To begin my yearly rancid excuse assignment, I'll preface by declaring my steadily time-consuming career path (the workload reflects my deceptive title "administrator" more than my paycheck, I assure you) and my recent appointment to a much more prestigious calling known as baby daddy No. 2. As such, I also abandoned my post as video store leech, where I both toiled (once a week) and absorbed (every day of the week), leaving my slack to be reeled in through an exclusive mixture of Netflix, Turner Classic Movies and a trip to the theater about (gulp!) once a month. I didn't make it the Ritz once. I missed countless films I desperately wanted to see. And, to be honest, I really enjoyed tightening the bundle (watching a slew of films I knew would be tripe, simply to swell the year's repertoire, I found, wasn't all that exciting, in past years.) Honestly: I'm much more proud of the films not current to 2004 which I saw for the first time this year. So proud, in fact, that I've included the three that totally re-postured last year's list several months after I posted it.

[one through ten, 2004: ]

01. Before Sunset - Richard Linklater

Like its predecessor (which also enjoyed a throne seat atop this silly list in 1995), Before Sunset, as with nearly all of Linklater's oeuvre, makes you want to pretend that instead of buying a ticket to watch it, you buy a ticket to experience it. For sure, though, it's: a) as good - if not better than Before Sunrise>; (b) the kind of cinema that - for me - acts like most of Eric Rohmer'ss work, in that I felt as if I were spending time with down-to-earth friends rather than watching two actors discuss their lives; c) maybe the first time in a modern film where I've seen two people un-self consciously become obsessed with an event in their lives without being made to appear wrong or sick for doing it; d) the second time this year when I've been genuinely upset - and almost angry - to see a film end. (Alright, you got me: Both times I saw it, I was blubbering by the time the credits rolled.)

02. Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter...and Spring - Kim Ki-Duk

When I saw Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter...and Spring in the theater, I was knocked out by the quiet comfort of it, the warmth of its worldview, the dreamy haze of the photography and the high of walking around for the next few hours, stuck in it's spacey bubble. Over time, its power dissolved. When I watched it a second time, I was careful to see it in the morning, so it's effect could spill over into my whole day. As a film of minimalist lesson learning, landscape-as-character and as a (gulp) journey to enlightenment, it reminded me of an Eastern The Straight Story. As art that seems designed to seep into our veins rather than be deciphered, the idea of its envious nod toward lifestyle makes my cockamamie The Big Lebowski comparisons seem almost warranted.

03. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - Michel Gondry

The cinematic simulation of Alzheimer's as seen through the brightly colored filter of a cartoon fable, Gondry's labyrinthine allegory channels the cruelly fluctuating perspective of a newly broken-up couple through the radical procedure of mental erasure. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind has the unique distinction of seeming, at first, to be hopeful and then, after multiple viewings, almost unbearably heartbreaking. Winslet and Carrey each give their best performances to date, the former stunningly attractive yet nauseating and the latter so casually pitiful as to upstage a begging puppy. Sprinting the opposite direction from his straight faced collaborations with Spike Jonze, Kaufman's complex premise is invested with the visual dynamics of Gondry's music video work. (And how often is that an asset rather than a flaw?)

04. Spartan - David Mamet

"Now you're going through the looking glass. Is it fun? Is it more fun than miniature golf?” Kilmer warms to the lingo and the lack of wasted space - - or, maybe warm isn't the term, exactly; He seems to fill the emotional vacuum required of him without particular matinee idol allure or evidence of foggy naiveté. Few are as skillful at authoring lean misdirection with seamless flow as Mamet, here proving himself capable of turning on its ear even the most cringe worthy of clichéd premises: The kidnapping of the President's daughter. The twisty tale's big second act shift - and how much it doesn't undermine everything that came before it - is the real reason to see the film. When rebel finds his cause, its not just saying something about the irony of how a free-thinking mentality can blossom from a many-splendored spread of formalities - - it's also using the Mamet slight of hand to compare characters who appear to be loyal to a cause and characters who actually are loyal to a cause. Most stellar are the crop of red herring tricks whose narrative forward momentum has the snapback of a car crash (i.e. - no one is safe from whatever just happened, even if they happen to be a main character), and leaves an unwavering sense of necessity Mamet seems to allow his characters whenever they smell a side glanced detail.

