Tim Mitchell tried his best to work within the format that we gave him for our year-end list but it didn’t work out so well. But being fierce nerds, we know that sometimes you have to go’on ahead an let a square peg be a square peg. So here’s Tim Mitchell’s picks for best and worst of everything in all of its contrarian glory.  Best/Worst Book of the Year: KILLING LINCOLN, by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard. Why It’s The Worst: Because O’Reilly, a self-proclaimed devotee of Lincoln, finally gets around to co-authoring a book about the Civil War president and then proceeds to get facts wrong–many, many, many facts wrong. Why It’s The Best: Who else can screw up the facts in a historical book, make the bestseller list regardless of how bad it is, and then reflexively blame the “liberal” media for his own intellectual ineptitude? (That is, who else other than Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Michele Malkin, Sarah Palin, Andrew Breitbart, etc.) Keep it classy, O’Reilly. Honorable Mention: THE SNOW ANGEL, by Glenn Beck and Nicole Baart. Yep, the guy who promotes one paranoid, unfounded conspiracy theory after another has also co-authored a heart-warming family Christmas drama. It’s like finding out that Senator Joseph McCarthy liked to paint adorable pictures of kittens, puppies and teddy bears in his spare time.   Best/Worst Movie of the Year: JACK AND JILL Why It’s The Worst: There is not enough room anywhere for me to explain why I think JACK AND JILL is the worst movie of 2011 — actually, the fact that Al Pacino is in this movie and he never gets a single opportunity to go full Scarface on Sandler is proof enough. Why It’s The Best: It’s the best example from 2011...

FIERCELY ANTICIPATING: HALLOWEEN I’m a horror film fan — of course I’m looking forward to Halloween! This is the one time during the year where many of the things that make my freak flag fly–ghosts, skeletons, giant spiders, zombies, tombstones, and haunted houses–are not only considered acceptable decorum in both public and private settings, they are actively encouraged. I’ve lost track of how many spur-of-the-moment stores I’ve seen pop up this time of year to sell masks, costumes and all sorts of props, and some companies have even launched lines of Halloween tree ornaments, which opens up all sorts of new possibilities for eerie self-expression. It’s almost as if the horror sections of bookstores, libraries and video rental businesses break out of their (ab)normal dwellings and seize control of the public sphere for a few weeks. It’s glorious. (Of course, I never let seasonal restrictions stop me from indulging in ghoulish glee. My wife and I put up two gargoyles in our front lawn for one Halloween. Not only did we never take them down, we went out and got four more, and our gaggle of gargoyles is still on display to this day. I also picked up some eyeball ornaments but since we don’t put up our tree until December, they go up with the rest of the ornaments then. Thus, if you ever see our Christmas tree, don’t be surprised to find it staring back at you.) No one is required to subject themselves to anything scary on Halloween, but to me there’s something very refreshing and genuine about a holiday that openly combines fear and fun. We live in a scary enough world as it is, and sometimes the best way to cope with that is to actively engage the most...

FIERCELY ANTICIPATING Disney Cartoons in 3D Let me be up front about this: I am not an ardent fan of Disney cartoons. When it comes to feature-length animated entertainment, I usually prefer stuff from Pixar and Hayao Miyazaki over stuff from the House of Mouse. (The one notable exception to this rule of mine is The Emperor’s New Groove, which captures the absurd, slapstick comedy style of the old Warner Brothers’ Looney Tunes shorts better than any other animated movie that I can recall.) However, this little piece of news caught my attention the other week, and I’ve been pondering its potential awesomeness ever since: This fall, Disney will re-release Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King in the 3D Blu-ray format. Disney’s decision to convert two of its most popular films to 3D clearly stems from Hollywood’s current love affair with 3D movies. Many of this summer’s big-budget blockbusters are being released in 3D, and older 2D films such as the Star Wars movies and Titanic are being converted to 3D for re-release on the big screen. Yet what makes these Blu-ray releases by Disney distinct is that this is the first time I have heard of a major film company performing post-production 2D to 3D conversions to hand-drawn animated films. Both of these films used CGI technology to augment some of the hand-drawn animation, and I’m sure that this involvement of CGI played at least some part in Disney’s selection of these two particular titles for 3D conversion (as opposed to, say, Snow White or Bambi). Nevertheless, both Beauty and the Beast and Lion King are essentially 2D hand-drawn animated films, so I’m curious to see how Disney will add depth to flat, cell-animated drawings. There have been other attempts in...

Fiercely Anticipating PROMETHEUS There are many films coming out in the next few months that I’m eager to see, films such as Scream 4, Captain America, and the last Harry Potter film. However, the film that really catches my interest is one that’s not coming out until 2012: Ridley Scott’s next film, Prometheus. Prometheus was originally slated to be a prequel to Scott’s Alien from 1979. What little I know of the plot of Prometheus sounds much like Alien in that it involves a human crew of space travelers and some kind of ancient and unmistakably extraterrestrial presence. In the time since the announcement of its pre-production, Prometheus has gone from being a prequel to Alien, to not being a prequel to Alien, to being a sort-of prequel to Alien that takes place in the same narrative universe but has nothing to do with the characters and events in the Alien movies, to not having anything to do with Alien at all. At this point, what Prometheus has to do or not do with Alien matters little to me; instead, the fact that Scott is returning to the realm of futuristic deep space horror has me giddy like a teeny bopper at a Justin Bieber concert. Even though it wasn’t a blockbuster on the scale of Star Wars or Avatar, there’s a reason why Alien inspired three sequels, two spin-offs, dozens of comic books, novels and video games, and countless rip-offs: it’s because the title creature is so unique, exquisite, and absolutely bug-nuts weird that monster movie fans keep coming back for more. Through Alien, Scott made the inspired choice to bring the disturbing, erotic artistic style of H.R. Giger into the public eye. Not only did Giger provide the look of the alien...