THE BEST OF 2002

THE BEST OF 2002

ACCORDING TO FUNKYLB

WHAT	WHY
1. Norah Jones *Come Away With Me*
	Singular songs augmented by choice musicianship... Norah's songwriting and lyrical phrasing brand her as a bit of an anachronism. She seems to be of that time when Billie, Patsy and Nina reigned supreme. The songs here are wonderful jazz, country and pop confections that only become more whimsically delightful with each listen. No way these tunes sprang from the imagination of a 23 year old, but they did! One of Norah's own compositions, "The Long Day is Over" just floors me! What a languid and lilting denouement to the day, to a special occasion or even to a entire life well-lived. Now, everybody say it with me, "Ahhhhh...."
2. Me'shell Ndegeocello Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape 3. Prince *One Night Alone (3 discs, live)*	This is this quintessential queer-funskter's magnum opus! Nobody brings the funk swathed in searing social commentary quite the way Me'shell does. "Dead Nigga Boulevard" is a classic already, in my book. Me'shell also understands that, while the bass is the backbone of the rhythm section; it deserves to be heard unobstructed. I love that she puts the bass in the center of the mix in lieu of excessive panning left or right. This disc shows why Me'shell is actually the future of hip-hop, as ill-fitting as the two forces may seem to be right now. It's just criminal that this disc has sold under 100,000 copies to date.
	Prince finally realized what his inveterate, knowledgeable fans want: live material that is relatively lite on The Hits. I'm truly giddy about the fact that "Anna Stesia" and "Joy in Repetition" are included here, as well as material from his little heard, all-acoustic 3 disc set, The Truth. Prince is his best in a live forum 'cause he is the consummate showman who always seems bent on proving that he is the very best there ever was on stage in the pop milieu. The jazz reworking of "The Ballad of Dorothy Parker" included here, originally from his most brilliant album to date, Sign of the Times, is a very compelling piece of evidence to support my claim that one of the reasons that Prince is among the top 5 songwriters of the Modern Era is that you can take the lion's share of his catalog, strip the songs of their original stylisitc imprimatur, recast them in any way you please, and they will contort seamlessly and beautifully. Prince is still pop royalty!
4. Donnie
The Colored Section
	This is Afro-powered soul if I ever heard it! Donnie is among the first in a new breed of R&B artists who are triple threats (singers/songwriters/multi-instrumentalists). Donnie further distinguishes himself because his love songs, a stylistic mainstay in R&B, are primarily about a love of self, a love of community and a love of tradition. Listening to Donnie is like revisiting Stevie Wonder at his most soulfully political, Donny Hathaway at his most achingly blue and Sam Cooke at his most gossamery sanctified all rolled into one. I can't wait to see what this preacher's kid does next.
5. Derek Trucks Joyful Noise
	Derek was considered a blues slide guitar god and wunderkind in his early teens. But, unlike the Kenny Wayne Shepards and Johnny Langs of the world, he never took himself that seriously and continued to grow. This disc is an example of what happens to genius when it is approached as a protean, dynamic thing as opposed to an all defining, static thing. Derek covers so many musical genres here and kicks ass at each of them. He is truly a student of music! There's deep Delta electric blues with a twist, Eastern Kwali music, old school rhythm and blues, pop ballads, jazz and gospel here. The one cohesive thread running throughout is Derek's innate soulfulness and unaffected spirituality. Here is a man who knows how deeply meditative and prayerful playing music can be. A Joyful Noise, indeed!


