The Lists: Best Albums (300-201)

Image courtesy of Eric B. and Rakim

Here are numbers 300-201 in my all-time albums list.

The Lists: Best Albums (400-301)

Image courtesy of The Pogues.

Here are numbers 400-301 in my all-time albums list:

The Lists: Best Albums (500-401)

Image courtesy of Black Sabbath.

The third - previously, favorite books and TV shows - of my four all-time lists is the Top 500 Best Albums. I've broken the list down into five parts (500-401, 400-301, etc.) to make it a little easier to scroll through.

The albums on the list are primarily from the rock 'n' roll era - or, the 1950s through the present, although there are some jazz albums on here as well. With this list, I tried to both represent my own personal favorite albums as well as include records that I believe deserve to be on such a list.

Also, I've tried to represent as many eras and genres as possible, though I'll admit you won't find much country here, unless you include Johnny Cash. And there's not a whole lot of albums from the past five years or so and only a handful since the beginning of this century. Here are numbers 500-401:

Review: Her

Image courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.

Spike Jonze's funny, strange and melancholy "Her" is the perfect iRomance for our gadget-obsessed age. But not only is the director's latest an hilarious - and slightly disturbing, considering the implications - view of a world in which everything, including love, for some at least, involves a computer, it's also a forlornly rendered - and often lovely - take on the loss of love and loneliness.

We first meet Theodore Twombley (Joaquin Phoenix in, perhaps, his most sympathetic role to date) as he composes a romantic love letter to a person unknown. We soon find out that Theo, who lives in a not-so-distant future Los Angeles where high-waist paints are all the rage, works for a company that writes authentic-seeming letters for people and, as the picture opens, our guy is merely doing his job.

Theo is not so lucky in love. It is revealed through fragmented flashback images that he is in the midst of a divorce with his wife (Rooney Mara), who was his childhood sweetheart, and that he is living a mostly isolated and lonely existence. His only true friend is Amy (Amy Adams, terrific as ever), who is also married but has some problems of her own.

Our guy has few opportunities to connect, with the exception of a phone sex date that goes hilariously awry and an actual date with a friend of a friend that hardly goes better. Theo is confined to playing a virtual video game in his apartment that includes a foul-mouthed little alien who berates him. No, seriously, you have to see it to believe it.

One day while walking, Theo sees an advertisement for OS 1, a new operating system that can be tailor-made to its owner. He purchases one and is a bit disarmed at how quickly his system, which is named Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson), not only learns to communicate with him based on his needs and personality, but also can read a book in less than a second and gradually develops personality traits and feelings.

Theo strikes up a friendship with Samantha that becomes something much deeper, preferring her company to that of actual human companionship, which his soon-to-be-ex-wife is quick to point out. The story of "Her" may sound preposterous but, then again, so did "Being John Malkovich." Jonze is a filmmaker that takes outrageously wacky stories and gives them heart, soul and purpose.

Despite that the film is a love story between a human being and a gadget, I can't think of any other movie about love or relationships this year as profoundly thoughtful on those subjects. Theo will eventually face a harsh truth - and not an obvious one where you think the film may be leading you - and his discovery is handled poignantly and in a manner that feels true.

"Her" is one of the year's most unique films. It's one that captures the essence and difficulties of loneliness better than any other of recent memory - and yet, it's not a picture without hope. The movie has that off-the-wall sense of humor we've come to expect from Jonze as well as the bizarre plot, but the filmmaker tackles the subject in all seriousness.

And the film is even a bit unsettling in a recognizable way. During one particular sequence, Theo is sitting on the stairs leading down to a subway and in the middle of getting a piece of bad news. As he looks up, every single person exiting the subway is engaged with a piece of gadgetry, ignoring the rest of the world around them. It's no wonder poor Theo feels so gloomy - everybody is plugged in, but nobody is connecting.

The Lists: My Favorite Written Works

The second of my lists - last week, the best TV shows - is titled My Favorite Written Works because it includes novels, plays, poems and at least one piece of nonfiction.

