6000 movies on Flickchart: How consistent have I been?

I have what you might call an obsession with documentation. You may have noticed.

One way this expresses itself is by keeping track of my movements on Flickchart, partly so that if their server ever dies, I'll still have my rankings in an Excel file. But partly also for analyses like the one I am about to do.

I've just reached the milestone of 6,000 movies added to Flickchart, which is still 187 shy of my actual number of viewings. I've gotten behind on what was once a real-time ranking of new movies seen, but right now I'm as close to being caught up as I have been in some time, only about six months behind.

And having just crossed that milestone, I decided it was time to analyze my own Flickcharting to see how consistent I've been. But first I need to explain how it was even possible I could do that.

I'll start by explaining my method of tracking my Flickcharting offline. I have an Excel spreadsheet which gives a real-time snapshot of where my movies are on Flickchart. When a new movie gets added, I go to the appropriate row on that sheet and insert it, moving all the other movies down by one, in keeping with what actually occurs on the site. When a movie wins a duel against another and moves up that way, I'll cut it and paste it from its lower rung on the spreadsheet to its new position of prominence. In this way, I will always have an exact backup of my Flickchart in Excel.

But then I also have a sheet in the same workbook where I keep track of the movements as they occur. I tend to alternate adding new movies with dueling random movies, so you will get a pair of line items on the sheet that look like this, my most recent two "transactions" completed:

A quick explanation of this.

The top line shows that The Golden Compass beat Copland in a random duel, which moves it from 929th on my chart to 884th, pushing Copland down to 885th. I recently rewatched Copland and was not enthralled with it, so I expect more duels with outcomes like this.

The second line shows my addition of C'mon C'mon, a film I was not a big fan of. There are only about a thousand films I've ranked so far that I liked less. As you can see, it landed at 4923 on its initial entry into the chart, losing to Skyscraper but besting The Last Unicorn. (Seeing as how I have not seen The Last Unicorn since the early 1980s, it's dubious how accurate this is anyway.)

If my screenshot had been extended just a little to the left, you'd see that this was row 4243 in the spreadsheet, which gives you an approximate idea how long I've been keeping track of these movements.

So what to do with all this data? Well I'll tell you.

One would be to track a particular film's movements over time. Did I mention that I also take snapshots of the main page every 10,000 rankings, saving them as their own sheet, so I can look back in time to see where I once was? Well I do that too. However, that's on as-needed basis when I'm curious about a particular title, and so far, the need has not arisen.

Instead, I decided to use this milestone to see how consistent my dueling decisions have been over the years. By searching titles -- assuming I spelled them correctly in my haste to record them -- I can see how many movies beat another movie at one point in time, then lost to the same movie at a different point in time. Theoretically, the implicit goal of working toward a perfect Flickchart means that all your decisions are sacrosanct and internally consistent with one another -- an impossible standard, but one all we Flickcharters secretly like to believe is hypothetically attainable.

This little trawl of my data would show me just how consistent I've been.

Now, if I wanted to spend all my time analyzing this data, I'm sure there's a lot I could find out. But I'd really need an algorithm to help with something like that. I'm not some Howard Hughes who has all the time I want to parse my Flickcharting decisions while wearing boxes of Kleenex on my feet.

So I decided to just go from the top of the list and see how many inconsistencies I could find in my top, say, 100. Due to the way I duel -- which I won't explain right now, just trust me -- those top 100 movies duel more than any other on my chart, so they are the easiest to track if I want the most number of results.

Now, it should be no surprise that the top ten did not contain many movements. I've not had a lot of changes in my top ten during this time. In fact, since Raising Arizona has been my #1 the whole time, it doesn't appear at all on this page of the workbook -- having never lost a duel nor needed to win a duel to move up.

But as we get closer to the bottom of that top ten, some interesting results are revealed.

For example, I discovered that my #7, Fargo, has both beaten and lost to my #8, Toy Story. Since they are only separated by one on my chart, one might assume something like this would be the case. A rewatch of either one or the other could easily be responsible for such a shift, though in this case, I doubt that's a factor -- I happen to have not rewatched Fargo since 2012 and Toy Story since 2013. I haven't been keeping this spreadsheet for that long. (In fact, Excel says I created it on May 28, 2014.)

