKenzie, The Muppets
“Endtapes,” written by Ritzy Bryan, Rhdyian Dafydd, and Matt Thomas, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1
“Pictures in My Head,” written by Jeannie Luris, Aris Archontis, and Chen Neemn, The Muppets

Documentary
Tabloid
Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Animated Film
Arthur Christmas
The Adventures of Tintin

Visual Effects
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Real Steel
Thor
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2
Hugo

Makeup
I didn’t see any movies from 2011 with particularly great makeup, so I’m going to assume The Iron Lady – with its old people makeup, which I hear is hard to do well – was the best.

5) Buffalo: A Love Story – For most chicken wing fans, a perfectly fried and spicily sauced morsel represents the quintessential bar food. For me, each order is a referendum on my marriage. When my wife and I first started dating over 20 years ago, the local chicken wing joints in her neighborhood were often our pre-movie date stops. Sure, there were your typical shared interests and raging teen hormones. But, it was the chicken wing that held the secret to our future. My wife prefers the wing “flat”, while I’m a “drumette” man . . . perfectly matched wing munching companions and two decades later, still perfect for each other. So, when I wanted to haul the whole family up to Buffalo on Christmas Eve to see our favorite fellow Florida Gator alum Tim Tebow in action against the Bills, I knew I could use wings to close the deal. Turning down a journey to the Anchor Bar, birthplace of the Buffalo wing, would have been an affront to our blessed union! Despite being a major tourist attraction, Anchor Bar still feels like a neighborhood joint. We were guided to a cosy little table in the back and as we’ve done forever, ordered twenty medium wings. They were exactly as we’d hoped – crispy and tangy (and breading free!) with enough sauce left over for fry dipping . . . a meal my wife and I were seemingly destined to have and are guaranteed to repeat at our favorite spots for years to come.

4) Table for One – Normally, having a flight cancelled due to a major weather disruption is a nightmare. When you’re in Las Vegas . . . not so much. So while my family was huddled in the dark when Hurricane Irene tore up the East Coast in late August, I was on the hunt in Sin City for five dollar craps, free gin and tonics, a shaded chaise at the Mirage pool and new, exiting restaurant options. Come Sunday afternoon, my pack of friends had all found flights back East. I was on my own. More football than food obsessed, once the boys were gone I had an unexpected window of culinary opportunity as Restaurant Week was set to kick off on Monday. Breakfast was a no-brainer – a quick walk over to The Venetian to sample Thomas Keller’s Bouchon. The Croque Madame was a delicious, high-end version of my beloved deli staple bacon, egg and cheese sandwich. I was so into the meal and the surroundings, I even had a cup of cappuccino. As I never drink coffee, I found myself hurriedly scurrying back to my hotel room for relief an hour later. However, it was totally worth the temporary discomfort. Dinner would be the big decision. Having read a ton of great reviews for Sage, I headed out to the Aria. But when I got there, the Restaurant Week menu across the way at Julian Serrano was the one that spoke to me. Specifically, the Churros with Spicy Hot Chocolate dessert offering just drew me in. The Piquillo Peppers stuffed with Goat Cheese and traditional Spanish Croquetas were standout tapas. But I’m still thinking about the Churros. Maybe it’s the childhood connection with a treat I’d only sampled at street fairs. Or possibly it’s that it was the first time I’d tried a spicy dessert. There’s also probably a small element of shame too, as I was eating an incredible meal while my family was popping open cans of who-knows-what back home (Don’t worry. They were without power for less than 24 hours). Regardless of the reason, sitting solo at that bar enjoying those churros is a cherished, guilty memory.

3) “Location, Location, Location” – The famous quote refers to real estate, but it’s equally applicable to dining. My memories of a meal are often influenced as much by the setting as the actual courses or company. In June, my wife and I were able to sneak away to South Beach for a few days and scored a reservation at Scarpetta. As fans of Scott Conant from his various appearance on the Food Network, we were eager to try the legendary Spaghetti with Tomato and Basil, along with the rest of his inviting Italian menu. The signature dish was indeed worth the hype, simple and sublime. Other favorites included the Duck and Foie Gras Ravioli and Creamy Polenta with Truffled Mushrooms. Flat out, it was the best Italian meal we’d ever shared. The kicker for me, though, is that the dining room is located in and overlooks the pool at the Fontainebleau Hotel. It’s best known today as an ultra-hip, SoBe resort for the a-list, hard partying crowd. But I’ll always think of it as the opening location for the greatest James Bond film of all time, “Goldfinger”. As a long time 007 fan, I couldn’t help but feel a little Connery-esque – well dressed and on top of my game, enjoying an amazing meal with a beautiful woman, a warm Atlantic breeze blowing through the dining room. If only there was a bacarrat table available or if I could develop a taste for martinis . . . and speaking of alcohol, let’s head to New Orleans.

