Posts Tagged ‘best of the decade’

Top 10 Canadian albums of the decade

By macleans.ca - Sunday, December 13, 2009 - 41 Comments

Maclean’s writers pick the records they never got sick of hearing

10. Feist – The Reminder (2007)
For all the excitement and self-congratulation that defined the decade in Canadian music, these 10 years may ultimately be remembered for two records (Arcade Fire’s Funeral and Broken Social Scene’s You Forgot It In People) and one star (Feist). The potential for stardom was clearly there when Leslie Feist emerged with Let It Die. But she surpassed all imagination with The Reminder, a seductive pop record that was at once charming and eccentric, of the iPod moment and timeless. (Aaron Wherry)

9. The Constantines – Shine A Light (2003)
With a burst of frantic, jagged guitar on opening stomper “National Hum,” The Constantines leave no doubt they’re intent on making a racket. And what a glorious racket it turns out to be. Shine A Light is that exceptional album that’s as smart as it is intense. From the brooding menace of “Nightime/Anytime (It’s Alright)” to the rumbling, Springsteen-esque “On to You,” there’s a rare depth to the urgency of their music. It’s soulful rock ‘n roll that proves loud doesn’t have to mean dumb. (Philippe Gohier)

8. Sam Roberts – The Inhuman Condition (2002)
Sam Roberts kick-started the summer of 2002 with the bongo-heavy single “Brother Down.” Soon after, Roberts was shuttled into the studio with major label money—and it’s been a jam-band, epic, psychedelic, anthemic rock party ever since. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But the first EP, featuring six straight-ahead infectious pop-laced rock ditties, heralded one of the most exciting—and unabashedly Canadian—new voices of the decade. (Shanda Deziel)

7. Tangiers – Hot New Spirits (2003)
For awhile there, Toronto was a pretty weird place to live: SARS, a garbage-strewn civic strike, the final days of Mel Lastman, a blackout that became an excuse to party. All the while, the city’s music was starting to reassert itself. Hot New Spirits is the lost gem of that time—an anxious, nervy, joyous announcement to the world. Other bands would come to define the scene and the decade, but this is what it sounded like before we knew where we were going. (Aaron Wherry)

6. Sarah Harmer – You Were Here (2000)
Sarah Harmer’s “Lodestar” is like a Tom Thomson painting set to music, a gorgeous portrait of a “great black night” and a fateful canoe trip. For that alone, You Were Here deserves to be one of the best Canadian albums of at least the last decade. But Harmer also proved that both her singing and songwriting shine through no matter the subject or genre, whether it’s jaunty pop, swinging jazz, guitar rock or bluegrass. She’s likely the only performer who’s covered both the Beastie Boys and Dolly Parton in her live set, and she deserves an MVP award for her generous spirit with artists both greater and smaller than herself. You Were Here shows off all her good sides; it’s hard to imagine there’s anything else. (Michael Barclay)

5. Wolf Parade – Apologies To The Queen Mary (2005)
This Montreal band’s debut album revealed an obsession with ghosts and a penchant for danceable indie rock. The two songwriters, guitarist Dan Boeckner and keyboardist Spencer Krug, laid themselves bare, whether on the daddy-issues track, “You Are a Runner and I Am My Father’s Son,” or the ecstatic closer “This Heart’s on Fire.” Four years later, all 12 tracks sound just as poignant and powerful as the first time you heard them. (Shanda Deziel)

4. New Pornographers – Mass Romantic (2000)
The word ‘supergroup’ usually conjures up images of Crobsy, Stills, Nash and Young, or for the truly-depraved, Asia. Yet this Vancouver octet—pieced together from local scenesters including Dan Bejar (Destroyer) Carl (A.C.) Newman and Neko Case—definitely qualifies. Their 2000 debut, Mass Romantic, blends power pop, Beach Boys-style harmonies, and some wickedly catchy tunes. Bonus points: The Fubar-themed video for “My Slow Descent in Alcoholism.”  (Jonathon Gatehouse)

3. Black Mountain – Black Mountain (2005)
It’s entirely possible the members of Black Mountain have never heeded Bob Dylan’s clarion call from “Rainy Day Women” (“Everybody must get stoned!”), but you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise based on their self-titled debut. That said, unlike all too many of their psychedelic, stoner-rock brethren, what makes Black Mountain stand out is their willingness to exercise restraint. The album is heavy and heady, but never gets weighed down by its proggy leanings. Standouts “Modern Music,” with its catchy “1-2-3, another pop explosion” chorus, “No Satisfaction,” with its blissed-out campfire vibe, and the swaggering, bluesy “Druganaut” show a band with impressive range—and the good sense not to overindulge it. (Philippe Gohier)

2. Broken Social Scene – You Forgot It In People (2002)
This is family values. This is it all coming together. The result is a seminal indie rock record. And in that achievement it became clear just how much was possible, launching a mid-decade renaissance for the Canadian music scene. The sight and sound of these friends and lovers crowding on stage together to make music defined the messy rush of wonderment that followed. (Aaron Wherry)

  • Top 10 Canadian movies of the decade

    By Brian D. Johnson - Saturday, December 12, 2009 at 10:05 AM - 48 Comments

    Using the Genie Awards criteria, I’ve confined the list to Canadian productions or co-productions. Not eligible are movies merely directed by Canadians, such as A History of Violence, Eastern Promises, Juno, Up in the Air and Avatar.

