The Top 100 of 2006

Illustration by Jillian Tamaki.

Mmm, cupcakes. And, for fun, 100 reasons to celebrate 2006:

1. David Altmejd. Who better to represent Canada at the prestigious 2007 Venice Biennale of Visual Art than a Montreal artist whose Plexiglas-hair-metal-anything sculptures evoke David Cronenberg, werewolves and giants? His installation of a body blooming in a house of mirrors should confirm Canada’s reputation for weirdness — in a good way.

2. Black Swan Green by David Mitchell. Life in Thatcher’s England through the eyes of a 13-year-old stammerer. A rich, painfully funny coming-of-age novel that transcends the genre’s clichés.

3. Roy Dupuis in The Rocket. Maurice Richard was the most dynamic hockey player ever to lace on skates. Thanks to Dupuis’s portrayal of the legend in Charles Biname’s biopic, we now understand how a pathologically shy guy off the ice could inspire rioting on the streets of Montreal. The actor nails the Rocket’s unique blend of grace and brutality.

4. Nelly Furtado, Promiscuous. Our first reaction to Furtado’s suggestive new single was a spit-take: What happened to Ms. Demure? Looks like she’s been taking cues from Misdemeanor, a.k.a. Missy Elliott, which includes borrowing her ace accomplice, the producer Timbaland. With its randy pulse and shimmering chorus, Promiscuous became conspicuous all over the globe.

5. Justin Timberlake, SexyBack. Many will remember 2006 as the year that an ex-boy band member (no, not Lance Bass) set himself an almost impossible task — to “bring the sexy back.” What ambition! What confidence! What the hell does that line even mean? Oh well, it didn’t really matter. With an assist from the always-busy Timbaland, J.T. came pretty close to making good on his solemn promise.

6. We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction by Joan Didion. How to top The Year of Magical Thinking, 2005’s resplendent memoir about death and dying? That’s mission impossible, but this weighty tome — over 1,100 pages of the writer’s personal essays and literary journalism, with selections dating to 1961 — reasserts the cardinal law of Didion: With rare exceptions, her sentences are better than everyone else’s.

7. Trailer Park Boys: The Movie. Turns out Ricky, Julian and Bubbles are twice as funny at 10 times their television size. The hosers made the transition from living rooms to multiplexes with the help of Ivan Reitman’s touch for mass appeal, earning $1.3 million on their movie’s opening weekend — a record for an English-Canadian film. That’s a lot of liquor money.

8. Jon Stewart hosting the Oscars. So what if the Academy didn’t ask him back? Stewart and his writing team added genuine bite and wit to the film industry’s annual ego stroke. The gay cowboy movie montage and the best actress negative campaign ads were priceless.

9. Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. When U.S. President George W. Bush sat down at this annual gathering of Washington reporters, he was no doubt expecting a light ribbing. What he got from Colbert, star of Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, was a punch in the gut. This was satire at its ballsiest — ballsier even than Borat, for the simple reason that the leader of the free world was sitting only a few feet away. “I believe that the government that governs best is the government that governs least, and by these standards, we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq,” Colbert quipped at one point. The room responded with a gasp. Comedy so devastating it took your breath away.

10. The first three minutes of Miami Vice. The movie adaptation of the ’80s TV show was ultimately unsatisfying, but the opening scene is vintage Michael Mann: a Miami nightclub, Jay-Z’s Encore blaring, loads of Armani, a beautifully edited shoot-out.

11. Watching The Wire on a string. One of us waited until early December to see a single episode of David Simon’s Baltimore crime series — and then plowed through all four seasons in two weeks. Yes, it’s true, Omar (Michael K. Williams) is 21st-century TV’s most excellent antihero. The Wire’s main draw, though, is its unblinking view of the war on drugs, the struggles of the working class, political corruption and the collapse of public education. HBO’s grand gift to devil-in-its-details, dystopian storytelling.

12. The Night Gardener by George Pelecanos. Like The Wire, the latest novel from Pelecanos is about the social framework that begets crime as much as crime itself. The murder of a young black teen in Washington, D.C., leads to the re-opening of an unsolved serial killer case, but also prompts a reflection on racial profiling and inner-city schooling. The Night Gardener is as smart as it is suspenseful.