2) Bayou “BBQ” Brilliance – As mentioned in Part 1 on my recap, my wife and I drank and dined up and down Bourbon St. and throughout New Orleans in early November. We ate the requisite beignets and po-boys (both excellent), sampled amazing charcuterie at Butcher and enjoyed old school NOLA charm and classically prepared seafood at the unrivaled Galatoire’s. However, Mr. B’s Bistro, just one block off of Bourbon St., provided the single best bite of our visit. I’d heard about their famous Barbequed Shrimp before arriving, but being a BBQ purist, couldn’t really grasp the concept. Frankly, I don’t know where the “BBQ” in the dish’s name comes from and after eating it, I don’t care.

Mr. B's Barbequed Shrimp

The large, head-on shrimp come swimming in a pool of peppery, buttery goodness unlike anything I’ve ever tasted. The bib that’s provided is absolutely necessary, as taking the heads off results in the delicious broth squirting everywhere. It’s also a dish that grew on me as I ate it. After the first shrimp I thought “tasty, but I’ve had good shrimp before”. By the end, my wife and I having downed every one and soaked up as much broth as possible with French bread, I was thinking “transcendent” and figuring out how to get back down to the Bayou as soon as possible.

1) Family Affair – I’m not sure exactly when or why it started, but sometime in the mid 2000s, my obsession with BBQ began. I’d always enjoyed eating it, but now became consumed with Q on other levels – visiting legendary BBQ joints, discovering local gems, watching BBQ travel shows and ultimately, making my own. I purchased my first Weber Smokey Mountain Cooker and started turning out my own versions of slow-smoked classics like ribs and pulled pork. Thanks to the invaluable information and Q-mmunity online, I learned new tips and tricks, developed my own recipes and was soon feeding family, co-workers and neighbors twelve months a year. Looking to take my hobby to the next level, I decided to enter my first competition in September. The whole family was on board and team “Rib. Rub. Repeat.” was born. My wife and mother helped with the prep, dad provided much-needed muscle for the set-up and my boys were excellent tasters and ran our entries to the turn-in tent. Just getting all four cooking categories (ribs, chicken, chef’s choice and dessert) turned in on time was a feat in itself. At day’s end, we were all exhausted and completely satisfied with our initial voyage into the world of competition BBQ. The results were pretty much an afterthought. I just didn’t want to finish last.

1st Place Spare Ribs

So, you can imagine our reaction when we took 1st Place in the ribs category and 6th overall – cheers, hugs, tears – an awesome family moment. My kids keep asking if we can enter more competitions this upcoming summer and my mother is obsessing over how to improve our dessert entry when we give it another go in September. I can’t wait to fire up the smokers and get the team going again . . . and to see what other great food memories 2012 is sure to hold.

Khalifa, whose second novel, The Ma3di Killer, was recently released, has blogged about books since 2008. His book-blogging began with a review of Mansoura Ezz Eldin’s Maryam’s Maze. But now he wants to open his reviews to a new audience, and particularly “to shed a light on the fact that Arabic literature is much more eclectic than many people, both in the region and outside it, believe it to be.”

The new blog is particularly billed as “a resource for translators,” and Khalifa hopes to update the blog “more than once a month, fingers crossed.”

He adds:

As long as Arabic books continue to be published, the blog will continue to feature new reviews And, as a rule, I don’t like wasting my readers’ time with books I don’t believe in, so most of the books featured on my blog will be good ones, in my humble opinion, of course.

Khalifa will review award-winners and best-sellers. But he’s also interested in Arabic literature at the margins. “I consider myself a huge fan of ‘alternative’ Arabic literature,” he says. “which basically means good books that haven’t yet been discovered by the majority of readers.”

What criteria does he have in mind when selecting a book for review? Since this is a “resource for translators” does a book’s apparent “translatability” matter?

