2008 wasn’t exactly television’s best year ever. The writer’s guild strike shut down television for a few months, and the ripples were felt all the way into the fall season, which had little in the way of interesting new fare to offer, and promising 2007 shows lost either their audience (Pushing Daisies), their creative drive (Dirty Sexy Money), or both (...Dirty Sexy Money) in the downtime and never recovered. But a few episodes did manage to stand out in this rocky year. Here are my picks:
30 Rock: “Believe in the Stars”
Oprah’s guest turn was everything I wanted it to be and more. As hilarious as the first twenty minutes are (Tracey in whiteface! Leia Liz!), it’s the final reveal that makes this episode a classic.
Entourage: “The All Out Fall Out”
In a season that was hit or miss creatively and stuffed to the mercury-laden-gills with filler, this episode, which featured Ari throwing down against his rival Adam Davies with hilarious results, stood out.
Fringe: “Same Old Story”
The creepy giant baby medical mystery that showed just how intriguing – and gross – this new show could be.
Gossip Girl: “Woman on the Verge”
I was torn between this episode, “New Haven Can Wait” (for alma mater pride – no, not Yale, Columbia! Which played the part of Yale! Unconvincingly, for anyone remotely familiar with the look of either campus!) and “It’s A Wonderful Lie” (for delicious Chuck/Blair sniping), but I finally settled on this episode from the end of Season 1, for the wonderful, “less judgey Breakfast Club” rare show of camaraderie among the Upper East Siders.
House: “House’s Head”/“Wilson’s Heart”
I haven’t been a fan of other House episodes that made a cast member into a patient (like the Foreman episode from a few seasons ago), but this one works beautifully, and the ending makes me cry every time. Farewell, Cutthroat Bitch, you will be missed.
Lost: “The Constant”
If this episode – featuring Des and his long lost love Penny in a head tripping time travel love story – didn’t make you tear up even a little, you have a heart of stone, my friend.
One Tree Hill: “Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly.”
One Tree Hill, against all odds, has actually gotten better as each season goes on. (Then again, most of Season 1 left it with nowhere to go but up.) This completes the trifecta of television episodes that wrenched my heart out this year as the OTH gang dealt with the senseless shooting death of one of their friends.
The Office: “The Surplus”
This was the first episode in two seasons that reminded me how effing funny this show can be. Pam’s passive-aggressive notes were classic.
Pushing Daisies: “Comfort Food”
I had a hard time narrowing it down to one episode of the dear, delectable, dead-as-a-doornail Daisies, but I settled on this one because it featured an appearance from Beth Grant as Marianne Marie Beetle, reprising her role from Daisies creator Bryan Fuller’s other tragically-cancelled-before-its-time show, Wonderfalls.
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles: "Samson & Delilah"
The second season started with a bang - a lot of them, in fact, as the Connors fled from Cameron gone rogue. Also, John lost his loopy locks, and Shirley Manson made her debut as the freakiest urinal/robot to date.
Weeds: “Lady’s A Charm”
Nancy makes her first, hilarious run down to Mexico. A great ep in an uneven season.
So that’s it! My best and worst movie lists will be delayed until 2009 because I want to see a few more of the recent releases before I finalize my picks (though I doubt anything will knock Cloverfield off the #1 spot), which, by the way, my 2009 movie wish list includes fewer studios packing all the good stuff into the last two weeks of the year. As for my 2009 television wishlist, I’d love for some miracle to save Pushing Daisies. I’d love for 30 Rock, The Office, and Gossip Girl to remain as strong as their past few episodes have been. And I truly hope that Dollhouse isn’t a complete mess.
Have a safe and happy New Year, drink too much, and sleep it off tomorrow!
