EW's List of the 50 Best Movies You've Never Seen

Entertainment Weekly published a list of the 50 best movies released in the last 20 years. Check it out here.  I've seen about half of the movies on the list.  It helps that the EW writers seem to like Sam Rockwell almost as much as I do.  Below are my favorites from their list:

Fish Tank (2009).  15-year-old Mia lives in the Essex projects with her single-mom and sister.  Mia has a tough life, her mother pretty much ignores her and the only person who seems to take an interest in her is her mom's boyfriend Connor. Media Corner favorite Michael Fassbender is in it!

George Washington (2000).  If you are only familiar with director David Gordon Green's recent work, including Your Highness and Pineapple Express, this movie will definitely surprise you.  This is Green in his arty, serious, Malickian mode. George Washington is also Paul Schneider's film debut. 

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999).  Jim Jarmusch's film about a professional killer (played by Forest Whitaker) who follows a strict samurai code of ethics. RZA from the Wu-Tang Clan did the score fore the movie and even makes a brief cameo!

Moon (2009).  Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is nearing the end of his time of a solo three-year stint on a lunar mine.  However, he starting to have health problems and strange hallucinations.  After a bad accident, Sam discovers something unnerving about his mission on the moon. 

My Summer of Love (2004). This film shows how the friendship between two girls, working class Mona (Nathalie Press) and wealthy Tasmin (Emily Blunt), evolves over the course of one summer. 

Safe Men (1998).  An outrageous comedy that has one of the best casts ever: Paul Giamatti, Steve Zahn, Sam Rockwell and Mark Ruffalo are all in it!

Happy birthday, Will Ferrell!

Actor Will Ferrell turns 45 today. Ferrell is known for his hilarious and quotable film characters, from Buddy the Elf to anchorman Ron Burgundy to figure skater Chazz Michael Michaels. His latest movie to hit DVD is Casa de mi Padre, out tomorrow. Later this summer Ferrell can be seen in the comedy The Campaign co-starring Zach Galifianakis. Will Ferrell fans are undoubtedly looking forward to the Anchorman 2 movie due to be released in 2013, reuniting the cast from the original 2004 film, which also starred Steve Carell, Paul Rudd, David Koechner, and Christina Applegate.

I always enjoy the way Ferrell plays off his co-stars, and he had great chemistry with his news team in Anchorman. I especially loved the back and forth insult slinging between Ron Burgundy (Ferrell) and Veronica Corningstone (Applegate). Ferrell and John C. Reilly were a great partnership as NASCAR drivers in Talladega Nights, and as rivals who become best friends in Step Brothers:

Brennan: Listen, I know that we started out as foe. But after that courageous act that you showed me against the one they call Derek, maybe someday we could become friends. Friends who ride majestic, translucent steeds, shooting flaming arrows across the bridge of Hemdale.

Dale: I would follow you into the mists of Avalon if that's what you mean.

Ferrell also shared hilarious scenes with Mark Wahlberg in The Other Guys. Wahlberg, as NYC police detective Terry, couldn't stand to be around Ferrell's character Allen Gamble, who he saw as weak and a "fake cop." Terry used a metaphor comparing himself to a lion and Allen to a tuna, and told Allen that he would even go outside the food chain to attack him. Allen came right back at Terry and explained why a tuna could take a lion in the ocean "9 times out of 10":

OK, first off: a lion, swimming in the ocean. Lions don't like water. If you placed it near a river or some sort of fresh water source, that make sense. But you find yourself in the ocean, 20 foot wave, I'm assuming off the coast of South Africa, coming up against a full grown 800 pound tuna with his 20 or 30 friends, you lose that battle, you lose that battle 9 times out of 10. And guess what, you've wandered into our school of tuna and we now have a taste of lion. We've talked to ourselves. We've communicated and said 'You know what, lion tastes good, let's go get some more lion'. We've developed a system to establish a beach-head and aggressively hunt you and your family and we will corner your pride, your children, your offspring.

And that's not even the end of that scene. Another one of my favorite Will Ferrell roles was Buddy in Elf. A "human raised by elves," Buddy was happy all of the time, saw the good in everyone, and loved candy: "We elves try to stick to the four main food groups: candy, candy canes, candy corns, and syrup."

Ferrell is also not afraid to let loose and sing, which he's done in several of his films. Check out a clip of his performance of "Something to Talk About" in Step Brothers:


Happy birthday to the songbird of his generation, Will Ferrell!

I named a few of my favorite Will Ferrell moments. What is your favorite Will Ferrell scene and/or quote?

