12 Delights of Christmas
By Lev Grossman, RICHARD CORLISS, Richard Lacayo, Josh Tyrangiel
DVDs
Movies are coming out on disc faster than ever. So it's in with the old and with the new
FILMS THIS YEAR
FRANK MILLER'S SIN CITY RECUT, EXTENDED, UNRATED
Dimension $39.99
We have seen the future, and it's cool. Using green screen, stars like Bruce Willis and Mickey Rourke, and a style so rich and lurid it ought to be illegal, Robert Rodriguez has perfected a system that is to old-fashioned filmmaking what Grand Theft Auto is to your father's Oldsmobile. The movie's pretty good too: a gnarly noir nightmare in four parts, which the unrated DVD presents with added footage and a zillion natty extras.
THE WHITE DIAMOND
Wellspring $24.98
Nobody has dreamed of building a better airship since the Hindenburg exploded in 1937, but aeronautics engineer Graham Dorrington has just that obsession. That makes him an ideal subject for one of director Werner Herzog's luminous studies of the peril that attends man's quest to tame nature--the peril but also the ecstasy. When Dorrington finally gets the airship to fly, it's one of the most spiritually buoyant scenes in recent cinema.
KUNG FU HUSTLE
Sony $28.95
For years, Stephen Chow was famous across Asia as the bad boy of Hong Kong comedy. Who knew he was also a wildly gifted director, until this Buster Keaton--esque martial-arts comedy? In old Shanghai, a gang has scared everyone off the streets--everyone except the harder-than-jade residents of Pig Sty Alley, who help turn a mobster wannabe (Chow) into a Bruce Lee gotta-be. Behind the frantic fun is a directorial eye so acute it makes most Hollywood directors seem myopic.
STAR WARS, EPISODE III: REVENGE OF THE SITH
Fox $29.98
For maximum effect, this should be seen on a gigantic movie screen--the visual scope is that grand, the details that rich. But George Lucas' dark and honorable wrap-up to his space odyssey will look just fine on the 45-in. screen in your home-entertainment center. The DVD has a starship-load of extras to answer every question a viewer could have, except How come Padme dies here, when in the original Star Wars trilogy Princess Leia remembers her mother?
2046
Sony $29.95
Hong Kong's Wong Kar-wai believes two things: love hurts, and its pain can be beautiful to see. In Wong's 2000 romance In the Mood for Love, Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-wai circled each other in slo-mo for an hour and a half, and their almost-touching sparked more erotic heat than a dozen Jenna Jameson epics. 2046 is a kind of sequel, with Leung languidly courting a quartet of beauties: a prostitute (Ziyi Zhang), a vamp (Carina Lau), a gambler (Gong Li) and the elfin girl of his dreams (Faye Wong). That gives the director four times as many chances to let furtive glances and plaintive words collide--which they do, to subtly devastating effect. These days dreamy romances are hard to find, especially of the smoky, smoldering Wong Kar-wai brand. 2046 is the kind of picture an intelligent viewer can walk up to and ask, "Got a light?"
MILLIONS
Fox $27.98
A sack of stolen money falls on 7-year-old Damian, and he thinks it's a gift from heaven. Magical realism comes to the English Midlands, where saints speak to little boys and dead mums offer tips on hair conditioners. Kids and adults will enjoy this sweet-but-not-sticky fairy tale from director Danny Boyle. Blessed by the charisma of its young star, Alex Etel, Millions is found gold, and a little bit of heaven.
CLASSIC BOX SETS
GRETA GARBO: THE SIGNATURE COLLECTION
Warner $99.98
Garbo's centenary this September made lots of people remember that she was once considered a great actress. This set offers irrefutable proof: 10 features packed with enough glamour and bold genius to leave any skeptic awestruck. See her ignite the screen in Ernst Lubitsch's divine comedy Ninotchka or the Dumas melodrama Camille--made in 1939 and still the most astonishing display of star acting the movies ever recorded.