05. The Incredibles - Brad Bird

I submit that The Incredibles is arguably the best Pixar entry since the Toy Story films, but I stress the term arguably: I don't think there's one particular film of theirs that I'd be inclined to badmouth. Particularly strong this time around is their use of pop culture as a reference point (rather than an explicit framework a la Shark Tale), and their sly, almost appallingly obvious hook: Bird reduces his super heroes to metaphoric working class drones (Mr. Incredible gets sued and is forced to retire from superheroing), deftly illustrating the point that everyday people (especially parents) are just different kinds of super heroes (a point that will probably affect not only its target audience (kids, who will glean the literal) but the countless ambitious folks who barely scrape by). And they make it with such Pixar panache, such a superlative sense of confidence that animated films about human beings are worthwhile that, eventually, the transcendence of the medium appears effortless. A score that actively apes John Barry's spy themes from the 1960s doesn't hurt, either.

06. Kill Bill, Vol. 2 - Quentin Tarantino

The bulk of what's great about both volumes is the promise that, tacked together, an epic of unimaginable interest and excitement will be born [see "Kill Bill turned way down" below]. It's real clear that the movie was divided in two for marketing reasons, leaving a distracting, stilted aftertaste in both halves. What's actually encased in the deux moniker is awesome: The Bride's training with smart ass kung-fu master Pei Me, her brutal confrontations with the remaining DiVAS (a down-and-out Michael Madsen and spunky, nearsighted Daryl Hannah), and her eventual return for the big finale. Contained within are a slew of blood hopping set pieces and long, dialogue heavy slabs of Tarantinospeak that (thankfully) drip with cool. Above all, it's the final confirmation that this is, in every sense, Uma's movie. While tirelessly single-minded and brutally successful at her one woman revenge streak in Vol. 1, the actual fleshed dimensions abound in this outing: Vol. 2's most wonderful surprise is how full figured the full figured Thurman's circle really is. Even though the film itself seems undermined by existing in quasimodo form, Uma seems to benefit from having her performance bisected. Here, she's believable as the mommy and as the warrior (and it makes perfect sense that the Twin Pines Massacre was left out of Vol. 1, but opens - and sets the stage - for Vol. 2);; And overall, she's believable as a creature of truth - the perfect heroine for a campy kicker epic. So, on one front, I'm sticking up for the volume structure and, on another, I'm damning it. Wouldn't it be nice if I could just sit on one side or the other?

07. Dogville - Lars Von Trier

Besides the obvious hook (the Brechtian-bare stage, props illuminated in chalk outlines, et al), the most interesting thing about Dogville, for me, is the contradiction: A natural urge to see justice done met with an even stronger pull in the other direction as crimes avenged are revealed to be as appalling as said justice (i.e. - none of the characters in the film seem to do the right thing - and whether there is a "right thing" to do is the much larger and more relevant question the film is asking). I love the idea that things are either black or white (just as the backgrounds which stand for night and day), that the sensibility of experimentation with society - even of the amateur sort Tom performs with the people of Dogville - is as dangerous as leaving the society to exist without such provocation, and the double meanings to everything which, we see, is a reflexive technique: Von Trier seeks to have his audience expose their own fears and desires to themselves. Part of the punch, also, is packed in Von Trier's insistence that his film run over the one hundred sixty minute mark. As in Dancer in the Dark and Breaking the Waves, the disturbing subject matter seems all the more crushing because of the inimitable length of time you have to endure it. Strong medicine at any price, though.

