Best of 2005

We each picked a number of different categories to write on, some the same, some completely different. But here’s stuff from 2005 that Virtual Fools believes is worth getting a mention on the Internet.

Jimmy’s Picks
Best Movie: “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” I’ll be honest: when I look back, it seems like I didn’t watch that many new movies in 2005. But of the ones I did see, I feel like I saw the best. “Hitchhiker’s Guide” gets top honors because it’s fun, it’s hilarious, it managed to breathe new life into a long-running and much-abused franchise etc. Plus, I like the way they went with special effects. It’s nice to see muppets and guys in big rubber suits instead of computer generated aliens; it makes the universe seem more real, because everything you see on the screen is actually there. Honorable mentions: “Wedding Crashers” was funny, and I *heart* Rachel McAdams; not a lot of substance though, and sort of formulaic. “Walk the Line” was really entertaining, very moving, very powerful, but not exactly groundbreaking cinema. “Jarhead” was gutsy, especially in the curent political climate. “Hitchhiker’s Guide” also won out because it’s the only one I’ve rewatched several times.

Best TV: If I understand, to qualify for this category the show has to be NEW in 2005, which rules out “The Office”, “Veronica Mars”, and “Arrested Development.” It’s really between “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” and “The Boondocks,” and I’m going to declare a tie. Consider one a winner for live-action and the other a winner for animation.

Best Book: I read a lot of books in 2005, but only one of them was actually published in 2005. So the winner by default is “What Caused the Civil War,” by Ed Ayers.

Best Album: You see, hear I find myself in the same predicament as before. I had to go on Wikipedia and look up what was actually released last year to figure this out. I’d like to go with Springsteen’s “Devil’s and Dust”; from what I’ve heard of it, it’s pretty good. However, I’d also like to go with “DEVO Live 1980,” and I think I will, ’cause it’s funnier.

Best Game: Easy. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Pri…oh. Yeah. Well, um…Guitar Hero. It’s ridiculously fun, excellent replay value. The first time me and Bobby got a hold of it we played pretty much non-stop for two or three days.

Best Quote: “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” -Kanye West. Hilarious, and probably true.

Best Most Unnecessary Sequel: “We Heart Katamari!”

Best Improvised New Year’s Eve Cocktail: Red wine and Mr. Pibb with a Red Vine straw.

Best Gaming/Pop-culture Website: Penny Ar…uh, Virtual Fools!

Kevin’s Picks
It is hard to whittle down choices from a year as morbidly obese with cultural output as 2005, so this represents an approximate, tentative attempt. The worst part of a “best of” list is the inevitable conclusion that must be reached when making it, that one was unable to see, do, eat, and experience as much as one would like. My own experiences this year were hampered, as always, by lack of funds, school, responsibilities, and other lame shit that will get worse as time marches on.

Without further ado…

Best Television Show: When consistency, hilarity, and recent outbursts of self-reflexivity are taken into account, Arrested Development was a true benchmark in 2005. The recent news of impending cancellation caused a tour-de-force of real-problems-meet-show-problems, which is a hard thing for a show other than Family Guy or The Simpsons to do. What continues to amaze me about the show is the degree to which the actors can continue with their caricatures, at once maintaining quality but at the same time showing their maturation. Michael Cera’s George-Michael is totally pitch perfect, made all the better by the fact that lots of his subplots serve as counterpoints to some of the more fantastic excesses of, say, Tobias or George Senior. Jimmy made a good point to me a few weeks ago, which is that he is glad that the show is bowing out while on top, unlike another Fox show that went from perfection to abjection. Andy reminded me that most successful British shows autodestruct after a few seasons by default (The Office having run its course even sooner). Kudos, Ron Howard!

