Out of Focus

GOODBYE 2004 -- NICE KNOWING YA, BUT I'M LOOKING FORWARD TO THE BIRTH OF YOUR KID TONIGHT

Sorry to disappear like that this week. When I was last here on Monday, I gave you the top 10 (13, really) TV series of the year, and promised a return to discuss a few more that aren't the best-of-the-best, but deserve mention. But it's been a weird week with way too much death in the world, and maybe because of that, not matter how much I try to distract myself with movies, I just haven't really been in the mood for writing.

2004 was a weird and in some ways not-so-great year: Janet Jackson at the Super Bowl caused such an uproar in that first month, but its fallout aside, that ridiculous controversy seems quaint by comparison. Iraq, Bush's reelection, Tsunamis causing the worst natural disaster in (maybe) ever ... the deaths of a lot of important, fantastic and talented people (most recently including Jerry Orbach, laid to rest today, who's importance to the Broadway stage is being slightly overshadowed by his personality on Law & Order) -- it's hard to make sense of it all. I'm not really sad to see 2004 go. A lot of things will be changing for me in the next year (and I'll bring them up as the come along), and hopefully it will all be positive. But isn't that what we all do in the New Year: even more so than making resolutions, we create new hope, for ourselves and those around us.

One thing that wasn't bad about this year was film, though. I think this was the best new television season in a long time, and that goes double for movies. While there has been as much painful-to-watch trash as ever, this has really been an extraordinary year for movies, large and small. Top 10 film lists keep popping up everywhere (plenty of them at via the Village Voice critics poll and indieWIRE has its staff and "insider" polls), and I continue my attempts to catch-up so that within the next week or so I can deliver mine. I'm sure everyone is burned out on top 10 lists, yet you're waiting, breathlessly, unable to contain yourselves for mine. Oh yes, I know it's true.

(What? Sorry. Dozed off there. Such a relatively nice dream.)

Anyway, I hope to be back in full-force and better mood come Monday. Meanwhile, here's hoping that everyone out there has a happy, healthy and, most importantly, fun New Year. Because, you know, it's not like this is just another day on the calendar or anything – this is the day that the calendar ends!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

THE BEST TV OF 2004: IF YOU SAY THERE'S NOTHING GOOD ON, YOU'RE JUST NOT WATCHING THE RIGHT THINGS

I get really annoyed whenever I hear people talk about how there's nothing but crap on television. You change a couple words in that sentence, and it's fine: say, there's a lot of crap on TV, and I've got no problem, but "nothing but"? Sorry, you're just watching the wrong things, and obviously it's my job to set you straight.

I've done my best to watch everything at least a couple times, but with 7,854,326 channels across the cable and satellite spectrum, obviously I can't get to it all. Among the shows that plenty of TV critics seem to love but I just never saw this year are the big three from FX: The Shield and Nip/Tuck (which I have seen, just not this year) as well as its newest cousin, Rescue Me. Tomorrow I'll discuss the shows that deserve mention but didn't make the top 10, as well as the worst and most overrated! But for now, I'm just going to (unfairly) pretend that FX doesn't exist and present you with the definitive list of the top 10 television series of 2004!

(Full comments after the jump or by clicking the title!)

1. Arrested Development
2. Desperate Housewives
3. Deadwood
4. Lost
5. The Wire
6. Curb Your Enthusiasm
7. The Amazing Race
8. The Simpsons
9. Gilmore Girls
10. American Dreams

Knocking on the door: Chappelle's Show, Da Ali G Show, South Park

WEEKEND WRAP-UP: IF ONLY THEATERS WOULD SCHEDULE MORE TO MY LIKING

Friday I mentioned my plans for a big movie marathon. I actually saw about 10 movies in the theater and watched another five at home. I wanted to get to more current releases, but the damn schedules just weren't going my way. Regardless, I noticed an unfortunate common thread among all the current releases: filmmakers creating scenes but not movies. The vast majority of all the current films I saw suffered from a lack of consistency in tone and story. Well, I might try to write more about all of these at a later date, but just so everyone would know I actually am as insane as I sometimes report to be, here's a run-down of my past four days (with some basic yeas and nays – click the title for brief comments):

