My 2005 film rankings (in 2005)

This is the third 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. 

The shortcomings of my random rewatching of #1s, combined with a non-random reverse order listing of my year-end rankings from 2007 back to 1996, are being revealed to me this month, as I just watched and posted about Hustle & Flow a few weeks ago. Then again, I'm not really here to talk about Hustle & Flow today. I'm here to record my 2005 film rankings to the permanence of the internet.

Before we get to that, though, I'll just say that this list felt like a bit more of a stroll down memory lane than the two I've posted previously. Two thousand five was the first year I dated my now-wife (we met just before Christmas in 2004), so I remember a lot of these titles being things I saw with her pretty soon after we started dating. And since that dating experience obviously had a very happy ending, it makes me very fond of those movies, even the ones I didn't like very much. 

Here is the best-to-worst list I released in January of 2006, for 2005 movies:

1. Hustle & Flow
2. Good Night, and Good Luck.
3. The 40-Year-Old Virgin
4. Kung Fu Hustle
5. Munich
6. Proof
7. The Squid and the Whale
8. Batman Begins
9. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
10. The Matador
11. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
12. Brokeback Mountain
13. Match Point
14. Bride & Prejudice
15. Everything Is Illuminated
16. The Family Stone
17. Paradise Now
18. King Kong
19. The Constant Gardener
20. Melinda and Melinda
21. Broken Flowers
22. Guess Who
23. Walk the Line
24. Ellie Parker
25. Aeon Flux
26. Grizzly Man
27. Cache
28. Diary of a Mad Black Woman
29. March of the Penguins
30. War of the Worlds
31. My Date With Drew
32. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
33. Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
34. Millions
35. Syriana
36. Thumbsucker
37. Beauty Shop
38. The Ringer
39. The Aristocrats
40. Shopgirl
41. Crash
42. Layer Cake
43. Constantine
44. Son of the Mask
45. High Tension
46. Thirtyfive Something
47. Junebug
48. Wedding Crashers
49. The Ballad of Jack & Rose
50. The Jacket
51. Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous
52. Dark Water
53. D.E.B.S.
54. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
55. Coach Carter
56. Lords of Dogtown
57. Robots
58. Sin City
59. Are We There Yet?
60. Fun With Dick and Jane
61. White Noise
62. Racing Stripes
63. It's All Gone Pete Tong
64. 2046
65. Hide and Seek
66. Herbie Fully Loaded
67. The Dukes of Hazzard
68. A History of Violence
69. The Pacifier
70. Smile
71. Fever Pitch
72. The Upside of Anger
73. Saw II

Just glancing at this top ten, it doesn't have a lot of huge favorites that I watch over and over again. Only four of the movies in my top ten have I seen more than once, and strangely, Batman Begins is not one of them. Yep, even though I rank this as the highest of the Nolan Batman movies, I haven't seen it again after that first time in Paris (!). So I guess I've never seen Batman Begins without French subtitles on the screen. (I saw the English language version, not the dubbed version, thank God. That wouldn't have worked because there certainly would not have been English subtitles.)

Let's see where these movies find themselves ranked today according to my Flickchart. The number is its ranking on Flickchart out of 5807 films, followed by the percentage of that ranking out of 5807 films. That's then followed by the number of spots it went up since 2005 (a positive number) or down since 2005 (a negative number):

