In One Year and Out the Other

The obligatory retrospective for 2005…

• Tom Cruise’s re-enactment of Rosemary’s Baby with Katie Holmes as the unwitting counterpart.  “Tom, I just saw Chris and he’s saying that smelly herb in the necklace you gave me for Christmas isn’t a good luck charm, but something called tanis root”  “Shh…Calm down Katie…. drink some of this tea the scientologists made up for you…”  


• Favorite movie: Serenity.  Simply put, if you like sci-fi at all, this movie housed the last handful of Star wars and Star Trek movies.  Joss Whedon was forced to condense what he had in mind for 5+ seasons of Firefly into 2 hours, and the results were phenomenal.


• Most Regretable Movie: Bewitched.  Say what you will about House of Wax or Deuce Bigalow 2, but if you didn’t know they were going to be atrocious from the first sniff, you got the lesson you deserved.  Wife and I needed to kill a couple hours one day before meeting friends, we figured a Kidman-Ferrell comedy might do the trick, but oh my.  Starts off fair, but then lands itself with House On Haunted Hill on my “almost decent-movies until the interns wrapped up the final 45 minutes” list.


• Most powerful event: Katrina wiping out New Orleans.  Nuff said.  New Orleans v3.0 will be something to keep an eye on.  The city may just jump full on into an attempt to compete with Vegas.  


• Terrell Owens Terrell Owens Terrell Owens Terrell Owens Terrell Owens Terrell Owens Terrell Owens Terrell Owens Terrell Owens Terrell Owens Terrell Owens Terrell Owens Terrell Owens Terrell Owens Terrell Owens Terrell Owens Terrell Owens Terrell Owens Terrell Owens Terrell Owens Terrell Owens Terrell Owens Terrell Owens Terrell Owens


• Favorite Surprise: SNL’s Lazy Sunday sketch (The Chronic-What!-cles of Narnia video), which immediately leaps into their all-time top ten.  Honestly, I’d peg it higher, but I don’t want to risk forgetting something.  If Nl wanted me to give them a second chance, this was a fantastic start.


• Most Upsetting Surprise:  The wheels falling off The Chappelle Show.  I’d put in another Arrested Development mention, but it was coming for a while.  Dave Chappelle pulling out of his own show shocked as many people as it disheartened.  


• Hooray for John McCain and the others in Congress who rightfully raked MLB over coals for their ostrich approach to steroids.  On the other hand, let’s hope it ends there and they don’t follow through on their threats to go after the BCS system.  They need to nail the NBA refs first…


• I’m happy to see the 2005 year in music go.  Sadly, the music industry continues to battle its consumers rather than try to put out a good product.  IMHO, the popular music scene has slipped into garbage since its brief renaissance in 1992-6.  That Mariah Carey could come back and be the year’s biggest seller speaks volumes.  Sony’s despicable decision to load its CDs with autoexecuting spyware and malware left hundreds to thousands of unaware buyers vulnerable to hackers by opening up backdoors into computers.  Thank god for iTunes, because I doubt I’ll ever purchase another CD again after this.  


• Most horrifying song of the year: My Humps by the Black Eyed Peas.  There was a time when this was a fantastic group, in the vein of Jurrasic 5, Tribe, De La Soul, and the Roots.  But then they sold their soul, brought in Fergie to get on MTV, and now this is what they’ve become.  RIP.


• Most amusing: Jennifer Aniston hitting up every magazine cover and television spot she could to tell everyone that she’s tired of having to bring up Brad Pitt.  I’m sure that Jessica Simpson will be right behind her.