To me, it all comes down to whether the book is interesting, readable, and worth the readers’ time. As for gauging a book’s potential to “travel”, I am not sure, really. I have read some excellent Arabic books whose literary value was completely demolished by bad translations. And I have read some truly terrible Arabic books that were picked up by prestigious publishing houses and given translations that improved upon the original text. So that’s a tricky matter. But, in the end, I believe a good book is a good book, and it will show its literary value in any language.

Where is it?

http://arabic-lit.blogspot.com

1. The Tree of Life (d. Terrence Malick)

2. A Separation (Jodaeiye Nader az Simin, d. Asghar Farhadi)

3. Meek’s Cutoff (d. Kelly Reichardt)

4. Of Gods and Men (Des hommes et des dieux, d. Xavier Beauvois)

5. The Artist (d. Michel Hazanavicius)

6. Certified Copy (Copie conforme, d. Abbas Kiarostami)

7. 13 Assassins (Jusan-nin no shikaku, d. Takashi Miike)

8. Bridesmaids (d. Paul Feig)

9. Cold Weather (d. Aaron Katz)

10. Drive (d. Nicholas Winding Refn)

Cake

For anyone who has indulged in cake, you know that is slightly strange yet upbeat and rather easy to listen to. This is most likely because the Californian alternative band plays catchy melodies accompanied by smooth lyrics. They’re 6th and latest album ‘Showroom of Compassion’ keeps this trend. The album produced two singles, ‘sick of you’ and ‘long time’.

The song ‘sick of you’ wraps up cake pretty well for me. It starts with a simple chord progression on the guitar accompanied by a simple drum beat. It isn’t long however before a catchy guitar riff joins in with the recognizable voice of cake’s lead singer, john mccrea, shortly followed by a synthesizer playing trumpetesque sounds. Inbands where the lead singer also plays an instrument like guitar, it’s essential that the chord progression for the song is simple. Cake uses basically three chords throughout the song (E, A, D), tweaking the E chord on its second strum.

Contrary to the upbeat music, the lyrics paint a rather cynical outlook on life, specifically i think relationships. ‘sick of you’ uses its verses to tell the listener that everything ends and becomes the same thing at some point. “Every piece of land, every city that you plan Will crumble into tiny grains of sand Everything you find that at first seems to shine Always turns into the same old grind (Same old grind!)” It makes me think that the singer (and writer) of the song recently ended a relationship of some sort and his cynicism took a sharp turn. The idea of cynical or strange lyrics coupled with upbeat melodies is quintessentially cake.

My last take on the song and really the album is this:  no matter how long they’ve been around or how many albums they put out, cake is always enjoyable. However they repeat ideas and musical styles on every single album. Thus it’s not necessary to listen to this album or any specific cake album. It is a unique sound though so cake worth listening to if only for a bit.

We’re now on to the final leg of my movie list for 2011. Summertime blockbusters fade into the less bombastic films of fall, which in turn give way to the frenetic pace of the holidays as movies crowd the last few weeks – competing for box-office dollars and award nominations. Here’s the reminder of the movies I saw in 2011 (although there are a couple of cheats that I saw very early in 2012). Enjoy!

(If you’re just joining this series, it’s a four-parter. See my previous posts under Watch.)

Contagion (B) – A solid film about the threat of pandemics, fear-mongering, and exploitation of the media surrounding a public health disaster. The acting is quite good (Jude Law in particular stands out), and the story has a couple of interesting bits. Ultimately, it doesn’t really twist in any interesting ways, but it’s execution does make you leave the theater a little paranoid.

Drive (A-) – This feels a lot like a late ’60s or ’70s Steve McQueen/Robert De Niro picture. Long setup scenes with brief explosions of violence. The main character says little, and the movie is better for the sparseness of his dialogue. Ryan Gosling’s best performance to date.

Moneyball (A) – Brad Pitt is pretty much awesome in my book. He’s in tons of movies, and I like or love almost every one of them. This one is at the high end of the spectrum. The story’s foundation is the radical personnel decisions that Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane makes that changes modern baseball, but it is a very human story that is at once easy to grok and filled with depth. Jonah Hill is also surprisingly wonderful in a serious role as his assistant. People that don’t care for baseball will be entertained; and if you’re a fan of the game, the movie will rank among the best you’ve seen on America’s Pastime.

