[T]he five-and-a-half hours of Pierce serve as a plausible, patiently portrait of how class envy and distinction—often unspoken and therefore particularly virulent feelings in American life—can literally drive someone insane over years of difficult social climbing.

With tensions on the rise, whether Washington will move toward another protracted military engagement over petroleum in the Middle East is a fair question. It could be that Obama is a progressive president who’s been mugged by realpolitik. Or it could be that the GOP field, in painting Obama as soft on Iran, is succeeding in pushing the White House to the right on this foreign policy problem. Israel is certainly working hard to exert pressure, particularly via its GOP allies in Congress. The Iranian regime is aware of these pressures, and is happy to stoke them when the US is at its most vulnerable: heading into the heart of a presidential election cycle. Iran, too, is in an election year—and a confrontation with the US could benefit hardline incumbents at a time when many Iranians are otherwise disaffected with the regime’s handling of the economy. America’s Iran-bashing conservatives, then, play to the Tehran regime’s desire to distract its own people from the country’s domestic problems.

i’m watching tom waits’ big time on netflix this new year’s eve, so this fits right in. . .

2011 may well be remembered as the most numbing year for mainstream rock music in history. (For the purposes of this article, that’s more or less rock released on American major labels, regardless of origin, and played on mainstream rock radio stations.) The genre didn’t produce a single great album, and the best of the middling walked blindly in footprints laid out years, even decades, earlier. Plenty of juggernauts — U2 and Bruce Springsteen, among others — took the year off, but the genre’s failings are creative, not commercial. At this point rock is becoming a graveyard of aesthetic innovation and creativity, a lie perpetrated by major labels, radio conglomerates and touring concerns, all of whom need — or feel they need — the continued sustenance of this style of music. The fringes remain interesting, and regenerate constantly, but the center has been left to rot.

Declaring a genre dead is the worst, least imaginative sort of proclamation, so let’s call it zombified: it moves, it takes up space, it looks powerful from afar — with oodles of bands working hard, and some even making money — and garish up close. It lacks nutrients. How else to explain the critical consensus around a band like Foster the People, whose album, “Torches” (StarTime/Columbia), was one of the most lauded rock albums of the year by an emerging band, even though it did little to add to the soul-infused lite-rock of the 1980s.

i wouldn’t know, but moribund is the word that comes to mind.

chances are I’ll finish Carlos (miniseries) by week’s end, which might make the list.

note half of the 10 are docs, and I’ve not included anything I’d seen before.

Others of note:
Take Care of My Cat
Never Let Me Go
The Lookout (which I’d seen before but has gotten better)
Fanny and Alexander (series)
Made in Dagenham
The Panama Deception
Ulzana’s Raid
Station West
A Walk into the Sea
Gregory’s Two Girls
The Sound of Insects
Blue Valentine
Cornered (1945)
A Little Help
Terri
Rise of Planet of the Apes

why is Congress stalling on this issue?

yep, that’s where our attention should be.

nothing else going on here.

i wasn’t much into classical music, especially when i was younger, so only altered states stands out, but for his innovative and over the top m.o., for sure

During this time [1970-72], Russell became not only the most controversial British director but also the first in the history of British film to have three films playing first-run engagements in London simultaneously – The Music Lovers,The Devils and The Boy Friend. But his reputation as a kind of unruly cinematic anarchist, capable of frightening even the horses and doubtless making some of his subjects swivel in their graves, tended to cloud the formidable technique he brought to everything he did. In most of them there were some extraordinary passages. It might have been better if there had been a few more ordinary ones as well.

[guardian obit]

It actually is on just that Freudian/mythological plane that Blue Velvet, like a fairy tale, operates. Even though its deeply conflicted, repressed subconscious material manifests itself–with its anachronistically un-modernized small town and strangely appropriate, evocative popular tunes from a bygone era–through a particularly American pop-cultural idiom, there is some permanent, primal structure here that underlies (and is, according to Lynch’s vision, an integral part of and foundation for) Lumberton’s impossibly sunny skies and happy, healthy families. But the film entirely earns and justifies its ambitious, mythological scope; there is not a moment of pretention in the entire unsettling, submerging experience.

ahem.

and reasonable priced to boot, especially at deep discount through sunday the 20th.