What Life was Like 6 Days Ago: 2009 in Review

Slightly late but without lacking any of the pizazz, I'd like now to welcome you, dear readers to Norwegian Morning Wood's Official Review of 2009. Now, admittedly the following lists are going to be 85 - 90% complete bullshit. This will become immediately apparent, but follow along with me anyway.

I will take you know through the greatest parts of our collective pop culture over the last year, going through the best songs, television shows and then movies. I'll admit really knowing next to nothing about modern music beyond Top 40, so do with the following what you will:

Top 3 Songs of 2009:

Consider these either the most popular, crazy songs that should serve zero purpose towards the advancement of our civilization:

#3: "Poker Face" by Man GaGa (#1 on Billboard Hot 100 April 25) - This shit was everywhere, gave GaGa a career and an incredible South Park appearance.
#2: "I Gotta Feeling" by The Black Eyed Peas (#1 on Billboard Hot 100 July 11) - Summer 2009's Champion Song certainly gets an automatic place here.
#1: Clearly "New Divide" by Linkin Park reached an unforeseen peak of artistic creativity for the music industry.

Honourable Mention: I will give kudos to "That's Not my Name" by the Ting Tings for being one of the most legitimately brilliantly catchy pop hits of the summer, one that was completely unavoidable during the week of July 11 - 18.

Top 3 Albums of 2009:

#3: Malice n Wonderland by Snoop Dogg (December 8). Doggfather at his best, heralding an era of rap that relied only on weed, rims and real gangsta shit, less autotone and candy innuendos. Yes, Snoop is not replete of those.
#2: Incredibad by The Lonely Island (February 10). Enough joke songs to become a legit great comedy album, including funding enough SNL skits to aid the production one of the show's greatest seasons ever (34).
#1: Backspacer by Pearl Jam (September 20). Because it was Pearl Jam and it was ok, best of the year.

Top 5 New Shows:

#5: Parks and Recreation (NBC), might as well be an Office spin-off but with enough original characters, ideas and their own gut-busting commentary on shitty local government to make it worth watching.
#4: Sit Down, Shut Up (FOX). I actually enjoyed the irrelevance of this show a lot during its five-week run in Primetime. The animation style, some character treatments and Miracle's boobs were pretty original, if not trite half the time.
#3: Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien (NBC) Despite some recent awkwardness, the first few weeks of this show was the greatest Late Night talk I've ever seen. Period.
#2: Secret Girlfriend (Comedy Central). 'Nuff said.
#1: Community (NBC). Clearly the best show of the lot, this is quickly gaining its footing to what it wants to be in the comedy world. Ranking already among some of the greatest Halloween and Christmas specials of definitely all time, I'd love to see this get picked up for a significant run. See Also.

Top 5 Returning Shows:

#5: Now since cancelled, Life on Mars (ABC) was just getting interesting during the earlier half of this year.
#4: I flatly don't believe this show deserves its three Emmys (and counting), but 30 Rock (NBC) is still one of the greatest shows of our time.
#3: LOST (ABC) somehow got more ridiculous, and probably made more threads than it tied up, but the way they handled time travel without skipping a beat and hardly a paradox was incredibly impressive last spring.
#2: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (F/X) keeps getting better, and its Fifth Season this fall was flat-out incredible. There isn't a funnier new show on television.
#1: Without a question, The Venture Bros (Cartoon Network) is alone at the top of great television shows today, and not simply for these reasons. No other show has able to sustain this much consistent character growth and consistency through four seasons while simultaneously maintaining a facsimile premise and constant nerdy shout outs.

Honourable Mention: How I Met Your Mother keeps getting better and has in its own found a great little niche avoiding normal sitcom conventions in storytelling, tone and narrative while maintaining the classic three-camera / laugh track system. It's how three-camera sitcoms should be these days.

Top 4 (6) Movies that will Influence Everybody:

#4: 500 Days of Summer (July 17): Romantic comedies don't have to be like this.
#3's: The Hangover (June 5) / Paranormal Activity (September 25) / District 9 (August 14): You don't need to pour money into a film to make a good film. Or to make your money back. With all this recession bullshit, studios will start finding more and more directors and films like this to make their money.
#2: AVABAR (December 18): Besides you know, the insane special effects, the way this thing is making money, almost solely on cool word of mouth and the name of its director should effect marketing, promotion, not to mention the simple fact that this is the highest-grossing WHOLLY ORIGINAL film in years.
#1: Taken (January 30): The same principle goes for Paul Blart: Mall Cop, Fast & Furious, and others. You can make money in the first quarter. What the hell?

