Inland Empire
Grade: B

Even die-hard David Lynch fans may have trouble digesting this inscrutable three hour mindfuck about a Hollywood actress (Laura Dern) who undergoes a nightmarish journey after landing a big film role. Lynch revisits the theme of identity swapping from Mulholland Dr., and his uncompromisingly brutal portrayal of a woman in peril recalls Laura Palmer from Twin Peaks. Unless you’re a Mensa member on acid, the best thing to do is rid your mind of logic and let the dark, eerily beautiful dream world swallow you whole. Featuring Lynch veterans Diane Ladd, Harry Dean Stanton and Grace Zabriskie.

Happy holidays y'all! I'm posting my ten favorite films for 2006, but the list may change a bit in the coming weeks because I still haven't seen Letters from Iwo Jima, Inland Empire, Pan's Labyrinth and a few other critics' darlings.

1. Slither (dir. James Gunn)

2. Volver (Pedro Almodovar)

3. Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple (Stanley Nelson)

4. United 93 (Paul Greengrass)

5. The Queen (Stephen Frears)

6. Little Children (Todd Field)

7. Strangers with Candy (Paul Dinello)

8. Old Joy (Kelly Reichardt)

9. Lemming (Dominik Moll)

10. The Fountain (Darren Aronofsky)

HONORABLE MENTION (in no particular order)

The Science of Sleep, The Devil and Daniel Johnston, Jackass Number Two (yes I'm serious), Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, Notes on a Scandal, C.R.A.Z.Y., The Dead Girl, Heading South, A Prairie Home Companion, Borat, Infamous, Children of Men

Notes on a Scandal
Grade: B+

Dame Judi Dench is delightfully nasty in this repressed British lesbian variation of Fatal Attraction. She plays Barbara, an icy and lonely history teacher who befriends Sheba, a comely art teacher played by Cate Blanchett. Cate is as great as usual, but she had better beware that we're going to start taking her talent for granted if she keeps making 5,000 movies a year.
When Barbara discovers that Sheba is making it with a 15-year-old male student, she agrees to keep the scandal a secret on the tacit condition that Sheba becomes her "intimate" friend (this job description includes accepting unsolicited massages from Barbara).
Director Richard Eyre keeps things moving at a brisk pace, and the mesmerizing voice-over narration by Dench oozes with bitchy comments that are worthy of Bette Davis at her best. And Bill Nighy - who is currently getting raves on Broadway for his role opposite Julianne Moore in The Vertical Hour - brings humor and surprising emotional depth to his portrayal of Sheba's cuckolded husband.
The movie's main flaw is that the plot ceases to make sense about two-thirds of the way through the movie. For instance, Sheba has witnessed Barbara in all her demented and obsessive glory, but she decides to go live with her anyway, with the added bonus that all the tabloids are camped outside the apartment waiting for the latest scoop on the school sex debacle. It's a truly stupid plot development that only exists so that Barbara and Sheba can eventually have the knock-down-drag-out bitch fight that everyone's been waiting for.
Based on Zoe Heller's novel, which was shortlisted for the 2003 Man Booker Prize.

Opening Soon:

The Dead Girl
Grade: B+

Nominated for three Independent Spirit Awards including Best Feature, this is a bleak and generally effective psychological drama from writer/director Karen Moncrieff (Blue Car). Broken into five distinct sections with changing points of view, the story opens with the discovery of a murdered woman (Brittany Murphy) and ends with a sequence about her final hours. Murphy’s reckless performance comes off as a bad Courtney Love imitation, but the rest of the acting is top-notch. The formidable ensemble includes Toni Collette, Mary Steenburgen, James Franco, Mary Beth Hurt, Piper Laurie and Giovanni Ribisi.

The Good German
Grade: C

Director Steven Soderbergh (Out of Sight, Ocean’s Eleven) and George Clooney team up once again for this failed attempt to replicate the look, romance and intrigue of black-and-white classics like Casablanca. Clooney is about as charismatic as wallpaper paste as an American reporter assigned to Berlin in 1945. Tobey Maguire is miscast and hopelessly dorky as a scheming Army driver, and an expert German accent isn’t enough to help Cate Blanchett overcome the wooden script.

I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence by Amy Sedaris
(Warner Books, $27.99)

Allow me to confess that I’m a little bit biased before I review Amy Sedaris’ new hospitality tome.
David’s little sis has rocked my world ever since I first watched Strangers with Candy three years ago and saw her ingenious, ass-slappingly hilarious portrayal of Jerri Blank (If you’ve never seen the show or the movie version, Jerri is a 46-year-old high school freshman with a debilitating overbite and a history of drug abuse and streetwalking).
Since then I’ve taped all of Amy’s talk show appearances, printed a snapshot of Jerri on my personal checks, and slutted myself up with cheap makeup and a gold lamé turtleneck so I could be Jerri on Halloween.
Thanks to I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence, Amy is now a permanent resident in my kitchen. A psychedelic send-up of 1960s cookbooks and Martha Stewart, I Like You is a colorful and deliberately tacky explosion of recipes, kitschy arts and crafts projects, party hosting tips and musings on personal hygiene. Need the recipe for the scrumptious Lady Baltimore Cake? Just turn to page 138, and while you’re at it eyeball the next page for illustrated instructions on how to give your vagina a “spirited scrubbing.”
Gay fashion designer Todd Oldham captures Amy in a multitude of hilarious guises, from a raven-haired Greek vixen to bong smoker in a vintage floral print dress. Remove the book cover and on the flip side you’ll discover a giant pin-up photo of Amy slathered with whipped cream and rainbow sprinkles, joyously kicking her legs up in the air.
In the “Hospitality in Action” section, Amy teaches us how to handle every conceivable kind of guest, from out-of-towners to lumberjacks to gypsies. She prints the “Entertaining the Elderly” chapter in a gigantic font, spiking the text with politically incorrect digs: “I don’t mind pointing out some of the failings of old age, because we are all headed in that direction, unless of course we take our own lives.”
So far all of the recipes I’ve tried have turned out great, though I must say that Amy’s minimalist instructions keep me guessing a little more than I’d like. I paired a vegetarian version of the meatloaf with the tomatoey Greek Beans. Both were delicious, though a tad over seasoned thanks to the ambiguous directions.
I also recommend Captain’s Mouthwatering Bite-Size Blue Ball Cheese Balls, a surefire hit at any holiday soiree. Just don’t forget the Ritz.

