The waiting is the hardest part: 32 of our most anticipated 2010 entertainments

by Leonard Pierce & the A.V. Club gang

1. The return of Chuck (premières January 10)
Almost as soon as Chuck’s much-improved second season began last year, speculation about its fate raged; in spite of a major reboot that included attention to serialized show elements; a much looser, funnier ensemble; and an unabashed embrace of nerdtastic pop-culture references, the show wasn’t drawing a crowd. Websites with “Save Chuck” headlines popped up all over the place, and star Zachary Levi orchestrated an outing to show-sponsor Subway that numbered in the hundreds. Finally, at almost the 11th hour, NBC came through with a third-season order, and show-runner Josh Schwartz has ensured it will thank supporters in a big way. Just when the Chuck’s-on-the-sidelines formula was growing stale, Schwartz shook things up by imprinting Chuck with a host of new spy skills—à la The Matrix—and thus Levi will be at center stage again. Expect many Casey witticisms, too.

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The Year In Television: 45 Indelible Moments from 2009

by Leonard Pierce & the A.V. Club gang

When the regular TV Club crew started batting around ideas for how best to wrap up the year in television, we quickly nixed a list of the best series or the best episodes, since we’d already covered a lot of that territory with our Best Of The ’00s lists. So instead, here’s a look at some of the moments that stuck with us in 2009: some moving, some shocking, some thrilling, some embarrassing. Collectively, these make the case for why we turn on our TVs every night, ever-hopeful that we’ll get to see something unforgettable.

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Andrew Osborne’s 2009 Top Tens!

MOVIES

So, I recently contributed my picks for the best movies of the decade to a list on Nerve.com, and it was fun to reflect on the 21^st century’s impressive cinematic yield to date, from Almost Famous (2000) to Young@Heart (2008), and especially the bumper crop years like 2001 (The Royal Tennenbaums, Ghost World, Mulholland Drive, etc.) and 2007 (There Will Be Blood, Juno, No Country For Old Men, etc.).  

Tellingly, no films from the past year scored Best of Decade honors on the aforementioned list…which is not to say 2009 was a bad movie year, exactly.  In fact, picking the following Top Ten was difficult because many of the films I saw in the last 365 days were pretty damn good (if not great) works of high-level craftsmanship from old reliables and talented newcomers. 

Dear 2009…

by Hayden Childs

While I have to agree with the voices who say that you weren’t the worst at your job, I’m afraid that even when taking all of the positives on your resume into account, we cannot discount the frequent black marks against your performance.

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Nick Schager Reviews Sherlock Holmes

Like a jaunty, boozy, fisticuffing night spent at a nineteenth-century cockney brothel, Sherlock Holmes rocks and rambles, steams and swings, bounces and blazes with the type of electricity it wasn’t clear director Guy Ritchie was capable of generating. Kickstarted by a jangly old world-new world score that oozes breathless verve, Ritchie’s vision of the renowned sleuth is in fact an assured reinvention, imagining Holmes as a frazzled mastermind with theatrical flair, martial arts skills and a voluminous intellect that he naturally employs in the service of mystery-solving. Ritchie’s film opens with a fleet-footed race through the dark, grimy London streets and catacombs to arrive at a black magic ceremony orchestrated by murderous Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong), whom Holmes and trusty sidekick Dr. Watson (Jude Law) – a voice of good sense and, thus, the bickering foil to loose-cannon Sherlock – ably foil. This success, however, is only a beginning in Michael Robert Johnson, Anthony Peckham and Simon Kinberg’s live-wire script, which proceeds to briskly map out not only its protagonists’ siblings-soulmates relationship but also tease out the true nefariousness afoot, which revolves around the executed Lord Blackwood’s apparent rise from the grave and subsequent plot to use the dark arts to seize control of jolly old England and, thereafter, the world.

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The Decade’s Most Overrated & Disappointing Movies

by Andrew Osborne

I’ll be including my picks for this year’s most overrated and/or disappointing movies in my upcoming 2009 Top Ten list, but in the meantime, what the heck…how ‘bout yet another end-of-the-aughts retrospective, with a look back at some of the other films in the past ten years where my expectations were  apparently not sufficiently lowered… 

Scott Von Doviak Reviews The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus

You know a filmmaker’s stock has hit rock bottom when you’d rather watch a documentary about his failure to mount a production than actually sit through a new film directed by him. That’s where things stand with Terry Gilliam, whose greatest contribution to cinema over the past decade was his starring role in Lost in La Mancha, a behind-the-scenes look at the collapse of his planned epic, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. For a while there, following the sudden death of star Heath Ledger, it looked like The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus might have its plug pulled as well, but Gilliam managed to keep his financing in place by landing a trio of stars (Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell) to fill in the blanks. We might even be happy for him, if only he’d gotten back to the business of coherent filmmaking.

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Best Films of the 2000s: Scott Von Doviak’s List

The communal Nerve list is linked elsewhere; here’s my personal ballot, plus honorable mentions.

Best Films of the 2000s: Andrew Osborne’s List

So, yesterday, Scott, Phil and I posted our Top 20 movies of the past decade for Nerve, and now, for those what am interested, I hereby post my own personal list, along with some Honorable Mentions Nerve apparently didn’t have the bandwidth to include…

The 20 Best Films of the 2000s!!!!!

by Phil Nugent, Andrew Osborne & Scott Von Doviak

Most cinephiles agreed that 1999 was the best movie year in recent memory — perhaps one of the all-time greats. It seemed to bode well for the decade to come, but alas, the hoped-for golden age never materialized. While independent distributors were crushed by the economic squeeze, the major studios grew ever more reliant on sequels, remakes, reboots, videogame and comic-book adaptations, and everything else beloved by teenagers with plenty of free time and disposable income. But while the decade as a whole may have been a train wreck, your Nerve brain trust had a fine time plundering the wreckage for twenty souvenirs well worth keeping.

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