Finally now, we get to my Personal Top 10 Picks of the Year. Without adieu:

#10: AVABAR. Shit story and characters really couldn't stop this movie from being the most beautiful I've ever seen.
#9: Observe and Report (April 10). I've never seen a film more sharply divide critics and audiences (half my friends nearly walked out, I loved it). Great dark, tortured comedy and Seth showing some range (scruffless).
#8: I Love You, Man (March 20). We need more bromances.
#7: The Great Buck Howard (March 20). Colin Hanks doing his Orange County (2002) schtick to better effect, Emily Blunt beyond gorgeous and a solid story about the perceived and unperceived failure of a great entertainer.
#6: Up in the Air (December 4). Clooney is the best at doing Clooney, here he's the best. A movie about ignoring little but significant problems, personal, social and spiritual and the shit that causes. Awesome.
#5: Funny People (July 31) is the best movie to take seriously the lives of funny people, a lot of personal identification here and Sandler's most un-sandler like Sandler role. That makes sense.
#4: Zombieland (October 2) was so fucking refreshing it should have just been called Cool Pepsi in Baghdad. Unwarranted product placement aside, this did everything from prove that Zombies will always be cooler than Vampires, give new life into the genre and provide one of the funnest theater experiences in years.
#3: A Serious Man (October 2) found an intimate version of the Coens and the year's single greatest trailer. Tough to beat in any year.
#2: Inglourious Basterds (August 21) among others will cement 2009 as return to form for many directors (see also: Sam Raimi). Every moment of Basterds is carefully pulled out and executed, and what could have been a mindless gore-pron flick turned into one of the most meditative thoughts on the appreciation of media violence this universe has ever seen. That and it's extreme historical accuracy make it spectacular.
#1: I already named District 9 one of the best films of the Millennium, looking over this list right now it's tough to even call it the best of the year. Nevertheless, there are no real winners with movies (except for that award show), but if the prize has to go somewhere it might as well go to Neill's freshman effort. Tiny budget, awesome effects, alien acting more real than we had seen before to that point, District 9 should stay with us a long time.

2009 was a pretty nutty year all in all. It was great to see the uncontrolled egos of a few celebrities topple (see tiger and kanye) as well as the resurgence of a few longstanding shows whose once high-quality had been on the decline (The Simpsons and SNL). I'll leave you with one of the most poignant SNL moments in years, the Season 34 Finale. It ultimately shows Will Ferrell's ability to still hold together a cast full of insane talent, a great feeling of community and personal connection to some of these actors and a high point in class, music and depth for the culture. Enjoy for yourself:

First Impressions: AVABAR

AVABAR.

These impressions are a bit late I'm sure, but there's a lot to AVABAR and I'll try to get in as much as I can. This is by every right an absolutely massive film. Its scope is tremendous, the locations, the creatures, the effects, everything is extraordinary. There's a lot that's really nice to look at going on around the world and the one thing Jim Cameron does that I haven't seen in a film in years is truly establish and then cement a world that looks like it could exist, regardless of its fantastic elements. Let us journey deeper, SPOILERS probably abound:

The visuals are by and large AVABAR's greatest strength. It's been said hundreds of times all over the internet and papers by now, but this really is quite a feat. The CGI realism is astounding and the monsters and hovering rock mountains and shit are all very new and exciting. Seeing it in 3-D slightly enhanced the film but I'll tread some deep water here and say it was not essential to the experience. I will say, however, that seeing it on a huge movie theater screen IS essential to the experience, so go give Jim $10 of your money and watch this thing in theaters, it is worth it.

Where the visual experience is stratomospheric, the film falters due to its lackluster story and characters. It feels like something that we've seen a few times before. I've read other articles comparing it to FernGully: The Last Rainforest (1992) and Dances with Wolves (1990), both of which are spot on. It's got a lot of typical characters, from the spunky Indian Princess, the gruff Indian boyfriend, distant Indian father, angry Army Colonel, greedy Corporate dudes. While the characters at times are bland, though, the performances do shine through very well. Sigourney Weaver has a great deal of depth to her empathetic yet demanding scientist as does Joel David Moore as a fellow AVABAR to protagonist Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) who is able to conceal his justified jealousy behind a mask of duty and desire for knowledge. Actually, his character arc I really enjoyed and would have liked to see more of, of course pushing that into an already two and a half hour film is a bit taxing.

I'll also praise Stephen Lang as making Colonel Miles Quaritch probably one of the greatest villains of the decade. He is absolutely a product of a militaristic and patriotic tradition, driven by his duty alone without regard to what life may come in his way. He does elevate his archetype to a bit higher level than what may have been done with someone more typical. His hatred for Pandora is justifiable, but you can tell he really was merely biding his time until he was able to get the go-ahead to wipe out the natives. Jingoistic and soulless, Quaritch is a delight.