So while we said this result is not a surprise, it may be a surprise just how frequently this has occurred after these two.

The Iron Giant, my current #10, has both beaten and lost to Wargames, my current #21. I think this movement probably occurred not long after my most recent Iron Giant viewing in late 2018, when it ultimately moved into a spot in the top ten that it has not yet relinquished.  

Tangled, my current #14, has both beaten and lost to Jesus Christ Superstar, my current #15. But then Jesus Christ Superstar has also beaten and lost to Schindler's List, which is now down at #43. JCS used to "slum it" with Schindler's List down in the 40s but has since gotten a big boost. 

As we continue, more movies have switched places with more than one other movie. Do the Right Thing (#20) has had trouble deciding whether it's better or worse than both Run Lola Run (#22) and Unforgiven (#24). Wargames not only traded places with Iron Giant, as listed above, but also with Big (#33). The same can be said for Run Lola Run, which adds Donnie Darko (#23) to its list of dance partners in addition to Do the Right Thing, and then there's Shawshank Redemption (#26) being fickle with both A Fish Called Wanda (#30) and Time Bandits (#31).

I abandoned this exercise at this point, as it was becoming pretty clear that these sort of results would continue to bear themselves out down the chart.

I suppose what I would really need is to see if two movies that are far apart from each other on the chart have actually mutually beaten each other, but a) that's much harder to track, because I would have to have my suspicions of which titles these might be in advance, and b) Flickchart doesn't really work that way, except for over a long period of time with a lot of intervening movements. Once one film beats another, they are next to each other on the chart, at least for the immediate future -- so it's not so easy for them to be at a great distance from one another again, unless you purposefully re-rank a movie because it seems out of place.

I did find one interesting result from within this top 26, which was that Bound (#19) actually beat Big (#33) at two different times. How is it possible for one film to leap over another film twice? Shouldn't it be ahead of that film after the first win? Yes it is, but then the second film can leap frog the first by beating a film that's ahead of both of them. It's nice to know that both times that Bound and Big dueled with Big in the lead, I saw it fit to reverse their respective positions. That's the sort of consistency I'm looking for. Of course, I don't and can't keep track of how many times one of the films might have beaten the other without their positions changing -- and in fact, Big might have won a duel against Bound in this scenario when it was in the higher slot.

There's one other takeaway I want to discuss before I let you go.

I noted that Shawshank had beaten A Fish Called Wanda and vice versa, but what I didn't say is that A Fish Called Wanda has actually leaped past Shawshank two different times, with Shawshank getting the win in the middle duel. 

Now I don't keep track of the dates these duels occurred on this spreadsheet, but I can tell you that on line 1888 -- which means after I'd added 944 new movies and had 944 lower movies win a duel over a higher movie -- Wanda defeated Shawshank to move from 30th to 21st. Five hundred twelve "transactions" later, on line 2400, it was Shawshank upending Wanda to go from 24th to 23rd. Then a mere 142 lines later, which was probably only a couple months depending on how frequently I was charting at the time, Wanda claimed its revenge on Shawshank by moving from 25th to 24th. It seems unlikely that I watched either movie during that time, though I have seen both movies in the past ten years.

But that's not nearly the shortest time period to change my mind. Sticking with Shawshank, on line 2602, Time Bandits bested Shawshank to move from 26th to 25th. Only 64 transactions later -- in other words, only 32 new movies added and only 32 movies repositioned by the outcome of a duel -- Shawshank took the position back by jumping from 27th to 25th. And yes, that two-slot difference suggested there was an intervening transaction related to Shawshank, which was the aforementioned Big insinuating itself between the two of them. 

The only real conclusion to draw from this is what Flickcharters have acknowledged from time immemorial, time immemorial being the 13+ years Flickchart has been available to the public: that human beings, perhaps especially cinephiles, are fickle, and they might select differently between two movies depending on what day of the week it was and what mood they were in.

And when you have a chart with more than 6,000 movies on it, these relative positions are anything but absolute -- even when your thoughts don't change as the result of new information, like a repeat viewing. These are fine differences indeed, imperceptible levels of preference and variations in quality. 