13. Robin Sparkles, Let's Go to the Mall. The writers of the CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother created this genius, faux-1980s music video upon revealing that one of the show’s characters, Robin, is hiding a dirty secret from her past: the Canadian ex-pat was once a bubble-gum popstar. For those who lived through Alanis Morrisette: the Early Years, this hysterically funny video — which boasts the line, “I’m gonna rock your body till Canada Day” — is dead-on in the details: rubber bangles, cheesy white-girl rap, synthesizers, a toy robot, moonwalking and name checks of Brian Mulroney and Wayne Gretzky. It’s awesome, eh.

14. Madonna on Oprah. Oh dear, it was delicious television; not James Frey-delicious, but close. Madge slooowly, British-ly enunciating her position as ... regards ... the ... adoption of Baby David from Malawi made for a weirdly sympathetic moment. Make room, internet; TV still has the power to persuade.

15. Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 by Simon Reynolds. If you’re the kind of person who thinks John Lydon’s best work came while he was in Public Image Ltd. — and not the Sex Pistols — this is the book for you. Reynolds makes a convincing, beautifully researched case that bands like Joy Division, Wire and Cabaret Voltaire were actually more musically subversive than those nasty types who wore ripped T-shirts and safety pins.

16. American Hardcore. Alternately, if you’re the kind of person who thinks Lydon’s ilk were too pretty for real punk rock, this is the documentary for you. Paul Rachman and Steven Blush’s vivid reflection on America’s ultra-violent, anti-Reagan hardcore punk movement (1980-1986) catches up with Bad Brains, Black Flag, Minor Threat and other leading louts from the genre’s heyday.

17. Adam Beach in Flags of Our Fathers. Sure he was good on The Rez and in Dance Me Outside, but who knew he could do this? As a crushed, alcoholic soldier from Iwo Jima, Beach walked away with Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers.

18. Pam (Jenna Fischer) and Jim (John Krasinski) on The Office. For its first two seasons, the will-they-or-won’t-they mambo between this pair of Dunder-Mifflin drones anchored what’s become the sharpest and funniest show on network TV. And Pam’s inexplicable rebuff of Jim’s heart-melting declaration of love earlier this year has only upped the ante — especially now that she has serious competition for Jim’s affection in Rashida Jones’s gorgeous and game Karen. Television’s best love triangle.

19. Jackie Earle Haley in Little Children. Last spotted trading wisecracks with Walter Matthau in the late-1970s Bad News Bears franchise, Haley crafted one of the most remarkable comebacks in movie history this year. The former child star’s portrayal of sex offender Ronald James McGorvey is heartbreaking and horrifying, the emotional core of this impressive adaptation of the Tom Perrotta novel.

Matt Didemus (left) and Jeremy Greenspan, a.k.a. Junior Boys. (Timothy Saccenti/Domino Recording Co. Ltd.)

20. Junior Boys, So This Is Goodbye. More languid and song-oriented than their 2004 debut, the sophomore offering by the Hamilton synth duo isn’t so much an album as a trance state. Shivery synths underscore Jeremy Greenspan’s chilly laments. Few albums have made torment sound so gorgeous.

21. Mark Indelicato as Justin on Ugly Betty. The Salma Hayek-produced hit has so much to gush about: punchy writing; juicy plotting; a lip-smacking performance by Vanessa Williams as a cutthroat magazine diva; the delightfully fugly Queens stylings; star America Ferrera’s feisty, smart-girl charm. But topping them all is Mark Indelicato’s sweet and irrepressible, preteen, budding queen Justin, who makes us want to slap on a rainbow flag and join him in a game of Dance Dance Revolution.

22. The Fifth Estate. CBC-TV’s investigative warhorse hit several home runs this year, most notably “Luck of the Draw,” an episode about lottery winners being denied their rightful prizes, and “Frost Bite,” a hypnotic examination of former NHLer Mike Danton, who pleaded guilty to attempting to hire a hitman, and his relationship with his agent David Frost. After more than three decades, this show still manages to make the right people squirm.