Strutting down this path, I took some issue with the ridiculous anti-military message of this movie. It's so unforgivingly pro-green and pro-environment to the point of ludicrosity. Now, I'm a liberal guy who's a big fan of Kyoto and all that shit, but I would have liked to see some more balance between nature and machine. But that wasn't really the point of the film, instead Jim tries to purely distinguish his troops (with a few exceptions), which in the end is fine, if not showing immense bias.

Another strength, though, lies within the empathetic element. Some of the best moments come from little scenes between Worthington and the Blue-Cat Lady, and discovering these little wonders like big ballooney flowers or force-raping monster pterodactyls into doing their bidding. The film's length aids in this regard, it feels like a journey in itself and these intimate moments are sandwiched (and sometimes in the midst of) these huge epic scenes.

The sprituality is very high and ultimately very real. I liked how there were both spiritual and biological explanations for the connectivity of the planet. It's something wholly alien, and the deus ex of the planet coming together as one to repel the foreign invaders seemed less forced after both these spiritual and biological explanations were given at earlier stages in the film. You can't help but leaving the theaters a bit touched by how the Cat-Smurfs live in such harmony with their world while it is impossible now to treat ours the same way.

I have some lasting complaints here: Firstly, the mineral the Corporate Military dudes were seeking is called "Unobtanium." Ugh. I wouldn't have as much of a problem with the name if it hadn't already been used as such in The Core (2003). It just seems like an unoriginal sci-fi standard at a point where Jim could have easily made up a name as equally iconic as the rest of the film. The point of course, is that it doesn't really matter what the name is or what it does, just that it's there and valuable. Yes, this movie will be used for the next fifty years in film schools to teach what MacGuffins are, it's so easily emplified as such. Going back to The Core though, I guess my main problem is that in that wretchedly awful Sci-Fi movie they treated the name "unobtainium" as the stupid punny joke it is, but AVABAR takes it so seriously and it shouldn't. This whole thing should be a minor issue but I'm nitpicky and it still bothers me. A lot.

The last thing I'll mention here is sex. AVABAR is a fucking sexy film. But it's weird inter-species sex that gives my dick all kinds of strange feelings. The intimacy of Blue Cat-Lady and Sam Worthington moments, including their sweet Tree of Voices getting-it-on-jungle-hump fest really push this boundary. I am wary, however, for this a slippery slope here, Jim, I'm not sure you know exactly what you're fucking with. Hey, I don't either. Are the Cat-People even mammals with good sets of junk? They're modest about it at least, I don't know. This ultimately is just one of many unanswered questions about AVABAR.

I guess we'll have to wait until the fabled AVABAR 2: The Reckoning (2011) to find out. Boy howdy.

The Long Halloween: New Year's

It's my pleasure to drag you away from your revelry on this fantastical New Year's Evening to bring you the latest installment on Norwegian Morning Wood's continual look at the greatest Holiday Television Specials EVER. Now, New Year's Eve and New Year's Day I've kind of clumped together for January's entry, as the key moments happen of course, when that clock hits midnight. New Year's wasn't as obvious as some of the other holidays I've covered so far, but cleary, the greatest episode comes from the undersung CBS show, How I Met Your Mother, "The Limo" (S1;E11).

I don't really watch enough of How I Met Your Mother. I can't really ever get past the programmed sets and laugh tracks anymore, which I realise is shamefully pretentious. When I do give the show a chance, though, I'm always rewarded. "Slapsgiving 2: Revenge of the Slap" (S5;E9) should have been a strong contender in the Thanksgiving Competition. It's one of the only television shows, however, to not only have a New Year's special at all, but to have a really good one. Check it out here, courtesy of Megavideo:



Ok, let that sink in for a while. The episode captures a few significant elements of New Year's: 1) It basically sucks. There's so much anticipation and planning that always falls through or gets out of whack and it pretty much always lets you down if you get too psyched. This is true for many holidays. 2) It's the friendships that matter. Contrary to Point #1, to prevent significant suckage, spending the evening with a few lifelong friends is going to be more fun than losing yourself into the chill of the night. And finally, 3) if you're going to the same party Moby is at, there's something wrong. That something may be that this fake Moby has a gun and steals your pump-up mix.

There's a lot of great moments here, Jason Segel screaming about hot dogs, Barney becoming pensive after losing his pump-up mix (see the whole mix here), and Ranjit claiming that he doesn't want Ted to "see him pissed." It's also sweet to notice that the entire episode takes place in a single set, in and around the eponymous limo. There really hasn't been an episode like that since "The Chinese Restaurant" (Seinfeld S2;E11). Pretty impressive. It ends on a very sweet note, capturing the purest of New Year's traditions, a faux-unintimate kiss with a close friend of the opposite sex that creates more complications in a relationship. The memories should just instantly rush back into your head.

The episode hits everything about New Year's perfectly, so go out and enjoy the night, kiss someone you shouldn't, but who cares, it's New Year's and time to go nuts. Here's to 2010!