So yeah, I've written all this to conclude something you likely would have surmised before you even started reading.

Hey but at least I used my data. 

A fondness for inept criminals

Each week on the Filmspotting podcast, the hosts (Adam Kempenaar and Josh Larsen) end the show with a top five in some category -- top five movies about redemption, top five movies set in Los Angeles, even top five movie scenes involving bicycles. The top five is usually a tie-in to the new movie they're reviewing that week.

I'm always excited for the top five, but rarely satisfied once I've listened to it. The movies I would choose rarely seem to show up on their lists. Which I don't think is any reflection of my taste in movies vs. theirs. It's just an indication of how many movies there are out there to choose from.

This past week was an exception.

I first heard about it from my friend Don, who texted me on Saturday "Listening to this week's Filmspotting as I tend to laundry, and now I know that you like movies with well-done inept criminals."

The tie-in this week was Killing Them Softly, which I was a mere half hour away from seeing at the time I received the text. As soon as I saw the movie, I'd be free to listen to the podcast, which would reveal to me Adam and Josh's top five inept movie criminals.

And Don sure was right.

For starters, they called this alternately the "H.I. McDunnough Memorial List" and the "I'll Be Taking Those Huggies and Whatever Cash You've Got Memorial List." The purpose of "naming" the list is to acknowledge the one choice they consider most obvious, which they would theoretically both pick as their #1 if they didn't exclude it from consideration. Past examples include "The Overlook Hotel Memorial List" for the top five movies about hotels.

Right off the bat I knew they had "gotten" me, since Raising Arizona is currently listed as my #3 movie on Flickchart. Even though I secretly think it may be my favorite movie of all time.

And then:

Josh's top 5:

5. Jasper and Horace, 101 Dalmatians
4. Jacob, A Simple Plan
3. Professor Marcus, The Ladykillers
2. Jerry Lundegaard, Fargo
1. Dignan, Bottle Rocket

Adam's top 5:

5. Sam and Eddie, Safe Men
4. Holland and Pendlebury, The Lavender Hill Mob
3. Virgil Starkwell, Take the Money and Run
2. Ken Pile, A Fish Called Wanda
1. Jerry Lundegaard, Fargo

Of the nine different movies mentioned here (Fargo was mentioned by both), I've seen six. Of those six, four are among my top 300 movies of all time (A Fish Called Wanda, Fargo, A Simple Plan and Bottle Rocket), three in my top 100 (Plan, Fargo and Wanda) and two (Fargo and Wanda) in my top ten.

So yeah, I'd say I was pretty satisfied by this week's top five.

But as these things do, it also got me thinking: Am I drawn to movies about inept criminals?

If you had asked me that question without providing any of the evidence why you were asking, I'd have said "No, I don't think so. No more than anyone else, that's for sure."

But I wonder. Because those aren't the only favorites of mine that feature hapless hoods.

(And watch out for spoilers. If you see a name of a movie you haven't seen in bold, skip on to the next -- I may be spoiling something about it.)

Looking only at my current Flickchart top 20, you could make arguments for the following:

Pulp Fiction (#4). The guys eating their Big Kahuna burgers are pretty inept, considering that they got caught with their pants down, gunned down while eating burgers for breakfast. But then there's also the ineptitude of Vincent Vega blowing off Marvin's head because of a pothole -- this after he and his friend Jules forgot to check the back room for a gunman who should have killed them. And never mind the singular bone-headedness of Butch, whose unusual plan to screw over and subsequently escape the mob involves returning to his house when they're looking for him.

Glengarry Glen Ross (#11). When their priggish boss denies them the new Glengarry leads, Dave and Shelly decide to knock over their own office to steal them, planning to sell them to the competition. That plan is destined to fail in numerous ways, even if you remove the last part about selling the spoils of your theft in the same small industry where you already work -- where the police are most likely to look for it. 

Goodfellas (#12). Although you can't be inept and last in the mafia very long, in the end, everyone has a slip-up that results in their eventual whacking. Particular to this movie, however, most of the crew that pulled off the Lufthansa robbery gets whacked because they can't follow the simple instruction not to spend their newfound wealthy in showy ways that will attract attention.