1. Hustle & Flow (196, 97%) 0
2. The 40-Year-Old Virgin (268, 95%) 1
3. Batman Begins (316, 95%) 5
4. Good Night, and Good Luck (332, 94%) -2
5. War of the Worlds (335, 94%) 25
6. Munich (478, 92%) -1
7. The Squid and the Whale (597, 90%) 0
8. Brokeback Mountain (602, 90%) 4
9. Everything Is Illuminated (638, 89%) 6
10. Proof (649, 89%) -4
11. Kung Fu Hustle (658, 89%) -7
12. The Matador (681, 88%) -2
13. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (966, 83%) -2
14. Paradise Now (1115, 81%) 3
15. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (1179, 80%) -6
16. Melinda and Melinda (1552, 73%) 4
17. The Family Stone (1567, 73%) -1
18. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1584, 73%) 14
19. Bride & Prejudice (1585, 73%) -5
20. Grizzly Man (1623, 72%) 6
21. King Kong (1675, 71%) -3
22. Star Wars - Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (1835, 68%) 11
23. Match Point (1873, 68%) -10
24. Walk the Line (1922, 67%) -1
25. Guess Who (1985, 66%) -3
26. The Constant Gardener (1988, 66%) -7
27. Aeon Flux (2026, 65%) -2
28. March of the Penguins (2079, 64%) 1
29. Millions (2237, 61%) 5
30. Ellie Parker (2323, 60%) -6
31. Broken Flowers (2477, 57%) -10
32. Cache (2480, 57%) -5
33. Beauty Shop (2504, 57%) 4
34. My Date With Drew (2505, 57%) -3
35. Diary of a Mad Black Woman (2835, 51%) -7
36. Layer Cake (2941, 49%) 6
37. Constantine (3016, 48%) 6
38. Sin City (3252, 44%) 20
39. Thirtyfive Something (3491, 40%) 7
40. Dark Water (3574, 38%) 12
41. The Aristocrats (3626, 38%) -2
42. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (3662, 37%) 12
43. The Jacket (3735, 36%) 7
44. Son of the Mask (3754, 35%) 0
45. Wedding Crashers (3932, 32%) 3
46. Syriana (3938, 32%) -11
47. Thumbsucker (3954, 32%) -11
48. Robots (3972, 32%) 9
49. Shopgirl (4024, 31%) -9
50. High Tension (4027, 31%) -5
51. Are We There Yet? (4049, 30%) 8
52. The Ballad of Jack and Rose (4127, 29%) -3
53. Miss Congeniality 2: Armed & Fabulous (4211, 27%) -2
54. Fun With Dick and Jane (4308, 26%) 6
55. A History of Violence (4309, 26%) 13
56. Crash (4363, 25%) -15
57. Junebug (4365, 25%) -10
58. Lords of Dogtown (4593, 21%) -2
59. Racing Stripes (4724, 19%) 3
60. Herbie Fully Loaded (4747, 18%) 6
61. D.E.B.S. (4798, 17%) -8
62. The Ringer (4840, 17%) -24
63. White Noise (4841, 17%) -2
64. Coach Carter (4872, 16%) -9
65. It's All Gone Pete Tong (4982, 14%) -2
66. The Dukes of Hazzard (5072, 13%) 1
67. 2046 (5161, 11%) -3
68. Hide and Seek (5237, 10%) -3
69. Smile (5342, 8%) 1
70. Fever Pitch (5447, 6%) 1
71. Saw II (5562, 4%) 2
72. The Pacifier (5612, 3%) -3
73. The Upside of Anger (5641, 3%) -1

Five best 2005 movies I've seen since closing the list (alphabetical): The Baxter, Confetti, Nine Lives, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Transamerica
Five worst 2005 movies I've seen since closing the list (alphabetical): Alone in the Dark, Asylum, Chaos, The Island, Just Friends
Biggest risers: War of the Worlds (+25), Sin City (+20), Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (+14)
Biggest fallers: The Ringer (-24), Crash (-15), Syriana/Thumbsucker (-11)
Average percentage on Flickchart: 49.10% (3 of 3)

The obvious big mover here is War of the Worlds, which I apparently received somewhat middlingly the first time I saw it. Obviously it has grown in leaps and bounds in my estimation as I have rewatched it several times with my wife (having seen it solo originally). She also loves it so that helps. I just find this film unbelievably tense, and it doesn't lose me even though I know that the final 30 minutes are considerably weaker than the rest.