23. Lupe Fiasco, Kick Push / K’naan, KickED PushED. Kick Push is a breezy single about skateboard love by Kanye West’s rhyme protégé. KickED PushED is K’naan’s outraged remake about an encounter with racist violence in Gothenburg, Sweden. Following a spring concert, the Toronto MC’s manager (and friend of Arts Online), Sol Guy, was beaten without cause by venue security, and then held without charge by local police. “I’m watching in pain, my skinny arms couldn’t break their restraint / Bringing Europe to shame, they kicked, pushed, kicked, pushed ...” Get ’em, Dusty!

24. “Lookey.” Lars von Trier, Danish director of Breaking the Waves and Dogville, has a message to complacent consumers of cinema: Wake up! And I’ll pay you to do so! In his upcoming movie, The Boss of It All, von Trier has planted five to seven “mistakes” — contextual errors — that he challenges the audience to spot. The first person to identify all the mistakes and win at Lookey, as he calls it, gets a prize of 30,000 Danish kroner ($6,100 Cdn). Since that’s equal to von Trier’s annual income, we want Spielberg to do it, too.

25. Cadence Weapon, Oliver Square. OK, so this single was technically out in ’05, but Oliver Square also led off the Edmonton rapper’s blazing full-length album, Breaking Kayfabe, in ’06. Agitated and a little avant-garde, Oliver Square is hip hop back from the future.

26. André Ethier, Secondathallam. The former co-leader of the Deadly Snakes (see below) has one of the great voices in Canadian rock: part bluesman’s warble, part barfly’s growl. His songwriting pen is an even better instrument. Secondathallam tells 11 stories, most of them about love lost and found, in less than 35 minutes. All killer, no filler.

27. The Deadly Snakes’s official last show — at their unofficial home base, Toronto’s Horseshoe Tavern — was just what it needed to be. For almost a decade, Ethier and co. had been the city’s surest bet for big-bang rock ’n’ roll. Their summer break-up was amicable, though none of the band denied hearing the bell’s toll. At the Shoe in late August, the night’s first set was understandably uptight. During intermission, the lads did what they do second best — drink — and returned in peak form. Better to burn out than fade away; the Snakes rang four-alarm bells.

28. Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck’s Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing. Tracking the fallout from a 2003 concert quip by Dixie Chicks singer Natalie Maines — “Just so you know, we’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas” — this entertaining and inspirational doc captures the band’s resilience, humour, outrage and, yes, patriotism.

29. Zidane headbutt mashups. The World Cup Final in Berlin. France versus Italy. A worldwide audience of billions sees French football legend Zinedine Zidane utterly lose it, headbutting Italian defender Marco Materazzi. Zizou is ejected, ending his international career in disgrace. Accusations fly back and forth, but the mystery is never solved. Why did Zidane snap at a pivotal moment? Only one thing is certain: the momentary brain cramp was perfect fodder for amateur video editors, who had endless fun reconfiguring the strange sequence.

30. Monkey Warfare’s Saturday Afternoon montage. The best scene and best music in a movie of great scenes and great music: a sun-drenched, potheads’ bicycle ride through gentrifying downtown Toronto, made to the tune of Saturday Afternoon by Outrageous Cherries. A major breakthrough from Godard-freak (dig the candy-coloured text) director Reginald Harkema.

31. Victoria Beckham’s wardrobe. Say what you will about the perilously svelte friend of TomKat, but Posh Spice never fails to entertain with her Cher-meets-Coco-Chanel get-ups.

32. Panic! at the Disco, I Write Sins, Not Tragedies. P!atD may be rock’s equivalent of The OC: wordy, ironic, too clever by half. But these lads are also fresh out of high school, so ambition and gusto work in their favour. I Write Sins, Not Tragedies = emo single of the year.

33. A&W commercial with weird, hungry yuppies. You know the ad: it’s the one with two awkward people in their early forties wrapping up what has obviously been a wretched first date at a posh restaurant. All of a sudden, she suggests they have dessert together at A&W. There, despite an insane caloric intake — a burger, fries and pop after a three-course meal? — things start to go swimmingly. Sublimely strange.

