My 2002 film rankings (in 2002)

This is the sixth in a 2022 monthly posting of the 12 year-end rankings I completed prior to starting this blog, on the occasion of my 25th anniversary of ranking movies. I'm posting them as a form of permanent backup, plus to do a little analysis of how my impression of the movies has changed since then. I'm going in reverse order and will end with 1996 in December. 

As I was typing out the movies in my 2002 rankings, and got to about the mid-50s, I thought "How much longer do I have to go?" I could tell I wasn't near the bottom yet, but I knew that in 2003, I had ranked only 58 movies before my ranking deadline -- not from memory, but because I'd only just posted about it a few weeks earlier. In the last ten years or so, my annual numbers have only tended to go up or drop by a handful of titles at most, so it was stunning to me to discover that I ranked 80 movies in 2002 -- and 22 fewer than that only a year later.

I can't really account for it in terms of my life experiences. In both 2002 and 2003, I spent most of the year dating my last serious girlfriend before I met my wife. We got together at the beginning of March in 2002 and broke up at the beginning of November in 2003, meaning about two months in both years that I was not together with her. Yet our habits must have changed between the two years, because I consumed far fewer movies the second year. Hmm. It's not a specific choice I remember.

Other things I noticed about this year was the handful of movies I watched, on the down low, at my new job, my first job in IT, when I didn't have enough to do and worked in a back room where my boss almost never came. There were a handful of movies I was able to sneak in under these circumstances, spread kind of evenly throughout the list, which I downloaded through Kazaa, an old file-sharing service where I also picked up some songs I really liked. 

The first two movies I ever saw at the drive-in as an adult -- Scooby-Doo and my worst of the year, Bad Company -- were also watched in 2002. Which was also my first full year as a Los Angeles resident, having moved in May of 2001. 

Here is how I ranked my 2002 movies at the start of 2003:

1. Adaptation
2. Chicago
3. 25th Hour
4. Kissing Jessica Stein
5. Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
6. Bowling for Columbine
7. Y Tu Mama Tambien
8. About Schmidt
9. Auto Focus
10. Igby Goes Down
11. The Quiet American
12. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
13. Full Frontal
14. Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones
15. One Hour Photo
16. About a Boy
17. Blue Crush
18. Signs
19. The Cat's Meow
20. Reign of Fire
21. 8 Mile
22. The Kid Stays in the Picture
23. Minority Report
24. Scooby-Doo
25. Ice Age
26. Insomnia
27. Punch-Drunk Love
28. Brotherhood of the Wolf
29. Star Trek: Nemesis
30. Monsoon Wedding
31. Catch Me If You Can
32. Far From Heaven
33. Pumpkin
34. Moonlight Mile
35. Lovely & Amazing
36. Spider-Man
37. The Time Machine
38. Stuart Little 2
39. The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys
40. Austin Powers in Goldmember
41. The Hours
42. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
43. Like Mike
44. Jackass: The Movie
45. The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course
46. Lucky Break
47. The Rookie
48. Changing Lanes
49. The Bourne Identity
50. Men in Black II
51. The Importance of Being Earnest
52. Treasure Planet
53. Stolen Summer
54. All About the Benjamins
55. Lilo & Stitch
56. The Powerpuff Girls Movie
57. Red Dragon
58. Dragonfly
59. Resident Evil
60. Narc
61. Thirteen Conversations About One Thing
62. My Big Fat Greek Wedding
63. Snow Dogs
64. Death to Smoochy
65. Gangs of New York
66. The Rules of Attraction
67. Birthday Girl
68. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
69. Big Trouble
70. The Good Girl
71. Kung Pow: Enter the Fist
72. Storytelling
73. Hollywood Ending
74. 40 Days and 40 Nights
75. Secretary
76. Blood Work
77. Two Weeks Notice
78. A Walk to Remember
79. Eight Legged Freaks
80. Bad Company

And here is how I rank those movies today on Flickchart. This is out of 5916 films, which is the same number as when I did this post for 2003 about a month ago. I guess it's been a slow three weeks on Flickchart. Following the ranking is the percentage of the ranking out of 5916 and the number of slots they rose or fell compared to the other movies from that year on my Flickchart. A positive number indicates a comparative rise of that many slots, a negative number a fall.

1. Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (55, 99%) 4
2. Adaptation (58, 99%) -1
3. Kissing Jessica Stein (140, 98%) 1
4. Chicago (155, 98%) -2
5. 25th Hour (197, 97%) -2
6. The Cat's Meow (341, 94%) 13
7. Y Tu Mama Tambien (383, 94%) 0
8. About Schmidt (589, 90%) 0
9. Ice Age (593, 90%) 16
10. Bowling for Columbine (760, 87%) -4
11. Signs (784, 87%) 7
12. Full Frontal (808, 86%) 1
13. Reign of Fire (845, 86%) 7
14. Blue Crush (849, 86%) 3
15. The Quiet American (866, 85%) -4
16. About a Boy (943, 84%) 0
17. Auto Focus (1028, 83%) -8
18. Minority Report (1140, 81%) 5
19. Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (1218, 79%) -5
20. Brotherhood of the Wolf (1614, 73%) 8
21. Punch-Drunk Love (1618, 73%) 6
22. 8 Mile (1659, 72%) -1
23. The Kid Stays in the Picture (1775, 70%) -1
24. One Hour Photo (1883, 68%) -9
25. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2089, 65%) -13
26. Spider-Man (2174, 63%) 10
27. Igby Goes Down (2208, 63%) -17
28. Stuart Little 2 (2251, 62%) 10
29. Catch Me If You Can (2283, 61%) 2
30. Insomnia (2470, 58%) -4
31. Far From Heaven (2564, 57%) 1
32. Star Trek: Nemesis (2578, 56%) -3
33. Monsoon Wedding (2612, 56%) -3
34. The Importance of Being Earnest (2988, 49%) 17
35. Jackass: The Movie (3059, 48%) 9
36. Lucky Break (3095, 48%) 10
37. Moonlight Mile (3182, 46%) -3
38. The Time Machine (3258, 45%) -1
39. The Bourne Identity (3261, 45%) 10
40. Stolen Summer (3315, 44%) 13
41. Dragonfly (3446, 42%) 17
42. Lovely & Amazing (3455, 42%) -7
43. Red Dragon (3485, 41%) 14
44. All About the Benjamins (3561, 40%) 10
45. Like Mike (3563, 40%) -2
46. Treasure Planet (3576, 40%) 6
47. The Hours (3679, 38%) -6
48. Pumpkin (3752, 37%) -15
49. Lilo & Stitch (3754, 37%) 6
50. Resident Evil (3761, 36%) 9
51. The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course (3785, 36%) -6
52. Changing Lanes (3929, 34%) -4
53. The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys (3989, 33%) -14
54. The Powerpuff Girls Movie (4000, 32%) 2
55. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (4066, 31%) -13
56. Scooby-Doo (4082, 31%) -32
57. Austin Powers in Goldmember (4144, 30%) -17
58. Gangs of New York (4188, 29%) 7
59. Birthday Girl (4678, 21%) 8
60. Death to Smoochy (4735, 20%) 4
61. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (4875, 18%) 7
62. Narc (4894, 17%) -2
63. Thirteen Conversations About One Thing (4899, 17%) -2
64. Men in Black II (4930, 17%) -14
65. Big Trouble (4958, 16%) 4
66. The Good Girl (5069, 14%) 4
67. My Big Fat Greek Wedding (5070, 14%) -5
68. The Rookie (5116, 14%) -21
69. Bad Company (5186, 12%) 11
70. Secretary (5212, 12%) 5
71. Snow Dogs (5269, 11%) -8
72. Storytelling (5479, 7%) 0
73. Blood Work (5537, 6%) 3
74. Hollywood Ending (5538, 6%) -1
75. Kung Pow: Enter the Fist (5557, 6%) -4
76. A Walk to Remember (5574, 6%) 2
77. The Rules of Attraction (5661, 4%) -11
78. Eight Legged Freaks (5697, 4%) 1
79. Two Weeks Notice (5744, 3%) -2
80. 40 Days and 40 Nights (5778, 2%) -6

Five best movies I've seen since closing the list (alphabetical): Equilibrium, Infernal Affairs, Irreversible, The Pianist, Rabbit-Proof Fence
Five worst movies I've seen since closing the list (alphabetical): The Chateau, Fear Dot Com, Master of Disguise, Swept Away, 29 Palms
Biggest risers: Dragonfly (+17), The Importance of Being Earnest (+17), Ice Age (+16)
Biggest fallers: Scooby Doo (-32), The Rookie (-21), Austin Powers in Goldmember/Igby Goes Down (-17)
Average percentage on Flickchart: 47.74% (6 of 6)

The first thing worth commenting on is that the farther distance I get from these movies, the less well I remember their impact on me. This feels kind of like the wild west compared to other recent years. A full 22 of the movies, more than a quarter, moved up or down by double digits compared to how I ranked them nearly 20 years ago, and this year also has two of the biggest differentials so far in the 32 spots and 21 spots Scooby-Doo and The Rookie dropped. While the former is a case of reassessing it more recently when I watched it with my kids -- meaning I could see flaws I had ignored on that fun night at the drive-in -- The Rookie is simply a case of not correctly remembering how much I disliked it, which was a lot less than I remembered. I only ranked these films on Flickchart seven or so years after seeing them, so that was when I fixed on a semi-permanent impression of them.

Another notable detail is that this is the first year I've looked at (remember I started in 2007) where my highest ranked movie on Flickchart is not the film I ranked highest at the time. Although in a straight-up duel between Adaptation and Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, I would almost certainly pick Adaptation, the fact is that the latter sits three spots ahead of the former, due largely to the vagaries and inexactitudes of the Flickchart process.

The reverse of that is that my worst movie in 2002, Bad Company, is not very close to being the worst now. Incidentally, this was the other movie I saw at the drive-in with Scooby-Doo, which certainly didn't help its prospects at the time like it did for its double feature partner. There are now 11 movies worse than it, which I can only attribute to it winning some random duel and catapulting upward in my chart. In truth, while I do think of it as a bad movie, I'm surprised I saw it fit to saddle it with my number last of that year -- in retrospect anyway. 

All three of my risers are films that I now think I like better than I actually did. Dragonfly and The Importance of Being Earnest are just mediocre-plus movies for me, with Dragonfly bearing the novelty of my having seen it at a test screening -- in other words, a screening done to gauge audience reaction, with the possible intention of making changes before the final film is released. In fact, I don't actually know what resemblance the Dragonfly I saw bears to the Dragonfly you saw -- presumably they both star Kevin Costner. Anyway, I obviously hold it in higher esteem, in retrospect, than I did at the time. I always liked Ice Age, but it has invariably dropped some in my mind in the wake of something like five sub-par sequels, only one or two of which I've seen. Curiously, you'd think that would have the opposite effect of dropping it lower on Flickchart, but it still stands tall. 