The Fountain

Grade: A-

Writer/director Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream) has created one of the most beautiful and challenging movies of the year. It deserves to be seen on the big screen, so try to catch it before it gets chased out of the multiplexes by this year's parade of holiday fluff. The tone is a bit uneven, and there are some painfully pretentious and unintentionally funny moments. But overall this is fascinating stuff that will stick with you long after you leave the theater.

Three storylines intertwine to depict humankind's ongoing quest for immortality, as represented by the Tree of Life in the Book of Genesis. There's a modern day research doctor (Hugh Jackman) who races against time to cure his wife (Rachel Weisz) of a brain tumor. In scenes from the wife's novel-in-progress, Jackman appears as a Spanish conquistador bloodily questing for eternal life in the Mayan Empire. And in trippy outer space scenes that are suitable substitutes for LSD, a bald, Buddhist Jackman sits beneath the Tree of Life in a floating bubble. Yes it's as crazy as it sounds, but it all congeals in a way that's more spiritual than logical. I honestly don't know how to describe it.

After chucking some crappy audiobooks into the trunk of my car, I added a fistful of CDs to my collection while driving across country last month. Here are three of my favorite new recruits:

Marie Antoinette Soundtrack

The film was a major disappointment, but Sofia Coppola proves once again that she can compile a soundtrack album like nobody's business (The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation both boasted dreamy tunes). Though it contains a few classical pieces by Vivaldi, the 2-disc set for Marie Antoinette mostly reflects the film's anachronistic punk sensibility. Siouxsie and the Banshees kick things off with their infectious song "Hong Kong Garden," and Bow Wow Wow and The Cure both contribute multiple tracks. Coppola also summons The Radio Dept., Adam & the Ants and New Order to her revisionist Versailles mixing booth.

Joan Osborne: Pretty Little Stranger

Here's a gem from the gal who faded into relative obscurity after enjoying a monster success with her mid-90s album Relish. She's done some solid work since then, including a terrific album of R&B covers called How Sweet It Is. Pretty Little Stranger, an effort that Osborne describes as her "Nashville album," may be her best work yet. Good luck finding it in stores, though. I left several stores empty-handed until I finally found it at an indie shop in Park City, UT.
Osborne penned several of the songs, including the gorgeous title track and a rockin' number that asks: "Who divided up the days into hours? The hours into minutes? How could they really be that smart? Who divided up the minutes into seconds? They must've had a broken heart." It may look silly in print, but I can guarantee that her gravelly, uninhibited delivery will shake you up in the best way possible.
The well-chosen cover songs include Jerry Garcia's "Brokedown Palace," Patty Griffin's "What You Are" and Roy Orbison's "When the Blue Hour Comes."

Sufjan Stevens: Songs for Christmas

At $22.98 (and you can find it on sale all over the place) this is quite possibly the best music deal of the season. So far the prolific and ingenious Stevens is best known for his ongoing efforts to record an album about every state in the union (so far he's got Michigan and Illinois under his belt). And every year since 2001 he's taken a little time out of his schedule to record Christmas tunes. Songs for Christmas contains five CDs, each representing a different year. Stevens mostly draws on the classics, churning out charming instrumental and vocal renditions of "Silent Night," "Away in a Manger" and three takes of "O Come O Come Emmanuel." Being one of the most prolific writers in the business, he doesn't stop there. He includes several original songs, the most danceable and memorable being "Come on! Let's Boogey to the Elf Dance!"

The packaging for the collection is more fun than a gingerbread house drowning in gumdrops. Inside you'll find stickers, comics and a singalong-oriented songbook that contains the chords to all the songs. The label on the box informed me that I could find an animated video inside, but so far I haven't found any secret features when I've plugged the discs into my DVD player or computer.

Opening December 8th:

The Holiday
Grade: D

You just might need a vacation after sitting through this vacuous and criminally overlong romantic comedy from writer-director Nancy Meyers (Something’s Gotta Give). Thanks to clumsy staging and endless stretches of inane dialogue, Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz exude zero charm as two women who find romance when they swap houses for the holidays. Meyers tries to prove herself to be a film connoisseur by referencing classic movies, but quoting Casablanca doesn’t begin to disguise her incompetence. Jude Law and Jack Black play the love interests.

Coming Soon

Breaking and Entering
Grade: C

After proving his talent as a screenwriter and director with The English Patient, Anthony Minghella racked up rave reviews and Oscar nominations for a pair of ambitious but thoroughly mediocre films (The Talented Mr. Ripley and Cold Mountain). It’s hard to believe that the charade will continue with Breaking and Entering, a dull and remote character study that robs its viewers of two hours and squanders the considerable talents of Jude Law, Juliette Binoche and Robin Wright Penn. Law plays a London architect who has an affair with the Bosnian mother (Binoche) of a teenage boy who burgled his offices.