34. Overheard in New York. Big laughs from the Big Apple. Eavesdropping New Yorkers send snatches of their stolen conversations to this website, which posts the text verbatim. Tourists are a frequent subject for ridicule; it turns out there are curse words to suit any topic of conversation. Our current fave submission, overheard in early November: Kid No. 1: “Paper beats rock. Bam! Your rock is blowed up!” Kid No. 2: “Bam doesn’t blow up, bam makes it spicy. Now I got a spicy rock! You can’t defeat that!”

35. The Road by Cormac McCarthy. An uncompromisingly bleak novel from the master of American Gothic. A man and his son trudge through a post-apocalyptic landscape, driven on by nothing more than their survival instinct. You could interpret McCarthy’s latest book as a comment on Hurricane Katrina or the fallout of global terrorism, or you could interpret it as a nightmare as old as the hills. Either way, the tale is unforgettable.

36. Nick Cave. For decades, the Other Man in Black has been breaking our hearts (and scaring us a little, but we like it) with his music. He wrote a decent novel once, but it turns out his gift may be the movies. Cave’s script for the disturbing, bloody film The Proposition put Cormac McCarthy in the Australian outback. Not surprisingly, it rocked.

37. Jill Soloway’s hilarious interview with Amy Poehler in Bust. Reading these two feisty ladies connect the scarcity of opportunities for female comedians to a dearth of pubic hair proves that, yes, it’s true, Christopher Hitchens is kind of a dickhead.

38. Spy: The Funny Years. Long before Graydon Carter became editor of fame-worshipping Vanity Fair, the Ottawa native actually satirized celebrity culture as one of the co-founders of Spy magazine. The most influential (and funny) magazine of the ’80s gets the luxe retrospective treatment in this neat compendium. Twenty years later, it’s still smart and snarling.

39. Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins, Rabbit Fur Coat. Former California child star writes as good a lyric as Leonard Cohen, backed by gospel-belting twins who resemble a living Diane Arbus photo. A perfect pop moment.

Apak (Leah Angutimarik), the rebellious daughter of an Inuit shaman, in The Journals of Knud Rasmussen. (Norman Cohn/Alliance Atlantis)

40. Leah Angutimarik in The Journals of Knud Rasmussen. In a just world, Angutimarik would be as rich and famous as Reese Witherspoon or Hilary Swank. The spellbinding young Inuit actor made her film debut with the challenging role of Apak, a rebellious young shaman who witnesses the cultural demise of her community as it converts en masse to Christianity. Exuding a potent combination of sex and spirituality, Angutimarik steals every scene.

41. The J Dilla Foundation. In February, one of rap music’s all-time greats, the Detroit producer James (J Dilla) Yancey, succumbed to a three-year battle with lupus. In May, his No. 1 fan, Maureen Yancey, announced the launch of a non-profit foundation in her son’s honour. Its mission is to raise funds for lupus research and provide music training to underprivileged children. If you think hip hop is fickle, you don’t know Dilla — or his moms.

42. TV on the Radio, Return to Cookie Mountain. Like Radiohead’s Kid A and Sigur Ros’s Ágætis Byrjun, the second full-length from Brooklyn’s TV on the Radio redefines the Rock Album. While they mash up styles with abandon, TV on the Radio’s great innovation is in the vocal department: Tunde Adebimpe’s richly emotive growl is complemented by guitarist Kyp Malone’s incredibly high harmonies.

43. Annette Bening in Running With Scissors. A woman who wears kaftans, lives off prescriptions and gives her son up to a psychiatrist for adoption is a woman who might have been Mommy Dearest. Not so: as the crazy, anti-maternal poet from this flawed adaptation of Augusten Burroughs’s memoir, Bening was never shrill. She carved an unseen character: the mentally crippled female artist desperate for a room of her own.

44. Mark Critch on This Hour Has 22 Minutes. Although he inhabits many comic guises, the Newfoundlander was at his best skewering Liberal leadership candidates throughout the year. Critch refuses to cozy up to politicians — a refreshing change, given the current back-scratching climate of so-called satirical TV shows.