RAY HARRYHAUSEN GIFT SET
Sony $49.95
The magician of stop-motion animation brought fantasy to terrifying life. This pack of three 1950s monster films shows his no-budget brilliance: to save money, he gave the giant octopus in It Came from Beneath the Sea just six arms. He destroyed D.C. in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and created the Ymir, a sulfurous Venusian, in 20 Million Miles to Earth. All his beasties, hand-crafted and photographed one frame at a time, had the power and grandeur of the original Kong.
THE COMPLETE MONTY PYTHON'S FLYING CIRCUS 16-TON MEGASET
A&E $199.95
The Broadway success of the superingratiating Spamalot proves it: in a generation, any humor can go from naughty to nostalgic. This 16-discathon is a refresher course in the Brit sextet's cleansing silliness. All 45 of the original half-hour BBC shows are here, plus the 1982 Live at the Hollywood Bowl (a greatest-hits show, but ruder) and a 1998 reunion of the five surviving members, recollecting the canon: Silly Walks, Dead Parrot, Cheese Shop, Spanish Inquisition, etc. All together, Pythonites: Wink-wink nudge-nudge, say no more.
SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL COLLECTION
Sundance $149.99
Savvy viewers think they can spot a Sundance film a mall away: the liberal viewpoint, the slow pulse, the precise and subdued acting. No question that, in the 25 years since Robert Redford founded his film institute in Utah, the "Sundance film" has become its own genre. This selection of 10 films spawned at the institute or launched at its festival provides a corrective of sorts, showing that the range is wide and imposing. You can still savor the romantic desperation of sex, lies, and videotape, the working-class wit of Clerks, the community of self-aware losers in American Splendor, the devious plot pranks in The Usual Suspects, not to mention the creepy docu-glimpses of family life in Capturing the Friedmans and the creative disarray in American Movie. It makes for the best possible Sundance fest, and you won't get snubbed or snowed on.
REBEL SAMURAI: SIXTIES SWORDPLAY CLASSICS
Criterion $99.95
Samurai movies ... you mean Kurosawa? Yes, but not only. Beyond The Seven Samurai and Yojimbo lay the buried treasures of Japan's richest genre, dug up and handsomely packaged by the smart folks at Criterion. Sharpest of the four here: Masahiro Shinoda's vigorous, cynical Samurai Spy. Weirdest: Kihachi Okamoto's Kill!, a spaghetti Eastern, with clangorous guitars and an astronomical body count, inspired by the Clint Eastwood--Sergio Leone hits that were inspired by Yojimbo. And here we are, back at Kurosawa.
JOHN WAYNE SIGNATURE COLLECTION
Warner $39.98
To many of the Vietnam generation, Wayne embodied the American primitive--grudging and unbudging--that the rest of us were evolving from. That shortchanges him as actor and icon. He contained his own contradictions, as the tough man who led gentle folk to a civilization in which he would never be at home. This package includes his starmaking role, in John Ford's Stagecoach, plus his two flat-out masterpieces: Howard Hawks' limber, majestic Rio Bravo, and Ford's The Searchers, the most potent essay on race, sex and violence Old Hollywood produced. See it and learn, pilgrim. --By Richard Corliss
BOOKS
The must-read list of 2005 is full of disorienting stories and rethought histories
FICTION
SHALIMAR THE CLOWN
Salman Rushdie
398 pages; $25.95
Early on in Shalimar the Clown a diplomat is stabbed to death by his chauffeur. It takes Rushdie the rest of this absorbing novel to explain why. Prowling restlessly backward and forward through the 20th century, he follows the principal players from country to country, through World War II and the struggle between Pakistan and India for control of the Edenic villages of Kashmir. Everywhere he takes us there is both love and war, in strange and terrifying combinations, painted in swaying, swirling, world-eating prose that annihilates the borders between East and West, love and hate, private lives and the history they make. --By Lev Grossman
NEVER LET ME GO
Kazuo Ishiguro
288 pages; $24
You're better off not knowing precisely what is amiss at the exclusive English private school Hailsham. But something is definitely off. The teachers are afraid of the students. The students are afraid of the forest. And nobody wants to put into words just what exactly is going on here. Set in a creepy alterna-England, Never Let Me Go is a horror novel, but it is less about fear than it is about a deep, existential sadness that the world is such a horrifying place. By the time you learn the secret, it's much too late: you've been drawn into this strange amalgam of science fiction and high literature, and it won't let you go. --L.G.
