Favorite? Favourite? Fav Our Ite? Our Fav Ite? Out Fevar?

So the year’s just about ended, the holidays have come crashing down on us like corporate logos fallen from skyscrapers, and the critics of the world have begun to assail us with their Year’s Best lists. Those of us who read review sites are being bombarded with Top Ten, Top Fifty, Bottom Ten, Honorable Mentions, Dishonorable Mentions, and all those other self-important categorizations.

I’ve always liked these lists, though, even as I hate them, because they seem like incredibly pretentious ways for people to comment on what they liked, what they didn’t, and share their thoughts with other people. I’ve always found that Top Ten lists are easier to read, less pretentious, when one thinks of them not as “Ten Movies That Have Shown Their Quality” but as “Ten Movies That Thrilled Me This Year.”

So that’s what I’m going to write: a list of stuff that thrilled me this year, just as a way of sharing stuff that made me happy. I can’t claim to know what the best movie of the year is (okay, I might with that) but I do know what my favourite movies, books, songs, albums, and so forth were.

My year-end list is different in that I’m not concerned with whether or not the works of art I mention happen to have come out this year or not. I mean, if the best album you heard all year was Highway 61 Revisited, why bother to say it was something else?

This will be my last post until after the Christmas holiday has passed. I’ll be busy avoiding relatives, wrapping presents, and seeing if I can make a thoroughly unpleasant holiday a bit more bearable. I encourage others to make your own lists in the comments thread, if you’d like, but no one’s under any obligation.

Happy Holidays.

Favourite Movie of the Year: I think you know already… The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King was, far and away, the best movie I saw all year of any type, of any language, in any genre. I actually was not very fond of Tolkien’s books but love the movies and cannot recommend them enough. I know that some people had issues with the movie (particularly with the sentimentality and, most especially, with the pacing) but I’m not going to address those here. I loved the epic quality of the movie and its intimacy and how the two met. I miss the hour of footage that was cut from the theatrical release to meet a studio-mandated running time, but doubt that I’ll notice the extra hour when its restored on DVD later this year any more than I noticed the three-and-one-half hour running time of the theatrical release. Really, this movie was the best forty minutes I had in the cinema all year.

Favourite Movie Moment of the Year: It wasn’t in The Return of the King! Actually, it was in The Two Towers… Well, one of them was. I had two favourite movie moments.

The first was the Last March of the Ents from The Two Towers. When I saw this scene for the first time, on opening night for The Two Towers, I was entirely unmoved and actually thought the Ents looked pretty stupid. Over time, though, I started to like the Ents more and more. They were my least favourite part of the books, but in the extended edition of the movie I fell in love with them. I’ll confess that when I saw the Ents march on Isengard on Trilogy Tuesday (so, basically, when I saw the extended edition of The Two Towers on the big screen) I wept. The combination of the tragedy of the Ents’ existence (basically, they are living out their last days because they have forgotten what the Entwives look like) with the feeling that finally the Earth had risen against industry and the sheer majesty of the scene… Yay.

My other favourite movie moment came from the animé Millennium Actress. There’s a moment where the main character, a woman who is at once an actress, her character, and a symbol for Japanese history (um… just see the movie for that to make sense) flees a situation on horseback. As she rides down the road she begins to ride through a tableau, a frozen painting of an ancient battle done in the style of Japanese woodblock prints (the name of which I have forgotten). The rest of the scene is one long pan as the woman rides, literally, through hundreds of years of Japanese history as well as some of her own past and the roles she played. The technical skill of the scene, the layers of symbolism, and the interaction of music and image (not to mention my emotional investment in the character) made the scene gasp-worthy.

Runnner-Up Movie Moment: Okay, so this one is from The Return of the King…. Let’s just say that Eowyn is my hero.