45. The Walrus’s covers. This was the year when each new issue of Canada’s hoitiest, toitiest magazine looked very different from the last one. Big ups to Antonio De Luca, the W’s creative director, and his arts team for taking risks while most of their neighbours on the newsstand did the safety dance.

46. Aziz Ansari. The tart-tongued New Yorker made a strong bid as the Next Big Thing in Funny by appearing in a variety of web-only sketches. The best: as a psychopathic promoter in Clell Tickle: Indie Marketing Guru; as one half of a child talent agency in Shutterbugs; and as an overbearing jerk in Indie Clerk Assholes. As luck would have it, he’s currently developing a show for MTV.

47. All Aunt Hagar’s Children by Edward P. Jones. This unforgettable short story collection, a follow-up to Jones’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Known World, casts a gimlet eye on Washington, D.C.’s striving and disenfranchised black community in the 1940s and 1950s.

48. Consumption by Kevin Patterson. Patterson, a British Columbia doctor-cum-author, is the Chekhov of the Canadian North.

49. 49 Up. His subjects are getting grayer and fleshier, but Michael Apted’s sprawling documentary project is as lively as ever. The 7 Up series started in 1964 with the intention of exploring the British class system. Forty-two years and six installments later, it’s not only a compelling reading of the impact of socio-economic privilege; it could well be the most ambitious nonfiction film of all-time. Stunning.

50. Clipse, Hell Hath No Fury. And urban music hath no album as mighty as this one in ’06. Virginia Beach brothers Gene (Malice) and Terrence (Pusha T) Thornton spit stark, brutal raps about slinging cocaine (e.g. “the news called it crack, I called it Diet Coke”). The topic matter is a lot to forgive, but the resurgent Neptunes offer 12 reasons to get over it: the production duo’s beats have never sounded so sinister.

51. Cocaine Cowboys. Speaking of blow (really, it’s awful, people who use it remind us of the young Robin Williams, and that’s nothing like a compliment), Billy Corben’s documentary is a fascinating study of Miami’s drug trade in the ’70s and ’80s. It gives an insider’s view, through detailed interviews with a retired coke kingpin and his former paramour; a pilot who transported more than 10 tons of drugs from Colombia to Florida; and a hit man who is serving concurrent life sentences for multiple murder convictions. All are remarkably candid; all are disturbingly charismatic. With music by Jan Hammer.

52. Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos. Probably the funniest sports doc ever made, Once in a Lifetime charts the improbable rise and fall of the New York Cosmos, a ’70s soccer dream team that featured Pele and a gaggle of international legends playing alongside some painfully average Americans, including Shep Messing — the goalie who posed nude for Viva magazine in a misguided attempt to generate publicity for the squad.

53. Britney Spears dumps Kevin Federline on MuchMusic. Didjya hear how she did it? Via text message. While MuchMusic’s cameras followed him around Toronto; while he’s blabbing about how great life is with the little woman. Can things get worse for the guy? Yes: check it out on YouTube.

54. Tokyo Police Club. Twenty-five years ago, Newmarket, Ont., gave us Glass Tiger. This year, the Toronto suburb atoned for that sin by giving the world Tokyo Police Club, a wily quartet whose first EP, A Lesson in Crime, combines pop smarts and punk fury.

55. Roz Chast, Theories of Everything: Selected, Collected, Health-Inspected Cartoons 1978-2006. An essential collection of Chast’s best cartoons, mostly from the New Yorker. One of the great comic minds of our time, she frequently pokes understated fun at her much-derided boomer generation. Sample: a gravestone that reads, “Tuned In, Turned On, Dropped Out, Dropped In, Worked Out, Saved Up, Dropped Dead.”

56. Forest Whitaker in The Last King of Scotland. The movie played a little too fast and loose with the facts to make great historical drama, but Whitaker was stone cold hubris as Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. He ate this part.