    10. Manufactured Landscapes (2007)
    Travelling to China, director Jennifer Baichwal looked over the shoulder of photographer Edward Burtynsky as he found haunting beauty in epic landscapes of industrial ruin and mass production. The film is a portrait of the artist, a magnification of his already larger-than-life art, and an exercise in perspective that shows us the moving picture outside his frame. Cinematographer Peter Mettler, whose Gambling, Gods and LSD almost made this list, holds his own with Burtynsky in composing visual poetry. Another film about manufactured landscapes that’s equally deserving is Yung Chang’s Up the Yangtze (2008), a documentary on China’s Three Gorges Dam.

    9. Polytechnique (2009)
    Dramatizing the 1989 Montreal Massacre at École Polytechnique might appear to be impossible and unadvisable. But Quebec filmmaker Denis Villeneuve—whose Maelström and La turbulence des fluides narrowly missed ending up on this list—pulled it off with a stark, contemplative film that explores the horror without exploiting it. Filming in black-and-white, but mostly shades of wintry grey, largely ignoring the killer, Villeneuve focuses on two composite students. My colleague Mark Steyn suggested the film was an apology for the passivity of the men, concluding “you can’t make art out of such a world.” But like Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, Villeneuve’s art succeeds precisely because, unlike Steyn, he doesn’t mine the tragedy to draw a moral lesson.

    8. Water (2005)
    Following Fire and Earth, Deepa Mehta’s gorgeous period romance finessed a complex trilogy about women’s oppression in India, and it’s her finest film. Although it’s an unabashed romantic melodrama, it’s composed with an elegant eye and subtle, well-grounded performances. Water also performed a rare feat—a subtitled Hindi-language film became a box-office success in this country, then went on to get an Oscar nod, reminding us that popular Canadian cinema doesn’t have to be in English or French, or even shot in this country.

    7. Spider (2002)
    It’s the last film David Cronenberg shot before making a more mainstream breakthrough with A History of Violence and Eastern Promises. It’s relentlessly bleak, and it’s no surprise that virtually no one saw it. But Spider, starring a gnarly Ralph Fiennes as a schizophrenic who arrives at a halfway house after 20 years in institutions, is a brilliant psychological drama. With its chilling tableaus of industrial landscape, it’s also a fine-tuned portrait of the repressed desire and quiet desperation that are embedded like mildewed wallpaper into the English psyche.

    6. Dying At Grace (2003)
    Allan King, who died last year, was one of the world’s great vérité documentary filmmakers, making his name with excoriating portraits of raw psychology, such as Warrendale and Scenes of a Marriage. With Dying at Grace, like an explorer plumbing the outer limits of human experience, he takes the camera to a place it’s never been, as he films patients breathing their last breath in a palliative care ward. The film is not easy to watch, but there’s not a whiff of voyeurism. King, a director who makes a virtue of his own invisibility, gives us a work of pure cinema and captures the dying of the light.

    5. C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005)
    Quebec director Jean-Marc Vallée achieved a rare combination of wild artistic ambition and box-office success with this ’60s story about a young man growing up in working-class Montreal, infatuated with David Bowie, and struggling with his sexual identity. In the tradition of Léolo, it’s a poetic coming-of-age story set in the cultural vortex of Quebec’s not-so-Quiet Revolution, where Catholicism and psychedelia combine like nitroglycerin. Vallée took a huge gamble by building a major scene set in a church on Sympathy for Devil, then paid the Stones a small fortune for the rights—which still did not include America, thus thwarting U.S. distribution. Pity. Showing remarkable versatility, Vallée went on to direct a very different period film about a troubled adolescent, The Young Victoria.

    4. My Winnipeg (2008)
    Unfolding as an Oedipal fever dream, Guy Maddin’s love-hate portrait of his hometown mixes surreal memoir, faux documentary and actual documentary. With such seamless trompe l’oeil, it’s downright impossible to know, or care, which is which. That “archival” shot of horses frozen in the ice of the Red River looks so convincing. All of Maddin’s work is witty, virtuosic, and teeming with ideas, but this is his one masterpiece that is also utterly accessible, deeply moving, and laugh-out-loud funny.

    3.  Barbarian Invasions (2003)
    Reuniting actors from The Decline of The American Empire, it’s Denys Arcand’s finest work. Sometimes, Arcand lets intellectual ambition upstage emotion, but this symphonic ensemble piece moves gracefully from sweeping social satire to tender tragedy. The terminally-ill woman who seeks to end her life in the company of her friends, Marie Josée Croze, is a revelation.

    2. Away From Her (2007)
    Such an unlikely feat. While still in her 20s, Sarah Polley made her feature directing debut with an intimate tale of elder romance that drew pitch-perfect, career-capping performances from Gordon Pinsent and Julie Christie. Adapting and expanding on Alice Munro’s story, it’s one of those rare CanLit adaptations that works. Unlike most of the other titles on this list, it’s a conventional, unadorned narrative. But with its oddly uplifting story of a woman suffering from Alzheimer’s who forgets she has a husband, it is more exotic than it sounds. Polley locates a core of indelible romance in the heart of a vanishing marriage.

