Disappointments 2009

Since one of the traditions of Festivus is the "Airing of Grievances", I thought it appropriate to list a few pieces of entertainment that disappointed me greatly in 2009.

Book: EATING THE DINOSAUR by Chuck Klosterman
Dear Chuck: You need to decide what kind of cultural critic you want to be when you grow up. You can be an academic critic, and toss around philosophical, literary, and cultural studies references. Or, you can continue in the manner you've mastered so well over the past ten or so years, weaving metal, sports, trashy pop culture incidents, and your personal story into witty, highly readable essays. Unfortunately, you don't have the writing talent to create a hybrid of both styles, as evidenced by this mess of a collection.

Music: POPULAR SONGS by Yo La Tengo
Kinda... boring. And derivative. Derivative as in echoes of the Beach Boys’ “Sloop John B” in “When It’s Dark”, and classic Motown in the opening of “If It’s True” (although there is some nice organ playing in there as well). The three epics that close the album - “More Stars Than There Are In Heaven” (9:39), “The Fireside” (11:25), and “And The Glitter is Gone” (15:24) - redeem it somewhat, but this may be YLT's weakest release.

Book: RIPPED - HOW THE WIRED GENERATION REVOLUTIONIZED MUSIC by Greg Kot
This book presented nothing new or interesting for anyone who has download music (legally or illegally) in the past ten years. And it sorely lacked an editor or fact checker. I still cannot let this statement pass: “The Internet was conceived as a Utopian ideal, designed by nonprofit researchers in 1990 as an undiscriminating conduit for information.” 1990? (Read my entire review here.)

Movie: RACHEL GETTING MARRIED, directed by Jonathan Demme
Aggressively pretentious. And boring. And by the time it was done, I wanted to strangle every single person involved in its creation.

Movie: TERMINATOR:SALVATION, directed by McG
Please, stop yelling at me. Just stop. Please. My face actually hurt after suffering though this debacle.

Book: THE NEW KINGS OF NONFICTION by Ira Glass (editor)
The selections weren’t unusual, daring, or challenging, and most of the contributors are well-known NY Times bestseller list authors: Bill Buford, David Foster Wallace, Chuck Klosterman, Susan Orlean, Dan Savage, Malcolm Gladwell, and others. Most of the selections are long and tend to drag in some places. It took great effort to get through this volume, and I left a few pieces unread. It may have made for a more interesting collection if Ira Glass had selected a wider range of shorter pieces from more sources, such as websites, blogs, and zines. It was a collection of “kings” indeed - there were only two pieces by women.

Music: DARK WAS THE NIGHT by Various Artists
A 2-CD K-Tel-esque benefit compilation of Pitchfork-y indie darlings including Bon Iver, Arcade Fire, Spoon, The Decemberists, Andrew Bird, Conor Oberst, Beirut, and many other 7.0+ sweethearts. It’s a completely boring collection full of maudlin and midtempo songs that all kind of meld into one massive snoozefest. Sure, this is a compilation benefit for Red Hot, an AIDS research organization, but does that mean it has to be completely dour, overwrought, and unfun? Does serious medical crisis always have to equal “serious” entertainment? Cat Power’s version of “Amazing Grace” is so painfully overwrought it borders on parody. The few redeeming tracks are contributed by Spoon (“Well Alright”) and Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings (a cover of “Inspiration Information”).

Television: BATTLESTAR GALACTICA: THE PLAN
This felt like odds and ends from the last few seasons of BSG reconfigured into a less-than-coherent parallel story. It could have easily been condensed into one stand-along episode during the show's run instead of released as a DVD movie.

Movie: PUSH, directed by Paul McGuigan
An unfortunate muddled mess of a science fiction film, re-treading the “mutants vs. normals” yet again. The unusual Hong Kong setting and the amazingly compelling Dakota Fanning made it somewhat more tolerable.

Movie: KNOWING, directed by Alex Proyas
It took me two days to finish watching the turgid KNOWING. I think my description of it to a friend was much more entertaining than the actual movie:

“Okay, so Nicolas Cage is an astrophysicist. An alcoholic astrophysicist... at M.I.T. And his wife was killed in a tragic accident the year before, and so he’s raising his son alone... And the son is partially deaf. Anyway, the movie starts 50 years earlier when elementary school students draw pictures about the future for a time capsule and this creepy Emily The Strange-type girl fills up a page with numbers. So flash forward to the present, and Nic Cage’s semi-deaf son gets that letter from the time capsule. And then in an drunken stupor Dr. Nic figures out that the numbers identify dates, number of deaths, and locations of of every disaster in the past fifty years. (Of course, Nic screams that... THE! LAST! FIFTY! YEARS!) Blah blah blah... finds the daughter of the creepy girl who wrote the list of numbers… son’s hearing aid starts picking up voices and so does creepy girl’s granddaughter (but without a hearing aid)... heat wave... solar flares... mute visitors following the two kids… attempts at family reconciliation... aliens... chosen ones... ultimate sacrifice... angels (maybe)... destruction (actually, quite surprised that they did allow the earth to be burned)... resurrection and amber waves of grain and nice linen clothing and bunnies... and a thin layer of creepy quasi-Sc13nt0l0gee all over the screen. Maybe it was too deep for me to get, I dunno.”