Johnny Depp: Officially Single

As you are, no doubt, well aware, the fairest leading man in the land is now officially single. The rather optimistic subtext to the resultant press reports seems to be that Johnny Depp is not only single, but also on the market and almost certainly interested in settling down with you specifically. For those readers that are not currently en route to France to make good on that possibility, I invite you to take solace in the many fine performances this actor has given us. The following selected filmography may seem like cold comfort, but enjoying Johnny's company onscreen is probably as close to the real thing as any mere mortal is likely to get. I've taken the liberty of adding brief descriptors for each Johnny Depp role, should you wish to tailor your fantasy.

Cry-Baby (1990): If you like your Johnny young and rebellious, in a juvenile delinquent who is also the star of a musical kind of way.

Edward Scissorhands (1990): If you like your Johnny silent, soulful, and pallid. Warning: This Johnny is sharp and has been known to cause unwanted damage to hair, hedgerows, and water beds.

What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993): If you prefer a small-town Johnny who is sweet, sensitive, and misunderstood. Bonus: Johnny makes a great effort to be a responsible caretaker for his younger brother in this film, so you just know that he'll make a fantastic father once he stops hanging out with morticians and finally breaks free of his hometown.

Ed Wood (1994): A Johnny that is irrepressibly zany, artistically inept, and really, really fond of cashmere.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998): For those who like their Johnny balding, paranoid, chemically altered, and tersely literate.

Sleepy Hollow (1999): An adorably squeamish Johnny, saddled with profound mommy issues.

Chocolat (2000): Seductive accent? Check. Ponytail that only Johnny can get away with? Check. A deferential nature that guarantees he only shows up when you want him to and won't interfere with the important stuff in your life like raising your daughter and managing your small business? Check.

Blow (2001):  Consider this a two-for-one. If you want your Johnny to be the slim embodiment of '70s glamor and excess, the first half of this movie is your ideal. If you have a penchant for a bloated, midlife-crisis Johnny who is depressed and/or incarcerated a lot of the time, the second half of this film has got you covered.

The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise (2003, 2006, 2007): Should you favor an unintelligible, swashbuckling, kohl-eyed rogue who is more concerned with rum than he is with Keira Knightley.

Public Enemies (2009): Bad boy Johnny par excellence. Sure, he robs banks and brandishes a tommy gun, but he'd just as soon be holding you in his arms as you sway across the dance floor to a sultry ballad.

The Tourist (2010): For those of you who want to be Johnny's paramour and believe that the only suitable stand-in for yourself is Angelina Jolie.

Rango (2011): If you happen to prefer a scaly, endearingly cowardly Johnny, this is the one.

Flock of Seagulls Awards: Best Achievements in Hair and Grooming

After two years of doing the Beardys, I'm officially over beards.  I'm sick of talking about them.  I'm sick of seeing them.  I'm even over Ryan Gosling having one (scorpion jacket? okay, beard? no!).  So instead of awarding the bewhiskered this year, we will celebrate the weird and the wonderful world of hair in pop culture this year. 

I will, however, award a solo Beardy to Jason Segel for most disgusting facial hair in honor of his wispy mutton chops in the Five-Year Engagement...ew.  Unfortunately, I couldn't find a picture on the interwebs of Segel's chops, so here's my mock-up.  The real version is much more terrifying:

Now on to the Flock of Seagull's Hair Awards:

Best Hair Performance by a Group: The cast of Parks and Recreation.
Okay, I'm slightly biased.  Donna (played by Retta)  has more or less my exact haircut.  However, the rest of the Parks department has enviable hair too.  Pawnee must have some pretty good stylists!

Best Hair Performance by an actor:  Kit Harrington as Jon Snow from Game of Thrones.
So pretty, I'm jealous of his curls!

Best hair performance by an actress:  Connie Britton as Tami Taylor from Friday Night Lights.  Pretty much every woman in Hollywood has a good head of hair, but if I could only pick one to emulate, it would have to Mrs. Taylor's big, wavy blond coiffure. 

Best Bangs:  Hannah Simone as Cece on New Girl. 

Best Masterpiece Theatre hair performance by an actor:   Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes on Sherlock.
Besides solving crimes, playing violin and generally being a pain in the neck, Sherlock knows his way with a curling iron!

Best Masterpiece Theatre hair performance by an actress:  Laura Carmichael as Lady Edith Crawley on Downton Abbey. 
Sure, she might be the last Crawley sister to marry, but she has the coolest hair.  Spinster power!