One other thing of note is how middle heavy this list is. Although only the bottom nine movies are lower than the tenth percentile on Flickchart, the overall percentage is the lowest of any of the years I've looked at so far. My top five are all in my top 200 on Flickchart but it drops off pretty precipitously from that point.

I could probably analyze this more but I've taken enough of your time already. We'll look at 2001 in July.

I'm Thinking of Kaufman Things: Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine

This is the fourth in my bi-monthly 2021 series revisiting the films of Charlie Kaufman.

"... of the Spotless Mind." Yes, I know. I usually do include a movie's full title on first reference, especially in the subject of the post. But this allows me to get the whole post title on one line, so you'll just have to forgive me. Besides, who doesn't know what you're talking about when you say Eternal Sunshine?

So we go from a Dangerous Mind in May to a Spotless Mind in July. Did not even notice the parallel construction of those two titles until just a few minutes ago.

This is the only month in the series in which I am watching two films, which was necessary to fit all of Kaufman's movies (minus the one that inspired it, I'm Thinking of Ending Things) into a one-year bi-monthly structure. I chose these two to lump together because they are easily his films I've seen the most, as they were each my #1 film of their respective release years (2002 and 2004). I can be sure of five viewings of each now, three apiece since I started recording my rewatches back in 2006, and at least one apiece in the years between when they were released and 2006. If we just say it's five viewings for both, that'll make their pairing together this month seem even more predestined. 

I wasn't sure how much I'd have to say about Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, thinking that my familiarity with them would rob me of fresh insight. As it turned out, I ended up taking a decent number of notes for each.

The first thing I wanted to point out is how they relate to each other. I noticed both films begin with a neurotic voiceover from the main character, though Kaufman's voiceover as himself is a lot more self-effacing and contains a lot more self-loathing than the one he writes for Jim Carrey's Joel Barish in Eternal Sunshine. Both characters speak as though they are writing a journal, though only Joel actually is. They both talk about their personal tendencies, particularly their poisonous, self-defeating ones. Nicolas Cage's Kaufman concentrates in particular on his encroaching baldness and perceived fatness. Joel probably doesn't because he is neither bald nor fat.

A few scenes later, Joel says "Why do I fall in love with every woman who shows me the least bit of attention?" This could be a question every Kaufman character asks. 

Still, in a very real sense, Joel represents progress for the Kaufman stand-in. I couldn't help but notice that both of these films contain a scene where the Kaufman character is being asked inside by the woman he obviously likes when dropping her off after a date. The actual Kaufman in Adaptation turns down the offer by Cara Seymour's Amelia, despite her evident interest, as well as his own obvious interest in her. Moments later in his internal monologue, he says he's going to reverse that choice and go up to the door to kiss her. Instead he starts driving away. Joel initially rejects the offer of Kate Winslet's Clementine as well, but when she makes a second attempt, he relents. That's progress, but he still takes himself home before things have a chance to get really physical, citing the same thing Kaufman cites in Adaptation -- that he has to get up early the next day. But, this play works for Joel in the long run as he gets into a relationship with Clementine that is plenty physical.

Is this a real increase in Kaufman's optimism and self-esteem over a period of two years? It's hard to say. But if we are looking ahead to September's film, Synecdoche New York, it kind of looks like the answer is no. He actually has several romantic dalliances in that movie, including a marriage from before the story even begins, but Caden Cotard feels as repugnant in general to Kaufman as any of his characters. Let's not get too far ahead of ourselves though.

Both of these films also contain at least one character, and sometimes multiple characters, that Kaufman aspires to be, who emit a more effortless sense of cool and a far more easy sense of confidence. In Adaptation there are two such characters: 1) His brother Donald, also played by Cage, who is basically Charlie's exact opposite in every respect except for his appearance; 2) John LaRoche, played by Chris Cooper (in his Oscar-winning performance), who is brazen and rednecky while Kaufman is effete and intellectual and timid, though LaRoche is also extremely intelligent, making him even more of an aspirational figure for Charlie. 

That character is a bit harder to find in Eternal Sunshine, but I'd argue it is Mark Ruffalo's Stan. He's a bit of a Kaufman schlub but he's also a real cool dresser and is dating a real catch, Kirsten Dunst's Mary. He's like a Kaufman made good, maybe one step further than Joel. Then there's also a Kaufman gone bad, Elijah Wood's Patrick, who is like a Kaufman who gives in to his latent stalker tendencies. 

Although there's no other character to share Kaufman's neuroses in Adaptation, I'd argue there is one in Eternal Sunshine. Interestingly, that's Clementine herself, the original manic pixie dream girl (or one of them anyway), who also confesses to having found herself ugly as a child, and frequently talks about how fucked up she is. I think we'd see this a lot more easily if she were granted the internal monologue that Joel is granted, but only one of these per film is allowed. 