Killer Elite (C) – I like all the actors in this movie for various reasons (De Niro, Jason Statham, and Clive Owen), but this never really comes together in a meaningful way on-screen. It’s an action movie that involves Statham going after his mentor’s captors, and supposedly is based on real-life events. It felt like it would’ve made a much better book.

50/50 (B+) – A charming off-kilter comedy/drama about a 27 year-old man that discovers he has cancer, and how he deals with the struggle of beating the disease. Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Seth Rogen play very well off of each other, and feel genuine. Anna Kendick also adds a nice romantic element to the story.

The Ides of March (D+) – I saw this one with Rachel, my girlfriend, and after reflecting on her comments, she was right on the money on this one. Do we really need to see another film about how corrupt our election system is? There’s nothing really to take away that we don’t already know, and the movie has no sympathetic characters in it. Pretty much the ultimate feel-bad movie. The acting is very good, as could be expected from a cast that includes Clooney and Giamatti.

Puss in Boots (A-) – I seriously did not expect to love this film as much as I did, but there’s just something absolutely hilarious about Antonio Banderas’s voice work that totally cracks me up. Good jokes, very brisk pacing, and loads of fun. Better than the last 2 Shrek movies for certain.

In Time (B-) – Here’s a movie with a great sci-fi premise. What if time was literally money, and once you turned 25, your body stopped aging, but you were constantly trying to earn or steal time to keep you alive? Awesome idea, decently executed until towards the end of the movie. Then, it becomes “I got to take the Man down to free everyone and fix this dystopia.” And it falls apart right there. Justin Timberlake acquits himself well in his first attempt at being an action star. (This is another movie that was so close to being brilliant, but then opted for a “safe path” that just compromises the premise.)

Tower Heist (B+) – This was the funniest Eddie Murphy movie I’ve seen since “Showtime.” Ben Stiller does his pseudo-straight man thing to Murphy’s crazy goofy street thief. Fun cast, with Alan Alda as the bad guy.

Immortals (B-) – Visually stunning, but not as impressive as “300,” which had the same producer and would be a very close comparison (classical-themed action fantasy). The Titans are really cool, and the main bad guy – Hyperion – was a great fit for Mickey Rourke.

The Descendants (B+) – A smartly paced and interesting film about a too-busy-for-family lawyer and major landowner that tries to take charge of his daughters after his wife is critically injured. It’s bittersweet and funny, and shows Clooney in a vulnerable role, much like “Up in the Air.”

The Muppets (A) – The best Muppet movie since the first one, and possibly even better than that. It is an absolutely wonderful homage to the way most of us that grew up watching the Muppets on TV want to see them depicted on the big screen. Amy Adams and Jason Segel are fantastic, and the original songs (in particular, “Man or Muppet”) are spot-on. Great for adults that want to feel like kids again, although I wonder how well this film translates for 21st century kids. I know I loved it.

The Sitter (C-) – Not Jonah Hill’s best work, and a pretty big letdown from “Moneyball.” Very standard sort of terrible babysitter with problem kids film that we’ve seen before. The humor was pretty stale, and the writing was pretty bad.

Young Adult (B-) – A movie that, in parts, was really enjoyable. As a whole though, it left a sort of gaping hole of unfulfilled potential. Patton Oswalt, playing basically a handicapped version of himself, was the best part of this film about a terribly selfish young adult fiction writer (Charlize Theron) who tries to “save” her high school sweetheart from his “terrible” married-with-children life.

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (B) – A very solid action film, made better by the fact that it’s not just the Tom Cruise show this time around – his team is important too, much like the first Mission Impossible film. The break-in at the Burj Kalifa tower in Dubai (the tallest tower in the world) makes the entire film.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (A) – A very fine installment in the Sherlock Holmes movie series. I think this is Guy Ritchie’s best work to date (yes, I mean it). This movie (and the first one) defines the period action film, and I am enamored with the Steampunk sensibility of the both of them. This time, Sherlock and Watson take a tour around Europe as they thwart the schemes of Moriarity. Beautiful scenery/sets, great over-the-top action, and a thrilling final act.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (A-) – The American version of Stieg Larsson’s novel, shot in Sweden, has a thrilling mystery spanning 40+ years at its core and a superb performance from Rooney Mara as an unconventional investigator. I will say this though – there are a couple of very explicit sequences in this film that were definitely uncomfortable for me to watch, and definitely push the boundaries of an R rating.