08. The Village - M. Night Shyamalan

As much as I know I'm commanded (by the law of my inner film snob) to feel guilty when I like Shyamalan's films, I'm hereby shedding that skin for good: The Village is enthralling; It's the kind of big, entertaining film you almost don't want to spoil with reality after inhalation. He tells a story from a point-of-view that's very pro audience (he's guessing the way you'll see things - - ) and, at the same time, very independent minded ( - - having tricked us again, he has guessed right!), but he's always sold as this "master of the thriller". Master of the Thriller? No. Shyamalan is now the reigning champion of cinema-as-The Twilight Zone. Honestly, have you ever seen an episode you weren't, at the very least, amused by? As with 2002's crackerjack prize Signs, I found myself becoming addicted to the sensory buzz of uncertainty - - and the consistent revelation of surprise over and over again. The first twist feels much like the director delivering his norm (which is why - besides its incredible appeal to this viewer - the second twist is so valuable).

09. The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou - Wes Anderson

The whole spirit in which The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou is made has a sad, beautiful charm that radiates good taste, the driving theme - besides father figures and brilliant musical montages - in Wes Anderson's oeuvre. He mounts another of his wily, spot-on casts, finding the strangest chemistry in the strangest of melting pots: The kid like eye candy of the sea. Rendered through pitch perfect, cutaway sets and Henry Selick's colorful animatics, this world is a strangely playful zig to the zag of the film's gray skies malaise (a moody tone that Anderson allows to linger, bringing the muted - but deeply felt - conclusion to an amazing, jubilant head). There's a great deal of assistance from a near-total Bowie soundtrack and from Murray's performance which, though a lot less broad than his turn in Lost in Translation, is another of his great really funny (but decidedly not comedic) wise old sages. I left still swimming around in another of Anderson's one-of-a-kind movie universes. I've begun to look forward to that place.

10. Ocean's Twelve - Steven Soderbergh

I actually think I like this one - with more effort towards avante garde than its predecessor - better: Practically twitching with charm, Ocean's Twelve feels like it was invested with the kind of unspoken (and otherwise) dialogue you have as an audience member with a director who is totally on your wavelength. It also seems to me to be another in the sequential deconstruction of an outsider Hollywood perception (i.e. - Humble director is welcomed back into the fold with Out of Sight, and is continually relied upon despite obvious parodying of moviemaker culture in Full Frontal and noodling-with-your-studio-money Solaris); It seemed to me to be a sort of 70s Valentine sprung in the general direction of suits hell-bent upon duplication of the surprise success of the original: It's less about any sort of heist or double-cross than about how much entertaining dialogue you can spread around, how much genuine off screen charm you can bleed into on-screen hi-jinks and how little you can take something that is programmed to appear elaborate and highfalutin seriously. (And if Vincent Cassel's laser dance isn't proof that Soderbergh is just screwing around, cheerfully celebrating the movie as a movie, I just don't know what is...)

[five more I'd like to mention]

The Five Obstructions - Jørgen Leth

Lars von Trier is a sadistic bastard (see #7) and, in The Five Obstructions, he unleashes a bruising set of Dogme-esque restrictions on Jørgen Leth, who gleefully accepts a challenge: Remake his 1967 short The Perfect Human five times, at von Trier's mercy. It's like a courtroom drama where art is the very thing on trial and it's Leth's job to get it acquitted (this theory works, too, because von Trier obviously loves the cinema but, in the interest of clarity, doesn't mind risking its credibility to strengthen it).

Napoleon Dynamite - Jared Hess

Of all the great pleasures of the deliriously detail obsessed Napoleon Dynamite - a worthwhile Wes Anderson rip-off - is that Hess has a terrific set of characters to make fun of and, instead, bestows upon them complete and utter empathy. Reminded me a bit of Hell House in that way: I was all set to make fun of them and found myself eerily rooting for them instead.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow - Kerry Conran

Conran's is a movie that's high on Raiders of the Lost Ark and Star Wars fumes in tonal rhythm as well as the fun factor; The whole thing's clearly a blast - the kind of movie that thrives on making us forget ourselves (i.e. - the best kind). Feels like great animation more than anything.

Super Size Me - Morgan Spurlock

His name is fun to say (Morgan Spurlock) and he's a whole lot more focused than Michael Moore. (There, I said it.) Spearheading a single experiment (all McDonald's diet for 1 month), this propaganda yarn bursts forth with honest, palpable and relevant results. It's entertaining without pandering or sinking to carnival barking. And I haven't set foot inside a fast food restaurant since I've seen it.