The Glass Passenger – Jack’s Mannequin
So we come to The Glass Passenger – the first album Jack’s Mannequin has released since then, the first one that reflects his battle with leukemia. And don’t worry, it’s still the classic Jack’s/SoCo sound, but if his earlier work sounded like a Southern California day, then this is a Southern California night. A cooler kind of warm, beaches still pretty but with a foreboding edge, neon replacing sun. From the moody/sexy “What Gets You Off” to the classic SoCal pop-ditties “Suicide Blonde” and “Miss California” to the you’ll-get-through-this anthem “Swim” to the album ending one-two emotional punch of “Orphan” and “Caves” – there’s not a bad track on this album. And Jack’s Mannequin/Something Corporate does something that I personally find amazing: each album improves on the last. Every time I think “This is as good as it gets,” I get proven wonderfully wrong. And I look forward to getting proven wrong again and again, as long as Andrew keeps writing. Especially if he gives me lyrics like these, from “Hammers and Strings (A Lullaby)” – I can think of no better rallying anthem in these troubled times:
You’re Awful, I Love You – Ludo
Raise the Dead - Phantom Planet
Fast Times At Barrington High - The Academy Is...
Honorary Mention: Folie a Deux – Fall Out Boy
As a movie itself, Milk manages what many true stories turned cinema don’t, which is to keep the tension in a narrative we all know the outcome of, whether from history itself or from the movie’s press junket. And as a message movie, well, it’s hard to ignore the parallels between now and thirty years ago, though even if you were inclined to ignore them, director Gus Van Sant expends no small amount of energy hammering that point home.
His performance earlier this year in this summer's 
But the one thing I can’t get past is the woman issue. Alison Pill as Anne Kronenberg is asked to represent her entire gender, and while she certainly does an admirable job, the nearly complete lack of women in the film is absolutely unconscionable. I cannot fully respect a film that’s trying to make a statement about one marginalized minority that completely cuts out another. When Kronenberg, an out-and-proud lesbian, makes her grand entrance into Milk’s circle, the boys boo and hiss at the appearance of a woman, even if it’s a woman who is fighting the same exact fight they are, who as a fellow homosexual is every bit as discriminated against. When she says that rumor has it Milk’s boys hate women, only Harvey makes a transparently weak attempt to refute it.
As with most Baz Luhrmann movies, Australia will only be truly appreciated by a small group of fans, and probably not until long after it has left the theatres. (Which, at least in my area, it already has.) While this three-hour epic isn’t as visually creative as Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! and Romeo + Juliet, the big beating heart under the rough and tumble western façade is pure Baz. The movie feels more like a sprawling miniseries than a movie, which may explain why it did so poorly in the theatres of our ADDled nation, where viewers rarely have the attention span to digest one thoughtful story, let alone three packed into one. But Australia is well worth your time – all three hours of it. It’s as lush a love story as you’ll see in years. Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman’s relationship is more adult than Baz’s other star-crossed lovers, but no less passionate. And for once, you won’t use up an entire box of Kleenex watching a Baz movie. You’ll use up half a box in the middle, sure, but for once Luhrmann leaves his audience with hearts intact, and I think the movie is no worse off for ditching the sucking-air-from-chest impact for a bit of hope. This is easily one of my favorite films of the year.
And then there’s Changeling. I had great hope for this movie, but it fell irrevocably flat in the second half. The first half, driven by Christine (Angelina Jolie)’s search for her son and fight against a male-dominated, corrupt justice system, zips along nicely with good tension and acting. Jolie’s performance is not very layered – she see-saws between a wet-eyed, plaintive “I want my son back” to a snarling, animalistic “I WANT MY SON BACK!” for the duration – but has its effective moments. But the mystery is resolved with half the movie to go, at which point the film completely deflates. I understand when you’re working with a real life story and you want to cover certain events, you can’t always work with a traditional climax, but I feel like someone of Clint Eastwood’s skill and verve could have found a way to keep the tension going through non-linear narrative or something of the like. The ending itself is a bit of a sour note, too, as a text overlay tells you how Christine spent the rest of her life in false-hope limbo. Not exactly uplifting or giving of closure. Still, it’s in the least a historically interesting story, an unflinching look at the difficulty women had – and sometimes still have – navigating a patronizing legal system.