War Horse (B+) – A moving period piece about a young man named Albert whose simple, pure life and relationship with his steed is completely upended by the scourge of World War I. Adapted from a play, Steven Spielberg knows how to tug on your heart strings, and I am glad to see more attention being given to WWI-era stories and the Lost Generation.

Phew! Got through it all! The last installment of the movie review will have some of my “best of” for 2011, and maybe I’ll even make an Oscar prediction or two. See you in a few days!

______________

About the Awards by WedLuxe Magazine

2011 has come and gone (seriously, it’s February already, I’m continuing my streak of taking forever with these things), and much like one of the various horrific natural disasters to strike throughout the globe this year, it came both forcefully while also not quite meeting certain expectations for carnage.  How’s that as a way to start a year end list?  Yes, 2011 saw some bands that have never failed to make an year end list suddenly dropping off the deep end (what happened to Art Brut?  Who is responsible for telling Eddie Argos he can sing?) while certain bands managed to launch themselves back to respectability (Welcome back, Wilco, we thought we had lost you!).  Oh, and I think the Strokes released something.  I don’t know, I’ve stopped paying attention to them ever since they killed Indie rock in 2006.

But to get “real” and “personal” for a second, 2011 in life was almost the opposite of 2011 in music.  Musically, 2011 started gangbusters, dropping some of the best albums of the year before March, including solid albums by bands that are personal perennial favorites.  Toward the end of the year, things kept churning, but the year got it’s best stuff generally out of the way early on.  Meanwhile, personally, 2011 started less than great, and ended incredibly well.  I’d say that I was being vague enough about my personal life to instill mysterious curiosity but honestly, my name is on the article, if you really gave a shit you’d be able to google my facebook, twitter, and probably the personal notebook I keep under my bed in about five minutes.  One of you probably already did that and, going back to the beginning of the year, just laughed and said, “Ha, looks like this here Jeff feller ain’t putting no Decemberists on this here list of his,” to which I say two things.  First- holy shit, I have a southern reader?  Email me, I’m dying to know how you found me!  And second- you’d be surprised.

In fact let’s rip that first band aid right off as we get underway with…

ELITISH’S TOP 50 TRACKS OF 2011

50:  The Decemberists- Down By the Water

I’m going to start right off the bat and say this- I’m fairly sure I hate the latest album by The Decemberists.  Not the “Oh, I can see why people like it, but I’m not feeling it yet” sense I got when I listened to The Crane Wife, no, I’m talking about the pure, unadulterated loathing that makes you think, “Damn, they’ve stopped making good music.  I’ll miss them dearly” that I felt when I first heard The Stroke’s First Impressions of Earth (see above).

In The King is Dead, the band changes from “Quirky smart Indie folk with a rock edge” to “We’re country western, y’all” while forgetting the Jeff GoodSmith rule of making Jeff GoodSmith like your folk music (Banjos?  Encouraged.  Fiddles?  Get that shit out of my house).  Making matters worse, this follow up to the best album of 2009 so outsold its predecessor that this is probably going to be the permanent direction of the band now.  Fuck.

I think I finally know why educated people get caught up in the drama of celebrity rumors and tabloids.  At first, you think, “I don’t like this” but it just gets thrown at you over and over until finally it becomes familiar enough that you just accept it.  What I’m trying to say is that the only reason “Down by the Water” is on this list is that I’ve had to listen to it so many times I no longer hate it.  I have begrudgingly learned to accept the harmonica, the honky-tonk rhythm, the fact that the accordion is practically wasted behind the drums.  When all that is forgiven, the song is enjoyable, just so long as you let yourself forget that this is only a few years removed from “A Rake’s Song.”  Uh oh, I’m starting to dislike this song again…wait, okay, it’s suppressed.  The song is fine.  It’s good.  It’s the 50^th best song of the year.

Now can you please stop making country music, The Decemberists?  I mean, seriously.