Touching the Void - Kevin MacDonald

After completing the film - in which I had gasped with genuine disbelief more times than I care to count - I was pretty much floored to learn of the uncanny symbiosis
between the staged reenactments and the dry, two decades removed interviews with the principles. As the story unfolded, it was almost an afterthought that these
two were even able to talk about it, much less that the film was operating from a level of suspense usually reserved for films where the ending is still unknown.

[three that missed the deadline in 2003]

Elephant (Gus Van Sant, Jr.) (replaced Irreversible at #1, 3/28/04)

Van Sant's Elephant plays as if made in the interim between the incident itself and its analysis: A sober report on Columbine set in an imaginary world that existed for precious seconds before the media even had time to dub it a massacre - or even had time to arrive. It's the act before the finger pointing. The culmination of the film - though some have called it pornographic and self-serving - is considerably more disturbing than you can possibly be prepared for. Wandering, dazed, in Van Sant's unequivocally objective God's eye camerawork (influenced, as Gerry was, by Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr), we stumble around, lost in a constantly changing singular perspective, stoned on the camera trance, watching as helplessly as the victims, registering in a desperately human way as everything and nothing happens. I probably don't need to point out how rare it is to find a film this charged with realism, and yet observant and thoughtful enough not to blow its wad by intervening before the end.

Bus 174 (Jose Padhila) (entered at #9, bumping Master & Commander from the list, 7/24/04)

A scathing critique of a system that builds criminals, doesn't prepare their police and then judges both, nightly, on the news (all intergal parts to a horribly malfunctioning society). Bus 174 is another terrific entry in last year's seemingly endless collection of slam-bang brilliant documentaries. Disturbing images abound: Thirty-five men jammed into a jail cell meant for one or two (and a title that reads: "Any jail in Rio, 2002"), footage and testimony from those present at a vicious massacre of street kids in 1993 and - the most chilling bit byfar - the actual standoff (called the "Bus 174 Incident") which not only defines the problem (the media creeps up on the bus, inadvertently empowering and securing the hi-jacker), but illuminates it: We can see this thing going down from every conceivable angle. Whether this is meant to be taken at face value, or as a metaphor for the many, many factors weighing the situations' blame and meaning is up to the viewer. The last twenty minutes - when the extreme slow motion starts and this whole nightmare comes to a head - reminded me very much of the scary, spare-no-horror topicality of Waco: Rules of Engagement or Terror in Moscow.

An Injury to One (Travis Wilkerson) (entered at #8, bumping Lord of the Rings: Return of the King from the list, 1/08/04)

I think calls to order like "Everyone in America should see this film" are ludicrous, usually. Here, I'm making an exception. Bringing to the table a positively economic rendering of what feels like the natural, visual representation of an essay, Wilkerson dissects the deeply disturbing totalatarian/corporate ownership of Butte, Montana throughout the last century as a mining industry stripped and abandoned the town as well as the enviornment. It's that special brand of documentary that repeatedly elicits a shocked faux-denial. And, at gut level it's also, like Bus 174 and Capturing the Friedmans, forcefully devastating.

[a vault largely called Criterion: 16 from before I was born that I saw for the first time this year]

All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1955)
As exciting a piece of social critique as it is an audaciously un-studio studio release, Sirk's collection of metaphoric color saturation and gratuitously satiric crane shots continues to feel bracing and fresh today (as most great films do).

Bed and Board (Francois Truffaut, 1970)
The follow-up to Stolen Kisses is almost as delightful as that film. The Antoine Doinel films seem to me to be, for the most part, about the ordinary truths of life and the way personalities entertain us more than people do (sometimes).

Children of Paradise (Marcel Carne, 1945)
Poetic fatalism filmed under the nose of the Third Reich during the occupation sounds kind of suspect, but Children of Paradise - one of those classic-y three-hour plus films where the time just flies by - is so full of terrific characters and clever wit, it practically ruined its director's career (he was unable to live up to it by any stretch).