Speaking of the objects of Kaufman's interests, I noticed that he's got a particular type that represents sort of an ideal to him -- and it's not Clementine, much as she may intrigue him. Seymour actually seems to be the template for this, if we are again looking ahead to his future films. Physically, Seymour has a similarity of appearance to his love interest in Synecdoche, played by Emily Watson, and also to his love interest in Anomalisa, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh -- probably more like Watson as they are both British. I'd even say there is something similar about all these actresses to Patricia Arquette, who appears as a love interest in Human Nature. (Is Drew Barrymore from Confessions of a Dangerous Mind someone we should include in this group? I think probably that's a bridge too far.)

Some other isolated thoughts from my notes:

- In multiple projects we have seen that several characters in the film represent particular sides of Kaufman's personality, and that may have no more literal depiction than in Adaptation. Not only do we have Nicolas Cage playing both Kaufman and his brother, who have very different personalities, but we hear about this within the text of the film as well. Donald Kaufman's script "The Three" deals with a serial killer, a detective and the killer's next victim, who are all the same person. "Trick photography" is his explanation of how you accomplish the effect -- a sly commentary on the current film, in which trick photography is being used to film two Nicolas Cages in the same scene, who represent different sides of the same character's personality, just like the three characters in "The Three." We of course see this splitting of one character's personality revisited in all of Kaufman's films that come after this.

- In talking about the possible film version of the adaptation Charlie Kaufman is writing in Adaptation -- which includes himself and Donald, just as the movie we're watching does (it's all very self-reflexive) -- Donald says "I think I should play me." This is yet another demonstration of just how different Donald is than Charlie. The "real" Charlie does not play himself, casting Nicolas Cage instead. Though one assumes that if Donald actually existed, he would have cast himself rather than Cage -- and also that Kaufman must have, on some level, considered playing the role, if only he'd had a bit more chutzpah or if only he'd deluded himself a bit about his own abilities as an actor. Which is something Donald would have no problem doing, or actually, does without even realizing he's doing it, since Donald is the consummate under-thinker while Charlie is the consummate over-thinker. 

- I noticed the flashback scenes in Adaptation, where we see the early years of the earth as well as certain historical figures, felt more like something out of the Michel Gondry playbook than the Spike Jonze playbook. I'm wondering if Kaufman urged Jonze to film them this way after he worked together with Gondry on Human Nature -- even if he worked with Jonze first on Being John Malkovich. 

- Both of these films feature an interest in science -- in some cases weird science -- that we have seen in most of the Kaufman films to date. In Adaptation, it's this interest in orchids that was part of his original mission statement to adapt The Orchid Thief, though also in all these "creatures emerging from the primordial ooze" flashback sequences. In Eternal Sunshine, it's the very process used to erase the unwanted memories.

- I noted, not for the first time, that the music that plays over Joel and Clementine meeting each other on the train to Montauk is very goofy and whimsical. Clearly that is to a purpose, even though the tone that has been introduced in the few minutes before that is decidedly wintry and melancholy. I'm wondering if it is Kaufman's and Gondry's acknowledgement that this sort of meet cute scene has a history on screen, and is very tropy in nature. It kind of remind me of a sitcom, which speaks to some of what Kaufman is looking at in his Confessions of a Dangerous Mind script. 

- This isn't related to one of Kaufman's other projects, but I noticed a similarity between Eternal Sunshine and another film I love from this same period: Vanilla Sky. And it has to do with that same "uncontrollable slippage of time" concept that I find amply present in both Sky and in Synecdoche New York. When the sleeping Joel inside his own brain realizes he can't control the loss of his memories and that this is extremely distressing to him, he yells at the sky "I don't want to do this anymore, I want to call it off!" In the tone of voice and in the function within the narrative, it reminds me of Tom Cruise yelling "TECH SUPPORT!" in one of my favorite moments of Vanilla Sky. Both films are dealing with the artificial manipulation of memories to wipe out the memory of something painful that has happened to the main character. No wonder I love both of these movies so much.

- Lastly: Both Eternal Sunshine and I'm Thinking of Ending Things end on a shot in the snow, though the former is much more optimistic in its conclusion than the latter. 

One thing from watching these two films that I really did not expect: I enjoyed my revisit of Adaptation much more than my revisit of Eternal Sunshine. Though both are former #1 films for me, my working conventional wisdom was that I liked Eternal Sunshine better, as I ranked it higher both in my best of the 2000s rankings (#5 vs. #11) and currently on Flickchart (#38 vs. #56). However, on this viewing, I felt myself resisting Eternal Sunshine just a little, finding it a bit too twee for its own good in certain spots -- especially surprising since I don't think of Kaufman as this type of person. Adaptation clearly seems like the more mind-blowing achievement on a script level, even as clever as some of Kaufman's notions in Eternal Sunshine are. 

I'm starting to think that the things that are great about Eternal Sunshine are more equally attributable to Kaufman and Gondry, whereas Kaufman's involvement is more dominant in Adaptation, and maybe that I prefer Kaufman dominance. (Which is why two of the three films Kaufman himself directed resonated with me so much.) I'm wondering if part of that was confirmed when I watched a little featurette afterward on my Eternal Sunshine DVD, a conversation with Carrey and Gondry where we get to see some of Gondry's process and the things he was dreaming up on the fly. 

I suspect Eternal Sunshine may have spoken to me more than Adaptation initially, precisely because of its melancholy elements -- when I first saw the movie, I was recovering from a breakup and starting to recognize that we probably were not going to get back together. As I've grown older and have been in a happy marriage for 13 years, I'm probably a little less affected by the poignancy of a lost relationship and maybe in a better position to appreciate the pure cleverness of Adaptation. 