The Movie I Liked and Others Didn’t: I actually rather liked the twin sequels to The Matrix, even if their titles completely sucked. I should qualify that: I hated The Matrix: Reloaded when I left the theatre on opening night. I thought it was terrible, that it had undermined the characters and themes established in the first movie, and that it was just a wankery exercise in guy film-making. I saw The Matrix: Revolutions anyway, though, and liked it. Seeing the whole story arc in context, from the first movie to the last, helped me to see what was going on and while I don’t think that the trilogy is great, I certainly feel that it is good, does not contradict itself as I had thought, and developed well. It’s too bad that the authors of the movies didn’t bother to figure out how to have Trinity do anything but be Neo’s shadow.

Favourite Book of the Year: Far and away the best book I read, and I read a lot of stuff this year, was Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. Actually, this year was for me the Year of the Comic as I started to really get in to the idea of comics and the potential of comics. This all started, actually, with Scott McCloud’s I Can’t Stop Thinking! online comic series, which I stumbled upon by accident one night, but the deal was quite sealed by Understanding Comics. I’m a sucker for theory, though, so your own milage for this particular book may vary.

Favourite Book that Wasn’t a Graphic Novel: Hmm… I’d have to go with the Kokinshu here. It’s a collection of classic Japanese poetry and contains more moments of quiet, transcendent beauty than the entire collected works of Shakespeare. I haven’t actually had an opportunity to read the entire collection (I’ve had a hard time getting my hands on a solid translation) but what I’ve read qualifies it as a sure-fire favourite for this year.

Book that Just Didn’t Live Up to It’s Title: Actually, this one is a poem: Longfellow’s Evangeline has the single most beautiful title I’ve ever seen, and yet is pretty mediocre so far as poetry goes. Also, the story didn’t thrill me at all.

Favourite New Album of the Year: I tried to get in to OutKast and Missy Elliott and Joy Division and Elliott Smith and the Velvet Underground, but my favourite album was M83’s Dead Cities, Red Seas, and Lost Ghosts while all of those others just didn’t thrill me. Something about the symphonies created from old-style electronic noises just makes me tingle every time I hear them.

Favourite Album Overall: For the second year in a row, I’m torn between the Flaming Lips’ The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. This year I think that The Soft Bulletin came out on top in terms of the number of times I’d listened to it, but I love both equally. I admire the hell out of Wayne Coyne (singer/songwriter for the Lips) for being vulnerable in his music, for upsetting hipster critics by contemplating things like death and life with a heart instead of a sneer, and for working with his bandmates to craft two masterpieces of pop music, one symphonic and one electronic. Here’s looking forward to the next Flaming Lips album.

Favourite Song: There are two in this category.

The first is Red Right Ankle by the Decemberists. I’d not noticed this song the first couple times I listened to Her Majesty, but on the fourth or fifth time through the album it jumped out and grabbed me. This is one of those songs that, like much of the Decemberists’ work, brings home just how terrible and/or lazy most lyricists are. The song’s a love story between an ankle and a leg… It sounds silly, but it’s magic.

The other song that grabs the “favourite” position this year is “Take Time” by the Books. The slow build of this electronic/acoustic track builds to a grand crescendo that moves along and captures the feeling of looking up and realising that a great period of time has clipped by you without your noticing.

This year I discovered I don’t have a thing for… Elizabethan tragedy. This year I took on some of Shakespeare’s tragedies and at the end of every single on of them, after the blood-soaked or poison-soaked ends, I had the same thought: good. They were neither tragic nor enjoyable to me. They were like watching a clockwork guillotine take off the head of a child molestor. I felt compassion and empathy for the characters because they were, after all, human, but I couldn’t bring myself to feel as though any sort of tragedy had taken place.

Since last year I’ve changed my mind about… Bob Dylan, who I like now.

Since last year I haven’t changed my mind about… Minority Report, which only gets stupider, less logical, and more offensive every time I see it.

Art trend that irritated me the most this year… Meta-fiction. Twisty and clever but ultimately empty and meaningless..