Day of Wrath  (Carl Th. Dreyer, 1943)
The opening sequence introduces sound as a practical weapon (bells and wind seem so otherworldly, it's as if we've never heard them before). The purposefully stilted ending gives an anticlimactic gush to the proceedings that has done beautifully in my mind. If unbridled passion fueled The Passion of Joan of Arc, it seems to be expertly muted in Day of Wrath.

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid To Ask) (Woody Allen, 1972)
Yeah, it's just a collection of short films - but it's a collection of really awesome short films. (Possibly the only set of vignettes masquerading as a film that all work in my opinion.)

Gaslight  (George Cukor, 1944)
Cotton is the daring detective who probes his minuscule suspicions long and hard enough to uncover a rather sordid and disturbing plot: Boyer marries and psychologically assaults Bergman in order to seek out a payload of jewels left by her former caretaker. Since we learn this fairly early in the film, the joy is in watching Cotton's investigation unfold amidst the moody sound of footsteps in various, foggy London settings.

Ikiru (Akira Kurosawa, 1952)
The use of flashback in the final scene, where a teary group of bureaucrats reminisce about the last days of the protagonist's life - a life that consisted of equal parts dusty diligence and suppression of nostalgia - is the perfect coda to Ikiru: The man's life, after it is over, swells by comparison to its size while earthly (Everyone praising the way he zigged when he should have zagged, and so forth). My current favorite of Kurosawa's films.

L'Age d'or (Luis Bunuel, 1930)
This is easily the most cohesively funny and exhilarating of Bunuel's films. By the end, when the gears have shifted into some serious left field, you're so absorbed, it's barely even important how you got there. L'Age d'or, like all great surreal work, is simply communicated in another language. It links the thematic resonance of its ideas, allowing you the privilege of thinking, comfortably, on a completely different level.

Le Cercle Rouge (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1970)
A riff on every great film noir sequence you could imagine, supposedly made to compensate for the deep regret director Melville harbored for passing on Rififi 15 years earlier. This movie never stops being badass. Not for one second.

Le Jour Se Leve (Marcel Carne, 1939)
Probably the most succinct blueprint for Poetic Fatalism (though Port of Shadows came first), Le Jour Se Leve contains one of the most resonant uses of flashback in cinema history, made all the more trailblazing by its insistence on shifting its sympathy between characters at what feels like the drop of a hat.

Port of Shadows (Marcel Carne, 1939)
The thick atmosphere and clean-cut personifications of the characters surpass Shadows' aimless tendencies, eventually transcending it's ramshackle plot as a mere delivery device for fleeing gestures of down-on-your-luck collisions (you could predict the ending now, even though I've told you nothing of the narrative). Michel Simon's Rasputinesque beard is one of the creepiest in the history of beards on film.

Sisters (Brian DePalma, 1973)
Here's a guy who is genuinely obsessed with Hitchcock. Simple to the point of stream-of-consciousness at the start, it evolves from black and white (as most of Hitch's films do) to very complicated shades of gray as one bizarre, stylish twist heaps upon the last with such building interest, the thing is over before you realize how amazing it really is.

Sunrise (F.W. Murnau, 1927)
It would be difficult to separate all the terrific, modern things happening in Sunrise and simply be moved by the content. The way it so effortlessly plays ahead of its time is breathtaking. Constantly redefining itself, it opens as a lover's bid to win back a wandering heart, dissolves into a dissection of the flaneur in the glittering Big City and ends, in its most ambitious move, with a gut wrenching bout of irony. Murnau takes the medium into a place that forever proves its strengths (in visual terms) and far exceeds nearly every silent film experience I've had to date.

3 Women (Robert Altman, 1977)
As roles begin to reverse and characters begin to usurp each other's personas in 3 Women, they do it all at once, which is incredibly exciting for the viewer. Altman reportedly wrote the whole thing from a series of dreams he had and it fits: Everything activates as if stuck together from fragmented thoughts, never completely fitting - but pleasantly so. The dazed and feverish montages remind one of the impregnating daydream in Rosemary's Baby stretched out to feature length.

Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)
Ozu's concern with spatial dimension may provide for some revolutionary editing techniques (the way he builds these abstract - yet instinctually fitting - cutaways is mind blowing), but it's his lesson-in-human-nature meditation on the contrast between a modernized lifestyle (of the grown children in Tokyo) and that of the aging rents (whose travel is a day by train) that taps the deepest vein of universality and, eventually, reduces us to tears.

A Woman is a Woman (Jean-Luc Godard, 1961)
Anna Karina, the perpetually indecisive heroine of Godard's slapstick deconstruction of the American musical comedy, doubles as an energy ball, making A Woman is a Woman fun from hair to the feet. His first full-blown avante garde piece, it's confidence might be its most charming aspect: Every single vibrant, wacky moment is as solid and as clever as the last.

[Kill Bill turned way down*: An experiment I'm willing/eager to share with everyone]

Settling once and for all whether or not the Kill Bill saga was intended as a cliffhanger or a feature (though the answer, to me anyhow, was obvious from the get-go), I decided to throw them back to back, lop of the closing credits to the one formerly titled Vol. 1 and the opening credits of the one formerly titled Vol. 2 and eat the whole meal without waiting a ludicrous six months between bites. The verdict is a mixed blessing - but not because of the full ingestion, as you're thinking; It will be impossible - short of hypnosis or amnesia - to see the thing as one sprawling, Leone-esque epic. Period. It doesn't help that the two volumes behave very differently (Vol. 1 being the quick draw lightning round with Vol. 2 picking up all the talky, contextual slack) - - but having seen both in their bastardized forms, I can barely comprehend them together without first consulting them as separate entities. That said, watching the characters for four hours - as they debate, grow, fight, kill and die - is an exercise in the true nature of Tarantino (He's really a genius). What he invests in these mythic souls, even in those who occupy the very badlands of the frame, is a humanity and enthusiasm that's - without hyperbole - a peerless venture. Having seen Vol. 2 in the theater only once - it's frame of reference as a counterpart to Vol. 1 merely a fading memory - it was impossible for me to recognize The Bride's mythic claim to fame: That she was truly more vicious than Bill. David Carradine's speech at the end - flawlessly delivered, I might add - tying Superman's born-with-it nature to The Bride's is the cincher. It makes for a wondrous, bittersweet ending when the whole rampage is still fresh in your mind: She's the ultimate baddie (see the title for proof).

Bottom line: This is worth doing.

[*Because I can't risk the NOT KNOWING in erecting a pun this utterly brilliant: It means "without volume"]

[five overrated ones, 2004]

David O. Russell weighs down his expertly staged screwballism and firebrand absurdity with long, tedious rants of philosophical doublespeak that
spin by us so fast, we can't possibly digest it in time, leaving each scene to build a foggier, less solid foundation than the last (until, eventually, our focus collapses and we begin to enjoy I Heart Huckabee's moment to moment - - which is clearly not the director's intention).

[Obviously I changed my mind; This film entered my top ten list on 2/22/05]

The most disillusioning thing, for me, is that The Aviator seems to be engineered to be conservative, precious little of it bearing the stamp of Scorsese in any state.

[Opinion ammended on second viewing: 2/17/05]

Isn't it irresponsible to program people to hate the thing you accuse of trying to program us? Is making a film [like Fahrenheit 9/11] that sidesteps slander by claiming patriotism - in other words, riding the rebirth of the very nationalism you're blaming one man for drumming up - really sort of, well, underhanded?
Can a film that has received this much attention - negative or otherwise - ever receive a fair shake? That the filmm inspires a great number of interesting and important questions by its existence alone - not so much for the content (however informative) within - does that irony ruin the experience?

House of Flying Daggers - though awesome - is distractingly, The Road Home-style operatic (with the purposefully convoluted misdirection, hoping to divert us from the fact that nothing at all is happening). This will not stand.

[downgraded from "overrated" to "not very good, in fact" on second viewing: 4/22/05]

On sale soon, a spin-off book: "101 reasons love is like a good bottle of vino"; Because praising realism simply because Sideways is full of downers and incongruities doesn't change the fact that Payne's comfortable buddy atmosphere never seems to mingle just right with his acerbic relationship humor.