Best Red Head: Christina Hendricks as Joan Holloway/ Harris on Mad Men.
Sorry Conan!

Most Red Heads in a single film:  The Help
Including Emma Stone, Jessica Chastain, Bryce Dallas Howard, Sissy Spacek, and Allison Janney.

What we're listening to: Blood Pressures by The Kills

Released just over a year ago, Blood Pressures by The Kills is a pretty rockin' record. As a group and overall sound, the Kills remind me of the Ravonettes and the Black Keys (2 person outfit managing to produce some full and heavy sounds). The Kills are comprised of Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince.

The disc opens with an excellent, almost tribal-like drum beat, on Future Starts Slow. It's basically a sonic foreshadow of the great beats throughout the record. The third track, Heart is a Beating Drum, features accompaniment by, of all things, a ping pong ball. Track two, Satellite, grabs you right away and doesn't let go. It starts out with a machine-sounding intro and a heavy beat (sense a theme here?) with some prominent, syncopated guitar-- almost ska like. The vocals are slightly sultry and the lyrics clever. It has all the elements for an excellent song; it's my favorite from the record. The barest of the tracks is The Last Goodbye, which features a mournful Mosshart singing about lost love, as you can imagine from the title.

I listened to this disc everyday for six weeks (I renewed it)-- and it never got old.

Blood Pressures by The Kills
Find it in the catalog!

My Music Year: 1988

After considerable deliberation, one stopgap exercise, and an awesome assist from Heather, I'm ready to endorse a music year. How did I settle on 1988? Was it my fond recollection of the molded plastic California Raisins that were so bountiful that year? It was not. My actual music-related memories of 1988 are fairly limited: I remember Fine Young Cannibals on the radio in my dad’s car (“She Drives Me Crazy” and  “Good Thing”), and Bobby Brown's "My Prerogative" was getting some serious play from my older sister. Oh, and the treacly "Living Years" by Mike + The Mechanics was an inescapable pop song. Apparently the New Kids on the Block were Hangin' Tough that year, but I don't really recall. (This Billboard compilation offers a fairly concise glimpse of what else people were listening to in '88.)

I was ten years old in 1988, and I was functionally illiterate as far as pop-culture goes. I didn't even have a tape deck. I think my only exposure to rap music had been a surreptitious viewing of the Beastie Boys' video "(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party)". It would be some time before I had the opportunity to understand the Beasties' oeuvre beyond that one song, but I did appreciate their sense of humor. (Yes, even I knew they were lampooning themselves.) I was so remarkably ignorant of popular music that I thought Simon & Garfunkel were a current group. (I'm not sure how to account for that misnomer, but I would guess it had something to do with PBS re-airing the duo's 1980 reunion concert.) What can I say? I lived in my own head-space, as many young people do, and I was content with my paperback copies of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jules Verne.

It wasn't until I was thirteen or fourteen that I began developing musical tastes of my own, and once that happened, 1988 proved to be the wellspring of my musical interests. In an odd way, the music of 1988 would influence me considerably from my middle-school years to the present day. And let me tell you, there are few constants in my life that span those years. (I'm not strictly using "constant" in the Desmond Hume sense of the word, but you are encouraged to interpret it that way.)

Time Capsule Album Obsessions: College

Somehow when I had dreamed of going way to college, I didn't imagine that I'd be escaping to Appleton, WI-a city almost more culturally devoid than the tiny, far-north Chicago suburb that I grew up in. I had more exotic locales like Chicago or New York City in mind. But a scholarship, parental pressure, and a campus that reminded me of Rushmore Academy won out in the end and I went to Lawrence University in Appleton.  Lawrence University is one of the premier colleges for music in the United States, which is great if you like classical music or the opera. However, for rock music you pretty much have to drive to Milwaukee (a little over an hour away) or Madison (about an hour and a half away) to see anyone decent live.  Unsurprisingly, I didn't go to a lot of shows during this period.  However, I did discover a bunch of new bands thanks to being surrounded by a bunch of music geeks.  Below are my five most listened to albums from college (check out the whole list here):

Transatlanticism by Death Cab for Cutie (2003).
Find it in the catalog!
This is one of the few early Death Cab albums that I can still listen to without cringing too much at my former, college-aged self.  I related to these songs immensely then, so listening to them is sort of like looking at pictures of yourself with a bad haircut that you thought was awesome at the time.  That's no diss to Death Cab.  I actually like their recent stuff quite a bit (especially Codes and Keys).  And Chris Walla's guitar work has always been superb. But Ben Gibbard's lyrics seem a little too angst ridden and confessional in hindsight.  Maybe I've just grown to hate earnestness.  In spite of this, Transatlanticism still holds up pretty well for me, possibly because Gibbard's lyrics aren't as intensely personally as on some of Death Cab's other albums from the early aughts.  I'm not a huge fan of "Tiny Vessels" or "Death of an Interior Decorator."  But the rest of the album is pretty solid. 