Among the risers and fallers I have a number or examples where I'm surprised they could rise/fall so much, because I already thought I had felt enthusiastically about them in the direction they have risen or fallen. Take Crash, for example. (Take it, please.) Crash was a very weird example of a movie where, when I walked out of the theater, I reluctantly admitted to my wife (then girlfriend) that it was probably the best film I'd seen that year, though I remember feeling confused about that assessment because I knew something was wrong with the movie. As soon as I thought about it for half a second and read some reviews, those wrong things became crystal clear. The epic backlash against the movie did not really ramp up until it won best picture, after I closed off my list, which helps explain my initially kinder ranking. Let's just say that although the backlash didn't sway me from one way of thinking about the movie to another, it did increase the vehemence of those negative feelings.

The Ringer puzzles me because I don't remember liking this movie even at the time I saw it. Johnny Knoxville and co. never overcame the problem of the movie being about an abled man who pretends he's disabled in order to dominate the Special Olympics, though I guess at the time I must have felt it redeemed itself near the end. I have forgotten that entirely by now, and it dropping 24 spots proves that.

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is the surprise riser for me, since I always thought I felt pretty positively about it and haven't even seen it again to have that assessment confirmed or strengthened, as a comparative rise would imply. Only a second viewing should significantly boost its standing relative to the others, you would think. Meanwhile, it was indeed a second viewing that caused me to decide I had been too harsh on A History of Violence (+13) the first time, though I still don't really like that movie. I don't think I've seen Sin City again, but I think I've just decided over time that it must have been better than I initially gave it credit for, just for the use of its groundbreaking techniques.

This is a very middle-heavy group, nothing in either the top two percent or bottom two percent of my Flickchart. But it leans a little toward the lower half of that middle, which is why the average Flickchart percentile is easily the lowest of the three years I've looked at so far. (I should point out, though, that I'm only consider the percentage of the movies I ranked at that time, not the ones I have seen since. However, 2005 probably doesn't fare very well in that regard either, as I had to leave a bunch of stinkers off my list of the five worst I've seen since the list closed.)

Two thousand four in April. 

It's hard out here for a Black-themed #1

I said I probably wouldn't write about the next previous #1 I rewatched during a 2022 full of rewatching #1s.

I say a lot of things.

Who knows, I might end up writing about all of them. But I'm writing about this one for a number of particular reasons, certainly not listed in the order of their importance, or if anything, listed in the inverse order.

1. The cover of this DVD I bought from a closing video store back in 2015. It's like an archeological find that captures the video store at the exact moment before its death. At this point they were renting out videos for a whole week for only $1.90. So it went from $1.90 to borrow it for a week to $3 to own it for the rest of my life. RIP, video stores.

2. Something funny I noticed on this cover. It has a picture of Taryn Manning with her eyes closed and her lips basically touching the microphone that she turns a trick in order to acquire. But she never actually sings in the film. I suppose maybe this image was just intended as a metaphor -- almost like a sexual relationship with the microphone? -- or maybe it's from a scene that ended up on the cutting room floor.

3. My region-free DVD player, one of our first purchases after moving to Australia, might be dead. For a while now I have had trouble with its tray ejecting properly. When I watched Looking for Richard the other week, which I also bought during the closure of the aforementioned video store, I got the tray to eject well enough to receive the disk, but it could not identify the disk. I thought it might have been an issue with the DVD itself, but it played fine on my computer, which is where I ultimately ended up watching it. My computer was where I ended up watching Hustle & Flow, though I did connect it to our TV via HDMI so as to get the maximum size of the image. I had to do this because in trying to wrench open the DVD tray, I ended up pulling it out of the player entirely. I'd like to take a pass at opening it up and fixing it, but it might finally be time to replace this stalwart piece of technology -- or else admit to ourselves that DVDs are a thing of the past and not get a replacement. I can watch DVDs from the correct region through my computer, but any of my collection originating in the U.S., which includes dozens of titles, will be inaccessible to me if I go this route. Sad face.