Okay, in September it's time for what could possibly overtake both of these as my favorite Kaufman: Synecdoche New York. It'll be my third viewing, so it hasn't yet had the repeat exposure to really challenge the other two. I could easily see that happening this time around though. 

The two extremes of Nicolas Cage

Without really meaning to, I watched two Nicolas Cage movies this weekend, and they represented the absolute diametric opposition of the two poles of his career.

The first was on Friday night, when I sat down for my fifth viewing of Adaptation for my I'm Thinking of Kaufman Things bi-monthly 2021 series on this blog. I won't write much about the actual movie here, because I'm planning to cover it in its own post alongside Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for this series' only two-movie month.

But as a role for Cage, it represents the height of his smart decision making. It's an eccentric, unique, infinitely creative script that requires him to play two characters and stretches him to the absolute limits of his technique.

In the other movie, he's not even required to play one character.

That's 2014's Left Behind, which I watched on Saturday night, and which is not only not original, it's a remake of a movie that was already not very good.

I actually liked Vic Sarin's 2000 movie Left Behind, starring Kirk Cameron, more than any self-respecting critic should. I don't dismiss Cameron's proselytizing movies out of hand, and in fact quite liked Fireproof, about a firefighter trying to save his marriage. I see that I gave his rapture movie 2.5 stars on Letterboxd -- a rating given in retrospect years after I saw it, mind you -- and that's probably generous. But I've made a point in my career of calling a not-terrible movie a not-terrible movie, and the original Left Behind was not-terrible in ways that I thought were worth acknowledging. (I think that's just because I had never seen a rapture movie, and the movie had some things going for it just for being the first of its kind).

Vic Armstrong's 2014 remake -- why do all Left Behinds have to be directed by a guy named Vic? -- does not have that same advantage. And the Vic and Nic show is godawful.

Now, Cage always brings a modicum of skill, even when he's sleep-walking through a movie. But this is not a good performance and this is not in any way a good movie.

A few of the terrible things:

- Jordin Sparks plays the wife (ex-wife?) of a football player who steals a gun from a raptured sky marshal and waves it in everybody's face because she believes the rapture was a scheme by her husband to get back his disappeared daughter. This of course does not explain all the other people on the plane who have disappeared. This is not a good look considering that this is also the film's only significant Black character. (There's a really oversized Black dude who gets raptured, but he's only in it until the rapture, and only as the film's lame attempt to show us that Black People Are Also Nice. But then there's also a Black preacher who does not get raptured because he is not a believer, even though he's a preacher.)

- The most disagreeable character in the whole film is a little person, who is constantly angry at everyone else on the plane for the ways he perceives them to be condescending to him because of his height. In reality, I suspect most little people got over that a long time ago.

- Most of the acting. Especially unfortunate is the woman who is some kind of drug addict, who wears her sunglasses at night on the plane and looks like she's being electrocuted most of the time.

If you've noticed that all three of these mentions are of things that occur on the plane piloted by Cage, that's because this plane is in flight for almost the whole movie -- which may be what happened in the original movie, but I feel like it landed before then and got the hilariously named Buck Williams (there played by Cameron, here by Chad Michael Murray) on the ground earlier to start doing some action hero type things, rather than being stuck on the plane where he really has no agency and is not particularly involved in the resolution of events. So ultimately, it becomes more of a "plane in danger" movie than a rapture movie. (Interestingly, the word "rapture" is never spoken, kind of like the characters resisting the use of the word "zombie" in a zombie movie.)

Of course there's also a part on the ground where Cage's daughter (Cassi Thomson, should have been a more recognizable star/better actress) runs around amidst all the panic on the ground. One of the funniest indicators of the movie's general ineptitude is that a good 45 minutes after the rapture moment, when this character (Chloe by name) is making her way back to her house to see if her raptured brother or mother are still around, she sees a school bus go over the side of the bridge, empty of both children and the driver. So, um, did this driver get raptured 45 minutes after everyone else? And if so, why was he still driving around with a busload full of leftover clothing from raptured children?

Her mother is played -- until she is raptured -- by Lea Thompson, an actress I used to dearly love, who I initially assumed lost her way and became a crazy Christian over the years. (The internet tells me she has not made her religious views known, though Chad Michael Murray is a True Believer.) It was interesting to see her appearing in a role just about 30 years after 1985, when Back to the Future came out, and when she played a version of herself who was 30 years older than she was then. I'm glad to say that the real 53-year-old version of Lea Thompson looks better than the 53-year-old version imagined in that movie, though I guess we get two versions of that Lorraine, one good and one bad.

Cage is not a crazy Christian, that I'm aware of, so his involvement is for the same reason as his involvement in seven out of the eight movies he makes per year these days: a paycheck. 

I hope it was a good one, because with every Left Behind he makes, he's a little less likely to appear in whatever the next Adaptation may be. 

Measures of duality

On Friday night I was reading my six-year-old from his series of books about Zac Power, the 12-year-old super spy, as we are wont to do. I've noticed the phenomenon I'm about to tell you about plenty of times before, but had occasion to contemplate it anew during the reading of the book Sand Storm, in which one of Zac's chief rivals appears.

The rival in question is a 12-year-old girl named Caz. Get it? Caz? Zac? Zac? Caz? Zac works for the good spy agency called GIB, while Caz works for the bad spy agency called BIG. Get it? BIG? GIB? GIB? BIG?