Best Film: It is inevitable that I break this into two categories, one for mainstream American film (that readers here have probably seen) and one for “other.” Because of the difficulties in film distribution and such, I have considered films that were made and shown elsewhere in 2004, yet did not receive U.S. distribution until this year.
Mainstream: I love hearing clamor over how conservative politicians feel that Hollywood is a bastion for liberals - even if the way these actors and directors vote is democrat, the entertainment that they produce nearly 95% of the time reinforces conservative values. As a matter of course, Hollywood disowns sexuality, celebrates militarization (in the worst ways), and substitutes social importance for gloss. For this reason I was gleeful over George A. Romero actually securing money from Hollywood, relatively free from intervention, to make Land of the Dead. While I find its direct political overtones to be less effective than the political undertones of each of the previous Dead movies, I feel that the clear statements at that it makes are in part aimed at a lethargic audience more used to seeing films that do everything they can to hide their ideology. While the film’s main performance by Simon Baker is fine, Romero seems to be able to best make points when having his films anchored by women or minorities. With that in mind, I was pleasantly surprised by John Leguizamo, an actor I had all but written-off after seeing one of the most deplorable films in recent history, The Pest. Dennis Hopper plays slightly against type as Kaufman, the corrupt patriarch, and Asia Argento again aligns herself with some of the best in horror. Hopefully history will be kinder to Land of the Dead than the box office receipts would let-on.
Other: Werner Herzog has made incredibly entertaining feature films to compliment his incredibly entertaining documentaries. Grizzly Man mixes the idiosyncrasies of a tragic character who seems to be written for one such feature with the morbid reality of him being a real person. Timothy Treadwell was a misguided activist who spent the later summers of his life living among the Grizzly bears of Alaska in an attempt to “protect” them from poachers, the park service and their natural enemies. He filmed his exploits. He was eventually killed by a Grizzly. Armed with that footage and some of his own, Herzog sets out to “reconstruct” (as he did in 1974’s The Great Ecstacy of the Woodcarver Steiner, a character study on a champion skier whose full-time job as a carpenter) the motivation behind a strange man. The central tension, between Treadwell’s belief in the possibility of harmony/equilibrium and Herzog’s notion of a-world-as-chaos turns the film into an exposé on the auto-destruction of the Romantic individual. The movie feels weird to watch, since it leads up to the inevitable last footage of Treadwell, and the man’s anger seeps through to the very end.

Best Game: I’ll break this category into two, one for new game and one for re-issue (since they tend to be what I buy).
New Game: Shadow of the Colossus won my approval recently for being very different from the rest of what the industry has to throw at us. Removed of most of the bulky apparatuses of games, of busy inventory screens and garish text, it is an exercise in abstraction. There is a true sense of breadth as you explore a world that takes hours and hours to cross. The game is open-ended enough to accommodate power-gaming, and let us face it, the game would be nothing more than an abstract space were it not for the battles with the colossi. While most fantasy games scale down battles to manageable levels, Shadow makes them larger-than-life. The fact that you actually have to climb onto the bosses to beat them makes there seem like lots at stake. The variety of strategies possible for completion yield many opportunities. What I like most about Shadow is that is legitimizes a new paradigm for gaming, one where abstraction, ambiguity, and personal interpretation are at least slightly more favored.
Re-issue: The game that hooked me on RPGs back in 4th grade has returned. Final Fantasy IV (then II) looks and feels better than ever. Much like the revamped versions of the first two installments released last year as Final Fantasy: Dawn of Souls, this tasteful update boasts better but still recognizable graphics, expanded story arcs, a huge final dungeon to trump the old final dungeon, and some slight name changes. The story remains the same more or less, and the party swap feature at the end of the game seems pretty awesome. Worth its weight in gold/gil.

Best Album: I mostly listen to jazz, so talking about music with me can seldom get you anywhere. Here is one that deserves to be checked out by more people: Steve Kimock Band’s Eudemonic. Waiting five years to produce a studio record (SKB formed as such in 2000), they made sure that their material and styles were road-tested before committing them to a record. Kimock’s airy guitar stylings melt into group improvisations. For all the territory covered, there are still plenty of themes and hooks to keep up with. SKB has recently started a program whereby all of their live shows can be downloaded at around $12 a pop. Compliment one of their concerts with this record, which will give you a sense of what to expect. The $15 ticket could really open your eyes and ears.