Run Lola Run (#16). Mani blows an otherwise smooth and simple job to transport a bag of money when he leaves it on the subway, obeying an instinctive reaction to elude a pair of cops who aren't even looking for him. Later he walks into a grocery store to rob it without wearing anything that would conceal his identity. Meanwhile, Lola tries to rob a bank by holding her own father at gunpoint.

Unforgiven (#20). An old gunslinger goes on a mission to claim a bounty on a pair of thugs who beat and cut up a couple of prostitutes, but nearly dies from the flu because he got wet in the rain (and then beaten by the sheriff, but you kind of feel like the rain is what did him in). One of the two thugs is then shot to death on the toilet, a pathetic way to go even if it might not have been helped.

You could even argue that #19 The Shawshank Redemption contains a hapless criminal, because the actual killer of Andy Dufresne's wife boastfully confesses to the crime while in prison.

I guess you could say that almost any movie that has an element of crime in it has someone who isn't that good at it. So I don't want to stretch this too far.

But I can't help but notice all the titles of movies featuring hapless criminals as you continue down my list. Time Bandits (#21) might qualify. The Bicycle Thief (#26) definitely does. Though it does drop off after that. Maybe that's because #27 is Bound, and Bound contains a group of the smartest criminal types you've ever seen in a movie.

What to make of this concentration near the top of my list of movies about backfired criminal exploits?

I don't really know. Though it could mean I have a fascination with the best laid plans gone awry. Or maybe I just like watching people who have truly made a mess, comical or otherwise, of their lives, to remind myself that I needn't get too down on myself just because I don't know where I want to be in my career in ten years.

I'll have to think on it some more.

But this realization does partly explain why I'm so in love with Killing Them Softly, a film I seem to like more than anyone else on the planet other than Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman (who also rhapsodized over it). More than the criminal ineptitude that inspired this week's top five, though, Softly really demonstrates how all crime is destined to have consequences, even if the criminals carry it off with a decent amount of panache.

That and a bunch of stuff about Obama and the financial crisis, but we won't get into that right now.

How much does screen size matter?

Flickchart Tuesdays is on Wednesday this week. Send a letter to the complaints department.

This week I thought I would see how much the size of the screen I watched a movie on affects its ranking. Put in a different way: What are my top ten movies I saw on video for the first time?

In the past I've argued that seeing a movie in the theater is likely to make you appreciate it slightly more than you would otherwise. That's certainly not true in all cases, and the reverse is difficult to prove as well. By that I mean, the reason we see more bad movies at home than in the theater is because we're usually not willing to spend theater prices on movies we suspect will be bad. So all the marginal crap eventually gets watched on DVD. However, I argue that if we did see those movies in the theater, we might have liked them slightly better. As long as we didn't like them worse because we spent the whole time grumbling over the waste of money.

But today I want to focus on good movies seen at home, not bad movies seen at home or bad movies seen in the theater. The theory I'd like to examine, because I probably couldn't go so far as to prove it, is whether slightly inferior movies I saw in the theater would be ranked higher in my Flickchart than movies I saw at home for the first time, which may be "better." Like I say, there's a lot of speculation here because the quality of a film is not absolute -- one person's "good" might be another person's "terrible."

One thing I can do, however, is measure how quickly I get to my top ten video movies (20 with the "honorable mentions" section) in terms of my overall rankings, and compare that to how quickly I "should" get to that number based on the total number of movies I've seen in the theater vs. at home. In other words, I've seen more than two movies on video for every one I've seen in the theater in my lifetime. In fact, although I don't have the exact numbers in front of me right now, it's something like 2331 movies seen on video for the first time to 978 movies seen in the theater for the first time. (Um, yeah, I guess that's pretty close to "exact.") Rounding the lower number up, let's say that's 30% theater movies and 70% video movies.

Which means that if all else were equal, 30% of my top 100 movies should be movies I saw in the theater. Of course, all else is not equal, since as discussed above, you're more likely to see good movies in the theater and bad movies at home. But it will be interesting to see how much the final total deviates from that 30%/70% breakdown.