Earlier this year, Richard Roeper and Roger Ebert were booted from their syndicated movie review show 
Then again, that’s not fully true. After all, it is kind of fun to watch Mankiewicz and Lyons snipe at each other like passive-aggressive little bitches for thirty minutes a week. Lyons, who’s about two decades Mankiewicz’s junior, for example, has lately taken to calling his co-reviewer “Mank” and “Manky” on air. Next week, I swear he’s gonna tweak Manky’s nose. It’s amusing to see the vein in Mankiewicz’s forehead throb a little every time Lyons does that. And Lyons has always been ludicrously soft in his reviews, mostly because he clearly has his eye on 
But Lyons is just the worst, and 
*On Good Morning America, a disgusting demonstration of a Baby Alive doll 
Following a bout of 
Do you like books? Reading? The publishing industry? Well then, my friend, the line starts here to throw yourself off a cliff because the world as we know it is coming to an end. So says the gloom and doom "
Listen. Literature exists beyond publishing. Some of the greatest works in our canon found their ways to an audience before the existence of moveable type and literary agents. And while it's sad that John Kennedy Toole didn't get to reap the rewards of his posthumously-published 
I understand the impulse to run through the streets shrieking that the sky is falling, I do. I graduated college in May, and the awesome entry-level media position I thought I'd snag by now has yet to materialize. But I'm not ready to throw in the towel just yet. In August, I went on a job interview for editorial assistant at a pretty awesome publishing company. I ultimately lost the job to someone who'd been working as an assistant editor at another company before she'd been laid off, and obviously someone whose B.A. ink hasn't yet dried can't compete against someone with 3+ years of real world experience. I now feel less bummed about losing out on the job because the company just did a major round of layoffs so chances are I would have been out on my ear by now even if they had picked me anyway. At the interview, the editor asked me whether I was optimistic or pessimistic about the future of the industry. I told him I'm an optimist by nature, but a pragmatist by experience, and I know that the only sectors of the publishing industry that will survive the coming lean times are the ones who are willing to re-think the way they do business and adapt to our changing culture. For many sectors, this means embracing online media. And there may be hope on that front, as the annual 
An update to the story of Catherine Hardwicke 
The Golden Globe nominations are out today. Not a lot of surprises to be had. Most of the nods are for the awards-baiting flicks that haven’t even been released or wide-released yet, making it a little difficult to weigh in. But the Globes do often paint a decent thumbnail of what we can expect from the Oscar noms in January, so for that they’re interesting. Here are the motion picture nominations. I haven’t included the television nominations because they’re just a watered-down version of the 
If 
The prize money is hardly the point for either the movie or Jamal, who only went on the show to attract the attention of his lost love Latika. The real thrust of the story is Jamal’s rough and tumble childhood and unflagging devotion to Latika. Slumdog spins admittedly familiar elements – star-crossed love, a ragtag group of orphans overseen by a menacing Fagin-like figure (Ankur Vikal), brothers at odds – through the kaleidoscope of Mumbai and Indian culture and winds up with something utterly entrancing. As the movie unfolded at the tiny Angelika Theatre in downtown New York City I noticed something amazing. The after-work audience, who started out as restless and chattery as after-work audiences tend to be after being trapped in cubicles for eight hours, quieted down, becoming entirely engrossed in the film, until – to my immense chagrin - I realized I could perfectly hear the squeaking of my Chucks against the floor. (I was engrossed, but that didn’t make me any more able to sit still after spending eight hours at a desk.) It’s hard to think of many flaws to nitpick. The movie makes its only stumble at the very, very end, when clumsy, saccharine dialogue is used where silence would have resounded louder, but this little misstep can be forgiven in light of all the beauty that precedes it. Slumdog is a simple story, beautifully told.