6. Jaguar Wright Denials, Delusions and Decisions

	Jaguar is raw! There are no pretensions, no qualifications and no bullshit! This album has been lumped with those of the neo-soulsters, but it really doesn't fit comfortably. Most neo-soulsters are a layer or two removed from the church; Jaguar 's got one foot in the church and the other squarely in the juke joint. These self-confessional songs are not the least bit pretty. Jag can deliver a gilded melody line, but she is more interested in exploring the reticulated innards of a lyric and the more profane colors of harmony. "Self-Love" is just unadulterated, post-modern blues.
7. Floetry Floetic
	Hip-hop with feminine and feminist sensibilities is always exciting. Everyone tires of the male bravado and masculinist perspective(s) that pervade it right now. Natalie and Marsha would have been embraced for those reasons alone, but they also bring a kind of harmonic inventiveness and ambitious word play that would be welcome in any genre of music. There is such symbiosis and complementarity between these two women. It's fun to listen to them playfully spar. There is such joy here and positive portents for things yet to come, especially with respect to Natalie and Marsha as songwriters. "Butterflies" is one of my favorite songs of 2002. No wonder MJ barely veered from Marsha's demo of the song; she delivers it perfectly.



8. The Gabe Dixon Band
On A Rolling Ball
	This is the jam band of the year, for me! Gabe and the fellas have successfully taken that crown, at least for right now, away from DMB. Gabe is really the thinking man's Ben Folds. His lyrics, though, are less cutesy-mercurial and his chord vocabulary is pretty expansive in a jazz-inflected way. Some might call him a funkier, blusier Billy Joel or Elton John (for real!), but Billy and Elton haven't integrated P-Funk, Billy Preston, Stevie Wonder and Jimmy Smith-isms into their musical output in the way that Gabe has. Let me be clear about that fact that Gabe is no mere regurgitator; he has filtered and stripped his myriad musical influences of their surfaces and re-shaped the raw materials to his liking. There is so much funk on this CD that they probably keep it in a special, sealed room at the wrecka sto'.


9. John Mayer
Room for Squares

	He has a voice that sounds fairly wizened, not necessarily in tone but in texture. He writes pop tunes, but they have a folkie's storytelling center. They call him the poor man's Dave Matthew's or the Ryan Adams for the MTV set. OK, he might be those things, but what he absolutely is, for sure, is an accomplished tunesmith with a gift for unconventional guitar chord shapes and harmonic layering. The boy has chops for days! I challenge anyone to make me aware of a pop ballad as melodically and lyrically rich as "St. Patrick's Day." John was barely 21 when he wrote that. I shudder to imagine what he'll be writing as an ancient 31 year old!
10. Elton John Elton John: 1970-2002 (two discs)
	Elton John, Billy Joel and Sly and the Family Stone raised me. That's a true statement. Those are the artists whose records I found in my Nana's basement as a 7-13 year old. I used to hide out down there and listen to music. The thing about Reginald Dwight (Elton) that fascinated me was his sartorial outrageousness (those album covers were fun) and the all consuming ennui that seemed to pervade his music, even the up-tempo stuff. Nobody gets to the heart of the blues through the labyrinth of pretty pop melodies quite like Elton.