Best DVD: I am a collector in addition to being a scholar and enthusiast, so films released for home consumption are as important as those in the theatres. My favorites center on two very different two disc sets. First, is Acron Media’s Complete Ripping Yarns. In the later 1970s, Terry Jones and Michael Palin (of Monty Python fame) completed 9 total episodes of stories that paid homage to/spoofed Edwardian adventure tales. These “Ripping Yarns” deal with the dying throes of the British Empire, from tales with Britain on the world stage such as “Roger of the Raj” and “Escape from Stalag Luft 112B” to more insular tales such as “Tomkinson’s Schooldays.” For most, Jones is content with directing, while Palin acts as protagonist. Previously, the show was only available in long out-of-print VHS format. In addition to boasting superior image and sound quality, the discs commentaries, deleted material, and photos. The package contains a nice commemorative booklet which gives historical context for the show. Equally impressive, and perhaps more important in the grand scheme of things, is Kino’s Avant-Garde/Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s, a collection of short film work by some of the 20th century’s greatest artists. Though each disc is pack with material, some of the standouts include Orson Welles’s first work, Hearts of Age, films by Man Ray, Marcel DuChamp, and such canonical favorites as Leger’s Ballet Mechanique. The reasonably priced collection belongs on any film lover’s shelf, even if they don’t often watch experimental works. The presentation of the films makes it possible to enjoy a short or two at a time.

Best Book: I hardly read fiction anymore, so my choices will reflect writings on film and other media. This year was busy and I have read many recent works, so my choices can in no way be simplified beyond a rambling list. Paul Ryan’s edited collection Never Apologise: The Collected Writings of Lindsay Anderson provides the perfect compliment to Paul Sutton’s 2004 The Diaries of Lindsay Anderson. At last, fans, scholars, and, others are given insightful views as to Anderson’s approach to filmmaking and commitment in art. Edward Castronova’s Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture on Online games speaks to the very bizarre financial circumstances surrounding MMORPGs, where now real-world money and economies are bleeding into the substance of the games. John C. Tibbett’s Composers in the Movies is of particular interest for me, as it was the first work to detail Ken Russell’s legendary Dance of the Seven Veils. Reprinted book of the year is, without a doubt in my mind, Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art, one of the greatest single volume works of film writing of all time.

Best Mexican Chain Restaurant: Baja Fresh, Chipotle, Moe’s Southwestern, Qdoba, the list goes on. One of the only tangible benefits of living in Northern Virginia is the proliferation of mid-range Mexican restaurants to grace its borders. My favorite of the lot is California Tortilla, a place that combines the hugeness of portions characterized by these chains but adds in the bonus of size choice. For me, their small burrito is of perfect size. Their ingredients are all as fresh as one would expect, and their queso is probably the best to ever grace a tortilla chip.

Best Scandal: The Carnegie Mellon Pornography Scandal, as recounted by VF’s own Andy Jih. Once again, dolts and bozos speak for the “community” but don’t even bother to check their facts or argue an impassioned ideological position. To read about its impact, check the past blog entry.

Andy’s Picks
Best Game: Shadow of the Colossus

A guy kills 16 colossi to revive a dead girl. Sounds pretty simple, right? The premise might be simple, but Shadow of the Colossus’s execution and storyline are far more layered than it first seems. What strikes the player at first glance is how little you are given in terms of motivation and direction. You’re told that you can revive a dead girl by destroying 16 colossi that represent 16 idols. Who is this girl? What are these idols? What does this Dormin, the ominous voice who tells you to destroy these 16 colossi, have to gain from you doing so? The game is left intentionally vague, providing only a small handful of answers at the end of the game and raising a great many more questions as well. As a result, Shadow of the Colossus is perhaps one of the most rewarding gaming experiences I’ve encountered in recent years.

Gameplay is surprisingly smooth, and while at first glance it seems simplistic, there are many nuances that you can unearth. There are only 3 meters or gauges in the entire game: your grip gauge, your health, and the colossus’s health. You begin with 2 weapons: a magical sword that guides you to the colossi and a bow and arrows. The game is fundamentally a puzzle game in the guise of an action-adventure game. You have to figure out how to get to the colossi’s weak points in order to defeat them. Once you get to the magical weakspots, it’s quite simple and easy to stab the colossus by simply pressing a button twice, but getting to these weakspots requires far more ingenuity than pressing a button twice. There are a variety of ways that one can get to these weakspots, and I in fact found myself conversing with other people about how they managed to defeat a colossus differently.

Visually speaking, Shadow of the Colossus is stunning. The terrain and textures are all dynamically rendered, and this forbidden land in which you fight colossi is free for you to roam without any loading times (that is, until you manage to find the colossus you’re supposed to fight). I could go on and on about how I think this is the best game of the past 5 years or even the best Playstation 2 game ever made, but I’ll just let this rest and say that you should do yourself a favor and play this game.