4. Because it was a shitty video store DVD, the image quality was not great. I don't think the video store pirated it or anything, that would be pretty shady and this was a legit store. Plus Hustle & Flow is supposed to look a little, or a lot, grungy. But I reckon the image quality would have been a lot better on BluRay or streaming, and I hope this didn't impact my feelings about the movie as I was watching it. (Incidentally, when I was having those problems getting the DVD player's tray to open, I checked to see if I could find it streaming anywhere for free. Nope, only for rental.)

5. As I was updating my list of rewatches on Letterboxd, I noticed I had given Hustle & Flow only 4.5 stars when I retroactively assigned star ratings to all my previous viewings upon first getting started with Letterboxd, just about exactly ten years ago. (Hey, another occasion for an anniversary post if I weren't already flooded with content just waiting for its chance to get posted online.) This is significant for two reasons: 1) I was much less generous with my star ratings when I first started on Letterboxd. I gave Tangled only 4.5 stars, which now seems insane. 2) I had previously thought Parasite was my only #1 I had given less than five stars on Letterboxd, a star rating I would now boost to five if I were putting it in the first time. Parasite remains the only #1 I gave less than five stars in real time on Letterboxd, but having at least Hustle & Flow joining it in a retroactive assessment is an interesting wrinkle.

6. It's Black History Month, and this is the only #1 I've ever chosen that has Black themes of any kind.

This is what I really want to talk about.

I've only had one #1 film that contained more than a token representation of Black characters, and it couldn't even be directed by a Black director.

Craig Brewer does not seem guilty of cultural appropriation in Hustle & Flow -- this is not something we were talking about so much back in 2005 -- but it has always gnawed at me that the one time I picked a film about Black people, it's directed by a white guy.

But it's the only one time selecting a film about Black people that really gnaws at me.

I'd say I need to do better on this, but making it a conscious thing is a recipe for disaster. A #1 movie of any year is such a cherished object -- by me, anyway, as evidenced by the rewatch of #1s I'm doing in 2022 -- that if you try to boost a movie to that spot artificially, even based on admirable goals like trying to be more woke, you aren't being honest with yourself or anyone else. If I purposefully set out to "do better," I'd be polluting a process that should be pure.

The closest I've gotten in recent years was when Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman was my #2 of 2018. I felt it had a real shot at #1, but in the end I knew my appreciation for Paul Schrader's First Reformed was greater. And since I saw First Reformed first, I don't think it even spent any time in the #1 position before ultimately ending up at #2.

I'm desperate for this to occur organically, as you can probably tell. But there have not been any serious contenders since then, and I can't remember the last serious contender before that. If Beale Street Could Talk would have been a serious contender, as it finished even higher in my top 25 of the decade than BlacKkKlansman, but I didn't see it in time to rank it -- it was a very late release in Australia, not until after I'd closed my list. Besides, that was also the year of First Reformed, which was a very tough competitor -- I've already seen it four times in less than four years since I first saw it. 

The real dispiriting element to this is that Black characters are few and far between in all of my #1s. I ran through them in my head the other night. I won't list all the titles that are painfully white, but instead, list the remaining options that at least have some decent Black representation on screen. And I can count them on one hand, other than Hustle & Flow: Children of Men, First Reformed, Our Friend. Crap, I don't even need all the fingers on the hand. That's not to say there are zero Black characters in the other films, just that they don't have any significant role in the story.

To be fair, it was more common back then for films to feature exclusively white people and for this not to raise any eyebrows. Only in the past decade have we made genuine strides on representation in film. Plus, five of those are foreign language films, where you are even less likely to find people of color.

Still, the whole thing feels pretty shameful.

I'd examine how this state of affairs has come to be, except it increases my sense of shame. Well, this is my blog and I always try to be honest with myself in this space, so let's do it.

If I were being as harsh on myself as possible, I'd say I need some sort of white character for a film to achieve maximum resonance for me. Even Hustle & Flow has two significant white characters, the sound engineer played by DJ Qualls and the prostitute played by Taryn Manning. (Interestingly, I noted Manning plays the ultimate white character in 2021's Karen, a multi-Golden Raspberry nominee, which I have rented and will watch within the next month.) BlacKkKlansman is notable for being told almost equally through the eyes of Adam Driver's character as John David Washington's character. I hate that the evidence suggests this is a contributing factor, but I'm not going to ignore the evidence either. 

