So, it’s New Year’s Eve. Time for a few resolutions:

1. I resolve, as I hope I have on this blog (officially launched three weeks ago!), to be snarky, nitpicking, argumentative and critical in every sense in the service of good food and wine and our experiences of eating and drinking and to battle cluelessness in the many guises in which it occurs.

2. I also resolve to proclaim as loudly and as eloquently and as exhaustively as possible my love for great food and wine whenever and wherever they may appear.

3. And I resolve to drink as much great wine and eat as much great food as I can in 2007. And to walk a lot. And work-out. Do a few crunches. Practice the piano every day. Come to grips with the categorical imperative.

And, with all those elements in mind, allow me to direct your attention to this page on my website, where yesterday I posted the “50 Best Wines of 2006 and 25 Unbeatable Bargains.” Something for every taste and pocketbook. Please enjoy. But safely, O.K.?

Here’s the link: http://www.koeppelonwine.com/Featured_Article.asp

You know that old saying about how it's bad luck to leave your Christmas tree up after New Year's? Maybe that applies to signs cheering on Memphis marathoners, too.

Unless my weary eyes deceived me on the drive to work this morning (wouldn't be the first time), the "Uncle Todd" sign I complained about in a posting earlier this week is no longer up along Danny Thomas Boulevard.

If someone saw the blog posting and decided to take the sign down, I thank you. And if the wind finally blew it over, thanks to you, Mother Nature.

Anyway, I hope it really is as simple as complaining about leftover signs to get them removed. If that's the case, then my next target is the Barbara Cooper campaign sign that's on the corner near the Jackson Avenue fire station Downtown. Since the election was back in November, I would love it if that sign weren't still around next year.

And speaking of the new year, I'd like to extend happy New Year's wishes to everyone out there in the blogosphere. Thanks for reading and I hope you'll be back to visit Blake's Blog again in 2007.

Here are my choices for the Best of 2006 (chosen from movies that played theatrically in Memphis).

See today's Memphis Playbook section in The Commercial Appeal or go to the newspaper's website to see a somewhat fuller story, with more pictures.

And, of course, you can see my lists for each year dating back to 1996 at the Top Tens page of The Bloodshot Eye.

The Ten Best (in order of preference):

1. "Half Nelson": In what may be the peformance of the year, Ryan Gosling stars as a hip-looking, drug-addicted eighth-grade history teacher in Brooklyn who treats his underprivileged students with good-humored respect. What's remarkable is that filmmakers Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden treat their characters - and their audience - with a similar lack of condescension. Shot mainly with inexpensive handheld cameras, the movie resists cheap stereotyping and easy categorization at every turn as it explores the friendship between the white teacher - the product of former hippy parents - and the withdrawn 13-year-old black student (Shareeka Epps) who knows his secret. "Half Nelson" is heartbreaking in its clear-eyed look at human frailty and failure, but it's also inspiring in its honesty, its political engagement and its compassion.

2. "The Proposition" : As pitiless a film as one might expect from the pen of self-consciously gloomy songwriter-turned-screenwriter Nick Cave (who titled one defining album "Murder Ballads"), director John Hillcoat's grim and violent Australian Western presents a convincingly dusty and fly-ridden vision of the "fresh hell" of the barely settled Outback of the 1880s, where it’s no surprise to find John Hurt as a drunken bounty hunter who discourses upon the superiority of "white men" through clenched and yellow tombstone teeth. Looking like a Spaghetti Western Jesus, Guy Pearce stars as an outlaw who agrees to track and kill his psychotic older brother (Danny Huston); the bloody events that follow offer a dark and tragically relevant interpretation of the cost of Western expansionism.

3. "A Scanner Darkly": The "scramble suit" that undercover narcotics officer Keanu Reeves wears to conceal his identity in this barely futuristic film transforms him into "a constantly shifting vague blur"; it's an ingeniously literal symbol of the character's loss of self and as good a justification as any for Richard Linklater's decision to adapt Philip K. Dick's mournful novel in the disorienting rotoscoped animation style of the director's 2001 film, "Waking Life." Like Dick, Linklater appreciates the anti-authoritarian integrity of life's outcasts and so-called losers, and he devotes much screen time to their time-squandering bull sessions: comic cul-de-sacs of Gracie Allen-meets-Tommy Chong paranoia and illogic, played out in a hippy crash pad on an appropriately dead-end street infested with surveillance cameras and such druggy moochers as Robert Downey Jr. and Woody Harrelson.

4. "The Departed": An exciting showcase for a showboat cast and for director Martin Scorsese, this remake of the 2002 Hong Kong thriller "Infernal Affairs" in some ways feels like an unofficial followup to Scorsese's "Gangs of New York," moved from 19th century polyglot New York to present-day Irish South Boston. Once again, Leonardo DiCaprio is a young thug with a secret apprenticed to a devilish crime boss/mentor, played here by Jack Nicholson; DiCaprio's Jungian shadow counterpart is a state police officer (Matt Damon) working as an informant for the mob. From its vulgar, male-dominated ethnic underground to its sudden violence to its use of "Gimme Shelter" on the soundtrack, the movie unreels like an irresistibly propulsive greatest hits compilation of practiced Scorsese riffs. The sardonic message: The rats are dead; long live the rats.