But you haven't heard all of it yet. Caz' last name is Rewop. That's right. Rewop. Power. Power. Rewop. Zac Power. Caz Rewop.

It'll go right over most kids' heads -- my son hasn't commented on it yet, anyway -- but for adults, it's a stupidly obvious application of the notion that the hero and villain are two sides of the same being. They're not opposites -- the opposite of the name Zac Power would not be Caz Rewop, but, I don't know, Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Rather, they are mirror images of each other, having more in common than they have different. In fact, in extreme instances, you might argue that the only thing they don't share in common is their respective morality. Even then, though, the creator of these characters likes to emphasize the bad in the good character and the good in the bad.

It was interesting timing, then, that the movie I was watching that night also engages in a sort of literal exploration of the hero-villain duality.

Last Days in the Desert is the latest film from writer-director Rodrigo Garcia, and it couldn't portray a more symbolic struggle between good and evil if it tried. In the film Ewan McGregor plays both Jesus Christ and the Devil, who tempted him during his 40 days in the desert. Garcia makes the things they have in common manifest by having the same actor play both roles. If the side of Jesus that tempts him is personified as the Devil, I suppose to balance things out we'd also need to see the just side of the Devil as portrayed here. That complicates the duality a bit but I think the principle of the thing still holds.

If this were a children's story about super spies, I suppose his name would be Susej Tsirhc rather than the Devil, but I digress.

Garcia's rather on-the-nose choice is meant to allow one actor to explore both sides of a characterization, and theoretically give us something profound. McGregor is reasonably good in the film without quite attaining that level of achievement. So the film is worth watching but nothing extraordinary. McGregor might as well have a mini angel McGregor on one shoulder and a mini devil McGregor on the other, both advising him on what to do.

Perhaps the biggest "disappointment" about it, if you want to look at it that way, was the fact that it was shot by Emmanuel Lubezki and does not actually look mind-blowingly good. It looks good, but not mind-blowingly.

An interesting thing happened while I was watching it, though, that makes the thoughts I was already having about Zac Power and Jesus Christ and writing this post all the more eerie.

At about the halfway point of the film, I was getting really sleepy and I decided it was time for a bit of a sugar wake-me-up in the form of ice cream.

Not "about" the halfway point, though. At the halfway point.

Going over to my computer, which was tethered to the television via an HDMI cable, to press pause on iTunes, I then discovered that I had paused on exactly the halfway point of the film. There had been 49:51 that had already elapsed and there was 49:51 left to go. You could say I planned it, but when you're watching something in iTunes, the time remaining only displays when you run your cursor over the progress bar. There's no alternate method to track the minutes ticking away -- or none that I know of, anyway.

So I managed to split the movie right down the middle, into a duality of its own running time.

Even stranger was what happened about five minutes after that midway point. Another character who fancies riddles says to Jesus, "How far can a man walk into the desert? Only halfway. After that he's walking out." Probably just another way the movie is conscious of its own duality. But it had a special coincidental significance for me, given how I had just paused after walking exactly halfway into the movie, after which I was walking out of it.

I thought I'd leave you with five other explicit considerations of the duality between hero and villain, good and evil. Listed in the order I thought of them.

1) Oh God, You Devil! (1984, Paul Bogart) - The third in George Burns' series of Oh God! movies features Burns as both God and the Devil, much like in Friday night's movie. Though I don't think anything other than Borscht Belt comedy was being explored here.

2) Superman III (1983, Richard Lester) - Even at the best of times, Superman has a dual personality that includes another side of himself -- the Clark Kent side. Usually, both sides are good. In the third Superman movie, though, they explored an evil Superman, one corrupted by kryptonite -- and one who actually fights Clark Kent. I don't remember how they managed to get them into separate corporeal bodies -- I think there was a bit more suspension of disbelief than usual on that one -- but I do remember their extremely bizarre junkyard battle for control of their soul.

3) Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002, Peter Jackson) - There's also a struggle for the soul of the man once known as Smeagol, now the twisted troll called Gollum. To emphasize this, Jackson uses a technique whereby the two sides of the character -- one kind and one cruel -- have a conversation with one another on how to handle the two travelers Gollum has just met. Although only one being is actually present, Jackson gives a standard shot-reverse shot setup as though there are two conversing.

4) The Dark Knight (2008, Christopher Nolan) - Back to superhero movies, one of the most commonly referenced instances of hero-villain duality is between Batman and the Joker, though in this case they look nothing like each other. However, there's a direct symbol of the two sides of a character's personality within The Dark Knight, and that's the very brief appearance of Two Face, known as Harvey Dent before he is disfigured and corrupted. The coin flip that is part of his MO -- which usually decides the fate of a prospective victim -- could also decide which version of him you're getting. But truly, the Dent side isn't there anymore, only symbolically represented by the failure to kill somebody instead of killing them.

5) Adaptation (2002, Spike Jonze) - And though I should end with something from Hitchcock, I couldn't find anything that literalized the theme in the way I'm going for here. So let's finish with a movie I alluded to on this blog only yesterday -- giving us one final coincidence with the Zac Power reading/viewing of Last Days in the Desert. In order to literally explore the dormant half of his personality, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (appearing as a character here, played by Nicolas Cage) introduces a brother character named Donald, who is everything he isn't -- gregarious, mainstream, moronic, successful. In this case it's not really good and evil Kaufman is exploring, though -- he intermingles aspects of both in each personality, and toys with his own perception of which is which.