SATURDAY
Ian McEwan
289 pages; $26
McEwan followed his 2002 masterpiece Atonement with this robust meditation on evil, fear and--unusually for him--happiness. His main character is Henry Perowne, a prosperous London neurosurgeon with a loving family and a handsome town house. He's a contented man, or he would be if his well-being weren't edged with the anxieties that trouble most of us after 9/11. On the single day on which this book takes place, with the streets of London jammed by a massive demonstration against the impending Iraq war, he crosses paths with a belligerent stranger. Before this haunting novel makes its intricate peace with the world, they will meet again, the hard way. --By Richard Lacayo
BEASTS OF NO NATION
Uzodinma Iweala
142 pages; $16.95
In this harrowing first novel by Iweala, a 23-year-old recent Harvard grad, a young boy is swept into a pitiless world. In an unnamed West African nation, the boy, called Agu, is seized by a band of rebel soldiers and initiated into their way of life. Soon enough he learns to loot, burn and butcher other humans like a man, all the while struggling not to become a heartbroken monster. He tells his story of unspeakable terror in a halting, not quite comprehending voice that will stay with you for a long time. --R.L.
MAGIC FOR BEGINNERS
Kelly Link
273 pages; $24
The first story in Magic for Beginners concerns an enchanted handbag. Open it one way, and you find a village that was hidden inside it long ago for safekeeping. Open it another way, and you're pulled into a dark land guarded by a dog with no skin. Link's stories are kind of like that handbag. At first blush they look like charming yarns about divorce and TV shows, but they're haunted by dark spirits and dark emotions--loss, anger and despair. They play in a place few writers go, a netherworld between literature and fantasy, Alice Munro and J.K. Rowling, and Link finds truths there that most authors wouldn't dare touch. --L.G.
THE MARCH
E.L. Doctorow
363 pages; $25.95
It's the autumn of 1864, the final months of the Civil War, and General William Tecumseh Sherman is leading 60,000 Union troops in his fearsome march across Georgia and the Carolinas. As Sherman's men humble the Confederate countryside, hundreds of runaway slaves follow along. The author of Ragtime and Billy Bathgate returns to the vexed territory of the past and comes back with a novel in which Sherman's advancing column and the thousands of lives caught up in it become the force of history itself. --R.L.
NONFICTION
1491: NEW REVELATIONS OF THE AMERICAS BEFORE COLUMBUS
Charles C. Mann
480 pages; $30
It's a convenient fiction that American history starts with Columbus. In 1491, Mann tells the story of a lost world of vast, glittering, wealthy cities, sophisticated cultures and an agricultural economy built without the aid of horses or, largely, the wheel--all destroyed by the epidemics initiated by contact with Europe. The Indians whom the Pilgrims encountered were only the last survivors, refugees from a civilization that had already collapsed. --L.G.
THE ASSASSINS' GATE: AMERICA IN IRAQ
George Packer
467 pages; $26
This is a very discouraging account of the war in Iraq so far, from its flawed inception to its chaotic daily execution. Packer, a staff writer for the New Yorker, begins as an "ambivalently prowar liberal," siding with Iraqi-exile friends in their hatred of Saddam but skeptical of the Bush Administration's neoconservatives who thought that Iraq could be transformed easily into a pro-American democracy. In Packer's deeply persuasive telling, their false assumptions and inadequate planning ensure that the war will proceed down a path into deepening chaos, and it does. --R.L.
POSTWAR: A HISTORY OF EUROPE SINCE 1945
Tony Judt
878 pages; $39.95
A massive, kaleidoscopic and thoroughly readable survey of the Continent's difficult passage from the devastation of World War II to the still uncompleted project of the European Community. Judt briskly reviews every part of this complex story, from the Marshall Plan, the cold war and the upheavals of 1968 to the aftershocks from the fall of the Berlin Wall, offering useful and sometimes surprising judgments on all of them. His book becomes the definitive account of Europe's rise from the ashes and its takeoff into an uncertain future. --R.L.
THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING
Joan Didion
227 pages; $23.95
Didion and her husband had been married for almost 40 years on the night when he collapsed at the dinner table and died of a heart attack. The loss devastated Didion so completely that she entered a state of temporary insanity: she literally believed that she could bring her husband back. This memoir is the story of her slow acceptance of what had happened, her journey from madness to the duller, deeper pain of mourning. To watch one of our most acute, acerbic social observers turn her attention to the collapse of her own psyche is to witness an act of consummate personal and artistic bravery. --L.G.
AMERICAN PROMETHEUS: THE TRIUMPH AND TRAGEDY OF J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER
Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin
721 pages; $35
A painstaking account of the making and breaking of a complex man. Oppenheimer directed the successful U.S. effort to develop an atomic weapon during World War II. But after the war his opposition to the even bigger hydrogen bomb helped set in motion events that led to his being stripped of his government security clearance. The authors show how the naive Oppenheimer was complicit in his destruction, but they never lose sight of the ugliness and injustice of the process. --R.L.
1776
David McCullough
386 pages; $32
The troops were filthy and low on gunpowder, uniforms and artillery, but they were awash in rum--an average of a bottle per day per man. Their tall, charismatic commander, George Washington, had never led an army in battle. McCullough recounts the events of 1776 as if they had never been told before, with a freshness that brings home the drama and the sheer improbability of the events on which the U.S. is founded. --L.G.
MUSIC
The recording biz had its woes this year, but a lack of good music was not one of them
SPOON
Gimme Fiction; $15.98
For almost a decade Spoon has been indie rock's reigning "if there were any justice ..." band, as in, "If there were any justice, Spoon would wake up with Nickelback's money." A lack of good Karma hasn't stopped lead singer-songwriter Britt Daniel from soldiering on and producing yet another album of tense, cliche-avoiding, minimalist rock songs, capped by I Summon You, which has to be the most perfect 3 min. 55 sec. of music this year.
Best Tracks: Sister Jack, I Turn My Camera On, I Summon You
BRIGHT EYES
I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning; $12.98
At 25, Conor Oberst, a.k.a. Bright Eyes, is expert at turning his disenchantment into fuel. He's not wild about himself or his country at the moment. But instead of sounding desperate or polemical, the best of these quiet, well- observed songs do something far tougher--create a mood. Lua, about seduction and loneliness, feels like a shameful walk home on a winter morning, while Landlocked Blues starts as a breakup song and meanders its way into an antiwar ballad. The link, at least by Oberst's reckoning, is futility, and whether you agree with his politics or not, his emotions are believable.
Best Tracks: Lua, Landlocked Blues, Road to Joy
NEIL YOUNG
Prairie Wind; $18.98
These spare, mostly acoustic songs about death, loss and life's rearview mirror make for a draining listen. But they're not a drag because Young knows exactly how an album this thematically grim--he wrote and recorded it between being diagnosed with and treated for a brain aneurysm--needs to sound. At his most frightened (Falling Off the Face of the Earth), there's an easy melody and notes of assurance from the impeccably played instruments. And when he contemplates all his choices (The Painter) and wonders if he has got lost, the voices that rise behind in the chorus are so unmistakably warm that you feel certain they will guide him back.
Best Tracks: The Painter, When God Made Me
LEE ANN WOMACK
There's More Where That Came From; $13.98
Unlike most country singers, Womack knows that ballad singing isn't an Olympian test of lung capacity. She hush-sings her way through Twenty Years and Two Husbands Ago and a delicate cover of Sonny Throckmorton's Waiting for the Sun to Shine, providing a much needed reminder that country, more than any other musical genre, still has the potential to offer instant intimacy.
Best Tracks: Twenty Years and Two Husbands Ago, Happiness, Waiting for the Sun to Shine
FRANZ FERDINAND
You Could Have It So Much Better; $13.49
These disco-loving Scottish art-school punks spend much of their second album boasting of their badness. Singer Alex Kapranos is blessed with Mick Jaggeresque persuasiveness--Evil and a Heathen and I'm Your Villain would be musts on any syllabus of "Songwriting for Cads"--but he's also growing in ways that suggest depth. The fast songs have more than one musical thought (some even scoot past the 3-min. mark), while the slow ones have the courage to be pretty (Fade Together) and vulnerable (Eleanor Put Your Boots On).