Thursday 12/23

• Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst: a sad skip-it
• Being Julia: skip-it
• Birth: wanting to be seen, but skip-it
• National Treasure: just above the see-it line

Friday 12/24

• Alexander: Stay away – far, far away. One of the worst of the year.
• Spanglish: Just misses. Skip-it.
• The Woodsman: See-it, but be prepared.
• Closer: See-it, but no huge rush.
• The Stepford Wives (DVD): The original. See-it to see what the remake did wrong!

Saturday 12/25

• The Boondock Saints (DVD): Skip-it, unless you've seen Overnight.
• In the Mood for Love (DVD): See-it/Rent-it.
• Baadasssss! (DVD): See-it, and see the film that inspired it.
• The Human Stain (DVD): See-it, but it's lacking.
• Intolerable Cruelty (cable): See-it, if there's nothing better.

Sunday 12/26

• The Aviator: Very big see-it, but get comfortable.
• Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events: You haven't read the books – see-it! You've read the books – skip-it!

More substance after the jump ….

MISCELLANEOUS MISCELLANY: THE GHOSTS OF CHRISTMAS PRESENT

When all is said and done, Chrismukah will have lasted about 18 days this year. Not too shabby. I started my little movie marathon yesterday and successfully managed to get to four films. In case you've been waiting, don't you fear: I hope to have my own Top 10 movies of 2004 list coming in the next couple weeks. I just still have a bunch to see. (And Karen, no it is not OK to put a film on your list you think will end up there if you haven't seen it. I'm sure I'll be mentioning a film or two I haven't seen and therefore didn't consider, but it can't make "the list.")

Strangely enough, with the end of Chrismukah comes the end of presents, and I still haven't received my Criterion Collection Holiday Gift Set. I can’t believe there's not one measly person out there willing to spend $5K on me. Geesh.

OK, maybe I'm being a wee bit unrealistic. Oh well. Meanwhile, here are a couple notes for the holiday weekend:

• One of my favorite parts of The Week magazine is the "Briefing" section in which the editors play 20 questions (although it's more like 5-10) with one issue. In the most recent "Briefing," The Week tackles Santa Claus. For instance, did you know that St. Nicholas and Kris Kringle are actually completely different people whose identities in folklore have become merged? Or that the celebration of St. Nick was originally Dec. 6 and didn't become merged with Christmas until the late 17th Century? Or that the current image of Santa Claus as a big fat jolly guy in a red and white suit with large beard developed over a long period of time but really became solidified by none other than Coca-Cola in the early 1930s? In fact, the red and white coat is specifically because Coke's colors are red and white! And for most of history before then, he looked quite a bit different? Go read the article; it's fascinating. The weirdest part is that Santa himself has obviously agreed to go along with all these changes over time. He must have, otherwise the alternative is that he's … wait, no … I won't believe you. Santa's real. I know it!

• You want Christmas movies on Christmas? TCM obviously gets into the Christmas spirit starting tonight at 8 PM with Christmas in Connecticut, Meet Me in St. Louis, Holiday Inn, and The Shop Around the Corner. Are you a red-stater all upset about society having taken the "Christ" out of "Christmas"? You'll want to watch TCM's double-bill (starting at 10:30 AM) of Ben-Hur and The Greatest Story Ever Told. And while NBC owns the exclusive rights to It's a Wonderful Life now, TCM decides to bring the non-Christmas Capra to our televisions with a night of classics including Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Meet John Doe,, and It Happened One Night.