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FILMS

WHAT	WHY
1. Monsoon Wedding *dir: Mira Nair*
	Director Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay, Mississippi Masala) is back in fine form with this family dramedy. She suffered an egregious misstep, I think, with the softly pornographic (but, notably, it did seem to be aimed at women) Kama Sutra, but finds sure footing with a movie that celebrates transition and change of many varieties, even as it is critically interrogative of them. At the center of this story is Lalit Verma, the patriarch of a socially affluent New Dehli family, on the eve of his only daughter's arranged marriage to an Americanized Punjabi man working and living in the US. Lalit has to send off his only daughter in style, even if that means going broke, and that is strong possibility as the male "wedding planner" has a reputation for running families into the ground financially. In addition, it seems as if every member of the Verma extended family has arrived for the nuptials, so there are many personalities, opinions and even antipathies to be dealt with. Meanwhile, the bride is still secretly seeing and in love with her boss, a married man. This script is delightfully reticulated, smart and, dare I say it, positively feminist. It deftly tackles issues of gender, class and cultural disruptions that plague a family, and by extension, a society, as it tries to walk that fine line of respectful adherence to Punjabi traditions in the face of mostly welcome and rampant western influences. I don't want to give away too much of the story's arc and its denouement, but I will say that this film boasts some of the more complicated and interestingly drawn female characters that I've seen on screen in quite some time. The nods to inchoate female agency that the story provides do not feel at all hollow and gimmicky here. Too, cinematographically, this film was joy to watch, even with the hand-held camera effect. YOU CAN RENT OR BUY THIS ON DVD NOW
2. Kissing Jessica Stein dir: Charles Herman-Wurmfeld 3. Swimming *dir: Robert J. Siegel*	Jessica is a neurotic, assiduous and persnickety copy editor who seems to find fault with every man she meets. Helen is a cool downtown art gallery assistant director who remains unfulfilled by her polyamorous straight life. The women connect through The Village Voice personals and find in each other what they've both been looking for in men. A successful formula for any great film begins with its script, and this one is a gem! Written and produced for the screen by the two leads, Heather Juergensen and Jennifer Westfeld, this script is bursting at the seams with wit, intelligence and astute observations about matters of the heart. It's central questions: how gendered is attraction; and how fluid might an individual's sexuality be if she did not allow her fears to limit her choices in mates? I think this film is very thoughtful and honest about some of the possible answers to those questions. In addition, KJS has some of the best comedic interplay between actors (especially when Jennifer Westfeld is in the scene) that I've witnessed since the halcyon days of great Woody Allen movies. Remember those days? Allen clearly doesn't, if one considers Mighty Aphrodite and Deconstructing Harry as evidence. This film also reminds me of Allen in his heyday in the way that the city of New York, with its swagger and with its paradoxical toneless opacity and its sometimes garish sheen, is lovingly offered up as a character in and of itself. Unfortunately, also like Woody Allen movies, the NYC of KJS is curiously light on melanin. There ain't no sistas in the film, and the only brotha is a bike messenger with a rapacious (or robustly healthy, depending on you POV) sexual appetite. Reductive and boring! Still, because I am the poster child for dissociative personality disorder, I found much to love about this film. I think it completely fitting that, though its budget came in at just under one million dollars, it went on to gross slightly more than seven times that theatrically, to say nothing of the success it has had on DVD and video. Now, where is Love Jones meets *Kissing Jessica Stein? I'm still waiting for the first Black/Latina lesbian romantic comedy that's smart, funny and sexy. I can't even say that that Polk kid accomplished this for Black men, because Punks* hasn't made it into wide release. Woe is me! YOU CAN RENT OR BUY THIS ON DVD NOW