This is not to say that movies without white characters don't resonate with me. Take the If Beale Street Could Talk example. The only two white characters with any sort of dialogue are a malicious police officer played by Ed Skrein and a nice landlord played by Dave Franco. It would be silly to suggest that either character's perspective had anything to do with why the film resonated with me. It's just that a film starring exclusively people of color has yet to achieve the maximum resonance implied by naming it your #1. Barry Jenkins' film had two things going against it, the latter of which made the former moot: 1) It was going up against the juggernaut that was First Reformed, and 2) I didn't see it in time to rank it anyway. 

In letting myself off the hook a little bit with this, I have to recognize exactly what I've concluded in the paragraph above: Some of this is just random. Had Beale Street been released a little earlier, and had I not caught First Reformed at MIFF, one might have been #1 and the other might have been the one I didn't see, given that First Reformed had a weird release strategy in Australia and I never actually observed it playing in theaters. It happened the other way around, and the history is what it is.

But speaking of history, Black History Month is a good time not only to rewatch this #1 -- remember I still had more than 20 others to choose from -- but also to examine some of the reasons it's so lonesome in my history of best films. I can tell you that as a cinephile surveying the slate of new releases each year, I sit there in a constant state of optimism -- some might say desperate hope -- about new Black-themed projects directed by Black directors, and the impact they could potentially have on me. 

One hasn't risen to #1 yet, but I hope it's only a matter of time.

Picking over the bones of another video store

When I first arrived in Australia, I described it to a friend back home as "kind of like the U.S. in the 1990s."

This is not to say that most things are backward or particularly behind here. In fact, certain things -- like the ease of paying for goods, where you can sometimes just tap your card against a screen -- are a bit ahead of the U.S. Rather, what's old-fashioned is the quaint ongoing viability of certain things that have long since fallen by the wayside in the U.S.

Pay telephones, for example. It's easy to find a pay telephone here in Melbourne. They are few and far between in the U.S., but they are still plentiful here, still a resource that provides a useful service to the public.

Book stores? Don't get me started. You can't go a city block in almost any part of the city without tripping over a book store. And the price people will pay for books -- even used books -- is absurd. I'm sure people have their kindles and their iPads, but by and large, they still love reading a good old paperback or hardcover book.

And video stores?

Well, it looks like the times are finally catching up with Australia in some respects.

Until recently, I had two video stores that were equidistant from my house. The one I regularly frequented -- well, on $2 new release Tuesdays, anyway -- was called Video Ezy, and then Network Video. The other I've never even set foot inside, because a phone called told me they didn't have any equivalent to $2 Tuesdays.

Well, I'm going to have to learn what deals they do have, because Video Ezy/Network Video is no more.

My wife broke the news to me about a week back. She'd received a text, apparently, that they were going out of business and that everything was on sale. Why I didn't receive this same text, I don't know -- they texted me once when they thought I didn't return a movie on time, which turned out to be their error. Since then, they must have lost my number.

So I planned to go there on Wednesday, to pay my last respects.

Except it was closed on Wednesday. From now until April 2nd, when it shutters for good, it will only be open Thursday through Sunday. Which I can certainly understand, since they're not renting anything anymore, only clearing out the remaining unsold inventory.

I made sure to return this past Saturday, this time with only the older of my two sons in tow.

And I guess my purpose was not so much to thank Video Ezy for all the good times -- it had always been a pretty lame video store, if I'm being honest -- but rather, to figure out which movies I could buy on the cheap.

So though I do still recognize the passing of each remaining video store that closes with a bit of sadness, now the inevitability of the event has adjusted my perspective. This new version of me doesn't dwell on the sadness. Instead, apparently, this new me tries to dig in and find deals.

