We here at Hooray For Anything would like to initiate a new, weekly feature. This is the "SF Bay Guardian Bonehead Column of the Week." For those outside of San Francisco, the Bay Guardian is a particularly annoying free alternative weekly that everyone in the city reads because it's free yet nobody actually likes. You know what kind of paper I'm talking about- the kind with hipper than thou cultural reviews, ultra P.C. outlook, and super-fantasy land liberal viewpoint (the kind of view that runs something like we should tax every business in San Francisco to give money to every performance artist in the City because it's more important to have bad performance artists than a good economy and that way all of the writer's friends will be able to actually quit Starbucks). Because the paper is just so annoying and yet so addicting to read (kind of a love hate thing, like why I watched "Beverly Hills 90201" when it aired- up until Dylan leaving due to his new wife being accidentally killed by her Mafioso father of course). Anyways, the point of this is to pick apart the blatant stupidity and masturbatory wankiness that makes up the Bay Guardian.

And away we go-

This week's "SF Bay Guardian Bonehead Column of the Week" is actually about the entire issue. It's the Bay Guardian's 2001 "The Year in Film" issue. In it, all of the film critics, editors, and essayists get to post a Top 10 list of their favorite movies of the year. The lists are always a variation of the "huh, what the hell is that movie, I've never heard of it?" type lists so favored by reviewers of their ilk. Just reading through the list, I think I've heard of at least four or five of them. And we're talking at least 10 lists with each 10 movies in it, so that's a lot of movies. Heard of this one: "The Century's Great Catastrophe' Amrerica's Disaster: The Pearl Harbor of the 21st Century" by various Directors (Alvin Lu's top pick). Or this one: "Werckmeister Harmonies?" (another top movie of the year by an editor). Not surpassingly, most of the movies listed are foreign because there were no good American movies made this year (which is kind of true, but that's another story). But this American movie made the list- "Ballad of a Soldier" as did "Radio Free Steve." Heard of those?
All of this should prove a general rule for movie reviewers, that if a movie airs at 2 in the morning at a film festival, it doesn't make it necessarily a great movie. And, as always, just because you can name movies that only three or four other people have ever heard of, you are not really, really cool. In fact, I'd be willing to be most of the people who put their lists together have probably seen "Lord of the Rings" at least as many times as I have (twice), but couldn't, of course, admit it because where's the fun in admitting that when you can praise the beauty of a Hungarian documentary.

Strangely, Terry Zwigoff's "Ghost World," a movie in which one of the anti-heroes is kind of a pathetic loser who collects really obscure blues records, is one of the few American movies that made several lists. The Bay Guardian is not known for it's sense of irony.