49:  The Wombats- Our Perfect Disease

The Wombats are one of those bands that would have been much more popular if they had come out about three years earlier.  2007’s A Guide to Love, Loss & Desperation was British power pop glory, from the tight hooks to the cringe-worthy lyrics.  The band members met at the Liverpoiol Institute of Performing Arts, which was founded by Paul McCartney, and they made their presence known with catchy as hell tracks such as “Kill the Director” and “Let’s Dance to Joy Division.”  They are a Brit rock band that comes in equal parts energy, hooks, cleverness (“If this is a Rom-Com/ Kill the Director/ This is no Bridget Jones”), and awkward filler lyrics (I mean, seriously?  “Carrots help you see much better in the dark/ don’t talk to girls they’ll break your heart?”).  It took them three years to follow up their legitimately great debut album, and the results are…well, good, but not great.

“Our Perfect Disease” is a great example of what the Wombats are still doing right…as well as where they’ve sort of departed from their best work.  It’s a little less straight-forward instrumentally, trying to be more “club-dancey” than “rock-dancey,” though they still craft catchy songs with sharp hooks.  But the lyrics are a little more serious and a whole lot less earnest.  While The Wombats have never been a particularly great lyrical band (the term “bad lyrical band” comes to mind) they always had a youthful earnestness.  Not so in their latest album.  Seriously, they have a song called “Anti-D” which has the lyrics “Let me be your anti-depressant.”  That’s the chorus.  That’s terrible.  “Our Perfect Disease” is nowhere near the height The Wombats reached with “Let’s Dance to Joy Division” but, at the very least, it’s a reminder that they’re still capable of crafting a good pop song.  Just not a great one.

48:  Cymbals Eat Guitars- Rifle Eyesight (Proper Name)

Back in 2009, I predicted that Cymbals Eat Guitars would go at their sophomore album gangbusters.  Just an incredible sophomore effort that took their work to the next level.  And I was…not wrong, but not right either.  Cymbals Eat Guitars pretty much stayed on par with their first album.  And I’m not complaining, they are a high energy, intriguing group, and I give them credit for not only starting their album with an eight and a half minute song, but for making one this good.  Yes, “Rifle Eyesight” is long, rising and falling affair.  It’s great for a long song.  Of course the main problem for Cymbals Eat Guitars remains.  Musically, the song is a lot like rice.  At first, it’s exciting, and grabs your attention.  And while it maintains that quality for duration of the song, eventually it starts to sort of fade in the background, and it’s not grabbing your attention so much as being pleasant in the background as you focus on other things.  Like, uh, peas.  This metaphor is falling apart.

The first three minutes are going to be incredible for you, the next four minutes will be forgotten about as soon as you hear it, and the last minute will amp things up to end on a high note.  You’ll wonder where the last 8 minutes went, and you’ll remember hearing exactly four minutes of an awesome song with some gaps in your memory.  But those four minutes?  Well, they’re absolutely good enough to include this on my year end list.

47:  Los Campesinos- Hello Sadness

You know when an acquaintance that you are secretly but strongly attracted to changes their appearance in some way (a new piercing/hair cut/ hair color/etc) and while you still find them attractive you have a hard time coming up with a way to compliment them on their new look because, quite honestly, they were hotter before?   Los Campesinos! are great.  They really are.  But they’ve done that slight cosmetic change, and while they’re still better than 99% of the stuff out there, that remaining 1% (Ha, remember Occupy Wall Street, you guys?) does include their earlier work.

Los Campesinos! made a name for themselves due to the contrast between their somber lyrics and their youthful exuberance.  This is the band that would gleefully shout angry ejectives to the Universe, the band that could take lines like “We kid ourselves there’s future in the fuckign, but there is no fucking future” and make it sound like a gleeful battle cry.  Then last year they released Romance is Boring, with the standout track “The Sea is a Good Place to Think of the Future,” where we found a somber and profound band spinning a beautifully tragic yarn.  Remember that?  I liked it so much I made it one of the year’s best songs for the year before the actual album came out.

The problem was that they continued into that direction a little too much.  Hello Sadness as a title seems too direct to have effect, which is why the title track from this album gives you a very enjoyable Indie rock song that doesn’t have a single particularly memorable lyric to take it up that notch to put this in the top 10, 20, or even 40 songs of the year.  But don’t interpret my negativity to be me saying this song is no good.  It’s quite good, there’s a reason it’s on this list, Los Campesinos! can craft a quirky Indie anthem with their eyes closed.  It’s just that, well, I liked them a little better before the haircut.