I instinctively avoided the new release wall, because a) those movies were selling for $7 instead of $3, and b) I don't necessarily want to buy movies that have just come out on video, since they aren't the kind of old favorites I typically add to my collection. (The good titles had been picked pretty clean by Saturday, anyway.)

It's an interesting challenge, to choose titles from a whole video store that's separated out by genre, and know that pretty much everything is affordable. There were still a couple thousand titles available, so it wasn't like I was down to just the dregs. My idea was to look extra hard at the comedies, because those tend to be the ones with the most repeat watchability (and the ones my wife is most likely to repeat watch with me). I gave cursory looks at the other sections as well, but came away with more comedies than anything else.

Having not bought a movie in more than year, I thought I could go a little hog wild. So after circling the store for about 20 minutes, coming up with an initial pile of purchases about twice this size, and driving my son to the brink of boredom-inspired insanity, I came away with the following seven titles:

Seen this twice, but the second viewing was probably four years ago. My wife likes it too, so we'll probably throw it in within six months.

Really liked this one and have only seen it once. Also, I don't know if my wife has seen it yet, and it's right up her alley.

Comments for Cedar Rapids are pretty much ditto for this.

I've already seen this twice, but it's been more than three years since my last viewing. My wife doesn't like this as much as I do. Then again, I don't think anyone likes this as much as I do.

Okay, leaving the comedies behind now ...

Did I say "leaving the comedies behind"? I should have waited one more movie before saying that. The funniest Star Trek is in my top 100 of all time, and I haven't seen it in forever.

My favorite movie of 2005. I may not have a burning desire to see this again, having seen it again about five years ago, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to own one of my #1 ranked movies. This was the last to make the cut.

And finally ...

I've seen this movie three times already and it only came out in 2013. Obviously I love this movie and need to own it.

Some that didn't make the final cut: Private Parts, Go, Headhunters, Philadelphia, a few others I can't remember. These are movies I like or in some cases love, but I just couldn't quite pull the trigger, either for repeat watchability reasons (Philadelphia) or having just seen them recently reasons (again, Philadelphia). Besides, that was $21 worth of movies, and I still had to pay another $10 for two videos my son wanted -- which were priced at $5 apiece because they were brand new.

So while I'm sad that another chapter is closing in the way we watch movies, at least I can salve my wounds with seven nice new additions to my video collection.

An elusive Hustle

It's starting to look like I may never get in my second viewing of Hustle & Flow.

I already consider it a personal travesty that I have yet to revisit my favorite film of 2005. Now, the fates are conspiring against me as I try to watch it again prior to ranking the decade's best films.

You may remember a couple Sundays ago that I tried to pick it up at a local Blockbuster, leading to shock and disappointment that they didn't carry it. Which devolved into melancholy over the state of the rental industry, that we'd soon be losing physical DVDs and be streaming all the movies we want to watch, buffers and all.

Well, I figured that at least I wouldn't have any trouble receiving it through the mail. Blockbuster the company owns a copy of this movie somewhere. All I'd have to do is list it at the top of my queue, and I'd have it within a couple days.

Having no specific urgency to see it other than the February 2nd deadline I've chosen to finalize my best of the 2000's list, I slotted it around third on my queue, and resumed my normal viewing habits. Hustle & Flow was scheduled to arrive this past Thursday, but here's what I got in the mail instead:


That's right -- just the part of the envelope with my name and address on it, the part you usually tear off and throw in the recycling as soon as you receive it. The rest of it was out there, detached, in some post office somewhere -- or maybe in a puddle, judging by the looks of it. We've had rain for almost a week straight here in Los Angeles, as you probably know -- it's made national news. That certainly accounts for the condition my "movie" arrived in. In fact, given how messed up that remnant is, I'm surprised they could even determine the correct address.

There was something perverse about this mangled and smudged bit of envelope. It was almost like something somebody would send you with a ransom note. To prove they had the object you desired, they'd send along a little piece of it that left no shadow of a doubt. You know, maybe the pinky finger of a kidnap victim. Or, more benignly, the gas cap to your stolen car.