The list is by no means my list of what I consider to be the greatest works ever written, although many of the titles are most certainly among them. Instead, this list represents the top 100 (plus 50 runners-up) works that have most inspired, influenced or helped to develop my love of reading.

That being said, this list will be the most incomplete of the lists (next week, best albums and, the following week, the great movies by decade as well as my favorite films of 2013). Obviously, it takes a lot longer to read a book than it does to watch a movie or listen to an album.

As is the case with all four lists I'm posting on this blog, this one is subject to updates. So, below I've listed a number of books considered to be great that I have on my list to read. As I make my way through them, they may or may not be added to the list.

Review: The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Image courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.

Peter Jackson's "The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug" is by no means a bad film, but this is a franchise that is gradually running lower on steam. I was impressed by the director's original "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, but thought that last year's "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" was good enough, while also being a little overlong and a bit more minor thematically.

This second entry into the LOTR prequel series is a little less inspired than its predecessor and appears to act mostly as a bridge between the first film and the finale, "There and Back Again," which is due one year from now.

For the sake of contrast, watch "Catching Fire," the second "Hunger Games" film, and, one the one hand, see how that film continues the story from the first film in its franchise and then sets the scene for the finale, but - on the other hand - actually further develops its characters, reinforces its themes while adding new ones and gives a fresh spin to the material, whereas "The Desolation of Smaug" comes off as just more of the same.

And by more of the same, I mean more epic, drawn-out battles, more creepy villains (although those spiders in the trees were kind of impressive), more dramatic line readings in fictional tongues, repeated references to places that mean something to the story's characters but not so much to anyone else and loads of expository dialogue.

That being said, "Smaug" is a better example of the big budget style of storytelling we've come to expect from our blockbusters and Jackson does it better than most. The film is littered with CGI effects and they are mostly impressive.

But what's missing in these "Hobbit" films, especially this second entry, is the heart and soul as well as the character development from the original trilogy. "Smaug" is, essentially, one narrow escape or battle after the next, but without a sense of purpose.

Review: Saving Mr. Banks

Image courtesy of  Walt Disney Pictures.

So, here's a genuine surprise: John Lee Hancock's "Saving Mr. Banks" is not exactly the feel-good making-of-a-movie film that you'd might expect. Yes, it has its heart-warming moments, yet the picture is not sentimental, but rather genuinely affecting. And, surprisingly, it's a bit more downbeat than I could have ever expected.

The film follows the turbulent process of bringing P.L. Travers' "Mary Poppins" to the big screen in the early 1960s. Emma Thompson plays Travers as a bit of a pill, a snooty English woman whose career has faded after her royalties have run out and dreads the idea of relying on an American film studio to restore her financially.

Tom Hanks is Walt Disney and, at first, he plays the iconic animator, director and studio head in the aw-shucks manner you might be expecting. That is, until he lays some heavy baggage on Travers late in the film. Between his terrific performance in "Captain Phillips" and some strong supporting work here as Disney, Hanks has, thankfully, reentered the realm of great acting after having kept a mostly low-key role as a producer, director and occasional performer during the past few years.

The struggle between Disney and Travers, who does not want the film of her novels to include cartoon figures and cheerful ditties, is coupled with a series of flashbacks as Travers grows up poor with her well-meaning, but alcoholic failure of a father (Colin Farrell), in early 20th century Australia. This story sheds some light on why Travers is so difficult in matters of handing off her beloved Mary to Disney and his team of writers, which includes Jason Schwartzman and Bradley Whitford.

As I've said, for a movie that aims to be an Oscar crowd pleaser - you know, the type of film about moviemaking that has scored the top prize during the past two Academy Awards ceremonies, "Saving Mr. Banks" goes to some dark places. This is yet another movie about an artist - or, in this case, two artists - at work, but also an exploration of how their histories have shaped and inspired their art. At one point in the film, Travers insists that Disney appropriate the gravitas of her novels into the movie version. It's nice to see that Hancock has respected that wish in his own film about the making of that movie.