• By the way, if you happen to be home tonight and are flipping through the channels, you might run across the new A Christmas Carol: The Musical on NBC starring Kelsey Grammer as Scrooge, which originally premiered earlier this month. If I might make a suggestion, stay as far away from it as you can. This thing was absolutely terrible (yes, I watched it!). A smarter choice tonight might be the great A Christmas Story which TBS starts showing tonight at 8 PM and then continues repeating for the following 24 hours. No, I'm not kidding – 12 showings, with the last one starting at 6 PM tomorrow. That's good timing because tomorrow at 8, NBC takes advantage of their exclusive rights and broadcasts It's a Wonderful Life. I don't quite get the backlash against this film over the past several years. I suppose so many other sappy, schmaltzy imitations have made this picture a little more quaint in its sensibility, but is there any film that treats sentiment and the holidays better? More importantly, just think what the world would be like if there had been no It's a Wonderful Life! (Sorry, didn't mean to get so meta there.)

Here's hoping everyone has a great holiday weekend wherever you are. See you Monday with my Top 10 television series of 2004 and a report on movie movie-filled weekend.

LET THE MARATHON(S) BEGIN

So one of today's top stories in Variety today is about how HBO made over a billion (!) dollars in "pure profit" for big momma Time Warner this year (subscription req'd). I'll bet you're thinking, "Wow! It must be great to work for HBO. That much profit, I'm sure all the employees got some kick-ass bonuses this year!!!"

Well, it is great to work at HBO for many reasons (and sometimes, it's not so great to work there for others ... but that's another story). I've done it for the majority of the past 8 years working in two different departments, although that string is most likely coming to an end within the next two months. No big bonus though for the little worker bees like me, although the company did decide to close for two extra days (today and next Thursday) this holiday season giving everyone two three-day work weeks/four-day weekends. I'm thinking it might have been even nicer to just close all next week, but I guess companies don't make over a billion dollars by making moves like that. Still, a cash bonus might have been nice too.

Anyway, today's day off coupled with my girlfriend's departure to Florida to visit her family for the next 6 days means just one thing: movie marathons. Posting will be light until Monday when I plan to unveil my long-awaited (HA!) top 10 TV shows of the year, which of course is the definitive list, so you won't need to read any others. Between now and then, I plan on trying to catch-up on a lot of stuff I haven't seen, and that means that over the next four days, I plan on seeing somewhere between 10-16 movies.

No, I'm not kidding. Besides, Saturday is Christmas; I'm Jewish; throw in some Chinese food, it's kind of how I'm required to celebrate. The only variable being that this year I may choose to revel in my heebness by holding my own private 11-1/2 hour marathon of all three Lord of the Rings Extended Edition DVDs.

Meanwhile, I'm just rambling. If you want to read something interesting, check-out any number of people listed on the right. I'll be back when I have something more interesting to say. Happy day before Christmas Eve!

CHANUKAH NEVER REALLY ENDS WHEN HEEB IS AROUND TO DO THE GIVING

I can believe I forgot to mention this in my post last week mentioning the Heeb Magazine out on newsstands now (featuring the Beastie Boys -- who give their first "Jew interview" -- on the cover), but tomorrow night is another edition of Heeb Storytelling, again at Joe's Pub.

The last edition of Heeb Storytelling back in August sold out way in advance, and I procrastinated so long, I couldn't get tickets. Tomorrow night's event still has tickets available which you can purchase downtown at Joe's Pub or via Tele-charge. The cover is $15.

I haven't been to one at Joe's Pub, -- their original location was at Lansky Lounge. The evenings I did attend were a lot of fun, and the lineup tomorrow night looks great. Which is of course why I can't go -- friend's birthday party: same time, different locale. But if you've never been, give it a try. I'm sure it will be a blast.

FADE OUT OF THE DARKNESS, BUT KISS ME DEADLY FIRST

Well, this is it. I've been touting it all month, and now it's the final three days of Film Forum's fantastic "Essential Noir" series, and while there are four films being shown (two today and tomorrow and two more on Thursday), there is one which is by far the most important. And no, I'm not talking about Strangers on a Train, a fantastic film in its own right and one of Alfred Hitchcock's best.