It's hard to tell when, or if, I'll get the object I desire this time. I waited a day and then reported Hustle & Flow missing to Blockbuster. I originally reported that I didn't get the DVD, to which I received an automated response that it had only been shipped on Wednesday, so I should wait two more business days before assuming I wouldn't receive it. So then I changed the reported problem to the next best option that I could find: that I'd received an empty mailer. Of course, it was really less than that I'd received, so I took it one step further and sent them a message to explain what I had in fact received.

I got a very prompt response from the customer care representative assigned to my ticket. However, the response leaves some uncertainty as to whether I will be getting Hustle & Flow again straight away. You be the judge:

"It appears that your report was received on January 23, 2010 and a request for a replacement was chosen. When you report a problem and choose "Resend Same," we do our best to ship a replacement copy to you. When all copies of the title are currently out to other customers and it is not immediate availability, we will ship the next DVD from your queue to prevent any service interruptions. Your DVD issue was reported and the DVD will be resent when it becomes available."

Okay, so either this is a generic response -- I doubt it because of the mistake "not immediate availability" -- and I might be getting Hustle & Flow again right away, or it's a specific response to me, saying that all the copies are currently out. Either way, my queue does not currently list it -- or any other movie -- as shipped. And it makes me wonder if maybe there just aren't any other copies of Hustle & Flow -- not at the location that ships to my house, anyway. I think that's what happens when movies are listed as "Very Long Wait" -- roughly translated, it's "we don't have any, but if that guy who's had it for the last year ever returns it, we'll send it to you." And I don't think they would borrow from a neighboring retail center just to ship it to little old me.

I wonder if this is the universe telling me I should just buy Hustle & Flow. There was a time, not too long ago, when I was trying to come up with a system for adding movies to my collection that I could justify. I would love to have a large movie library -- I probably have 40-50 DVDs right now -- but I usually try to refrain from buying new ones, on the theory that it's not a great use of money to buy something I may only watch once in the next five years. There's an intangible value to having the library itself -- you can impress your friends with it, I guess -- but in most cases you are better off just renting it for that second viewing, then probably not watching it again for five or ten years.

But I do like acquiring movies now and then, just as we all like wasting money on hobbies and other things that have little demonstrable value. So I told myself I would permit myself to buy any film I had ranked #1 for a given year, from when I started doing it in 1996 to present day. That seemed like a good objective standard, without being excessive. Strangely, in those 13 years, I own only four such movies that I ranked #1. And maybe that's why I didn't immediately go out and fill in the rest. If the whole discussion came from a place of saving money, it hardly made sense to go shell out $100 to fill in those gaps.

But maybe now, given what's happened, given my repeated flailing on Hustle & Flow, I have the excuse I need to go buy at least one of those top-ranked films.

You know, sometimes, it can be hard out here for a pimp.

A depressing pursuit

As I was driving down Ventura Blvd. toward the Arclight theater in Sherman Oaks yesterday, I was thinking, "Do I really want to see Nine?"

And as I circled the parking garage looking for a parking space, I was thinking, "Do I really want to see Nine?"

And as I boarded the escalator bound for the theater, I was thinking, "Do I really want to see Nine?"

And as I shelled out $14.50 via credit card on an automated ticket-buying station, I was thinking, "Do I really want to see Nine?"

And as the movie was starting, and here I was, seeing Nine, I thought, "What am I doing here?"

It was a depressing feeling. And I don't think I ever recovered from the funk over the course of the rest of the day.

Stuffing your rankings to get in as many movies as possible from the previous year can be a depressing pursuit.

It's like this every January. On Oscar nomination morning, which is February 2nd this year, I finalize my entire list of films seen in the previous calendar year, from favorite to least favorite. That morning arrives three weeks from tomorrow -- about ten days later than last year -- so it's officially "crunch time." Which means a lot of half-hearted trips to the theater and perfunctory rentals from the video store.

