This year marks the 200th birthday of British novelist Charles Dickens and even though he’s been dead since 1870 that isn’t stopping the BBC from heartily marking the occasion. And, honestly, that’s OK with me.

The celebrations kicked off after Christmas, just before the dawn of the new year, with a three-part adaptation of one of Dickens’ most celebrated titles Great Expectations.

Now, for those new to the blog, my wife and I love a good mini-series based on a British novel. Dickens’ Little Dorrit, which I reviewed in a roundabout way last year, is simply one of the best mini-series you’ll find. Considering we both love Great Expectations, the novel, we had high hopes. The cast looked promising too with Gillian Anderson, a great actress in her own right, and David Suchet who all fans of British detective dramas will recognize instantly.

Unfortunately, this particular adaptation, has been aptly coined by my wife as “Great Expectations for Dummies.”

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Ah, the 2011 list. For a hack of a blogger like myself it’s my once-a-year bread and butter. This year instead of separating music, movies, and television I’ve decided to produce a comprehensive list and lump it all together. Hold onto your hats, and enjoy.

Favourite Films of 2011

I had a quick look around because I was curious and it seems like Tree of Life is topping everyone’s lists this year. We have it in the queue but haven’t got around to watching it yet. I’m curious now though and I wonder if it would change things if I were to watch it first.

The curious bit, however, about the two films that did make my list is that both feature the unmatched Paul Giamatti as the leading actor. This wasn’t intentional but when I looked at everything I’d watched this year and boiled it down to just a couple of my favourites… Do I have a particular bias towards anything that Paul Giamatti does? Perhaps. Is he undoubtedly the best actor working in Hollywood right now? Yes, sir.

Barney’s Version

Barney’s Version is a brilliant take on the novel by Canadian literary heavyweight Mordecai Richler. I remembering having to read The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz in my O.A.C. (Grade 13) English class. I probably only understood about a third of what I read at the time but I can certainly appreciate a heavily nuanced and deeply moving plot a lot more now that I’m older. Barney’s Version is a movie about love, marriage, family, and memory. It’s wonderfully-acted (duh), well-written (duh), and unfolds itself in a fantastically pleasing fashion distilling all the very best parts of a well-developed Woody Allen movie. Complicated, comedic, and charming sums it up pretty well too.

Win Win

Win Win follows in the same genre of comedy as another of my all-time favourite movies Lars and the Real Girl. I’ll sum it up like this: Small town, quirky characters, social conundrums, and the kind of plot that sometimes seems like something you couldn’t make up if you tried. Like Lars, we’re treated to ninety minutes of some truly great and wholly surreal story-telling about people, a place, and a number of situations we’d never even thought about before. In this film, Giamatti plays and small-time lawyer and high-school wrestling coach as if he were born for the role.

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The only thing less impressive than Greg Long’s skills as a writer are his skills as an investigator.

In The Making of Bigfoot writer and self-professed journalist Greg Long sets out to uncover the truth about the famous Patterson-Gimlin film. The Bigfoot film. Captured in the late 1960′s the film features about forty seconds of an unknown bi-pedal creature walking across a creek in the middle of the woods. Allegedly filmed in Northern California by two amateur Bigfoot hunters (Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin) it has been the subject of much controversy since its release forty years ago. Greg Long decides to put all the questions and controversy to rest, once and for all and by the end of the book he is satisfied that he’s done exactly that.

Let me be clear though, if I handed in The Making of Bigfoot as a term paper in University I would receive it back to me, almost immediately, chalk-full of red pen.

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Douglas Coupland is one of my favourite authors, not to mention an absolute Canadian gem, but his last novel, The Gum Thief, felt tired and phoned-in to me. So, when I began to read his latest novel, Generation A, I wasn’t wholly optimistic. What I found though, as I went, is that Coupland is far from tired and while I don’t think he’s been at the top of his game recently—since jPod, I’d say—Generation A is nonetheless a winner.

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To any aspiring writer, learning that The Bishop’s Man is only Linden MacIntyre’s second novel is surely nothing short of depressing. MacIntyre’s story of one priest’s journey through the Catholic Church’s abuse scandals reads like he’s a writer who’s had lots of practice. He has, in a way. In the non-fiction realm, Linden MacIntyre is a well-known, award-winning investigative journalist. The host of Canada’s The Fifth Estate on public television and the often guest host of The Current on public radio, MacIntyre clearly has a prowess for fiction too.

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Maria picked up Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend off the non-fiction new releases rack at our library. She knows me so well.

It was a pretty good read, in a way. Through the course of the book, the author, an “independent scholar” with a fairly strange name, Joshua Blu Buhs, sets out to frame the legend of Bigfoot in terms of its larger societal impact. From the outset, this seemed like a pretty interesting idea. I’ve had an interest in Bigfoot since, I think, I discovered my own big feet (size 12, not bad) so a book about society and the Bigfoot monster seemed like something good to read. But it was, to be sure, a little bit too good to be true.

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I received Douglas Coupland’s Shampoo Planet for Christmas this year. At the same time I received the Talking Heads Greatest Hits record. This is an omen.

Understanding Shampoo Planet, I think, is the same as understanding what Talking Heads were doing back then. It’s about the future. It’s about a time in history when technology, innovation, and invention are racing forward at light-speed. At the same time, things are beginning to decay. Global warming is beginning to catch up with us; toxic waste and acid rain are seaping into the common lexicon. Advertising is everywhere. It’s all product, product, product, and this is called progress—a Shampoo Planet. This is what the Talking Heads are about, in my opinion, and this is what Coupland is getting at too.

This is Coupland’s second novel, following up on his incredibly successful Generation X. It feels like a second novel. It feels full of energy, packed with excitement, buzzy and confident. The novel follows a twenty year-old protagonist, a budding entrepreneur, obsessed with technology, the future, and business. His favourite book, he confesses, is the biography of a successful C.E.O., he expounds his love for things and his shower is a shampoo museum. At the same time, he senses decay all around him. His family is crumby, wrapped up in pyramid schemes and bad relationships. His town, once dominated by The Plants—factories which produced all kinds of wonderfully toxic and terrible things—are shutting down, the government moving in to clean up. He searches for meaning but things are moving so fast.

If I had a complaint about this book it would be about the section somewhere near the end. For the most part, Coupland’s writing style is crisp, quick and future-forward—it suits the plot well. But near the end it gets a bit mushy; the plot moves quickly, but the writing can’t keep up. It feels a bit stretched, but Coupland recovers in a huge way and comes through with a brilliant and honest conclusion to his character’s odyssey.

All told, Shampoo Planet is wholly authentic and that’s its selling point. If there’s one thing that Coupland is very good at, in my opinion, is taking the temperature of the times. Shampoo Planet is that temperature reading. Coupland nails it. Here he’s embedded deep in a culture that he understands very well: it’s the future, then, and it’s a great read.