The Best Stuff of the Last Decade

Ahh, the end of the decade, how'd you come around so quickly? It hit me a few weeks ago that this was the first full decade of my life that I can actually remember, and what a decade...for me and my personal development, that is. Considering this decade spans my better years in high school, college, my initial foray into the working world, and, uh, law school, it's sort of hard to bring together all my personal experiences over the past ten years.

So, in lieu of substantive retrospective, I figured a trendy "best of" countdown would be a better way for me to think back on the decade in a manner fit for public consumption.

I was debating yesterday with one of my friends whether it would be proper to do my own list of best films (or whatever) when I likely never saw (or read or played) some of the biggest titles of the decade. The solution? I decided to list a mish-mash of the ten multimedia experiences which most impacted me over the decade, i.e., I didn't end up regretting buying the DVD.

Movies, CDs, and video games are all fair game; books, however, are not--I spent the entire decade reading textbooks and Harry Potter (and Freakonomics) so I'm not too well read. Onward!

Tom Cruise became a caricature over the course of the decade, Penelope Cruz isn't a particularly good (English) actress, and this film is both too long and a bit pretentious, but the story just haunted me for years after the fact.

Yes, Tom Cruise's character, David Ames, is a selfish human being, a character that is impossible to sympathize with. He leads a privileged life that he squanders away, but the film's larger message about finding real meaning in our relationships with others is worthy.

Alas, I think most self-centered high schoolers assume immortality is inevitable but worry their future glory will leave them alone and adrift in some way. Vanilla Sky shows how we can be our own worst enemies sometimes.

It also has a nifty science-fiction element that I certainly didn't see coming at the time--I wasn't an observant movie-goer at the ripe old age of eighteen. The audio-visual experience is pretty fantastic, too, with an awesome soundtrack played on top of eerily beautiful visuals of New York City. Jason Lee can also be my BFF any day.

The best (and only) sci-fi western in existence, firefly seems like an impossible combination: horses and gunfights on one hand and, uh, spaceships and high-tech evil government agents on the other. The concept probably doomed the show from the start, but there's never been another fourteen episode series which I've watched in one sitting (on Super Tuesday '08 no less). I haven't much cared for Joss Whedon's other ventures (Buffy), but firefly was probably the most charming science fiction universe of the decade...

And the follow-up movie was just awesome. Of course, no body watched either and the whole universe died a pathetic comic book spinoff death. It did, more or less, turn Summer Glau and Adam Baldwin into geeky icons.

My friends tend to think of me a serious gamer, but, aside from a prodigious amount of knowledge about the game industry, I didn't actually play a ton of video games this decade. I don't really think I sank my teeth into anything until Final Fantasy XII showed up when I was haplessly unemployed in the fall of 2006. Despite my limited monies, I took a flier on the game and ended up finding the perfect antidote to the depression that came with a thousand rejected job applications.

Final Fantasy began as a modest medieval adventure game for the Nintendo back in the late nineteen eighties. By the time the seventh installment of the, uh, final fantasy was released on Playstation in 1997, the series had been transformed into typical Japanese fan fiction: effeminate blond protagonists find angsty-love with magical schoolgirls while world-consuming demons threaten existence. Accordingly, my interest in the series was largely limited to the earlier releases.

Final Fantasy XII had a new development team and made for a whole new experience with the franchise. Though the game still featured an effeminate blond guy, he was the protagonist in name only--a character bolted onto the story at the last minute from above because, you know, Japanese role playing games need effeminate main characters.

Instead of angsty demonic love, this final fantasy told a story full of political intrigue, rebellion, and the corrupting influence of technology. It also played out in real time, with gameplay ripped from some World of Warcraft-esque MMORPG minus the whole massively multiplayer online aspect.

And I loved it. Maybe it was because I was unemployed and had nothing going on, but Final Fantasy XII was the first game all decade that I actually savored playing. In the midst of college and high school and now law school, video games served as momentary diversions--I'd either play them in pieces or race through them as quickly as possible. With Final Fantasy XII, I absorbed the game; I thought about the story and planned out my strategies for how I'd proceed with the game.

The experience was so awesome that I bought the collectible strategy guide for the game after beating it and then bought the game's bizarre Nintendo DS sidestory/sequel two years later just because.

Shadow defines unconventional game design. Though the story is ultimately "save the princess," everything else about the game made for a unique game experience. The unnamed player arrives in a beautifully rendered but utterly empty game world, tasked with beating sixteen beasts in order to save his lady love. As the beasts are slain, the game character begins to take on a sickly appearance, suggesting saving the princess might require the ultimate self-sacrifice.