5. "Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story": In this movie about a movie inspired by a book about a book, director Michael Winterbottom and writer Frank Cottrell Boyce use their source material - Laurence Sterne's experimental 18th century novel, "Tristram Shandy" - to goof on the absurdity, rampant self-interest and intense forced camaraderie of the moviemaking — i.e., life-making — process. Droll, literate and just plain funny (thanks mainly to stars Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon), this was one of the year's most beguiling and thoughtful surprises.

6. "The New World": The fourth feature in 32 years (and second in seven) from writer-director Terrence Malick explores the psychic consequences of the conquest of a "virgin" land by revisiting the 17th century story of Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell) and the American Indian maiden usually known as Pocahontas (played by a preternaturally poised 14-year-old named Q'orianka Kilcher). The effect of this ravishing-visuals-with-tedious-voiceover reverie is akin to experiencing a past life under hypnosis. I've watched the film three times, and each time something in the final shots has reduced me to tears.

7. "Brokeback Mountain": Director Ang Lee's so-called "gay cowboy movie" is a film of extreme tenderness that sympathizes with all its deserving characters, including the wives and family members who suffer from the contagious unhappiness of secret lovers Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger), who discover each other amid the natural splendor of the Wyoming wilderness in 1963. Some viewers sympathetic to "Brokeback" might reject a gay love story set in a modern urban milieu, but this sadly beautiful film cannily uses the seductive and "manly" iconography of the Western - the campfires, the coyotes, the tumbleweeds - to encourage identification.

8. "Old Joy": Can you imagine a beautifully lensed, no-budget, slacker-generation, Pacific Northwest indie mash-up of "Sideways" and "Brokeback Mountain," distilled to its utterly believable and unmelodramatic essence the way Hemingway eliminated all extraneous incident from "Big Two-Hearted River," so that what's most significant occurs in the silences between the spoken lines and the spaces between the frames? Director Kelly Reichardt's film - screened here only once, during the Indie Memphis Film Festival in October - accomplishes something of this effect with its story of two old friends (Daniel London and Will Oldham) reunited for a brief camping trip in the Cascade Mountains.

9. "The Devil and Daniel Johnston": Director Jeff Feuerzeig's documentary about the mentally disturbed singer-songwriter and visual artist Daniel Johnston unreels with all the suspense, comedy, pathos and surprise of a great narrative film. Constructed in large part from an amazing wealth of vintage source material (including the home movies and audio tapes that Johnston obsessively began recording as a kid), the movie doesn’t shy away from the troubling implications of the romanticization - the hipster "enabling" - of its subject.

10. "Slither": How can I include this funny-scary-gooey horror movie about body-snatching slugs from space in my Top Ten? How can I not? With nods to "The Blob," "I Married a Monster from Outer Space," David Cronenberg's "Shivers" and a million other predecessors, writer-director James Gunn (a Troma graduate who scripted the "Dawn of the Dead" remake) delivered the most satisfying and least pretentious genre film of the year.

The Second Ten (in alphabetical order):

1. "Art School Confidential" : Despite the facile ironies of its telegraphed plot twists and the score-settling, almost adolescent pettiness of its bilious point of view, this semi-companion piece to the near-perfect "Ghost World" from director Terry Zwigoff and writer Daniel Clowes delivers some of the funniest characters and wittiest lines of the year as it examines art-world phoniness, selfishness and narcissism through the eyes of a naive freshman (Max Minghella) exposed to the "living cliches" who inhabit an incestuous college campus.

2. "The Black Dahlia" and "Hollywoodland": Real-life Lala Land killings - the 1947 mutilation-murder of Elizabeth Short in "Dahlia," the 1959 shooting death of George "Superman" Reeves in "Hollywoodland" - inspired these ambitious if not entirely successful Tinseltown autopsies. The much-hated "Dahlia" - a movie of disfigured, deceitful smiles - is frustrating and confounding, but it reaffirms Brian De Palma's status as American cinema'ss cruelest social satirist; "Hollywoodland," from debuting director Allen Coulter, mixes a hardboiled mystery, a warts-and-all biopic and even Ben Affleck into a potent kryptonite cocktail.

3. "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan": This hilarious satirical tour of the "U S and A" might be merely a ruder "Candid Camera" or a "Jackass" of the mind if not for the sustained brilliance of Sacha Baron Cohen's performance as the clueless title journalist and the sleight-of-hand artfulness of Larry Charles' direction. To paraphrase a famous possum: We have met the racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, crazy Kazakh, and he is us.

4. "Happy Feet" : This occasionally ultra-cute CGI melange of "March of the Penguins" and "Moulin Rouge" also functions as a weirdly scary and penguincentric "first contact" science-fiction story with an earned eco-message, linking it to director George Miller's breakthrough "Mad Max" movies.