One final note before we finally get into this: You may notice films like Citizen Kane and The Bicycle Thief not appearing on this list, and wonder how I could have been around in the 1940s to see those films in the theater for the first time. For the purposes of this argument I am considering those to be "theatrical" screenings, because I saw them in film classes where they were projected. (Though I suppose it's also possible I could have seen them in special theatrical re-releases.) That will focus the emphasis of this post on the actual method of screening, not the era of the release of the films.

Okay! Again, a reminder that I don't know what the results will be before they come up ... I just load up Flickchart and start typing.

1. A Fish Called Wanda (1988, Charles Crichton). Flickchart: #10. Well, it's interesting to note that it takes until my 10th favorite movie to get one I saw for the first time on video. Makes perfect sense with this one -- I was about 15 when it came out, and I hadn't yet discovered the pleasures of British farce. So my friends and I wouldn't have been lining up for this one -- we had to hear about it word-of-mouth. I did see it within a year of its release, though. And for awhile owned a 3D cardboard fish tank diorama type thing that they used to advertise it in a video store that went out of business.

2. Donnie Darko (2001, Richard Kelly). Flickchart: #14. No surprise here either. Donnie Darko is the consummate cult movie, which means most people missed it in its initial theatrical run. We just relied on the wise few who did see it to spread the gospel to the rest of us. But boy would I have loved to see this on a big screen. I actually did see the vastly inferior director's cut on the big screen in 2004. Unfortunately, it was vastly inferior.

3. Run Lola Run (1999, Tom Tykwer). Flickchart: #16. I vividly remember the night I rented Run Lola Run, though I don't vividly remember the name of the service from which I rented it. It was one of those short-lived delivery concepts where you would order a variety of things online, including food and videos, and they would deliver to your house. (Or, apartment, since it was New York.) I used to love ordering Ben & Jerry's and Krispy Kreme with my movies. Then you would return the movie in drop boxes located around the city. Anyway, I probably would have seen Lola in the theater if I hadn't been a poor grad student living in New York City at the time.

4. When Harry Met Sally ... (1989, Rob Reiner). Flickchart: #17. I don't at all remember the circumstances of the first time I saw When Harry Met Sally. My guess is that it was on a rental night with my high school friends. As is the case with many comedies, they don't suffer as much on the small screen as the large-scale epics tend to suffer.

5. Bound (1996, Andy & Larry Wachowski). Flickchart: #27. I remember the thrill of discovery when I watched Bound, but not the circumstances. I might have watched it with my friend Justin. Yeah, that sounds right.

6. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975, Terry Gilliam & Terry Jones). Flickchart: #28. The hardest I've ever laughed in my life was the first time I saw the scene where King Arthur systematically hacks off both arms and then both legs of the knight who challenges him, yet the man hasn't lost his pluck. "Tis but a flesh wound." I was rolling around in my basement for minutes on that one.

7. National Lampoon's Animal House (1978, John Landis). Flickchart: #29. The consummate movie people discover when they go to college -- for my generation, anyway. We must have watched this at least ten times my freshman year in college, making up for the fact that I didn't get out to the theater to see it when I was five.

8. Do the Right Thing (1989, Spike Lee). Flickchart: #31. When this was in the theater, I was probably a tad too young to have developed a sense that movies could serve a purpose beyond merely entertaining me through some particular accessible genre. My first film class came in the fall of 1990. You can bet I saw Lee's next movie, Jungle Fever, in the theater the following year.

9. Dumb and Dumber (1994, Peter & Bobby Farrelly). Flickchart: #36. I had a big bias against Jim Carrey from his In Living Colour days, and I didn't get past it until I finally saw Ace Ventura: Pet Detective in 1995. I'm pretty sure my first Dumb and Dumber screening came quickly on the heels of that. It hasn't been my last.

10. This is Spinal Tap (1984, Rob Reiner). Flickchart: #37. I don't remember my first screening of this film, but I do remember my first introduction to it. It was on an island we used to visit for a week every summer. On our last night there, all the kids would stay up all night, because we were cherishing every minute we could spend together until we saw each other the next summer. One year I remember seeing the night staff watching it on a TV in the lobby at something like 5 in the morning. Intrigued, I probably saw it soon after that.

