One thing bugging me in these last weeks of the naughty-aughts is the triumphal smugness of my TV-critic colleagues, the lucid Emily Nussbaum (in New York) and the trenchant David Bianculli (on NPR’s Fresh Air): The Wire this, The Sopranos that, The Shield Battlestar Sex and the Oz and The Office and HBO blah blah blah. What’s most irritating is they’re right. Television—at least cable television—has embraced longer and more complex storylines and left movies behind as a narrative medium. The Brits have been doing this kind of thing for years, but Americans have finally caught up and surpassed them. There has been a mighty leap—both in form (open-ended, polyphonic) and content (no moral absolutes, protagonists more imperfect than perfect).

Because I don’t want to close the naughty aughts on the sour, bitter, acid note of my last entry, but on one that’s fruitier and more effervescent, with hints of juniper and spice, here are a couple of lusty lists: the best performances of 2009 and some cool movies of the past decade.

I left out a couple of demerits in my Best and Worst of the Year and feel a sacred duty to add a few kicks.

Although I’m not always in sync with the mainstream audience or my fellow critics, I pride myself on understanding why, say, a royal pile of dung like Titanic moved so many people, why “the Twilight saga” takes up so much space in the fantasy lives of teen girls and teen-girls-at-heart (not all of them girls), and why no Lars von Trier atrocity will ever be rejected from the New York Film Festival. I don’t share those sentiments, but I get them. Here’s what I don’t get: how anyone could think Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans works on any level, even as camp. Abel Ferrara’s original Bad Lieutenant was no prize — it was pulp with laughably florid anguished-Catholic pretensions. But it did have a scene that’s among the most disturbing in the annals of sleaze: Harvey Keitel’s protracted torture and blackmail of two young women whose car he has pulled over. I wasn’t certain — I’m still not certain — those were actresses acting. In the new movie, Werner Herzog and Nicolas Cage imitate that scene (Cage waylays and blackmails a couple leaving a nightclub), but it has no emotional kick, no suggestion of real people being violated. It’s just Cage getting his rocks off. Folks, he’s terrible in this movie, and I say that as someone who championed his eye-rolling Renfield act in Vampire’s Kiss. He’s attempting to deliver the most live-wire, gonzo performance in the history of film, but he looks like a high-school actor doing a bad Nixon impersonation.

As Herzog and Cage pile on the drug abuse, we expect this bad lieutenant to go down hard. Instead, they pull a deus-ex-machina switcheroo that’s written and staged so absurdly that I thought it had to be the dream of the dying protagonist, something along the lines of Ambrose Bierce's “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” Only he doesn’t wake up. That's the ending for real. Our more formalist critics will make the case that the resolution is “ironic” and that Herzog is mocking Hollywood conventions. To me, it looked like he was pissing away his movie in an attempt to top his self-destructive loon of a lead actor. And oy, those lizard POVs … in the end, I can only throw up my hands. I love Werner Herzog. I admire Nic Cage's performance-artist-like impulse to add madness to his Method. But there’s no drug on Earth that would make me see Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans as anything but an amateur hour championed by pseuds.

Mark Graham at Vulture reports that Fox Searchlight has canceled its rollout of Jared Hess's Gentlemen Broncos because of savage reviews. To hell with those reviews. And to hell with Fox Searchlight for losing heart. This is among the wildest and bravest comedies I've seen in years. Sure, some of Hess’s gross-out gags are heavy-handed, and the grotesquery is laid on too thick. But even at its campiest, there's a serious theme. Vastly disparate sexual issues are being worked out through outlandish fantasies — freaky, psychedelic enactments of the hero's novels that are so visionary and intense that they hurtle past Freud into a Jung-like mythical dimension. Gentlemen Broncos is a leap over Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre. Now, Hess doesn’t just gaze on paralyzed nerds from the outside; he takes you into their heads and gives form to their alienation from the physical world. It used to be that movies this ambitiously bizarre could find a home in midnight screenings and develop fanatical cults. Now they go straight to DVD — which deprives us of the fun of experiencing them with a responsive audience. See the movie before it goes away. And Fox Searchlight: Reconsider. There must be a way to help this picture find an audience.

Some readers (and a posse led by Latoya Peterson at Jezebel) are angered by my review of Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire. They believe my language reflects deep and both conscious and unconscious prejudices toward African-Americans, obesity, and the so-called “underclass.” Defending myself against those charges (as well as outright abuse) is bound to be a losing battle, but I respect the feelings of Peterson and many of her commenters (the least abusive, anyway) and am sick at the thought that my attempts to evoke this movie have been viewed so harshly — and, I believe, unfairly.

Tonight at BAM at 6:50 I’m going to introduce the rarely screened (and unavailable on DVD) 1962 drama The Chapman Report, directed by George Cukor. It’s part of a 1962 series hatched by New York Film Critics Circle president chairman Armond White and the nice folks at BAMCinématek to celebrate the circle’s 75th anniversary. Why 1962? That was the year that — because of a newspaper strike — the NYFCC gave out no awards. Beyond that, it was a year when the culture was teetering between two violently disparate eras and the cinema was beginning to reflect the tension. No film is more quintessentially 1962 — in its strengths and weaknesses — than The Chapman Report.

I'd intended to blog on the New York Film Festival today but took the wrong cold medicine last night and spent the next eight hours on the couch in front of the TV. I'd like to say I plucked one of my fabulous Kino box sets from the pile and filled in the gaps in my Murnau, but it was mostly a semi-stoned voyage through the late-night bowels of cable movie channels. I recall something with the kid from American Beauty following around with a video camera a serial killer who'd kidnapped his mom (!), some bikers killing supposed high-school students in the desert, nutberg Mark Wahlberg pawing a nubile young Reese Witherspoon and getting chucked out the window by William Peterson, a cut-rate alien in a sub menacing Robocop and Amanda Pays, a scientist who kept killing and reanimating his assistant for no clear reason, a Most Dangerous Game update with a serial killer hunting a naked woman in the Rockies, Jack Bauer's uninteresting daughter getting tortured by serial killers, Jack Bauer himself as a telepath hunting a serial killer ... I did rewatch, for the tenth time, the last 45 minutes of Carl Franklin's classic thriller One False Move, with its increasingly canted angles and nearly unbearable suspense (even if you know what's coming), Michael Beach and Billy Bob Thornton (who co-wrote the film) as among the coldest and scariest killers in film, and Bill Paxton — maybe the most sheerly likable of modern leading men, back then and now, as a harried Mormon. The bloody final confrontation takes less than half a minute, yet you'd be pressed to find its like for pure catharsis. I hate to admit I hadn't seen all of Showgirls, but I finally, finally got through it after stopping every fifteen minutes when Elizabeth Berkeley's big teeth got too much and coming back after watching part of another serial-killer movie. Gina Gershon hissing in Berkeley's face reminded me of the giant Komodo spitting at the giant cobra in another movie I caught in stroboscopic flashes ... Truly a dark night of the soul ...

But then I read something that renewed my faith ...

Roman Polanski has been arrested in Switzerland and will reportedly be flown to Los Angeles to stand trial after 35 years. This is as it should be — alas. But it didn’t have to go down this way. The excellent documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired did not minimize the horrific nature of the crime, but also made a good case against the late judge who held up a plea agreement between Polanski and the prosecutor. Now, there will be a lot of grandstanding by idiots, who will say that Polanski is worse than the likes of Peter Braunstein and should be thrown in prison for the remainder of his life.