The Chris Moeller Archives

The best of 2010

I said goodbye a year ago to the CM Blog film awards. Instead, here are my top five favorite things in the culture this year. Remind me to make this recurring.

Alison Brie. Most of the year, she's adorable, ambitious Annie on "Community," who is herself sometimes Southern-drawled Caroline Decker from Corpus Christi when she's out on the town armed with fake ID. Then summer rolls around, and she's "Mad Men's" effervescent Trudy Campbell, dancing the Charleston with her beloved husband and rockin' maternity negligees hiked up nearly to her basket of kisses. More shows for Alison Brie please.

Smash His Camera. This documentary film was the most entertaining new feature to move up and out of my Netflix queue this year. It's subject is Ron Galella, the legendary New York City paparazzo who hunts celebrities from around corners and behind bushes with his photographic lens on the streets of the Big Apple. Galella became famous during the early '70s when he was court-ordered to stay at least 75 feet away from Jackie Kennedy Onassis, then a year later, punched in the mouth by Marlon Brando after the actor left the Manhattan studio of "The Dick Cavett Show." Today, Galella is a septuagenarian, as busy in his career as he's ever been, and sounding only slightly creepy when he says something like "I think at the time Jackie became my girlfriend."

Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. Years ago, author and historian Daniel Okrent invented the concept of fantasy sports, and became a trusted talking head on a few of Ken Burns' PBS documentaries. But he's also a terrific writer. This spring, his publisher released his account of American's greatest Constitutional blunder short of the formation of the Electoral College. For 14 strange years, alcohol was illegal in the United States. 480 pages of Okrent read like about 150. It's not a central thesis, but it's impossible to read this political, economic, and social history-in-one book and not think about the current blunderous "War on Drugs." I'll avoid the paronomasian adjectives for the book such as "intoxicating" and "delicious," but there they are anyway. The Ken Burns PBS adaptation is due in 2011.

Backatown. It's Troy Andrews' world now. At only 24 years of age,"Trombone Shorty" is New Orleans' top man of brass, and that puts him on the throne of the palace in American musical culture. This album marked Shorty's major record label debut in 2010, and propelled him and his backers, Orleans Avenue, onto the stages of the Letterman, Leno, and Kimmel shows, into a recurring dramatic role as himself on HBO's "Treme," and an end-of-the-year Grammy nomination. A first man of the second line, cooked up in an Armstrong-meets-Lenny Kravitz gumbo, Trombone Shorty is standing tall.

Kenny Powers. The main character of HBO's "Eastbound and Down" is like many things already seen on television-- just more of it. The former star baseball pitcher, on the road back to the big leagues and forward to personal redemption, is what he believes himself to be-- a myth, a legend, "a man with an arm like a fucking cannon, a mind like a scientist, and a cock like a burmese python." South of the border, he's "La Flama Blanca," the black flame, walking into "a Mexican standoff in Mexico." He's a tit man, not an ass man. His heart got broken in Season 2, but in the end, he decided, she was just like the Italian woman Michael Corleone married in "The Godfather." His true love and his future lie awaiting in the United States during the coming year.

posted by CM @ 6:41 PM