My Best of 2006 list

Dear family:

For what it's worth . . .
As you know, my friends and I all trade our "best of" lists each year, and here's mine. Lots of this probably won't be interesting, but you can skim over it to see which movies, books, etc. I enjoyed most last year.

Best Travel: Cappadocia in the heartland of Turkey: sleeping in cave dwellings, hot air ballooning at dawn, and particularly, hiking with a local Turkish guide, Mehmet, into a 10th-century Christian church hidden from persecution by being carved into the walls of the canyon. And a close runner-up: the Four Seasons Istanbul.

Worst Travel: Flying Olympic Airways' prop-plane service from Athens to Santorini, and, during a nosedive, telling Julia good-bye.

Best Acquisition: A Christmas gift from my Dad--an alarm clock that projects the time onto the ceiling, which I love much more than any adult should.

Overall Highlight of 2006: Kathy Griffin, Live at the Nokia Theatre. I'm absolutely the target audience for this sort of stand-up comedy, which consisted of nearly 2 hours of scathing commentary on celebrity culture and the Bush administration.

Best Movies: While in 2005 my favorite films were movies that explored Big Issues like race (Crash); or class/gender (Pride and Prejudice), in 2006 I had a very different experience: the movies I found most satisfying were not the movies that aspired to win awards (Babel; The Last King of Scotland; Little Children), but were instead movies aiming simply to be popular entertainment . . . and that so successfully revived and revised the conventions of popular entertainment--through great writing and acting--that they felt completely fresh and new and, yes, deserving of popularity. So of my top 5 movies of the year, only Notes on a Scandal has the sort of pedigree I'd think would merit a place on a Top 10 list, while the other four movies are solidly rooted in, while also transforming, the formulas of popular entertainment: the road trip move (Little Miss Sunshine); the romantic comedy (The Holiday); the innocent-in-the-big-city (The Devil Wears Prada); and of course, the Bond movie (Casino Royale).

Best Movie of the Year: Casino Royale

Top 10:
1. Casino Royale
2. Notes on a Scandal
3. The Holiday
4. The Devil Wears Prada
5. Little Miss Sunshine
6. The Queen
7. The Pursuit of Happyness
8. An Inconvenient Truth
9. Children of Men
10. Blood Diamond

Best Performances:
Actress: Judi Dench, Notes on a Scandal
Supporting Actress: Adriana Barraza, Babel
Supporting Actor: Jackie Earle Haley, Little Children

Most overrated:
Jennifer Hudson's performance in Dreamgirls. If good acting is simply SINGING REALLY LOUD, she deserves an Oscar. But it isn't and she doesn't. Moreover, she was so vacant and expressionless that I found myself actively rooting for her character's demise, which is not what I'd guess the filmmakers had in mind. I really wish I'd followed my gut and skipped this movie, which I thought was dull and meaningless.

Best DVD: Da Ali G Show [HBO]. I'd never heard of this show until the Borat film generated so much publicity for its creator, Sacha Baron Cohen, and while I'm not a fan of the Borat movie, I'd urge everyone to check out at least one episode of Da Ali G Show, which consists of Sacha Baron Cohen, in disguise, interacting with various American civilians and celebrities, none of whom know that he is not really the uneducated rapper (Ali G); Kazakh journalist (Borat); or Austrian fashion journalist (Bruno) he is pretending to be. While veering occasionally into poor taste, the jaw-dropping interviews he conducts with everyone from Donald Trump to Newt Gingrich are not just the funniest, but also the most morally penetrating, comedy I've seen in years. Netflix this--at least one disk. I've never seen anything like it.

Best Book: Gilead [Marilynne Robinson]. I can understand why some would find this book to slow or episodic, but I found immersion in the heart and mind of an aged, faithful Protestant minister in 1950s Iowa to be a deeply and quietly moving experience, and I appreciated the way this book treated with dignity and respect a protagonist representative of persons of faith, avoiding wholesale the cynicism towards organized religion found in most of the canonical art and literature of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Best Theatre: The Trip to Bountiful [Signature Theatre Company]. As is fairly typical, an Off-Broadway production trumped all the much-buzzed-about Broadway and West End shows I saw this year.

Best Opera: The Ring Cycle [Oper Koln]. Maybe, some year, I'll see a terrific opera production by someone other than the great Robert Carsen, but not this year. His humanizing and engrossing take on what could otherwise be a really long 4 nights at the opera was as good as opera gets, and I'll never think of Wagner's mythology again without seeing the tremendous imagery employed in this production: the desiccated Rhein river, reduced to a waste-choked trickle by environmental ills; the frozen corpses of the fallen soldiers rising back to life during the famous "Ride of the Valkyries," and especially the downpour of rain quenching the fires raging across the set in the final minutes of the 16 hour marathon. I'd felt a nervousness about climbing this mountain of an opera, and am glad to have had the experience in such a smart, relevant, and engrossing production.

Best Art: Americans in Paris [National Gallery, London]. Sheer, unadulterated beauty in room after room after room.

Best TV: Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip I'm ashamed that this was the best TV I saw, which really speaks more to the fact that I didn't watch much TV, and clearly missed all the shows that people really seem to think are good: The Wire; 24; The Office; Heroes; Friday Night Lights. Glad there's such a thing as Netflix. And while Studio 60 is hardly a show to love, it doesn't deserve its status as the whipping boy of TV. I enjoyed it.

Best of Sports: Bleacher seats and rowdy crowds at the first Yankees play-off game. Good times . . .