[After an extremely long back and forth with Randy - where I pretty much reveled in playing devil's advocate, myopically and consistently missing the point on purpose, I watched Sideways again on 2/26/05. And laughed my ass off.]

[61 through 71, 2004]

01. Van Helsing

"You know, Van Helsing, we've counted on you for many years. As you know, we're a secret Vatican society. And you must certainly be aware that we're all very sorry that you've lost your memory."

02. Taking Lives

Toss-up what hurts worst: The repeated violation of its own, rather promising opening sequence, the nth generation thinning of cop banter, the comforting/obligatory appearance of Jolie's breasts, the forced weirdness of Jolie's Profiler, the rote, forgettable serial killer movie greatest hits collection or the painfully silly "all along" conclusion that pretends to double back when merely doubling over.

03. Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen

There's an almost unnerving irony in the naive way Lohan keeps posing as the poster teenie-whore for Disney and the way her character in Confessions of a
Teenage Drama Queen is an unlikeable, borderline rabid little twerp. You figure out how.

04. The Terminal

Spielberg ends up setting this one in his own, personal happy place (the Hollywood of unnecessary crane shots and even more unnecessary phone call exposition) and finds himself blind sided by a disastrous vein that features Catherine Zeta-Jones martyring her romance for Tom Hanks to get him out of his predicament. As in films within films, an overarching sentimentality - not the usual [sic] subtle brand Spielbeerg has made his fame with - seems to rule over everything from scene to scene mechanics (there is no actual sense of time) all the way up to the big, somewhat capricious secret of the Planters peanut can.

05. We Don't Live Here Anymore

Laura Dern's soapbox posturing looks quite hilarious against the seamless naturalism of the rest of the doomed cast; They've inhabited their personas, reducing
speeches to natural clicks and stops while she's angling for an Academy Award with every gesture and breath. But what really annoys me about this rabid PSA against adultery is that both couples have the most absurdly well behaved children on the planet.

06. A Home at the End of the World

The actual tagline of this movie is: "Family can be what you want it to be".

07. Troy

As we've learned from the current administration, there's an oddly bleak odor to watching warmongers in any way shape or form. The characters in Troy seem to have engaged in a bet to see which of them could become Grand Warmonger. And there's also a great deal of discussion, mostly by Pec-illes, about echoing into eternity (Just like that Maximus fellow...)

08. The Passion of the Christ

The Passion of the Christ is constantly plugged up in the literal, even when it's being boring (as in the long, sagging "road to calvary" sequence wherein the same thing seems to be happening over and over again for, like, thirty minutes of screen time). The violence is used in the same way hand-held photography
is typically used: To express an asymmetrical, scruffy realism. If the result is meant to be one where suffering transcends love, why did I feel like I'd been pummeled by the film rather than enlightened by it? A less profound movie riding a crest of deafening word-of-mouth I couldn't imagine; A better title might have been The Beating of the Christ.

09. Shark Tale

A solid proof, if ever there were one, that Dreamworks is a second rate animation studio toiling with rickety flashlights in the gaping shadow of Pixar. (Of course, after having been spoiled for so long by animated features that cater to both sides of the equation (that's parents and kids), it's almost a sour burp to watch one that tries desperately to pull it off - - and fails so miserably. The Love Conquers All ending is probably not an especially safe bet, given that in real life sharks that pretend to be human gangsters would have murdered - without reproach - a large school of fish pretending to be happy capitalists. And stuff.)

10. Intermission

Less a film than a reunion of decent-ish actors from the British Isles willing to participate in the most mundane, wrap-every-loose-end-up-extra-tight indie film anyone could dream up for them. Veering on cartoonish in spots, bordering on nihilistic in others and sappy convenience to plague it's "everybody's connected" riff, Intermission is only as charming as television (and that's to say not too charming).