57. Blindsight. Lucy Walker’s documentary tells the remarkable story of Erik Weihenmayer, a blind American adventurer/superhero who has conquered the Earth’s Seven Summits; Sabriye Tenberken, a blind German teacher who co-founded Tibet’s first school for the sightless; and the six teenage students they lead on an incredible, dangerous climb of Lhakpa Ri (7,045 metres), a Himalayan goliath that neighbours Everest. This year’s Murderball.

58. McSweeney’s Lists. Wow, earnest hipsters can actually be funny. Really funny.

59. Thom Yorke, The Eraser. No one articulates modern paranoia better than Radiohead’s Yorke. His insular solo record, The Eraser, is a gorgeous collection of electronic hymnals featuring lyrics like, “Please excuse me, but I’ve got to ask / are you only being nice / because you want something?” Somebody give the man a hug.

Pushed, Pulled, Depleted & Duplicated No. 7, by Karin Davie. Oil on canvas, 84" x 108" (213.4 x 274.3 cm). (Courtesy Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery)

60. Karin Davie. A Canadian living in New York City’s Lower East Side, Davie’s always admired abstract expressionist swirli-gigs got a long-deserved survey exhibition— called Dangerous Curves — at Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Looking at these paintings is like falling into a giant funnel wallpapered by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.

61. Nas, Hip Hop Is Dead. Rap’s longtime lyrical mastermind returned with a mission to school his wayward descendents — and reclaim the vacant crown of King of New York. Better title: Hip Hop Was Dead.

62. Kevin Dillon on season three of Entourage. Dillon continues to steal the show as Johnny (Drama) Chase, the hack actor who is reduced to making breakfast for his movie star half-brother, Vincent (Adrian Grenier). Drama’s relentless optimism about kick-starting his moribund acting career is both desperate and strangely heartwarming.

63. Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance by Ian Buruma. So that’s why Paris (and Amsterdam and Stockholm and London) is burning: an absorbing and even-handed inquiry into the rising tensions between Islam and secular Europe.

64. Daniel Craig. Many observers are bringing the love because of that whole reinventing James Bond thing, but did you see him as mass murderer Perry Smith in that other Truman Capote movie, the underrated Infamous? It will leave you shaken — and stirred.

65. The opening chase in Casino Royale. So, how did Craig bring tenacity back to the Bond franchise? For one, by doing many of his own stunts. The most impressive footage in Casino Royale is a fierce foot chase in the opening minutes, where Craig-as-Bond tails a suspected bomber through Madagascar. The pursuit includes a gravity-defying sequence on a hoist and culminates — with a literal bang — in an embassy.

66. Pink Floyd’s omission from Time magazine’s “All-TIME 100 albums” list. It’s nothing personal; in fact, we still think Meddle’s the bomb. But with Boomers running so much media nowadays, “all-time” lists of anything tend to be cluttered with touchstones of their youth. (Case in point: 51 of Time’s 100 albums come from the ’60s and ’70s.) What makes us smile is knowing that a space opens for the new breed every time a dinosaur gets bumped off. Or so the theory goes: four of Time’s nine albums from the ’00s are anthologies of decades-old music; none of the others is called Elephant. Baby steps.

67. Andy Warhol/Supernova: Stars, Deaths and Disasters 1962-1964. Co-curated by director David Cronenberg, this Art Gallery of Ontario show was a timely reminder that celebrity is its own kind of disaster. (Yes, Paris, we’re looking at you. Go put on some panties. Now. We mean it.)

68. Dubstep. The U.K. gave the world trip-hop and grime. This year, Old Blighty bestowed another musical gift: dubstep. This new form combines the eerie atmospherics of trip-hop and grime’s beat science. Key records: the self-titled debut by Burial and The World Is Gone by Various Production.

69. Sacha Baron Cohen. You had us at “Jagshemash.”

70. Married to the Sea. A daily web comic by husband-and-wife cartoonists Drew and Natalie Dee. The Ohio couple annotate Victorian clip art with captions and speech bubbles about blogging, creationism and other pressing matters. Routinely not safe for work; invariably outrageous.

71. Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky. A book that should not exist. While living in exile during the Second World War, Nemirovsky, a Ukrainian-born Parisian author, wrote theses two novellas about invaded and occupied France contemporaneously with actual events. Her daughter discovered the fully formed, uncannily beautiful stories in the 1990s, and the English-speaking world got Sandra Smith’s elegant translation in 2006. A literary sensation with an unrecoverable ache: Nemirovsky was arrested and sent to Auschwitz in 1942. She died of typhus a month after arriving at the camp.

72. MSTRKRFT’s Work On You video. The clip that accompanies this single by Toronto beat merchants MSTRKRFT may be the sweetest android love story ever told.

73. Hot Chip. Damn what the Mercury Prize jury had to say, the best British album of 2006 was Hot Chip’s The Warning. This record had it all: soaring melodies, propulsive rhythms, playful rhymes and not an ounce of pretension. And despite a stage set-up that resembles Kraftwerk’s, Hot Chip’s live performances have the feverish energy of a rave.

74. Ellen Page in Hard Candy. The Halifax native was seen by more multiplexers during her brief turn in X-Men: The Last Stand, but it was her role as Hard Candy’s victim-turned-victimizer that served notice she’ll have a major film career. Just 19, Page shows remarkable physical and verbal dexterity in turning the tables on an internet predator.

75. Cuteoverload.com. Because sometimes in this cold, cold world, you need a little (or a lot of) cuteness.

76. Harriet Hayes from Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. The Aaron Sorkin show may be loved and loathed (lovthed?), but the character of Harriet Hayes, celebrity Christian comedian (played with glowing, smart charm by Sarah Paulson), keeps us coming back. Isn’t the red state-blue state divide all about religion? Shouldn’t we care? Well, now we do.

77. Drive-through art. Not-so-pleasant things available through your car window: Wendy’s, funerals, banks. More pleasant: art, as Vancouver’s Contemporary Art Gallery proved this summer, with its interactive, drive-through exhibit. Super-size our experimental video, please.

78. Friends with Money. Set among well-to-do do-gooders in Los Angeles, the third film by director Nicole Holofcener (Walking and Talking, Lovely & Amazing) is a sly, slow-burning rumination on camaraderie, class and the nature of charity. Frances McDormand and Catherine Keener are typically splendid; surprisingly, so is Jennifer Aniston, who plays against type as the “friend” without money.

79. Lil’ Wayne. The self-proclaimed best rapper alive — who becomes less wrong about that every time he grips a microphone.

A scene from Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. (HBO Enterprises)

80. When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. Spike Lee’s HBO documentary is an elegant, deeply affecting and meticulous examination of the fatal mix of freakish weather, civic neglect, entrenched racism and federal ineptitude that led to the post-hurricane Katrina flooding of New Orleans. Featuring a multitude of voices, ranging from mayor Ray Nagin to journalist Soledad O’Brien to displaced citizen Phyllis Montana LeBlanc — arguably the doc’s star — this eloquent film is must-see for anyone who watched footage of the Gulf Coast’s desperate storm survivors and wondered: How could this happen in the world’s richest country?

81. Justin Rutledge, The Devil on a Bench in Stanley Park. OK, so the guy’s new album can be a touch earnest (see: title), but this was the year’s best go-away-I’m-moping soundtrack. Damn pretty, too.

82. Scritti Politti, White Bread Black Beer. Missing in action since last century, Welshman Green Gartside returned this year with a wondrous mix of soul, hip hop and electropop. The instrumentation is so minimal, it often sounds as if he’s singing a cappella.

83. The Keep by Jennifer Egan. Twenty years after a juvenile prank goes hideously wrong, two cousins reunite to refurbish an old German castle. Scared yet? You should be. Egan’s third novel is creepy, diabolical and, best of all, completely unpredictable.

84. Devin the Dude at Toronto’s Reverb. If you can imagine a musician who is one part Slick Rick, one part Curtis Mayfield and one part Blowfly ... well, the Dude would probably offer that guy some weed. Houston, Texas’s smokingest MC put on the best rap show we saw this year. Or at least we think that was him, throwing rhymes from somewhere in the clouds above the crowd.