Best Film: Brokeback Mountain

It’s being touted as Ang Lee’s “gay cowboy movie” but any person with half a brain who watches this film knows it’s about much more than simply two cowboys who fall in love. The film is a study of repression. The film looks at how Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) deals with his feelings and his relationship with Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) in 1963 Wyoming. The film follows these two men through their lives as they each get married and have children of their own while still maintaining their secret relationship on the side. It’s obvious what “side” Ang Lee is taking in making this film, but it also functions in much the same ways as many other tragic love stories in which the two lovers, for whatever reasons, are unable to fully realize their relationship.

Best TV Show: “Arrested Development”

Why does Fox continually pull the funniest and most intelligent shows from the air while continuing to air tripe like “Trading Spouses” and “Nanny 911?” Fox cut “Arrested Development’s” 22 episodes down to 13 episodes for its third, and at this point, most likely last season, earlier in October to everyone’s dismay. How did the writers and actors respond to this? Very simply, they became even more brilliantly self-aware and self-parodying. The Bluths, the dysfunctional family at the center of the show, are in financial trouble and decide to pull out all the stops to raise funds for their business. They ask for help from the Home Buyers Organization (HBO), get celebrity guest stars to attend their dinner, and even go so far as to say very blatantly, “Please tell your friends about this show.”

Best Abum: Kanye West - “Late Registration”

When people who don’t even like rap or hip-hop buy Kanye West albums, something of note must be happening. Combine what arguably became the pop anthem of 2005 “Gold Digger” with brilliantly produced tracks like “Touch the Sky” and “Roses” as well as commentary on the diamond trade in South Africa put on top of an old James Bond theme song, and you have one of the most sprawling thematically and focused musically hip-hop albums of all time. Despite the two weak tracks, “We Major” and “Celebration”, and the ubiquitously obnoxious skits found on hip-hop albums, Late Registration features genius touches one after the other by bringing in instruments and sounds rarely found in hip-hop. Crossing over with nearly every genre available and still managing to make it hip-hop just goes to show how brilliant Kanye is as a producer.

Bobby’s Picks
(Sung to Rent’s “Seasons of Love”)
Five hundred twenty-five thousand six-hundred minutes.
Five hundred twenty-five thousand hits on VF.
Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes - how do you measure, measure a year?
In best-ofs! In top tens! On the net, in pretentious lists.
In movies, in albums, TV shows, fastfood places.
Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes - how do you measure, what’s really cool?

We’ll start with the most important:

Best Coupon: “Whaaaa?” you ask? Well, I’ll tell you. In the programs at each UVA football game comes a coupon for Taco Bell: 2 dollars off any combo meal. By itself, this isn’t that impressive. But when you snatch up all the programs around you and gather thirty of them, you’ve got yourself set for a few months.

Best Fast Food: Wendy’s has done it again. Not only is their food delicious to begin with, but they’ve made everything on the value menu $0.99 (instead of like $1.19 for a Jr. Bacon Cheeseburger) and they’ve added a new combo - the 10 piece nugget combo. I used to get 10 nuggets anyway off the value menu, but now they’ve saved me a dime here and there and made it easier to order. Thanks, Wendy’s, for being the best arrrounnnnddd.

Best Local Eatery: This one is only in Charlottesville. Bodos makes my favorite bagels ever. Not only that, but just about everything on the menu is delicious. They’ve got your standard bagels with cream cheese, amazing bagel sandwiches, breakfast bagels that make waking up on Sundays worthwhile, and if you’re in the mood you can get some good soup or a hot cup of BoJoes coffee. The prices are reasonable and it’s a cash only affair (no paper trail… so I think they’re selling smack). They finally opened the location on the Corner this past summer, which has been “coming soon” since 1947 or so, so I eat there when I’m On Grounds and at the one that’s two minutes from my house on the weekend.

Best Album: A strange transition, maybe, but it’s onto the not so important things in life. I’m going to give Best Album to The Gorillaz Demon Days. It had been around four years since they released their first self-titled album produce by Dan “The Automator” Nakamura and I was anxiously awaiting a new release. Produced this time by DJ Danger Mouse, Demon Days is a more mature album than the first. It still keeps the interesting experimental nature of the first album but makes the work a more coherent single piece; a true “album” as it were. And besides, which other CD this year had Dennis Hopper narrating a story about a monkey village? I rest my case.