5. "Hostel" and "The Hills Have Eyes" : American irresponsibility and arrogance are critiqued with a take-no-prisoners ferocity that's otherwise missing from the multiplex in these two extreme lashings of the old ultraviolence. Eli Roth's "Hostel" unfolds as a privileged frat boy's worst bait-and-switch nightmare; Alexandre Aja's "Eyes" explicitly deals with (mutant) desert terrorists created by a U.S. military operation. Both movies demand that viewers examine their responses to ideas of torture and vengeance.

6. "House of Sand": At once allegorical and grimly naturalistic, director Andrucha Waddington's beautifully photographed film equates the sands of time with the drifting dunes of Brazil's unforgiving Maranahão desert. Powerful performances by Fernanda Montenegro and Fernanda Torres hold fast against the encroaching oblivion.

7. "L'Enfant": This won the Golden Palm at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, but Memphians rejected it: The movie played here only one week. Written and directed by brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne of Belgium, this story of a smalltime and pointedly childish street criminal (Jérémie Renier) who sells his newborn baby to the adoption black market ought to be screened in a church rather than a theater: It's as pure, simple, devastating, hopeful and forgiving as a New Testament parable.

8. "Match Point": Woody Allen's London-set drama of adultery, psychopathology and ruthless class-climbing is not really a return to form but an advance: a stylish work of gliding camera movements, cunningly framed shots and seamless edits that marks one of the few times the writer-director's interest in pictures has equaled his facility with words. Jonathan Rhys Meyers stars as a Patricia Highsmith-esque antihero who is the very embodiment of Allen's belief that the forces that govern existence are cold, random and meaningless.

9. "The Queen" and "Marie Antoinette": Stephen Frears' impeccably produced film showcases Helen Mirren - a shoo-in for the Best Actress Oscar - in an extremely sympathetic portrait of a troubled Elizabeth II, coping with the death of Princess Diana; meanwhile, Sofia Coppola - perhaps responding to the famous "Let them eat cake" line - delivers a pink, sugary, decadent film that seems to have been squeezed from a confectioner's bag, with a typically (and this time, appropriately) blank Kirsten Dunst as the 18th century celebrity monarch.

10. "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada": Official indifference to the death of a "wetback" adds political implications to this modern Western from debuting director Tommy Lee Jones, who also stars as a tough ranch hand investigating the shooting death of a Mexican friend. Jones is as surefooted a director as he is a cowboy, and he ensures that each sequence is a model of economic visual storytelling. The chronologically fractured script is typical of Guillermo Arriaga ("21 Grams").

Honorable Mention:

"Phil Chambliss: Auteur from Arkansas": This program of three short amateur films by little-known Locust Bayou-born "outsider" filmmaker Phil Chambliss was the highlight of the Indie Memphis Film Festival, with "Shadow of the Hatchet-Man" (1982) — a black-and-white cross between Andy Milligan and Guy Maddin that transforms South Arkansas into a comically eerie David Lynchland — delivering the most terrifying, hilarious and synapse-frying 26 minutes to be found on any Memphis movie screen this year.

The American Academy of Ophthalmology offers these tips for popping the champagne cork New Year's Eve without injurying yourself or your guests.

Keep champagne chilled. A bottle chilled to 45 degrees or below is less likely than a warm bottle to lose its cork unexpectedly.

Remember shaking the bottle increases the risk eye injuries.

To open, hold down the cork with the palm of your hand and removine the wire hood,

It really is. Union Avenue in front of the Peabody is clogged with buses carrying legions of South Carolina 'Cocks fans, along with what at least one member of the Houston Cougar nation (vast as it is). That must mean the AutoZone Liberty Bowl kicks off at 3:30 p.m. Friday. I lived in South Carolina for a couple years after college, so I have something of a soft spot for the Chickens. On the other hand, I'm a lifelong Steve Spurrier hater since my brother's UT days. For its part, Houston is starting to show flashes of offensive firepower that almost call to mind the record-shattering run-and-shoot days with Andre Ware and David Klingler at quarterback. If I were a betting man, I'd take Houston plus the 6 points, and definitely take the over. But I'm not.

In other news, in case you've been under a rock this afternoon, Mike Fratello is out as Grizzlies head coach. Catch all the developments here.

Our streets seem safer already.

In the local news section today, there's a story about how People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals dispatched two young women clad in fake police uniforms, fishnet stockings and stiletto heeled boots to Memphis in order to make a point about, well, the ethical treatment of animals.

These racy-looking fashion police handed out citations to people they observed wearing leather shoes or fur coats. Their message, as explained by "officer" Monika Meilleur: "There is nothing sexy about wearing a dead animal."

I'm just wondering how effective they were as deterrents to people who might be inclined to wear clothing products made from animals. The guy in the photo doesn't exactly look like he's in a lot of distress about getting collared by Meilleur.

Memphis was apparently just one stop on PETA's national tour for the fashion police. Too bad Meilleur and partner Janna Harris didn't stick around, though.

Then Mayor Willie Herenton would only need 648 new police officers, instead of 650.

Each year, I keep a chronological count and roll call of the movies that open in Memphis.

On Christmas Day, when the year's final two movies opened ("Dreamgirls" and "Black Christmas"), that count hit 387 - a fairly astonishing number, and a record for any year since I began keeping these lists in 1997.