It’s a cold December night, less than a week from Christmas. The third Friday of Advent, to be exact. In two days, I’m going home. Home to Kansas for the holidays.

Following in the footsteps of Fraulein Maria (and Oprah too, I suppose), here are a few of the things that have been my favorites in 2008.

Wendy and Lucy is an unexpected tour-de-force. It’s probably the simplest, cheapest, and shortest film to be receiving accolades this awards season (AFI just named it one of the top ten movies of the year), but it’s also one of the most surprisingly affecting.

Yesterday I read this Newsweek article that attempts to debunk the apparently misguided biblical argument against gay marriage. I will say nothing more about it, except that the article hammered home one major point: Christianity and the Bible are frightfully misunderstood.

This is sort of my pre-emptive excuse for not including any documentaries on my “best films of 2008” list (coming later in the month). Plus, I have such respect for the documentary form (i.e. “nonfiction film”) that I think it deserves its own best-of-the-year list. So, without further ado, here are my picks for the five best documentaries of 2008.

It's December, which on this blog means one thing: end-of-year lists! There will be lists for every variety of media in the weeks to come, culminating on December 29 and 31 with my top ten albums and movies, respectively. I'm kicking it off today with my pick for the 20 best songs of 2008. This list is not a collection of obvious singles or hits, but simply the best individual songs (in my opinion) that have come out in 2008. They include flashy pop dance songs, eccentric indie rock, and at least two songs from Kanye West. They were the most-played songs on my iPod in 2008, and they are all available to buy ala carte on iTunes (well worth the 99 cents). This is the ultimate 08 playlist!

Though Thanksgiving is not a part of the liturgical season of Advent, I think it fits perfectly as segue or entry point into this period of the church calendar.

In saying “no” to gay marriage I am really just saying yes to the moral system of restraint, discipline and piety that I believe is God’s best plan for humanity.

We need restraint. We need to be more disciplined. We need to rediscover the beauty of not getting things we want. We need to re-introduce ourselves to the ascetic life. We need to deny ourselves daily.

Just when I had almost purged the memory from my mind, the “pregnant man” re-emerged in the pop culture zeitgeist, and reminded me (as if I needed reminding) that the world is on the brink of losing whatever shred of rational bearings it still has left.

Ballast is a beautiful picture of the durability and persistence of humanity. At first glance it looks like some sort of cruel examination of poor, hapless black people beat down by the system. It is that, in part, but there are no victims or villainous oppressors here, and there are no excuses. The characters are flawed, frustrated, but determined to somehow forge ahead.

I’m not sure that Clint Eastwood intended it to be, but Changeling is in my mind one of the quintessential films of the “George W. Bush lame duck” period in American pop culture. That is: the period of intense malaise and disillusionment that started around the time of Katrina and is just now beginning to subside.

Synecdoche is about a lot of other things, too: fate, free will, fatherhood, love, theater, Artaud, cruelty, death, dreaming, and the housing crisis. It’s also about life—contemporary life—and the ridiculousness of our unfailing searches for macro significance at the expense of our micro happiness.

[Note: Last week Focus on the Family shared with us a sage and sobering letter from the future: 2012 to be exact. Perhaps because the news was too depressing to share, they neglected to also release the sequel--a letter from 2016 (after Obama's second term as president), written by someone named Ryan Hamm. I have that letter here. It's your Christian and civic duty to read it...]

One of the hardest things for a film to do, or a book (or any art, really), is to portray a truly good character who is also believable and human. It is a lot easier to portray truly wicked, depraved characters who are believable (i.e. The Joker, or anyone in The Departed). It is totally refreshing, then, to see a film like Happy-Go-Lucky, which is basically a study of one person’s commitment to living a happy, upbeat, glass-half-full life in contemporary London.

I really want to vote for Obama. There are a myriad of reasons why it would thrill me to cast my vote for him on November 4. He is such an attractive and inspiring figure, and I'm not just saying that because it's the standard line about Obama. It's true.

These songs alternate between a sort of shiftless urban malaise and a midwestern harvest-time sturdiness.

People who frequent this blog know very well that Terrence Malick’s The New World is high on my list of the happiest things on earth. It’s a film that I’ve probably watched 20 times over the past three years, each time relishing anew the truth, beauty, and catharsis it offers. Imagine my utter glee, then, when it was announced that a new director’s extended cut of the film was to be released this fall on DVD. I was beside myself.