So with 2004 drawing to a close, the whole country's got a fever for some listmakin'. According to the fourth edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, excessive list making is a common compulsion associated with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.
Well it's time for many of our favorite indie-music publications and sites to start a-courtin' Helen Hunt*, because the best-of-2004 lists are flying fast. The excellent Stylus has done 2004 albums and singles. As we mentioned before, The Onion A/V Club put their picks up. The NME list and several others are available at the Rocklist site. Stereogum posted the really embarassing entries in Rolling Stone's 2004 top 50 albums list. Jimmy Buffett is represented. I shit you not. Be prepared to throw up in your mouth a little. Finally, Bitchfo... er... Pitchfork has posted their reissues and singles. Albums go up tomorrow. So that leaves Spin, The Village Voice's Pazz & Jop poll, and the major newspapers.
In the spirit of year-end stock-taking, the management would like to take a moment to consider notable moments in the cinema of 2004. Specifically, two films that were so bad, so unnecessary, so... wrong as to boggle the mind. The first offender is the Denzel Washington/Tony Scott wank-fest Man on Fire, a paean to gratuitous violence so deeply cynical and coolly executed as to go virtually unnoticed by critics and social commentators alike. The basic premise, that any level of physical depravity is justified if it's perpetrated in retaliation for the death of Dakota Fanning is bad enough. That the victims of Denzel's increasingly sick and elaborate tortures are all Mexican scum who dared to defile a lily-white innocent takes inspiration from one of the oldest (and most offensive) tropes in American cinema... one that points back to the proud tradition started by D.W. Griffiths's Birth of a Nation. Who woulda thought? A respected black actor and an Englishman just set America's cultural growth back about 20 years. Oh, and the little shit turns out to be alive at the end.
Shitfest number two is a more straightforward, old-fashioned stupid movie. In fact, rather than tell you why it was so bad, I'll just give you the name: Van Helsing.
But don't listen to me. Of my three favorite movies this year, two are about zombies.
*In case you didn't get that Helen Hunt joke
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