For more examples, check out, oh, the rest of western literature and cinema.

Quotidian solipsism is no longer my thing

Logically, I recognize that my year-end rankings from the 20 years I've kept such rankings constitute a snapshot of me and my tastes from a particular moment. Somewhat less logically, I actually think the contrary -- that my tastes haven't changed too much over the years. Once good taste, always good taste, right?

Well, taste that once was good might no longer be, and every once in a while I get a pretty clear indication that I'm not the same viewer I once was.

This year, it's been the realization that quotidian solipsism is no longer my thing.

What do I mean by "quotidian solipsism?" I mean the kind of thing that Steven Soderbergh peddles in Full Frontal, a movie most people never liked. I liked it quite a bit back in 2002, when I ranked it #13 (of 80) for the year. "Quotidian" meaning "commonplace" or "workaday," "solipsism" meaning "an excessive inward focus on the self." (Those aren't dicitionary definitions, but they are pretty much correct.)

I watched Full Frontal for the first time in 14 years last night and I didn't really dig it at all. I didn't hate it, and recognized some moments that certainly drew the 29-year-old version of me to it, but I'd be ranking it closer to 13 from the bottom of 80 films than 13 from the top these days.

I still like it more, I think, than Igby Goes Down, a similarly self-indulgent, navel-gazing look at self-absorbed people and their concerns about their personal selves. (And yes, the use of three different variations on the word "self" in the previous sentence is intentional.) I ranked Igby at #10 in 2002, three higher than Full Frontal, and when I watched that earlier this year for the first time since then, it dropped by more than 1,200 spots on my Flickchart.

I won't be forcing a re-rank of Full Frontal to get it off its elevated spot of #631/4343 -- not nearly as elevated as Igby's former ranking of #392 -- but I do have some complaints I want to make about it here, and explain a little more what I mean by "quotidian solipsism."

"Solipsism" is almost always a negative term, but I suppose there are certain people about whose selves we would really like to learn. They don't even have to be people we like. Donald Trump is a good example. Especially in the past week, I am addicted to news about Donald Trump. It's all so I can experience schadenfreude regarding his spectacular collapse, but that doesn't change the fact that I am soaking up everything and anything about The Donald. He's larger than life, and, let's admit it, he's interesting, even if for the wrong reasons.

The solipsism in Full Frontal and Igby Goes Down is about people who are not especially interesting. In Igby it's about a Holden Caulfield-type kid in New York and his group of insufferable associates. Here, it's about a group of people who are sort of appendages of the film industry -- some actual actors and other stars, but then also low-level writers, playwrights, even a masseuse to the stars.

The thing is, Soderbergh's film treats them as though they are inherently interesting. Part of his experimental form -- yes, this is one of his "experimental" films -- is to include snippets of dialogue over images of them going about their lives. But it's not narration -- it's responses to questions from a hypothetical interviewer, who asks them questions about themselves, what they were feeling at the moment in question, how their lives brought them to this particular point, etc. The film compliments itself that its characters are interesting enough that a person should want to interview them, even if no person actually would. More charitably, the film suggests that we are all interesting enough to tell our stories to a hypothetical interviewer.

But it's not that the film places such stock in the charisma of its characters, which I guess is something we would hope all movies would do -- why tell a story about characters if they are not interesting? It's the way that Soderbergh is gazing at his own navel here that makes things a bit more distracting.

One thing that kind of annoyed me -- though I don't think it would have annoyed me in 2002 -- was that in the scene where Julia Roberts is interviewing Blair Underwood on the plane, the camera takes a moment to look a few rows behind and see Terence Stamp as his character in Soderbergh's The Limey. It's meant to be just a wink to Soderbergh's fans, and today we might fawn over it as his attempt to create a cinematic universe. But I'm tired of cinematic universes and I am also tired of meta winks to the audience. Back in 2002, meta was still new. It wouldn't have felt hopelessly self-congratulatory, as it does now.

Then there's the more overriding meta aspect of the structure of this film. There are films within films within films in Full Frontal, frequently distinguished by two or even possibly three different film stocks. Soderbergh loves pulling a fast one on us, making us think one layer of reality is actually reality, only to pull out and show a movie crew shooting the characters in question. The film eventually assumes so many layers that it resembles a Russian nesting doll. And we don't care which one is the real one.

Self indulgence is certainly a subdivision of solipsism, even though Soderbergh would probably argue that the narrative tricks he's playing with are just an artistic endeavor and have nothing to do with his own selfhood. However, the mere willingness to pat yourself on the back for purported cleverness is what makes it a celebration of his own self.

I don't want to go too hard on the movie because I would still say I like it. I just can't fathom why it had such an impact on me back in 2002.

Unless, you know, I just wasn't the same self I am now.

The funny thing is that my #1 movie of that year was a movie that probably fits into the same category. It's Spike Jonze's Adaptation, and it's a movie about a person going down his own rabbit hole into his own neurotic soul. In a way it is the very definition of solipsism. And having revisited it about four years ago, I know I still love it. In fact, it's in my top 50 on Flickchart, just barely, at #49.

