The Top 10: 
1. Memento
2. Pan’s Labyrinth
3. Requiem for a Dream
4. Oldboy
5. The Royal Tenenbaums
6. No Country for Old Men
7. The Mothman Prophecies
8. Mulholland Drive
9. Donnie Darko (original theatrical version)
10. The Descent (international version)
Christopher Nolan directed five movies released this decade; two of them are nearly perfect, one of them has unparalleled rigor for a superhero movie, and the other one has Heath Ledger’s Joker casting an enormous shadow over (and therefore obscuring) its many flaws. The unnecessary remake of Insomnia was the necessary bridge between Memento and Batman Begins – from independent to studio work – but beyond it Nolan has made nothing but winners. To be clear, I don’t believe Nolan is a great filmmaker, and I’m skeptical he’ll ever equal any of these four movies, even though he hasn’t yet turned 40.
The goal: Make an album from favorite songs released in 2009, with special attention paid to the arc and to the relationships between songs. The rules: one song per performer; artists featured in the previous three years of this project are excluded. The caveats: I listen to a lot of music, and I estimate this list is culled from roughly a thousand songs from the past year. But I don’t hear everything, and my listening is constrained by both taste and work. These are merely favorites.
A throw-away bit of connective tissue struck me in Jim Emerson’s announcement of his and MSN’s movies of the decade: “That’s a pretty mainstream list (hey, it’s for MSN) – and so is mine.” Not really, I thought. Unsurprising? Yes. Dominated by English-language films? Yes. But mainstream? This is, of course, a matter of definition.
The One-Line Review’s Iain Stott has followed up his The 50 Greatest Films project with Beyond the Canon, meant to address complaints that the first survey was too canonical. The top five: Eyes Wide Shut, Mulholland Dr.,The Killing, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Shadow of a Doubt.
Instead of generating yet another list of 20 or 50 or 100 great horror movies for Halloween-viewing consideration, I tried to approach the task a little differently. My original plan was to present many movies in various horror subgenres with different labels (“under the radar,” “fashionable but worthy,” “classic,” and “could do without”), but I realized I was mostly repeating myself. So instead, I offer one movie in each of 10 horror divisions, with some effort to avoid the obvious, everybody’s-seen-them choices. A director can only appear once on the list.
This week saw the debut of “The 50 Greatest Films,” with the One-Line Review’s Iain Stott compiling responses from 187 movie buffs, including me. The list made me wonder: Has the “film canon” become too ossified? I was frankly shocked that the results were so … ordinary. A top 10 of Citizen Kane, Vertigo, 2001, The Godfather, Casablanca, The Third Man, Taxi Driver, Seven Samurai, Psycho, and Dr. Strangelove is perfectly reasonable and respectable, but it’s also merely reasonable and respectable. Given Stott’s admirable democracy (“[I]gnoring thoughts of position or pedigree … ,” he wrote, “professionals and amateurs sit side by side”), I expected a tension between the canonical and the contemporary and the popular. Nope.
My 2008 album begins in Utah and ends in (or near) hell. Whether you think the distance between the starting point and the destination is a lot of territory or not much, we do get to travel pretty far afield. There’s sunny California with the Botticellis, lovely inner-city Baltimore with DoMaJe, Iraq with the estimable Danny Elfman, and someplace sublimely absurd with Flight of the Conchords.
This isn’t a list of the “best” songs of 2007, or even my favorites. It’s a personal 2007 compilation that tries to capture my experience with music over the past 12 months. The songs are meant to play off each other – sometimes in obvious ways, often not – and there’s a purpose to the sequencing.
The results are in. The top five: The Shining (1980), Night of the Living Dead (1968), Halloween (1978), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), AND Psycho (1960).