It's hard to describe how compelling the game's world is. It's a Playstation 2 title so it's not exactly HD-ready, but the developers crafted this gorgeous world full of forests and streams, deserts and misty lakes. Picture if you will, Gandalf galloping across Middle Earth/New Zealand in Lord of the Rings and you'll get a feeling for the visual majesty of Shadow.

Despite this beautiful world, the game exudes a powerful sense of isolation and despair. The world you travel in is completely empty, save for the colossi, of course. Most video games have boss fights, ultimate enemies if you will, but Shadow is probably the only game in recent memory where fighting the bosses is all there is.

The bond you develop with your trusty horse as you travel vast distances, over mountains, into caves to track down these enemies is tangible. The horse becomes your only friend as you, literally, take on the world. The experience is aided by (yet another) haunting soundtrack.

I list Shadow on here not because I had "fun" playing the game, because I didn't really. It was about the experience; it was also one of the only games I played through with a friend. My buddy Matt and I would play the game for a few hours each Friday afternoon, alternating attempts at taking on colossi. If I hadn't had him by my side (or at the controller), I never would have made it through all sixteen baddies and seen the end of the game. That alone makes it one of the more memorable experiences of the past decade.

More science-fiction! Though BSG ultimately devolved into a strained message about spirituality, the reimagining of the camply 1980s series began as a critical treatment of social issues disguised as science fiction. There's not a lot of teevee shows out there that seriously address abortion, suicide-bombing, and violent class struggles, but BSG could evidently get away with taking on dicey political issues by using an ample amount of sexy robots.

Since this list has made it apparent how much I like science-fiction, it may be a bit surprising that I didn't even know about BSG when it launched in the fall of 2003. I caught an episode or two on SciFi "SyFy," but I didn't get invested in the show until I decided to pick up the first season on sale at Best Buy last winter. Even then, I didn't even crack open the first season until I caught one of those nasty colds that makes it impossible to do anything but sit and watch teevee around the time of last year's Super Bowl.

It took me a week to get through that first season, and I managed to watch through the entire show before viewing the series' finale live mid-March.

Though my opinion shifts regularly whether the show ended in satisfactory fashion, the scope of the series is unquestionably phenomenal. BSG showed military life in a way that was neither glamorous nor cynical. The female characters were more powerful, compelling, and memorable than the male characters. The story-arcs were clever; the twists surprising. And the sexy robots weren't even the coolest characters--I was a bigger fan of the Secretary of Education-turned-President of the Colonies who spent the series fighting breast cancer or the ship's second-in-command who was a bitter, functional alcoholic.

Nowadays I probably watch too much teevee, but, surprisingly, up until I got hooked on a second season DVD of The Office in December 2006, I didn't really have any regular teevee shows I cared about. Even though Arrested Development came before it, The Office was the first show I expected to make me laugh week-in and week-out.

The show was relevant and quotable (at least for a few seasons) in a way something like Friends just never was. Also, Jenna Fischer made for a pretty damn cute receptionist.

I didn't quite expect this list to be so dominated by science-fiction, but my love 2007's Mass Effect doesn't actually have to do with its sexy blue aliens or futuristic sensibilities. Instead, Mass Effect was the first video game I ever played that made me question my decisions.

A massive role-playing epic, the game thrust you into a militaristic earth put into a precarious diplomatic position. Sure, sure, you played as a heavily armed-space marine, but the game forces you to choose between playing the noble hero or pragmatic villain in such delightfully nasty ways. The game lets you encourage racists and political terrorists or execute greedy albeit unarmed and impotent ex-corporate CEOs.

The game also features amazing production values, a haunting electronic soundtrack, and ::horror of horrors:: blue alien sex which no one save Fox News cared about. 2007 was a helluva year for emotional experiences in video games: Mario orchestrated, Ayn Rand brought to life in Bioshock, and the feeling of virtual jihad in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

But probably because I didn't like Bioware's previous efforts, I had no comprehension by how much I'd be impacted by Mass Effect. The sequel comes out January 26th--it'll be a personal holiday.

Yeah, I know it's fashionable to like The Wire. That doesn't mean it's still not the best show that seemingly no one actually watched when it was on air.

The series was a shockingly depressing view of the seedy world of Baltimore--Bodymore, Murdaland. I love multifaceted dramas, but I'm not sure there's a single show out there that had more layers than The Wire. Sure, sure, Lost has its many mysteries, but, by the end, The Wire had a cast of dozens and dozens that interacted among each other in surprising ways.

While the show was largely the tale of a city's failed battle against the "streets," each season of the show explored a particular facet of modern urban America: dying industry, city politics, the schools, and, hilariously (if less effectively), the mainstream media.

