Movies
My Top 5
Pretty big drop off between 4 and 5, but I just didn’t see that many movies this year. I suspect that True Grit will earn a place on this list when I see it.
I don’t get all the love for The Social Network and for Eisenberg‘s performance in it. It was a very good movie, well written and well directed, and it was a very good performance. But at the end of the day it was just entertaining docudrama. I don’t think it says anything transcendent about fame or class or friendship or technology or the modern world. Zuckerberg (the Zuckerberg of the movie, at least) was a dick to his girlfriend and a bigger dick to Saverin. Beyond that he was just a nerd that came up with a website that made him rich. That story stopped being new about 1996. And despite his dickishness, my sympathies were mostly with him, especially when it came to the Winklevosses. I tend to agree with the line “If you had invented Facebook, you’d have invented Facebook!” (No one does rhetorical repetition like Sorkin.)
Also the class struggle stuff seemed completely hollow to me. The Harvard I knew was nothing like that. Yes, there was old money there and probably some people who resented it, but mostly we were too busy being college students to notice. According to Wikipedia, Zuckerberg had a fairly privileged upbringing himself: parents were a dentist and a psychiatrist, Dad got him a private programming tutor, he went to an exclusive prep school. We don’t know all that about movie Zuckerberg, but he does wear an Exeter sweatshirt several times during the film, so at least some of it is there. The point is that all of MZ’s posturing in the film about wanting “a better life” is kind of BS, and I didn’t come away from the film with any certainty that it knew that.
One piece of Harvard life from the film does deserve effusive praise for it verisimilitude: The late night hack session that produced “FaceMash” was just about perfect. All the House names were accurate (though Cabot wasn’t mentioned, holla) and all of the technical jargon used was appropriate and sensible. I also liked the acknowledgment of the nonuniformity of the House web sites and the consequently varied screen scraping techniques Zuckerberg had to use. Plus it just captured the mood of a hack session where you get in the zone and you know you’re not getting up until you have working code.
Worst of the Year
I’m not going to a list or single out a movie as the worst I saw, but both The A-Team and Knight and Day were stunning in their mediocrity.
TV
My Top 5
I want to talk about The Big Bang Theory. It doesn’t seem to aspire to be much more than a farcical but knowing take on geek culture, and in many ways I don’t want it to be more than that. But this season it seems that the writers are taking the most tentative steps into raising the stakes. A little. Even before this season, for all of the jokes that ask us to laugh at the guys, the show has always had a core of sympathy for its characters, and a refreshing willingness to show the pleasures of a life of the mind (and of the comics and the sci-fi and the Xbox). These guys clearly have fun, and that’s some kind of positive portrayal of geeks even if we haven’t advanced into role model territory yet. And Bernadette was a nice addition last season to both soften Howard and to balance the intellectual scales for women on the show. But it is in Amy Farrah Fowler, character/plot point of which I was initially enormously skeptical, that I see the potential for BBT to go to a really interesting place.
I like Sheldon. And I like how uncompromisingly Sheldon is written and acted (Parsons really earned his Emmy). But he’s still a human, and a man, and so far I have been very impressed with the delicacy with which the show has used Amy to explore that. Sex (I’m sorry, coitus) has been on the table, yes, and I imagine that a Shamy bedroom scene is coming in 2011 to a sweeps week near you. And I’m kind of looking forward to that. But in the meantime, Parsons and Bialik are doing a great job showing how much Sheldon and Amy enjoy each other’s company, without sacrificing their established characterizations at all. News flash: I’m a little like Sheldon, and seeing him find companionship while being true to himself pushes my wish fulfillment button pretty hard.
Books
I think the only 2010 release I read this year was Dan Ariely‘s The Upside of Irrationality, a disappointing follow up to Predictably Irrational. Too much self indulgent commentary, not enough research.
Music
Most of my exposure to new (to me) music comes from TV. Glee, of course, is primarily responsible for this, but SNL pitches in sometimes (when it’s not busy sucking) and I even picked up one particularly hungry earworm from Parenthood (Lyle Lovett’s “If I Had a Boat“). This is the year I went gaga for Gaga, discovered “Dog Days Are Over“, and took delight in “Teenage Dream“. On the other hand, I can still only put up with Madonna for about 4 minutes at a time, and I think Brittany Spears is pretty toxic.
I also started using Pandora this year. All in all, it’s a pretty nifty service, though I wish there was some way to tell it that “Like” is not the same as “Play Constantly”. “Seasons of Love” is on such heavy rotation on one of my channels that it has itself become a plausible way to measure a year.