85. Danzanes.com. We don’t care that Disney bought him, or that his awesome new album Catch That Train — featuring Nick Cave and Natalie Merchant — is aimed at six year-olds and available at Starbucks. Dan Zanes, former lead singer of the Del Fuegos, is the best children’s entertainer around, and his website has games, videos and songs that will keep your tots occupied for hours without making you mental.

86. Phoenix, It’s Never Been Like That. Jangly guitar-pop perfection. Maybe French bands should record in Berlin more often.

87. Tyra Banks. With her eponymous talk show and evermore me-Me-ME, dammit! appearances on America’s Next Top Model, the poor person’s Oprah has become the ego that ate television. Girlfriend is the guiltiest of pleasures.

88. Spektrum, Don’t Be Shy. Basement Jaxx’s album Crazy Itch Radio was a surprisingly tame showing, so it fell to this sexy, Jaxx-inspired single to fly the year’s freak flag.

89. The sound effects in Pan’s Labyrinth. Fairy tales and fascism meet in this unlikely political fantasy by Mexican director Guillermo del Toro. Set in Franco’s Spain, a little girl in the grips of the revolution finds a secret world underground where monsters have eyeballs in their hands and fairies flutter. The visual effects are phenomenal, but it’s the cricket sounds, the slosh and crinkle of the creatures’ bodies, that get up into your spine. Chilling.

90. “Jamaica to Toronto” reunion concert. Time: midsummer; three decades past the glory days of Toronto’s since-forgotten island soul, funk and reggae scene. Place: Harbourfront Centre, an open-air pavilion on the downtown shore of Lake Ontario. Performers: Lloyd Delpratt, Jay Douglas, Bob & Wisdom and other greying wonders of TO’s 1970s West Indian influx. Result: pure magic.

91. Radiant City. Directed by Gary Burns and Jim Brown, this inventive almost-documentary is a gorgeously shot indictment of suburbia.

92. Diplo, Shhake It Up. Forget Love, the Fab Four-sanctioned remix album; the Beatles mashup of the year arrived courtesy of Diplo, the Philly DJ whose 21st-century remake of Twist and Shout comes close to surpassing the wild exuberance of the Beatles’s version.

93. Elizabeth Shepherd Trio, Start to Move. Toronto’s Elizabeth Shepherd is a jazz double threat — she comes equipped with a dazzling voice and a bracing piano style. Aiming to expand jazz’s frontiers as well as its audience, her 2006 debut is a daring amalgam of hard-bop, hip hop, torch song and samba.

94. David Caruso versus acting. It’s not that we enjoy Caruso’s performance as Horatio Caine on CSI: Miami. Rather, we are comforted by its existence. Shatner’s Kirk impregnated fewer pauses; Al Pacino eats less ham; and what — what? — is with the sunglasses? Proof positive that you can be a spectacular failure, and millions of people might love you anyways. So inspiring.

95. Atari Flashback 2. Just as Nintendo and Sony were showing off their brand new gaming consoles, Atari released this vintage, joy-stick controlled classic. Comes complete with wood veneer and 40 games. Pong, anyone?

96. The completion of Deepa Mehta’s trilogy. Always controversial in Asia, Fire (1996) and Earth (1998) showed elemental desire up against the constraints of Indian culture. But director Deepa Mehta saved her best for last: Water, the calm and sensual story of the tragedy of ostracized Hindu widows.

97. Pet Shop Boys, Fundamental. A return to form for the synthpop survivors; I’m With Stupid is the most danceable indictment yet of Tony Blair’s support for the Iraq war.

98. Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? by Anita Rau Badami. The third novel by Montreal’s Badami has the distinction of being the first major work of fiction on the Air India bombing. Two decades from now, when more writers have weighed in on this fraught subject, Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? may still reign as the best. This cross-generational saga is a meditation on immigration, family and the slippery slope of religious fervour.

99. Rinko Kikuchi in Babel. The year’s most fearless performance. Naked in every way.

100. YouTube. How ubiquitious has the internet’s most valuable video repository become? Well, this list includes almost 64 minutes of combined YouTube links, so we’ll have to get back to you about that later. Should be about an hour, give or take.

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