Best Tracks: This Boy, Do You Want To, Eleanor Put Your Boots On
RAY CHARLES
Pure Genius: The Complete Atlantic Recordings (1952-1959); $149.98
Are eight albums of early Ray Charles a little much? Damn straight. The makers of this boxed set exercise no restraint, but they do include some fascinating stuff. Skip the well-worn hits, and go right to the song sketches to hear how Charles felt his way toward redefining American pop music. And if you somehow make it to disc eight, the reward is a recording of the legendary moment when record executive Ahmet Ertegun sang a bizarre-- but not at all bad-- version of What'd I Say to convince Charles of the song's potential.
Best Tracks: Are you kidding? It's eight discs! Of Ray Charles!
KELLY CLARKSON
Breakaway; $13.49
This unpretentious album solves the mystery of how Kelly Clarkson unpinned herself from the scarlet A (for American Idol winner) that nearly doomed her career before it started. She works with strong producers, picks crisp, up-tempo songs that mine a slender emotional vein (to summarize: Why did you leave me, you jerk?) and sings them with an understatement alien to most of her peers. It's an (almost) guiltless pleasure.
Best Tracks: Because of You, Since U Been Gone
AMADOU & MARIAM
Dimanche A Bamako; $18.98
World music doesn't have a reputation for fun, and Amadou & Mariam, the self-proclaimed Blind Couple of Mali, might not seem the likeliest candidates to rock the boat. But a) they wear the coolest shades in the history of sightlessness, and b) they have partnered with Spanish-French producer Manu Chao, whose interest in multiculturalism stops at every country's best pop hooks. Listening to the fusion of Amadou & Mariam's polyrhythmic blues with Chao's exuberant rip-offs is like watching another nation's most hysterically bad TV; you feel as if you're learning something, even though you're enjoying yourself.
Best Tracks: Senegal Fast Food, Taxi Bamako
SLEATER-KINNEY
The Woods; $14.98
After six admirable but unadorable records, this trio of very earnest, very intense women from the Northwest decided to let loose their inner Led Zeppelin. The guitar playing is heavy, dexterous and hook laden, but the polish of the melodies never obscures their calling card--the raw, intermingled wails of Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein.
Best Tracks: The Fox, Jumpers, Rollercoaster
M.I.A.
Arular; $13.98
The geopolitical importance of this Sri Lankan--born, London-raised rapper has been heavily overstated by people who would rather she were a symbol than a star. Her manic energy and supremely confident delivery on such songs as Galang (now the sound track to a Honda commercial) matches her ear for those small production details that turn songs into bustling streets in foreign capitals. That's the combination, instead of her blend of ethnicities, that makes this the most compelling debut of the year.
Best Tracks: Galang, Bucky Done Gun
KANYE WEST
Late Registration; $13.98
West's second great album in 18 months has nothing so shocking as his Katrina-inspired "George Bush doesn't care about black people" moment during a TV fund raiser for hurricane victims or so original as the self-love/self-hate tightrope walk of his debut The College Dropout. But if you think you're invulnerable to an atmospheric ballad with Maroon 5's chirpy Adam Levine (Heard 'Em Say) or a song called Roses about a sick grandma, you will be shocked at the stealthy power of West's storytelling. As for the music, one listen to Gone, built around an Otis Redding sample and some ecstatic string arrangements, and you might be persuaded that West is as good as he thinks he is.
Best Tracks: Heard 'Em Say, Drive Slow, Gone
GORILLAZ
Demon Days; $13.49
Very few good albums make as bad a first impression as Demon Days. The cartoon characters on the front cover, the irritatingly meaningless track names (Fire Coming Out of the Monkey's Head) and the menacing prefatory oboes (oboes!) make it seem like a concept album about global warming for kids. Since the lyrics remain a bafflement, it might well be. But give the songs a fraction of the attention that went into making them, and you will begin to catch bits of good stuff from rock, rap, dance and dub. Then, magically, it all comes together in your head and forms something like a unified theory of modern music.
Best Tracks: O Green World, Dirty Harry, Feel Good Inc. --By Josh Tyrangiel