46: The Wombats- Techno Fan

Hey there, Wombats, look at you!  Being all meta!  Was that on purpose?  Did you write a song with the chorus line “I never knew I was a Techno fan” specifically for an album where you diluted your sound by adding the synthesizer aspect of techno music to it?  And when you said, “Shut up and move with me…or get out of my face” was…was that a dig at me?  I mean, that’s fair, I am being unduly hard on you guys.

The truth is, this song is the one that best takes the new elements that the Wombats are working in and combines them with the best elements of their earlier work.  The Wombats clearly disservice themselves by not having any guitar for the first minute and a half (some “dah da dahs” and alternating synth notes are in the forefront of the vocals and minimal drumming before the song stops pussyfooting), but when things actually pick up, it’s pure Wombat power pop gold.  Upbeat and catchy, this is what the Wombats do best.  It’s like they saw my reaction to the sophomore slump this album represented (this honestly should have been a top 10 album, dammit!) and placed a gentle hand on my shoulder as if to say, “We got this, asshole writer.  We got this.”

45:  Los Campesinos- Songs About Your Girlfriend

At this point you are saying “Jeff, is this list only going to be British bands?  It’s starting to feel that way.”  Well jokes on you, the Decemberists only pretend to sound British, so they don’t count.  Ha!  Sick Decemberists burn.   Okay, so I spent most of the last Los Campesinos! song description bemoaning how they’ve gone from “freaking amazing!” to “great, but not always freaking amazing” in this most recent album (the most succinct way to describe it would be to ask “where they better when they hadn’t grown up?”) but “Songs About Your Girlfriend” actually emulates the old spirit of the band more than many of the tracks on their album.  This is the second best song on the album, but you could see it fit in on, say, We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed (It’d probably be the fourth or fifth best song on that album).

I don’t know why I feel more prone to praise this song while only begrudgingly complimenting “Hello Sadness” (come on, man!  Title track!  Where’s the love?!).  Maybe it’s the stark emptiness of the opening slightly-fuzzed guitar solo.  Maybe it’s the frantically driving beat and the schoolboy energy.  But probably, it stems from the lyrical dichotomy you see when you go from lines like “You do not like us  ‘cause your girlfriend likely does” to the chorus of “Songs I’ve written about your girlfriend/ Are just psalms of spite since it came to an end.”

Wait, they wrote an upbeat song where you expect it to be a rock and roll brag song, but instead is cleverly inverted to be a song pining for an ex-lover?  Los Campesinos!, you’ve done it again!

44:  BOAT- Bite My Lips

BOAT is from Seattle.  How do I know that?  Because every band that’s from Seattle can’t stop talking about other bands that are from Seattle.  Seriously, look at that cover art up there for their album Dress Like Your Idols.  You see some pretty easy to spot allusions up there.  You see Built to Spill in the upper left corner, the middle is obviously the Velvet Underground, and the top right is…wait, The Long Winters?  I mean, yes, I love the Seattle-based Long Winters as much as anyone, but powerhouses of popular Indiedom they are not.

Yes, BOAT has been bouncing around the fringe of the Seattle (and to a lesser extent, Chicago- TFA represent!) for years.  So it only makes sense that Seattle musicians are going to have an important part to play in their quite excellent fourth album (stay tuned for the track featuring former Harvey Danger lead singer, and Long Winters backup singer, Sean Nelson).  But don’t interpret “fringe” with “divisive.”  BOAT writes catchy Indie pop songs like it’s their job (…which, it kind of is).

This song is all about the hook, which is simple but peppy and effective.  The first two minutes power forward before the song fades, leaving you to think “huh, that song was pretty short…” until the band picks things up to take it into overdrive for the last song.  It’s easily digestible, and sure, easily disposable, and it might not stick with you for the rest of the day, but for those three minutes where you listen, it’s absolutely worth a spot on this top 50 list.

43:  M83- Wait

M83 has been around forever.  Forming in France in 2001, by band went from a duo to “one guy with his brother sometimes helping out” back in 2003.  So while M83 has been one of those bands that’s been fairly established for, Jesus, over ten years, but it wasn’t until Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming came out (which happened to be after Cut Copy sort of borrowed their sound and got popular) that they started really charting everywhere.  Did you know this album was the 15^th top selling record in America for a week?  I didn’t think so.