The show had an amazing amount of humanity and a few happy endings, but it was mostly five seasons of sad ends and worst-case scenarios. There are few television programs that can make you depressed enough to stop watching, but that's the price you pay to walk through the garden of The Wire.

But, hey, Law & Order: SVU's Detective John Munch lie at the end of the tunnel.

Zach Braff's Garden State was one of those coming-of-age/explorations of twenty-something existence that came along at just the right time in my life. I think everybody my age gets hit by feelings of aimlessness, a desire for purpose and meaning, and Garden State was an amusing romp into how lost my generation feels sometimes.

However, the best part about the film was Frou Frou's "Let Go," which closed out the film. The moment I heard the song when I saw the film's trailer in 2004, it dug its way into brain for a long time. The song was pretty much my theme song of the decade--there definitely is "beauty in the breakdown." Ahh, sweet song.

Alright, some honesty: I'm not sure Chuck really belongs on this list, but, dammit, if I don't feel like hyping this show up some more in lieu of it's third season premiere next Sunday. Seriously: Sunday, January 10th, 9/8c on NBC...NOTHING ELSE IS ON.

Chuck is a really stupid teevee show; it's also the one I regularly enjoy the most. The premise? A twenty-something big box store employee gets all the government's secrets downloaded into his brain. He goes on crazy adventure fighting terrorists with a hot blond CIA agent and a gun-toting, Ronald Reagan loving Adam Baldwin (see firefly).

I'm not sure how the show has survived two seasons, but thankfully NBC is such a terrible network that the show keeps living.

Everything else on this list was brought to me in some fashion, but Chuck was a show discovered. I literally got bored with a Monday Night Football game, flipped through the channels, and got sucked into the world of Chuck. I've been a regular viewer ever since, even eating at Subway last spring as part of a fan-effort to get the show renewed for a third season.

Chuck really stands out in a world where teevee programming consists almost exclusively of "gritty" soap opera drama, CBS-procedural, or mind-numbing reality. Unfortunately, the show's awesome mix of hot women, weird 1980s cultural references, and orchestrated covers of "Mr. Roboto" doesn't seem to appeal to anyone but me because, try as I might, I've yet to get anyone to embrace the show like I have.

So, yes, I sit with my Chuck 3D-glasses and watch by myself, thank you very much.


Of course, as soon as I concocted this list of ten things, another ten popped into mind. Since what else is this blog for than me to wax on about such things, here's my honorable mentions or, better put, the stuff I thought of after the fact:

1. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy: an amazing filmmaking achievement, LOTR made for event viewing between 2001 and when The Return of the King's ultimate DVD was released in 2004.
2. The West Wing: the teevee show that made me want to love government, it made for some brilliant television. Alas, I never watched the show consistently when it was on the air, and some of it was really really bad...
3. iPod (5th Gen): I've never been much of a music aficionado and I saw no reason to ever get an iPod. Then my dad decided to get me one anyway for the holidays in 2005, and, well, my life really hasn't been the same sense. Even though I still only have 800-some songs and my click-wheel iPod was replaced years ago, I have a definite sense of life being different before and after iPod.
4. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: it's the perfect film to watch after a break-up and it's a visual delight, as well.
5. Fallout 3: probably transcends what it means to be a "video game." A dark humor post-Apocalyptic take on a Washington, D.C., that takes place in an alternate future based upon a 1950s-style American golden age, the game is a real experience.
6. Charlie Wilson's War: If The West Wing was Aaron Sorkin's peak and ::ugh:: Studio 60 his bottom, Charlie Wilson was an impressive return to form, and, somehow, a morbid cost-tally of all the Soviet equipment blown up in Afghanistan was one of the funniest individual scenes I remember all decade.
7. WALL-E: best romantic comedy of the decade and ample evidence that Pixar can do no wrong. I really didn't enjoy Pixar through the whole Monsters Inc./Finding Nemo/Cars era, but since then? Movie magic.
8. Mad Men: could usurp the title of best show ever from The Wire, me thinks, and it's got an equally catchy theme song, too.
9. Metroid Prime 3: Nintendo had a pretty bad decade in my mind. All the soccer moms didn't think so, however, so my disgust in the company was fiscally rewarded when I sold my stock in Nintendo when it was at a near all-time high. Anyway, Metroid Prime 3 remains pretty much the only Wii game to actually make the Wii's gimicky motion-control pointer seem like a useful contribution to video-gaming, and, golly, it's a science-fiction shooter, too.
10. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker: not only is the game like playing a Saturday morning cartoon, but it was also another one of those games I ended up playing through with a bunch of kids freshman year of college. Nothing like staying up till four a.m. in the common room figuring out a dungeon while eating pizza in the dark.

You know, it's a wonder I found the time to do any real substantive work this past decade...