Best Film: I’m not gonna lie, I rarely see movies in the theaters any more. Nothing out there really interests me. So of the four movies I saw, Batman Begins gets my nod. (Yeah, I changed my answer, wanna fight about it?) I love Michael Keaton and all, but this was actually the first good Batman movie. It had the same dark feel as Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One, in which Batman is a complex character not just some schmo with a few extra dollars and nothing to do. I enjoyed Christian Bale’s performance and loved Gary Oldman’s. Just goes to show that not all comic book movies have to end up like the Fantastic Four.

Game of the Year: Resident Evil 4 gets my vote this year. Besides just being a fantastic game all around, it did three very specific things that earn it top marks. First, it taught us that people don’t control like tanks. The control scheme had always prevented me from getting into the previous games in the series, but finally we saw an intuitive set up that not only worked, but worked really well. Secondly, it showed that Nintendo isn’t just about “kids games.” Sure, there were more mature oriented games on the Cube before this, but Nintendo finally showed that they aren’t afraid of taking on a big game like this. Thirdly, it showed how amazing a game can look on the Cube. No other on the system game gave you the sense that developers have been understating the power of the Cube.
So as not to undercut some of the other platforms out there, other nominees for GOTY included God of War (PS2), Shadow of the Colossus (PS2), Forza Motorsports (Xbox), Nintendogs (DS), and Civilization IV (PC).

Best Book: I will go ahead and give this one to the only book that came out this year that I actually read, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I like the flying… and the magic.

Best Suprise DVD Release: I had been waiting for “Miami Vice” to come out on DVD for ages and ages. My school had a Region 2 copy of the pilot and two episodes that I had rented a few times, but I couldn’t set my computer’s DVD player to Region 2 any more. It had appeared on Spike TV for a little while but that went by the wayside as well. Having given up hope for so long, I randomly decided to check on DVD Talk on February evening to see if it was going to come out. Sure enough, Season 1 was being released the very next day. Needless to say I instantly snatched that one up. Now, Season 2 has been released as well and I received that for Christmas. Too bad the movie will suck…

Coolest Tech Trend: The Rise of Podcasting. Podcasting as been around for more than just this year, but it didn’t take off until now. In fact, Webster’s is adding the word podcast to the dictionary this year. J and I started the Gamers Club Podcast for the UVA Gamers club this year, and it’s a lot of fun to make. It’s extremely easy to get them out there too, even if getting listeners isn’t. I’ve enjoyed podcasts such as GameSpot presents the Hotspot, Diggnation, and This Week in Tech. Now, with my new video iPod, I have started getting vidcasts too. It’s a great way to get interesting free content to keep one’s self occupied.

Website of the Year: Digg.com. Bored and on the Internet? Visit Digg! Digg.com is a “social news website,” in which users can post links for others to read and “digg” if they so choose, thereby increasing its rating and moving it to the front page for others to see. It’s mostly entertainment and tech stuff, but there’s a smattering of science and current events as well. Digg’s user-base has also shot up extremely high this year and they’ve managed to keep it running smoothly. Beware your website’s bandwidth, though, as the “Digg Effect” (like the Slashdot effect) can flood servers with the number of hits directed off of this page. Let’s just pray VF doesn’t get dugg, else we might see a crash on the level of the 1929 stock market.

Best TV Show: This one is so hard to give out, so I’m going to abstain. I mean, with options like “House,” “The Office,” “Arrested Development,” “Entourage,” the return of “Family Guy,” and “Veronica Mars” it’s hard to pick just one. So, instead, I’ll turn it into this category:

Best New TV Show that Not a Lot of People Watched: If you haven’t seen “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia,” you need to open up your torrent client this instant and watch last season’s reruns. There have only been seven episodes thus far, but it shows so much promise. Delightfully crass, “It’s Always Sunny” covers such harmless topics as racism, gun control, abortion, cancer, and underage drinking. Shot in the non-sit-com-style of no laugh track, non studio audience, and handheld-looking (like “Arrested Development” or “The Office” and the other good recent comedies), this show was a nice surprise for a network that used to be crap but now is starting to get better and better. The website says it promises to come back this year and I’m really looking forward to it. Oh, and by the way, your grandpa’s a Nazi.