Anthony Gonzalez, who is M83, moved from France to Los Angeles before recording this album, and he tried to create a fusion between the synthpop and ambience of his previous albums.  “Wait” is absolutely one that falls more into the “ambient” category of things, as the song is nearly six minutes of slowly rising electronica, basically with the lyric “No time” repeated over and over again.  If you love painfully gorgeous songs (which I do) and you like a song that slowly but consistently build to a beautiful crescendo (guilty again) you’ll want to make abomination-against-God babies with this track.  Of course, all of these are exemplified by the final minutes, which see an almost unearthly electronic yelp permeating the music in a haunting yet effective way.

I may have already beat you to the punch.

This song is soft and delicate, gingerly holding your hand as it guides you through six minutes that you’re not even aware of until the song ends and you ask yourself, “where did the time go?”  Such songs are hard to find, but it’s always a breath of fresh air when you do.

42:  Rural Alberta Advantage- Tornado ‘87

The Sophomore Slump is a problem for most bands.  They find some modicum of success with their first album, and they either try too hard to get the follow up out too soon (see also:  The Hangover Part 2) or they try so hard to duplicate the sound that made them popular in the first place that they produce a cheap imitation of their debut work (see also:  The Hangover Part 2).  It’s hard to really nail the Sophomore album, and a well done follow up to a breakout album can either establish a band as legitimate (take a bow, Arcade Fire) or you’ll come off as more of a flash in the pan talent (hey, do you guys remember The Go! Team?).

The Rural Alberta Advantage managed to navigate their sophomore effort relatively unscathed for the effort.  While the highs on Departing aren’t quite as high as those on Homelands, and while there are fewer songs that fully take Nils Edenloff’s drumming (he is very possibly the most technically proficient drummer in the Indie Rock game as of now) and Amy Cole’s delicate harmonies (swoon).  And while “Tornado ‘87” doesn’t feature much more than keyboard and “ooos” from Cole, and just a fairly standard (for him) drum pattern for Edenloff, Paul Banwatt’s lyrics and vocals for the song still make it a song worth consideration in the canon of truly great RRA songs (sure, there are less than 25 songs by them out there, but they’ve still managed to get quite a few memorable ones).

The song itself is upbeat and drives along at a nice pace, while thematically it’s pure Rural Alberta Advantage.  For a band that’s proven to be quite adept at spinning personal and effective yarns about events occurring in Alberta area, this song describes (surprisingly enough) a Tornado that went through Edmonton in 1987.  While the event is a personal event from Banwatt’s childhood, he manages to transcend the basic story and add some universality and depth to it, as the chorus of “I let you go” goes into the closing line of “Black sky comes and I hold you,” creating a real sense of urgency and futility, of life and love against forces out of one’s control.

So yeah, given that this isn’t even the only RRA song to make this list, I think we can safely say that they managed to avoid that whole “Sophomore slump” thing.

41:  Mr. Gnome- Bit of Tongue

When I first listened to Mr. Gnome, I always was under the assumption that A- there were at least four people in the band and B- that it was an all-girl band.  I can explain my reasoning here- as Nicole Barile layers her vocals to create a haunting, ghost-like effect, it’s not too much of a stretch to assume that there are two women singing in the band.  As for the accidental diss on drummer Sam Meister, uh, sorry bro.  I don’t know what to say other than the fact that I’m so used to band gimmicks that I assumed the old Indie rule of “if the band has less than 5 people, and there are at least two women in the band, then the whole band will be women so it can be a girl band.”  So to get this out of the way, no, it’s a two person band, with full guitar, vocal layering, and drums being the primary tools at the band’s disposal.

Hailing from Cleveland,Ohio, Mr. Gnome has already put out three albums, so they’ve had the proper time to get their sound down.  While their first two albums are solid, with a handful of truly great tracks, Madness in Miniature is proably their most cohesive album to date.  “Bit of Tongue” is a fun example of their sound here, starting off very light, feeling like a fairy tale, only to let things really take off in the second half of the song after a brief lull.  The last minute and a half races forward with manic intensity, like going from a calm jog to an endorphin-pumping sprint to close things out.  This song does a good job establishing what you should expect from Madness, and as you’ll see later on in this list, they’re not quite done yet.

And that’s it for this segment of the top 50 songs of 2011.  Look for songs number 40-31 to come out sometime between late February and Early October.