Each week viewers get to watch the wannabe fashionistas stumble through lame challenges ripped off from The Devil Wears Prada, and it would probably be an innocuous enough show in brighter economic times. It’s somewhat reminiscent of the earlier SOAPNet flop, 
The only contestant I was rooting for, Kate, was booted last week. (Before her, I was rooting for the guy who dressed like a character out of A Cockwork Orange, because his faux British accent amused me, as did his ascot.) Kate quickly made enemies of everyone in the house because of her inexperience, large and uncontainable chest, and...nope, that’s just about it. It was a pretty grisly show of girl-on-girl crimes week after week. Kate had limited fashion experience but good instincts, and she seemed genial enough. A little annoying, willing to throw everyone in arm’s reach under a bus and then find another bus to throw that bus under, sure, but compared to the other harpies she was stuck working with, she at least had something resembling manners. It was brutal and uncomfortable to watch DyShaun and Megan snipe after her week after week, so at least her elimination will spare us those shenanigans in these last few episodes. Never have I seen so many inept, ill-mannered morons bleating together in one place. None of the Stylista nimrods deserve a job at Elle – they deserve to have their faces chewed off by the very wolves that raised them. The knowledge that one of these ninnies might take this job, rise through the ranks, and be in a position to oversee me one day is enough to make me curl up into a sobbing, shivering ball and gulp down a bottle of gin. And I don’t even like gin.
Nikki Finke is reporting that 
The clearly-superior-to-CBS-rip-off-The-Mentalist fake psychic / real detective show is back with a Christmas special tonight on USA. I’m sure it will air a few dozen times between now and Christmas so there’s technically no rush to go see it, but all the cool kids are gonna watch it tonight, and you want to be one of the cool kids, don’t you?
I’ll do a full review this weekend, but I went to go see it this afternoon and holy crap is it fantastic. Normally, anything resembling a Western makes me break out into hives, but never fear, this is a big, lush, sweeping romantic epic that’s sure to please any fans of Baz’s other movies (Moulin Rouge!, Romeo + Juliet), as well as anyone with a still-beating heart in their chest.
Thanksgiving’s all about celebrating immigration (and the slaughter of indigenous people...with pie). In that vein (immigration, not slaughter), why not pick up two great books exploring recent immigration experiences, The Brief Life of Oscar Wao by Dominican author Junot Diaz and The Namesake by Indian author Jhumpa Lahiri.
By now, you probably know more about Twilight than you ever wanted to, but in case you’ve been living under a rock for the past two weeks, a recap: Bella, age 17, moves from Arizona to Washington. There she meets Edward, age 17 (give or take a century), and his family of “vegetarian” vampires, who feed only on cuddly woodland animals. These vampires are more in name only than full-out Nosferatu – they don’t sleep in coffins (they don’t sleep at all), garlic doesn’t repel them (but they’re no more inclined to eat it than they are any other human food), and sunlight doesn’t harm them but they have to stick to shadows anyway because their non-human status will be given away by how their skin sparkles in the sunlight (more on that later). Bella and Edward fall in love because Edward is super dreamy and Bella smells inexplicably extra-tasty compared to other humans. Which is all fine and well until they run into a trio of less progressive (Republican) vamps who see Bella as more of a snack than a romantic interest, and so it goes. That book spawned three sequels, with ever-increasingly-complicated mythologies, half-hearted romantic rivalries, and a fanbase of squealing hormone bombs and their daughters. So how does the series fare in its first big screen outing?
The casting is spot-on (although I may be biased as I read the books very recently, long after having seen countless trailers and read an interminable number of articles, so I certainly read it with these actors already in mind). It was well-acted throughout, and the chemistry between Robert Pattinson as Edward and Kristen Stewart as Bella sizzles and carries the movie nearly entirely. Pattinson said in an 
Still, as with the book it’s based on, it’s easy to look past the cheesy or unsettling parts of Twilight and get sucked into the romance and adventure. There’s plenty to satisfy the ardent fans, from near-slavish devotion to preserving purple-yet-beloved lines from the book to little easter eggs like Edward recreating the iconic book cover and a cameo by the author in a diner scene. For everyone else, it’s a solid flick, entertaining and well-paced with a bevy of great actors inhabiting charming roles. It might not be The Second Coming of Potter – this fact is underscored by the trailer for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince that’s attached to Twilight, which took over Potter’s original release date when Potter got pushed back to next summer – but it’s worth parting with $10 to see, even in this economy.