[proof that I have no proof (another "yet to see" buried suspiciously at the bottom of the page)]

The Brown Bunny, Cowards Bend the Knee, Distant, Goodbye Dragon Inn, The Merchant of Venice, Mystic River 2: Boxing Boogaloo, Primer, Red Lights, Undertow, Vera Drake and A Very Long Engagement.

[10/9/05: I see the last of these films, Cowards Bend the Knee ]

[tidbits worth repeating]

- Timothy Spall, David Thewlis, Emma Thompson and (especially) Gary Oldman in Harry Potter and a Smidgen of Art This Time
- Owen Wilson in The Big Bounce.
- Johnny Depp brings back Dean Corso (from The Ninth Gate) for at least the first third of Secret Window.
- That awesome animated version of The Tell Tale Heart that was on the Hellboy DVD for some reason.
- With hallways like tunnels between foxholes, the cavernous apartment - not the nonstop sex - is, surprisingly, the best part of The Dreamers.
- 13 Going on 30 replaces The Wedding Planner as my pick for most unsung mainstream Romantic Comedy that I'm embarrassed to admit I liked. A great deal.
- Why do the titles at the end of Man on Fire infer that the characters were real people? (They weren't, by the way)
- Jim Jarmusch makes three great short films starring actors like Cate Blanchett, Steve Coogan, Alfred Molina, Tom Waits and Iggy Pop. Then he goes and spoils
   it all by mixing in 9 significantly less cool ones.
- In a moment straight out of a silent film, two girls brooming in playful circles suddenly realize a flower of "the bad color" is growing along the side of the porch. Wasting no time, they pluck it up and bury beneath the ground, looking about to survey their exposure time as if they were hiding evidence in The Village.
- Shimmying towards the camera to Nina Simone, the seductive Julie Delpy tells a starry-eyed Ethan Hawke that he's going to miss his flight. It is Before Sunset and he replies - acknowledging their rekindled attraction - "I know".
-The boy in Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter...and Spring weeps when he finds that the snake he has tied a rock to has died. Later, he carries a neckbrace boulder (as he carries in his heart) right to the top of the mountain.
-In The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, the title character asks a man who just identified himself as his son to wait for him as he walks to the bow of the boat to smoke a joint. My favorite Bowie song, "Life on Mars?!", is cranked.
-I don't mind confessing to how attracted I am to Catalina Moreno, heroine of Maria Full of Grace. Also, she gave the best female performance this year.
-Elijah Wood steals dialogue from Jim Carrey that's proven to successfully romance Kate Winslet and he still manages to fuck it up in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It was such a wacky twist, I turned to my wife and said, "Omigod. Did that just happen?"
-The whole bid to contextualize (I guess) and marry the film to the television program produces the Pirates, who have journeyed to see The Spongebob Squarepants Movie.
-Despite his weak performance, Will Smith comes the closest to tickling the Battlefield Earth Prize awarder in me when his line "Somehow 'I Told You So' just doesn't cover it" (from I, Robot) became the hot line to repeat in my household.
-...ditto "I Left My Wallet in El Segundo" from The Ladykillers and the gingerly chirped "Please. Please." of Tom Hanks' overpolite immigrant in The Terminal.
  We don't even like these films very much. Why do we find ourselves incessantly quoting the darn things?
-In a move of unprecedented stupidity, I sneak into Open Water - a film I was not fond of - five minutes after it starts, only to find that I've missed the major redeeming factor of frontal nudity. I kick myself for the rest of the year because I know I'm not pathetic enough to watch it again for that reason, but that I'm curious enough to torture myself until I watch it again anyway.
-I have a weird patch of about a month where I worry that my wife thinks I rent only movies that will have a ton of sex and nudity in them. It starts with Secret Things, moves through Twentynine Palms and We Don't Live Here Anymore, peaks with The Door in the Floor and ends around the time I watch Sisters.
-The digi blood in Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman throws me such a left curve that I spend nearly an hour complaining about it. When I see it resurface in House of Flying Daggers, I don't even bother to tell anybody. Make of that what you will.
-Spying the grades I've given to films we've seen together one evening, a now fluently reading Victoria questions my grounds for branding Shark Tale a C. I face
    the harsh realities of how silly my little pasttime is.