  • The best of the decade

    By macleans.ca - Thursday, December 10, 2009 at 2:21 PM - 0 Comments

    We’ve selected the best in Canadian cinema, books, music and television

    It’s nearly impossible to winnow down the best in Canadian culture from the past 10 years, but we asked our critics to do just that and will be publishing their selections over the next four days. Click on a button below to discover Maclean’s picks for the best Canadian television shows, books, movies, and music.

  • Top 10 Canadian TV shows of the decade

    By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, December 10, 2009 at 12:56 PM - 71 Comments

    Our critic picks the English-language shows from the past 10 years that kept him glued to the small screen

    10. Clone High (2002 – 2003)
    This one-season wonder was created by Bill Lawrence (Scrubs) as a Canada-U.S. co-production, but the U.S. partner dropped the show so quickly that only Canadians saw the full series. A parody of sitcoms, high school shows, and world history, it featured a premise-explaining theme song, characters based on JFK, Cleopatra and Gandhi, and a robot who talked like Mr. Belvedere. Even with an American creator, how could it not make the list?

    9. Mantracker (2006 – )
    Schlocky, cheesoid TV needs to be represented on a list like this. The obvious choice is the story of Terry Grant, a bad-ass horse-riding, hat-wearing, bearded cowboy who spends every episode hunting down a team of city-dwellers released into the wild. It’s basically the Most Dangerous Game on horseback, or Dog the Bounty Hunter without all the Christian moralizing. In other words, something you feel guilty for kind of enjoying.

    8. Kenny vs. Spenny (2003 – )
    A combination of reality competition and sitcom, this show about two mismatched buddies (a neat nut and an evil schemer, like a Canadian Odd Couple) show Kenny and Spenny doing various humiliating things every week in a desperate attempt to one-up each other. Many episodes feature the evil Kenny destroying his supposed friend through deceit, trickery and blatant cheating. When Trey Parker and Matt Stone joined the show as producers, it seemed to suggest what we already knew already: these guys are the new Cartman and Butters.

    7. Life With Derek (2005 – 2009)
    Canada has produced a number of “tween” comedies (Naturally Sadie, Radio Free Roscoe, The Latest Buzz) that were considerably better-acted and better-written than their counterparts on the Disney Channel or Nickelodeon. This Family Channel show, about a blended family that—unlike the Brady Bunch—can’t get along, was perhaps the best of the bunch, a throwback to real-world family problems in a TV landscape increasingly dominated by escapism. It was like Step By Step with people who aren’t disgusting.

    6. The Hour (2005 – )
    Though The Rick Mercer Report was the ‘00s most obvious answer to The Daily Show, George Stroumboulopoulos comes closer to matching Jon Stewart’s appeal: a comedian and “personality” performer conducting interviews with many serious, earnest people. After years of interviewers who were totally serious and earnest themselves, or talk-show hosts who only interviewed second-rank entertainers, seeing “Strombo” chat it up with James Cameron or Barbara Walters demonstrated that Canadian talk shows could successfully follow the U.S. template.

    5. Corner Gas (2004 – 2009)
    With the success of Brent Butt’s half-hour comedy about wacky small-town Saskatchewan residents, we saw how Canadians can step into the breach and do things the U.S. isn’t doing—in this case, rural comedy. The show also took techniques that had become common in U.S. single-camera comedy, like sudden cutaways and flashbacks, and brought them into the Canadian mainstream. It was about a place where life moves slowly, but it helped Canadian shows move a lot faster.

    4. Durham County (2007 – )
    A mashup of cop shows and American Beauty-type stories about the hidden evil of suburbs, this drama starred Hugh Dillon as a big-city cop who tries to start a new life in suburbia, only to discover there’s lots of murdering and depravity going on. Though the second season was not as strong as the first, it was The Movie Network‘s most interesting attempt to do a show in the style of its U.S. counterpart, HBO.

    3. Trailer Park Boys (2001 – 2008)
    One of the most influential and successful comedy shows of the era, this mock-documentary show about a bunch of beer-swilling lowlifes premiered in 2001, leading to a seven-season run and two films. In mining comedy from the adventures of people who are basically horrible, it preceded shows like It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, and it was doing fake documentary comedy before Arrested Development and The Office made it cool again.

    2. Slings & Arrows (2003 – 2006)
    A Canadian show so good that international viewers don’t know it’s Canadian. A comedy-drama about the pressures of putting on a play at an artistically-compromised, financially-strapped Shakespeare festival, the show was both an inside look at the insanity of show business and a universal story about the things that go wrong in any workplace. It helped that the great cast was full of big names like Paul Gross and co-creator Mark McKinney (Kids in the Hall) and big names to be, like Rachel McAdams. The three seasons of the show were so successful they led to the ultimate compliment any show can receive: a foreign remake, the Brazilian Som e Fúria.

From Macleans