	Co-writer/director Robert Siegel is a patient, lyric storyteller sans gimmicks in a cinematic climate that lusts after direly anemic storylines as props for quick, puerile jokes, car chases and tête-à-têtes with crafty aliens. A case in point is his quiescently intelligent mood piece, Swimming. To say that this film is a coming of age story wherein three very different young women attempt to “find” themselves over the course of a summer season is criminally facile? They do, but the beauty, the complexity and the novelty is in the how as communicated in the actors’ moving performances. I especially love Lauren Ambrose’s (from HBO's Six Feet Under) portrayal as Frankie. Ambrose is note perfect as a sensitive young woman quietly molting her way to real subjectivity and personal agency. Ambrose manages this transmogrification with no soap operish histrionics, no soliloquies about how hard it is to be a girl and no belabored method acting. In fact, for a lead, Ambrose has relatively few lines. Everything that need be communicated is ably done so by her deeply expressive face and sagacious eyes. You never doubt her intelligence and you’re always aware of the inner steel beneath her shockingly pale skin and the layers upon layers of baggy sartorial armor that the tomboyish Frankie uses to hide from change. Swimming is not standard high school and post-high school coming of age pabulum. This is a pithy film for adults who are fortunate enough to have done the inner work necessary to appreciate when someone is telling it like it really is/was. This ain’t no Dawson’s Creek, folks! SEE MY FULL REVIEW HERE
4. Talk To Her
dir: Pedro Almodóvar
	Almodóvar has lost his mind for sure! What else would explain this film's intersecting love stories involving two men and their comatose amantes. Marco (a journalist) and Lydia (a bull fighter) meet when Marco is writing a piece for a travel magazine about Spain's national sport. Benigno (a nurse) watches Alicia (a dancer) rehearse at the studio across from the apartment he shares with his invalid mother, whom he has nursed for the lion's share of his adult life. The smitten Benigno follows Alicia one day after dance class and strikes up a conversation with her. Fast forward many years, and the film finds Benigno and Marco helping each other negotiate the care taking of Alicia, who was hit by a car and Lydia, who was gored by a bull. It's not so strange that two men would meet in the ward of hospital for patients in a vegetative state. What is a bit odd is Benigno's belief that his one-sided conversations with Alicia and the fact that he attends to her every need constitutes a consensual romantic relationship. We learn as the film unfolds that Alicia barely knew Benigno before the accident, and what she did know of his obsession with her creeped her out. But the film seems to privilege Benigno's devotion to Alicia and to resist passing judgment on what are probably aberrant impulses and motivations on his part. It is Benigno who counsels Marco that what Lydia needs is for him to "talk to her." Benigno advises Marco that he should interact with Lydia just as if she were able to respond to him. Benigno so resolutely believes that the women's condition is temporary, despite the fact that Alicia, in particular, has been in a coma for years. This film really seems to be about the many faces of loneliness and the ways in which human beings engage in some mighty suspect myth making to feel connected to someone, anyone. This piece is also, paradoxically, Almodovar's least sexually queer, but most emotionally queer film to date. Benigno seems not to have an edit button when expressing his feelings. He does some morally offensive things out of his love for Alicia. Marco, on the other hand, seems emotionally stilted when juxtaposed with Benigno. It is outrageously interesting that Almodóvar posits Benigno as the character with whom Marco should identify and emulate. See the film! There is one movie within a movie sequence that is beautiful, but depraved and one startling plot turn that seems to offer up Benigno as a very unlikely hero of sorts.
5. Frida dir: Julie Taymor
	This is a bio-pic that eschews a paint-by-numbers format for some delightfully odd and evocative visual devices placed in the service of telling the life story of a very abstruse and thoroughly modern woman. Director Julie Taymor successfully captures the whimsy and hyper-reality of Frida Kahlo's paintings. Many of Frida’s most famous paintings are historicized and brought to life in the film using the actors as models. Salma Hayek delivers such a soulful performance here. She seems to have inhaled, imbibed, and channeled the very essence of her subject. I'm not at all sure of the nuts and bolts of how she accomplishes this, but she delivers an emotional, affecting, self-aware and intimate performance. This film works on many levels: it’s a solid biopic; it’s a wonderful entrée to the real Frida’s work; it’s a love story of the epic and operatic kind; and it’s a love letter to a Mexico that no longer exists and to a native daughter who adored her homeland, its people and its indigenous cultures. SEE MY FULL REVIEW HERE


