The Year in Review, Part 2

// posted December 29, 2008 by Lou Schuler

When I started this blog, at the original louschuler.com, I gave an annual summary of my favorite books, movies, and events. (Or, in 2006, my favorite book.)

And from time to time, I would write about movies and books without any reason other than to note a trend I’d spotted. I particularly enjoyed writing this summary of recent biographical films. (Important lessons: If your brother dies when you’re young, you will become addicted to drugs. But if you’re not addicted to alcohol or drugs, no one will make a movie about your life, because you aren’t interesting.)

This year, as usual, I haven’t seen most of the movies that show up on the critics’ top 10 lists. All I’ve seen are what’s available on DVD. And, because of the Olympics and the election, I spent way too much time watching TV, and way too little time reading good books.

That’s the windup. Here’s the pitch.

MOVIES

I’ll start by noting what was, for me, the most disappointing movie of the year: The Dark Knight. I know it’s heretical for a male with a functioning endocrine system to profess anything short of a man crush on TDK, but to tell you the truth, I thought it was a mess. For all its outrageous visuals, the plot doesn’t make sense until characters tell each other information, which I always find frustrating.

I confess I didn’t watch it in an optimal environment, and I confess I don’t want to get in trouble with certain members of my family by explaining why it was hard to focus on the movie in certain places. (I’ll leave it at this: You don’t realize how much noise gift-wrapping creates until you try to watch a movie while someone in the room wraps gifts.)

But even without the noise and other distractions, I knew the plot was taking too many shortcuts. All of a sudden, two major characters are kidnapped, and only one can be saved? In most movies, that would be the plot, but in TDK, it’s just a convenient contrivance to kill off the annoying romantic interest and flip another character from good to evil.

I thought Batman Begins was a terrific comic-book movie (as I noted in my 2005 year-end review), but the makers of TDK seem to have learned the wrong lessons from its success.

Conversely, I loved Iron Man, which reminded me of Batman Begins in the way it shows its hero inventing his toys, as well as his superhero self.

My favorite comedy of the year is Tropic Thunder, and it’s not really close. I don’t think I’ve laughed that hard at a movie in recent memory.

My wife and I watched Tropic Thunder and Forgetting Sarah Marshall more or less back to back — I can’t remember if it was consecutive nights or consecutive weekends, but it was within a short time span. Interestingly, while my wife tolerated the former, she thought the latter was by far the better movie.

I was fine with FSM, but after years of watching every movie made about the Vietnam war, from The Green Berets to Platoon to Hamburger Hill, I was just knocked out by the deft ways Tropic Thunder skewered them all.

It was a good, possibly great, year for kids’ movies. I loved Wall-E, a movie that’s landed on a bunch of critics’ top 10 lists, and liked a long line of others, including (to my complete surprise) Kit Kittredge: An American Girl, Kung Fu Panda, and Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa.

Bigger, Stronger, Faster is my pick for best documentary of the year, but I say that with two caveats: I only saw a handful of documentaries (and haven’t yet seen some of the most highly praised, like Trouble the Water), and it just happened to be about one of my favorite subjects: steroids. (Nate Green interviewed the director, Chris Bell, for Testosterone Muscle.)

Two other documentaries I liked that came out this year: Taxi to the Dark Side and Gonzo: The Life and Times of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.

BOOKS

I wish I could list 10 great books I read this year, but I’d be lying if I did. My standard joke is that I wrote so many books in 2007 and early 2008 that I didn’t actually have time to read many.

But that’s not remotely true. As I said earlier, I spent way too much time watching sports and political coverage on TV, and way too little reading words on paper.

I can think of only one novel I read this year, A Lion Among Men, and that’s a Christmas present than I’m only halfway through. (It’s the third book in Gregory Maguire’s Oz series, which began with Wicked and continued with Son of a Witch.)

The best nonfiction book I picked up this year, Nixonland, is another one that I’m only halfway through. It’s not for lack of interest; I fully intend to finish it. I just need a really long plane flight, or some other time when I have some open bandwidth between the ears. (In my defense, half of it is still 400+ pages.)

One nonfiction book that I managed to finish, thanks to its brevity, is The Bush Tragedy, by Jacob Weisberg. Weisberg doesn’t manage to make the current President Bush likable or sympathetic, but that wasn’t his intention. He wanted to understand the president’s wrongheadedness, his unfailing ability to do the wrong thing at the right moment, to take credit for imaginary successes and assign blame to others for his own failures.

Weisberg tries to explain it all through Bush’s relationships — with his father, with Cheney, with Rove, with God, with his own image of himself as a modern-day Churchill. But it still doesn’t quite explain, to my satisfaction at least, how Bush managed to get through life squandering so many opportunities. He went to Yale and Harvard without really opening his mind. He doubled-down on the mistake of ignoring pre-9/11 intelligence by ignoring pre-Iraq war intelligence questioning the existence of WMD. He ran for re-election in 2004 by promising to keep the country secure, but immediately upon winning announced that he was going to war against Social Security.

I don’t know if Bush will go down in history as the worst of our country’s first 43 presidents, but it’s telling that his priorities resemble those of his chief rival, James Buchanan, who occupied the White House from 1857-1861, and left his successor, Abraham Lincoln, with the Civil War. Buchanan tried to stay neutral on slavery, but marched the army into Utah to take on the Mormons. Similarly, Bush rushed to Washington to save Terri Schiavo, but let New Orleans drown.

Historians will need a long time to sort all this out, and they aren’t helped by the Bush administration’s devotion to secrecy. Whatever records survive might give us more insight into how we got where we are today. But, as Bush likes to remind us, we’ll all be dead by then.

SPORTS

I’m supposed to say that the most remarkable sports achievement of the year was Michael Phelps’ eight gold medals at Beijing.

But for me that one comes in second, behind Tiger Woods’ epic performance in the U.S. Open, when he won on the 19th sudden-death playoff hole. I’ve had gimpy knees off and on for the past 10 years, and I can’t imagine walking 91 holes of golf in five days with the eyes of the world on me. Hell, I suck at golf riding in a cart with three guys watching.

After Woods and Phelps, in no particular order, I was excited by the Devil Rays and Phils in the World Series; by Albert Pujols’ MVP performance with a bad elbow (and who knows how many other injuries he plays through season after season; and Usain Bolt’s amazing Olympic performance in the 100 and 200 meters.

So that’s it for me in 2008. You?

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Tags: Tags: books, entertainment, movies, Politics, sports

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