I think the difference is that Nicolas Cage's Charlie Kaufman -- playing the movie's screenwriter himself, how could you get any more self-involved -- is not interested in self-regard for its own sake. He's more about self-loathing. And he's not trying to convince himself or anyone else that he's interesting. In fact, the opposite seems to be the case. He is repulsed by how uninteresting he thinks he is.

This is probably both an oversimplification and a rationalization. The better conclusion to reach might be that quotidian solipsism is compelling in the right hands, and banal in the wrong ones. And even someone as generally great as Steven Soderbergh can sometimes have the wrong hands.

Adapting to a DirecTV outage

Our DirecTV started acting funny last Wednesday night. Our first indication was when I was stopped, mid-program, from watching a show on our DVR in our bedroom, which is the secondary receiver we have in our house. I tried to call the Playlist back up, but it couldn't find it anymore. I shrugged and went to sleep, finishing it the next day with no problem on our main TV DVR.

Then Friday night, as we were trying to watch this week's 30 Rock with our dinner, it wouldn't load. We also discovered that we couldn't change the channel, either on the remote or the front of the receiver itself (which ruled out battery problems with the remote), nor could we call up various other menus. Eventually, it did try to pull up 30 Rock, but it went straight to the "Do you want to delete this recording?" screen.

We did not want to delete that recording, but in effect, that's what's going to happen.

After another 12 or so hours of trying various resets and getting various ominous messages ("1456 errors found on the disk; 0 repaired"), we called DirecTV and discovered that our receiver has gone kaput. We're going to have to get it replaced. This means we'll lose about 20 hours of saved programming. (And pretty much makes up my mind to stop watching Fringe, of which there were six episodes stockpiled with no plan to watch them in the foreseeable future.)

Darn it.

But as much as I bemoan the loss of those shows, I know we'll be able to cobble them together from other places, eventually. (We were able to see the list of saved shows, so at least we copied that down.) And in fact, it's possible our TV being down for a few days will have fringe (no pun intended) benefits for me.

Namely, now we have no choice but to watch movies.

Saturday night I babysat, so my wife and I weren't pursuing a communal viewing option that night anyway. But last night, we likely would have wound down the weekend with a couple shows on our DVR. Instead, we watched one of my favorite movies of the 2000s, Spike Jonze's Adaptation. (Though I think it would be more accurate to refer to it as Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation, or perhaps Charlie and Donald Kaufman's Adaptation.)  It was my favorite movie of 2002, and I ranked it 11th for the whole decade. And yes, I know the title is probably properly written as Adaptation. with the period at the end. But I find that problematic for the purposes of writing fluidity, so I'm excising the period here.

I'm not up to the mental calisthenics of giving this movie a review for you -- besides, you know that reviews aren't what I do in this space. (He says somewhat disingenuously, as more and more of his posts contain some form of a review of the movie being written about.) But even if I were completely clear-headed and hadn't spent half the night asleep on the couch while trying to make my way through a second movie, this is a difficult one to review in general because it's just so damn rich. Rarely have so many aspects of a script worked on as many thematic levels as they do in this impossibly meta (but never in an annoying way) piece of filmmaking.

So instead of touching on the movie's particulars as I do indeed believe is warranted, I'll just reprint my own review of it from allmovie.com, written nearly ten years ago, coinciding with the film's release. I was rather proud of accomplishing in those approximately 300 words the very thing that Kaufman struggles with in the movie: being able to say all the things you want to say in the limited time/space allotted to you. (For further consideration of this career-long struggle for Kaufman, see Synecdoche, New York.)

Anyway, here it is:

Critics charged with the divine headache of describing Adaptation, in all its twisted magnificence, should find it appropriate that the story concentrates on the paralysis of writer's block, brought on by the impossible urge to say everything. The sophomore collaboration between screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze is so drenched with unorthodox ideas, yet so fundamentally accessible, that it actually outdoes the groundbreaking Being John Malkovich in existential pretzel logic, while remaining digestible to a middle-brow audience. Kaufman's real-life struggles adapting Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief get brilliantly expanded into a self-reflexive narrative of sublime originality, in which screenwriter, author and muse become intertwined, and such rich topics as artistic integrity, social awkwardness and sibling rivalry get teased and prodded. Not only has Kaufman written himself into the proceedings, but in Nicolas Cage, he's found an exquisite choice to interpret himself and his twin brother -- an imaginary character given "real" life by receiving a screenwriting credit. Sweating, stammering, lowering his eyes, and imploding in a crisis of relevance -- then doing just the opposite as Donald -- Cage kicks his own career out of neutral, at least briefly exchanging the hunt for ever-bigger paychecks with work that truly matters. Although the stories of Orlean (Meryl Streep) and John Laroche (Chris Cooper) both carry a vital urgency, this is Kaufman's film, full of the anxieties of a kinky-haired shlub whose overactive imagination is both his meal ticket and his curse. Inasmuch as it eventually imitates the very story structure it abhors, Adaptation is the rare film that both attacks and revels in the humbling, soul-crushing yet exhilarating mechanics of Hollywood moviemaking. 

I did have a few new observations on this, my third viewing and first in about three years, but I don't have the time to get into them now -- nor, as described previously, quite the mental acuity. Let's just say that it still fills me with a sense of awe over its narrative audacity, and how well its many ideas cohere into something truly sublime.

Now it just remains to be seen how many more movies we can squeeze in between now and when our new DirecTV receiver arrives, which they tell me will be in three business days.

You know, I wouldn't mind if it were four.