6. The Hours dir: Stephen Daldry

	This is Nicole Kidman's movie to make or break. Hers is the presence that looms largest over these proceedings. Kidman plays author and feminist icon, Virginia Woolf, whose novel, Mrs. Dalloway provides the common thread linking the three stories, all set in disparate historical periods, that make up the film. We meet Woolf, exiled from London and quite clearly saddled with poor mental health, as she is writing Mrs. Dalloway circa 1925 or thereabouts. Julianne Moore plays a 1950's housewife who is reading Mrs. Dalloway. Meryl Streep, nicknamed Mrs. Dalloway by an old flame, plays a present day Chelsea publisher, planning a party of massive importance, just as the title character is in the opening of Woolf's book. This film doesn't so much tell stories as it muses about themes, ideas and questions that Woolf's life, death and creative output seem to make exigent: what of the socially constructed model of "the dutiful wife and good mother?" What if motherhood and marriage are literally drowning you as is the case with Julianne Moore's 1950's housewife? What if, for a woman, a brief life of madness, but creative superfluity is more palatable than a long life of quiet comfort and sanity? Why is it the universal expectation that a woman will put other's well-being before her own, and that any woman who refuses to do that should feel guilt and shame about it? Looking closely at the film's characters, we never honestly learn very much about them. Obviously we bring more knowledge about who Woolf was to the table, but Moore: did she marry her straight-laced husband for love or because of convention? If the times were different would Moore's character have chosen to live openly as a lesbian? And Meryl Streep's Clarrissa: was she previously married or involved with a man besides Richard? Did she and Allison Janney's character adopt their daughter or is she the product of a previous relationship? Does Janney's character know how her partner still feels about ex-flame Richard? A great deal of backstory exposition, there isn't in this film. Too, there is not a great deal of dialogue from the women in the film. Ed Harris' Richard probably has more lines than all of the women combined. The film's score, the actor's mostly silent performances and the film's direction propel this film along. All three leading ladies sprinkle this film with performative stardust. There are no false notes or actorly contrivances. I deeply felt every sharp intake of breath, every resolutely set jaw and every wild-eyed look of incredulousness that each woman has at some point in response to the lack of control over the trajectory of her own life. Director Daldry does a good job helping the viewing audience not to feel displaced by the temporal leaps in the narrative. One of the things that makes Michael Cunningham's novel so challenging, but deliciously so, are the sudden changes in time and place. Daldry uses devices like a ringing door bell or the placement of a vase of flowers to connect stories and to ease the audience into each new setting. This film is all about tone and mood and Daldry's direction sets the lever at "blue" for both. I don't completely understand this film. I find Cunningham's novel even more abstract and abstruse, but both make me feel something. And that's enough.
7. My Big Fat Greek Wedding dir: Joel Zwick
	Cinderella goes Greek! This is a zany comedy from writer/actor Nia Vardalos, loosely based on her own marriage to a non-Greek man. Toula Portakolos (Vardalos) is a thirty year old frumpy daddy's girl with bad skin, who longs for a better quality of life. Her family thinks that this ugly duckling will help run the family restaurant for the rest of her life and never marry. That is until hunky, WASPY Ian (John Corbett) comes into her life. The cultural assimilation of John Corbett's character inspires much hilarity. Toula's family definitely puts him through the ringer and reveal themselves to be a bunch of very strange, very idiosyncratic near lunatics with great, big hearts. Vardalos' script packs a comedic wallop. Its pacing is expert when she dispenses with the somewhat torpid, though well-meaning and endearing, serious moments between Toula and her parents. This film is simply hysterical; I was hyperventilating and weeping from laughter all the way through. SEE MY FULL (er) REVIEW HERE YOU CAN RENT OR BUY THIS ON DVD NOW



8. The Good Girl
dir: Miguel Arteta
	An apt subtitle for this film could have been "a TV friend gets de-glammed and plays at indie with little success." Thankfully, Jennifer Aniston, a veteran of light and cuddly romantic comedy films, picked a great project with which to get all serious and uglied up. Jennifer loses herself in this character and breaks my heart in the process. Aniston plays Justine, a bored housewife working at the make-up counter of the local Walmart clone. Her husband, played by the ubiquitous and gifted John C. Reilly, is a pot head house painter with a questionable relationship (read: Single White Female/Chuck and Buck-like scary, homoerotic) with his best friend. So, when Justine encounters a new 20-something kid at her job, who seems deep because he's all depressed and nihilistic, strongly identifies with the character Holden Caulfield and writes really bad short stories, naturally she's intrigued and turned on. This film was written by and co-stars Chuck and Buck auteur, Mike White. And if you know anything about Mike White the writer, you know that he is big on irony, and that he likes to point out the comedy in the desperate, in the depraved and in the absurd. There are no heroes in Mike White scripts. The characters in this film are no different. Everyone in this working class, red neck Texas town is going nowhere but fast. Most, as drawn by White, are either too dumb to know this or too emotionally dead to care. Justine feels claustrophobic and lost because she is at least awake enough to realize that there is something wrong with filling up her days pushing beauty products on women who sit around all day watching soaps in their bathrobes, then coming home to a stoner husband, and eating a TV dinner in front of a broken TV set. What is both beautiful and heartbreaking about this film is that the audience watches Justine become a deceitful person who makes some morally questionable choices, but we understand why she becomes who she becomes. We understand why and we know early on that it will all be in vain. This movie ain't really fun, but it feels real. YOU CAN RENT OR BUY THIS ON DVD NOW