11. Defending Your Life (1991, Albert Brooks). Flickchart: #39.
12. The Cable Guy (1996, Ben Stiller). Flickchart: #46.
13. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006, Tom Tywker). Flickchart: #47.
14. Rear Window (1954, Alfred Hitchcock). Flickchart: #48.
15. The Wizard of Oz (1939, Victor Fleming). Flickchart: #49.
16. Jesus Christ Superstar (1973, Norman Jewison). Flickchart: #56.
17. Dangerous Liaisons (1988, Stephen Frears). Flickchart: #60.
18. Airplane! (1980, Jim Abrahams, David Zucker & Jerry Zucker): Flickchart: #62.
19. All About Eve (1950, Joseph L. Mankiewicz). Flickchart: #63.
20. The Exorcist (1973, William Friedkin). Flickchart: #64.

So 20 of my top 64 films were seen on video for the first time. Twenty divided by 64 = 31%. So it works out kind of inversely: Movies I saw in the theater for the first time are only 30% of my total, but they account for 70% of my favorite films. Whereas movies I saw for the first time on video are 70-30 in the other direction.

What do we conclude from this? I don't know.

Though if I had to analyze it, I'd say that I'm pretty good at identifying movies I will love, and seeing them in the theater. Of course, the raving of critics has probably had something to do with helping me identify them.

It's also interesting to note that only eight of these movies were movies I probably would never have seen in the theater, either because I was not born yet or because I was under ten years old, and the subject matter would not have been appropriate for me. I guess that just means that my favorite movies, in general, are weighted toward movies that were made in my lifetime. Which is probably something most movie fans find to be true about themselves. This also helps explain why The Dark Knight is the top-ranked movie on Flickchart -- Flickchart's vast majority of younger users consider it more relevant to them than, say, Airplane! or This is Spinal Tap.

There. I hope you feel at least ten percent more enriched by this scientific exercise.

Back next week with another in-depth look into my favorite films of all time.

An Oscar for a jester

Oscars are so rarely given out for flat-out comedic performances. On Monday night, I was glad to be reminded of at least one exception to that rule.

My wife and I were in need of a good comfort movie from our collection, one that would make us laugh. As I observed to her at the time, it's rare that you can laugh wholeheartedly at a movie from your own collection -- especially one you've seen as many as ten times, which is about how many times I've seen A Fish Called Wanda. You watch these movies not because you really expect to laugh out loud again at them -- one of the keys of laughter is surprise, and you aren't going to be surprised by something you've seen more than a half-dozen times. Instead, you watch them to be reminded of the gales of laughter you produced upon first viewing, with the best possible outcome being broad smiles and perhaps a few snickers.

That is, unless it's A Fish Called Wanda, featuring one of the best comedic performances I've ever seen -- so good they had to recognize it during awards season.

Kevin Kline won the 1988 best supporting actor Oscar for his work as weapons expert and pseudo intellectual Otto, a role so gut-bustingly funny that it overcame the Academy's usual preference for honoring dramatic work with its precious Oscar statues. There have certainly been actors who've won an Oscar for being funny before and since -- Jack Palance for City Slickers and Cuba Gooding Jr. for Jerry Maguire come to mind. But Kline's Oscar is the only one I can think of that was given just for being funny. In those other examples, the actors had moments of both levity and seriousness. Not Kline. He's just a clown from start to finish, an ostentatious ass that you love despite the fact that he's totally disagreeable.

And I couldn't believe how much I was actually laughing out loud at Kline's creation. Maybe not having seen it for seven or eight years restored some of its surprises, even though I feel like I can quote half the movie. Or maybe it's just so funny that it defies my theory of how many times you can laugh out loud at the same thing.