Instead, I want to focus my attention on Robert Aldrich's brilliant noir classic, Kiss Me Deadly (Strangers on a Train today and tomorrow) which introduced another iconic character to the film firmament, Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer. (Actually, a really crappy version of Spillane's Hammer book I, the Jury came out two years before, but I'm not counting it.) This isn't the same Hammer you and I remember from the mid-'80s, a somewhat toned down version with Stacy Keach playing the title role. Previous noir main characters were choir boys compared to the Hammer given to us by Aldrich through the guise of actor Ralph Meeker. Dashiell Hammett's Spade and Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe aren't morally ambiguous in the least when put side-by-side with Hammer.

Spillane's Mike Hammer was a true anti-hero, and never more so than in Aldrich's film. His name is his character: hard, unyielding, and ready to nail anything in his way. In Hammer's world, he and his own well-being comes first. He created the stereotype of the tough-guy detective who doesn't pay attention to the grander right and wrong as long as it's right for him. He's American through-and-through, and in 1950s America, that means there's nothing worse than a Red. He's also as misogynistic as they come, treating every woman as poorly as possible, but not caring because he knows another dame is around the corner. He even pimps his own secretary (who, of course loves him and will do anything for him) in order to entrap cheating husbands. In Kiss Me Deadly, he tries to save a woman and then find her killers, but more because he's been made a fool rather than any altruistic feelings.

Kiss Me Deadly is one of the bleakest and in some ways most depressing of all noirs. It is a film of the atomic age, made in an era where the only thing that scared this country more than Communists was the USSR destroying the US with a nuclear bomb. Those fears come to play in Kiss Me Deadly, albeit in somewhat bizarre fashion. The ending (or endings since there are two that are very similar except for a couple shots which actually do change a great deal – which one Film Forum will screen, I'm not sure) will either make you sigh, gasp or become really upset. Whatever the case, Kiss Me Deadly is more than simply "essential" noir. It's noir at its darkest and most dangerous. It's the real world turned upside down – finding the blurred line between good and evil is almost impossible because in this film, everyone is on the wrong side of good, just to varying degrees. But in this noir world – a world reflecting a 1950s America where we masked its fear in idealism and tried to hide its dark side, not so different from what we're seeing now – there are no happy endings because the modern world doesn't provide them.

Kiss Me Deadly is definitely the don't miss highlight of these final three days, but that doesn't mean Thursday's series close is shabby – a twin bill of films by the great Jules Dassin. I've never actually seen Thieves Highway, but Night and the City is one of the more famous noirs, featuring a great performance by Richard Widmark, a hustler and dreamer whose every get-rich-quick scheme simply gets him in trouble. When he tries to get involved in the corrupt Greco-roman wrestling market in London, he takes one step too far. Dassin's Night and the City is a great character study and fantastic film, and if you happened to see the 1992 remake with Robert De Niro and Jessica Lange, you owe it to yourself to see the original (and try to forget the absolutely terrible Irwin Winkler version).

WHY THE O.C. IS SMARTER THAN THE AVERAGE BEAR (AND TEEN SOAP)

Have you ever seen Imitation of Life? It was a 1959 Douglas Sirk melodrama starring Lana Turner, Sandra Dee and Juanita Moore. It's a really great movie, even if some of its dramatic moments seem a bit corny by modern standards. But Sirk was the master of the '50s melodrama, and you may be slightly more familiar with him than you think since the fantastic 2002 Todd Haynes film Far From Heaven was at the very least inspired by and adapted from another Sirk film, All That Heaven Allows. But that's not important right now.