9. Unfaithful
dir: Adrian Lyne

	Diane Lane's performance as a morally imperiled housewife, who risks endangering a long and comfortable marriage and idyllic family life for some hot sex on a platter, is the only reason this film is on my list. Lane is the complete actor here. She has to tackle and make salable a host of human emotions: from domestic complacency, to suburban ennui, to sexy anticipation, to the exhilaration of reconnecting with corporeal delights, to haughty selfishness, to guilt, to shame, to fear and to loss of self. Now, that's quite a continuum of feelings, but Lane makes each distinctive, makes each look genuine and makes each quite palpable for the audience. Just take a look at the train sequence where Connie remembers her first tryst with Paul, and tell me you can't feel the horrific suffocation and the sweetness of her transgression equally. Adrian Lyne movies (9 and 1/2 Weeks, Fatal Attraction, Indecent Proposal) have always bugged me. His movies always seem to think they are smarter than they actually are. They seem to think they are sexually forward thinking with respect to distaff desire, when really they reek of contrived smut and cardboard female characters. Lyne only likes two kinds of females in his movies: the virginal, experience deprived one (Flashdance, 9 1/2 Weeks) or the female-as-monster (Fatal Attraction, Lolita). Lane, though, locates the soul and the truth in the character of Connie, resists either Lyne staple caricature, and proceeds to show the audience a polyvalent portrait of a woman, who has probably denied herself many things as a wife and as a mother, choose for herself, consequences be damned. As hard and as valiantly as Lane works here, the movie, unfortunately, falls apart in the third act. It arrives at what, I feel, is a craven and safe compromise for an American audience that likes to have its moral and social directives/imperatives served up to them on a see-through tray. Oh well, it is a fun ride up until that point. YOU CAN RENT OR BUY THIS ON DVD NOW
10. Standing in the Shadows of Motown dir: Paul Justman
	This documentary takes a celebratory and positively revisionist look at the legendary Motown house band known as "The Funk Brothers." The group's surviving members revisit the old Detroit neighborhoods, clubs, and tiny recording studios that inspired, incubated and ultimately forgot one of the two greatest rhythm sections in modern popular music. The other, I respectfully submit, was the Stax house band, "Booker T. and the MG's." It was great to hear about the creation of the music from the men who were really there, and to revel in these men reclaiming a part of their youth. There are, however, some quietly glaring and interesting lacunae in the Funk Bros. story as related in this film. One: most of the surviving members talk about the lack of recognition and creative credit for being pioneers that persists to this day. No one talks about how maliciously underpaid they were for their contributions and how Berry Gordy blatantly stole from them, failing to give them songwriting credit when they pretty much wrote the music to scores upon scores of Motown hits. Two: James Jamerson, perhaps the most virtuosic bass player there ever was (one could make a strong case for Jaco Pastorius), and the man who put the swing in every song, was treated like a pariah by "Hollywood" Berry Gordy. That treatment played a huge part in his subsequent alcoholism and depression. These darker chapters of the Funk Bros. story are discussed, but only briefly and usually indirectly. Fantastic film, otherwise. SITSOM will be released on DVD 4/22

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