To be sure, A Fish Called Wanda owes a debt to the other three leads -- John Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis and Michael Palin -- and a considerable debt to its script, co-written by Cleese and director Charles Crichton. In fact, on this viewing I marveled at how tight the script is. But Kline gets far more than his share of the laughs, and it's amazing to me how fully he develops Otto into a collection of consistent tics and mannerisms -- which is also a credit to Cleese and Crichton. Let's look at what we learn about Otto over the course of the movie:

1) He doesn't like to be called stupid;
2) He reads philosophy, but doesn't understand it;
3) He drives an American car (where did he get it?) on the streets of England, and repeatedly yells "Asshole!" after side-swiping other drivers on the wrong side of the road;
4) He can speak Italian -- or at least, produce a fair number of random Italian words -- and uses it as foreplay;
5) He has trouble with lists of options, and frequently asks people to repeat them;
6) He loves America and will defend it until the ends of the earth;
7) He hates all non-Americans, particularly the British;
8) He's incredibly jealous and has a bad habit of letting his jealousy spoil an otherwise smart plan;
9) He doesn't like animals, particularly fish;
10) He inhales deeply of his arm pits in times of crisis and/or insecurity;
11) He likes taunting people with disabilities, particularly, stutterers;
12) And, perhaps most surprising, he's an absolutely whiz with guns, knives, crossbows, and other weapons.

Can you think of another character whose quirks are so clearly and unobtrusively established?

This script is excellent with repetition, one of the keys to comedy. We get multiple instances of each of Otto's quirks, as well as such repeated gags as Palin's Ken repeatedly killing the dogs of the woman he's supposed to be bumping off.

Kline also makes almost all his dialogue quotable. Some examples:

"I love watching your ass when you walk! Don't go near him, he's mine! A pound says you won't kill her!"

"K-k-k-Ken is c-c-c-coming to k-k-k-kill me!"

"Avoid the green ones. They're not ripe yet." (mocking laughter)

"I'm so very very sssss ... FUUUUCK YOU!"

"Don't touch his dick!"

"Wake up limey fish!"

"I'm Harvey Man-fren-gin-son-fred." (Seen that spelled a couple different ways online.)

And my favorite exchange between him and Cleese:

Otto: "You pompous, stuck-up, snot-nosed, English, giant, twerp, scumbag, fuck-face, dickhead, asshole!"
Archie: "How very interesting. You're a true vulgarian, aren't you?"
Otto: "You're the vulgarian you fuck!"

In fact, I had a funny realization while watching -- one of Kline's lines from this film is something I say every time I watch House. In that moment about 51 minutes into the hour, when House's eyes go all far away and he considers some diagnostic angle that had previously eluded him, I say "Wait a moment!" in a British accent, and my wife always laughs. I always thought I was imitating some imaginary British inspector discovering a breakthrough in the case, but really, I'm just quoting Kline from this movie: "What do the English usually eat with chips to make them more interesting?" And continuing in a British accent: "Wait a moment! It's fish!"

Okay, so I don't mean for this post to turn into a rote recitation of what makes A Fish Called Wanda so great. Its fans, of which I hope most of you are, already know all this stuff, and there's only so much nodding along you can do.

So back to my original point: An Oscar for straight comedy. I applaud it. Obviously Kline is genius here, but what makes this performance different from all the other genius comedic performances that have never even been considered for nomination? I don't have the answer to that, and will just have to be thankful that the stars aligned to make it so.

It's hard for us to recognize what comic actors do as acting, per se. You might say "Kevin Kline was hilarious in that," or "Kevin Kline was great in that." But you wouldn't be very likely to say "What great acting by Kevin Kline," would you? We think of "acting," in the strictest sense, as using a different accent, or playing someone with a disability. We define it by the very difficulty of it, by the way it requires the actor to be in some way different from his/her true self. Whereas it's very easy to imagine Kevin Kline being some variation on this jester in real life, albeit probably less insecure and douchey.

Like most discussion points about films, it's an open-ended question. I'm just glad the Oscar voters got it right 22 years ago. I guess it wasn't a deep year for supporting actor performances -- one of the other nominations was also for a comedic performance (Dean Stockwell in Married to the Mob), while the other three were for movies that didn't exactly capture the zeitgeist (Alec Guinness for Little Dorrit, Martin Landau for Tucker: The Man and His Dream and River Phoenix for Running on Empty, which I actually love).

But I'll take it however I can get it. Any other perspective on it would be ... well, stupid.

And I don't like to be called stupid any more than Otto does.