Imitation of Life focused on issues that weren't really discussed in late-'50s America. The story is about an aspiring actress and single mother named Lora (Turner) struggling to get by who meets an even more unlucky black single mother named Annie (Moore) whose daughter is so fair, most people would think she's white. Annie convinces Lora to let her work as a housekeeper and nanny, giving Lora more time to pursue her acting career. The older women become the closest of friends – like sisters – even as Lora finally does get her big break and become successful. The two young daughters also formulate a sibling relationship, but Sarah Jane, Annie's daughter, is always very conscious of her "place," and as she gets older, she becomes more-and-more interested in hiding the truth about her mother and background, choosing instead to ignore the truth and pass for white. At least, that's the set-up and a bit of the plot. Since this is a '50s melodrama, it of course has a very sad, tearjerking ending. It's also a great movie, and if you've never seen it, you should absolutely consider renting it sometime soon. Especially if you're looking for a good cry. (In fact, the DVD includes both Sirk's version and an earlier film -- both were adapted from the same novel -- that's interesting but also very different in the actual story it tells. Especially fascinating is to see how the conversation about race changed -- as well as how it didn't -- over the 25 years from the first film to the second. Sirk's later version is also much grander and more opulent than the earlier film, a characteristic that itself tells a lot about the difference between many early-'30s and late-'50s films.)

What the hell does this have to do with Fox's great teen soap The O.C., you ask? Based on last week's episode, a lot actually.

THE GOTHAMIST INTERVIEW – DEC. DAY 5: JEFF MARX & ROBERT LOPEZ

I admit it: this is the one I've been waiting for. As I've expressed previously on this blog, I am a huge fan of Avenue Q. The only people more excited than I when the show won this past year's big Tony awards were those who actually created and worked on the show. So I'm sure you can understand why I was surprised but ecstatic a few months ago when I received an email from Jeff Marx who, with his partner Robert Lopez, created the show. It seems that Jeff had run across one of my posts from around Tony time, and he wanted to thank me for the support.

It so happened that before getting this email, I had said to Lily, "You know what would be really great? If we could do a Gothamist interview the guys who wrote Avenue Q." So when I replied to Jeff, I figured it couldn't hurt to ask. Amazingly, he accepted with barely any sales pitch from me. Fortunately for Jeff and Bobby, they're in such demand right now that we weren't able to get the interview done for our November interviews. Fortunately for us, they're nice enough to not back out, and today you can read the results.

We asked Jeff and Bobby a lot of questions, and they took the time to answer everything in so much detail -- even though we couldn't use absolutely everything, their interview is still a long, detailed and really interesting read. They talk about how they became writing partners, where the show came from and their Cinderella-story ascent from workshop to Tony winners, all utilizing foul-mouthed puppets and honoring the "patron saint of life sucking," Gary Coleman! The one thing I'm sure of – it sure as hell no longer sucks to be them.

If you live in New York and haven't actually seen Avenue Q, what the hell are you waiting for? There really isn't a better, funnier, more creative show on Broadway, and it will have you humming for days. Go see it … now. It really was better than Cats. I want to see it again and again. (Rinse and repeat!) But since it doesn't play until the evening anyway, take some time right now to read their interview.

WALTZING DE PALMA: A COMMENT ON THE COMMENTS

Wow, my love letter to Brian De Palma seems to have attracted a few interesting comments that I feel elicit some response. Where to begin …

First of all, Ed said that I shouldn't judge De Palma on a moment. Just to be clear, my little story about him snubbing me has no impact on the type of movie I think he'll make. My experience with De Palma did not make me like his earlier films any less nor his more recent films any more. But how can I judge a man treating a fan in a moment? Quite simply. I'm not saying he's generally a bad person, but he's obviously not a generous person, at least to his fans. The easiest thing in the world in that kind of situation is not to make a fan feel like an ass, don't you think? Still, my whole purpose for telling the story was more for simple literary effect. I don't actually believe that this moment had any impact on Mr. De Palma or that he has a vendetta against me. And I actually find it hard to believe that anyone might read my little blog post in such a serious way.