This Is Not a Year-End List

Non-List by Matthew Webber

I won’t be writing a top-ten list this year. It’s not that I didn’t hear ten songs, buy ten CDs, or watch ten movies in 2004 I liked more than others, it’s that I know there are at least ten great works of art in each medium I missed.

–I don’t get MTV anymore, and my hometown only has three non-talk or -country stations, so I know I’ve missed a glut of recent non-Maroon 5 singles.

–I didn’t buy or hear every critically acclaimed album, or even all the albums by artists I already like – I just didn’t have the money or enough cool friends with CD burners.

–Here’s the one top-ten list I’ll allow myself to make, in no particular order, of Movies I Wanted to See In 2005 That Could Very Well Have Appeared on My Top-Ten List of Films If I Were to Make One, But I Live In a One-Theater Town That Pretty Much Only Shows Cartoons and Movies With Gore and/or Jesus In Them, So I Didn’t, Which Sucks: Sideways, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Million Dollar Baby, Closer, Finding Neverland, I (Heart) Huckabees, Hotel Rwanda, Maria Full of Grace, The Aviator (The Aviator! A Martin Scorsese picture with the Titanic kid!), and Kinsey (which is now my theater’s lone artsy film). There’s no way I could justify making a list of the top-ten movies of the year without being able to consider some of this year’s most praised films. I’m sure I’d regret such a list a month later, after my theater has finally replaced all of its Christmas movies.

I tried to participate in the yearly critical tradition, I really did. But the week I e-mailed some tentative top-ten lists to friends was the week I finally bought Brian Wilson’s Smile and saw Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset, thereby rendering my Smile- and ¬Before Sunset-less lists moot. Smile is brilliant, by the way, and not just in a “Well, it’s not as bad I expected” kind of way or with a “This Prince/Morrissey/David Bowie album isn’t complete shit” sigh of relief. It’s the type of album a Pet Sounds fan should kill for. If you don’t smile upon listening to it, you might have been killed. And the dialogue in Before Sunset seems more realistic than most actual conversations I’ve had. And I’m now in love with Julie Delpy.

But you’ll never know where these works of art would rank on a list – only because I myself don’t know yet. I do know they’d rank high, though. Hell, with 20 more listens, Smile could be number one – or maybe Loretta Lynn’s Van Lear Rose and Nellie McKay’s Get Away From Me would continue duking it out; or Kanye West and Franz Ferdinand, the top two artists whose albums I haven’t heard all the way through yet.

The one decision of which I am 100-percent certain is that no film could possibly budge Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind from its perch. I walked out of the theater, as I do maybe once every three years, feeling so emotionally wracked I must have just seen the Greatest Movie of All Time. These Great Films are always the right movie at the right time of my life, but the emotional honesty in Eternal Sunshine ensures I would have loved it even had I not suffered a breakup in the week prior.

Oh. My single of the year? Britney Spears’ “Toxic.” Don’t try to argue.