Favorite Songs: Sound of Settling, Transatlanticism, Passenger Seat

Alligator by the National. 
Find it in the catalog!
The National were a band I had been hearing good things about for a while, but could never track down one of their records.  When  I saw Alligator on the shelves at Borders (in McHenry, of all places), I picked it up and fell in love with it instantly.  The National were different from a lot of the bands I had been listening to at the time.  The music was dark and well-crafted, and singer Matt Berninger had a deep, world-weary voice.  The National is still one of my favorite bands and I've loved both of their subsequent albums, but Alligator still probably has the most songs on it that I love (Boxer is my favorite overall).  Out of the albums that I loved in college, this is definitely the one that I revisit the most often. 

Favorite Songs: All the Wine, Geese of Beverly Road, Daughters of the Soho Riots, Mr. November

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot- Wilco (2002)
Find it in the catalog!
When I was in high school, "country" even of the alt variety, sounded like something that I just couldn't get into.  So it took me a really long time to listen to Wilco.  So long, in fact, that I did not check out Yankee Hotel Foxtrot until a year after it was released, in spite of its universal acclaim.  However, once I finally did get around to checking it out, I pretty much listened to it on repeat for about two years (it is part of my subconscious now). This is still one of my favorite albums of all time.

Favorite Songs:  I'm Trying to Break Your Heart, Ashes of American Flags, Jesus, Etc., Poor Places

Something Else- Kinks
Find it in the catalog!

The Kinks were probably my favorite band in college. Yet I don't remember how I started listening to them, I just remember suddenly being into the Kinks.  But it's pretty safe to blame the movie Blow-up, which made me want to check out anything that British and from the 60s.  The Kinks definitely had a gritter sound than other music from the 60s that I was used to (i.e. The Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel), which made their music sound more modern to me.  Also, Ray Davies is probably one of my favorite songwriters ever.  His lyrics are funny, biting and have great social commentary.  Something Else was my introduction to the Kinks.  While I'd eventually love The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society and Lola Versus Powerman and the Money-go-round more, Something Else remained in heavy rotation until grad school, largely thanks to "Waterloo Sunset."

Favorite Songs:  Waterloo Sunset, Afternoon Tea, and Tin Solider Man

69 Love Songs- Magnetic Fields
Find it in the catalog!

I first got into the Magnetic Fields with the album The Charm of the Highway.  I liked how poppy and yet bleak Stephin Merritt's songs were, as well as how clever some of the lyrics were.  Pretty much all of the Magnetic Fields albums were played in heavy rotation in my dorm room, but 69 Love Songs is probably Merritt's masterpiece.  Also, the three disc set was the perfect length to drive home for breaks.

Favorite songs: I Don't Want to Get Over You, I Don't Believe in the Sun, No One Will Ever Love You,  The Sun Goes Down and The World Goes Dancing, Busby Berkeley Dream, I Can't Touch You Anymore

Happy Birthday Ghostface Killah!

Break out your biggest gold chain necklace and start blasting Supreme Clientele, because it's Dennis Coles aka. Ghostface Killah aka. Ghostdini aka. Ironman aka. Tony Starks aka. my spirit Wu-Tang Clan member's 42nd Birthday!  Check out an album by Wu-Tang Clan or by Ghostface to celebrate!

The Rise and Fall of Wu-Tang: An Infodiscography

An enterprising designer named Jess Bachman has assembled an "infodiscography" of the legendary hip-hop group, Wu-Tang Clan. These visually striking graphics offer an insightful overview of the myriad Wu-affiliated releases, and are particularly useful for exploring the members' solo projects. The three-part series sets out to highlight the rise, fragmentation, and decline of the group. I would argue that the enduring artistic influence of the Wu-Tang Clan precludes anything like a decline, but it's a well executed project that can be especially useful to beginner or intermediate Wu aficionados. If you'd like to know which of these solo projects are available through the library, you can take a look at the list I've compiled in bibliocommons.

The "infodiscography" graphics themselves are quite large. Check out part one after the jump.