Yesterday, I had a little of both.

First off there was Nine. Nine was fine. The general argument by critics is that it's hard to identify exactly what's wrong with it, but there's nothing about it that argues strongly for its existence. (Oh, and that the songs are not the least bit hummable -- I agree, with one exception: the song "Be Italian," which plays during the trailer.)

Still, there were good reasons why I wanted to see Nine, maybe more so than the average moviegoer. The main one was that I loved Chicago, which was also directed by Rob Marshall. Nine looked quite similar to Chicago -- musical number fantasies interspersed with realistic scenes of plot development -- so I thought there was a decent chance I'd find it similarly charming. Plus I thought the material from Federico Fellini's 8 1/2, on which the original Broadway musical was based, is fruitful subject matter: A film director catalogs the influences the various women in his life have had on him, while vainly trying to come up with a script for his ninth movie, which will begin shooting any day now.

I also tried to tell myself that the main reason I didn't want to see it -- that it had gotten middling to poor reviews -- was not a very good reason. I have a personal creed of staying true to my initial interest in seeing a movie, regardless of what other critics have said about it. I am trying to recreate the conditions that would exist if I had been assigned to review the film as a new release, without the benefit of any previous reviews to influence me.

But as much as I have that shining ideal in mind, I'm a pragmatist as well. And as I was electronically feeding $14.50 into the coffers of the Arclight yesterday afternoon, all I could think about was all the other ways I might have spent that $14.50. It was easy for me to see the exact cost associated with adding one movie to my year-end list. And it didn't seem there was any way it was as valuable to me as the amount I was spending on it.

See, what I'm really going for with this list is a good representation of the films that were released in 2009, from January through December. The ones from January through September are easy -- you can get them on DVD. However, you have to pay theatrical prices for films released between October and December. So every year there is a film for which I half-heartedly shell out $14.50, just for that intangible value of ranking it. Last year, it was Revolutionary Road, which I believe my wife and I also saw in this theater -- I guess we were randomly up in the San Fernando Valley that time as well.

Yesterday itself probably had something to do with my mood, with making it a bad day to see a movie about which I was less than enthused. I was tired from staying up too late on Saturday night, and drinking too much wine, then getting up before 9 on Sunday morning to get ready for the morning playoff football game, which I watched at a friend's house in the Valley. The Baltimore Ravens slaughtered my New England Patriots -- it was 24-0 after one quarter -- so that kind of set the mood for the day. But if Nine had been a movie I really felt like I was seeing for the right reasons, I wouldn't have cared -- I didn't watch much football this season, and losses don't linger with me for very long these days. But combine all the factors -- tired, lost football game, pointless movie, then it almost being dark when I finally got home -- and it left me in quite the funk.

Of course, the trip to the Blockbuster didn't make things any easier.

I also wanted to pick up a 2009 movie on my way home, even though we already had one store rental -- the dolphin-clubbing documentary The Cove -- unwatched at home. But I had an in-store exchange burning a hole in my pocket, so I stopped at a Blockbuster I used to visit more when I lived in my old apartment. It was here that I became yet more dispirited.

I could tell right away that something was different. There were fewer rental aisles than I ever remembered there being, and in their place were bargain bins of previously viewed movies, a display selling a random assortment of books, and just plain unused real estate. I guess they were probably in the midst of moving things around, or had just done so, as there was a guy affixing category cards reading "DRAMA" to the top of one of the aisles.

Maybe that explained the denuded quality of this particular Blockbuster, but I suspected that the changing face of the rental industry also had something to do with it. I still like the spontaneity of going to a brick-and-mortar store and just picking out a movie, but that's no longer a supportable business model. It doesn't make sense for them to have any but the most frequently rented titles, or the newest releases, stocked in the store. And in fact, because of the poor returns on much of what is offered at the physical Blockbuster stores, Blockbuster has revealed that it will close a number of its locations. Yesterday seemed to be my first preview of that inevitability.

While this made me glum -- I'm an old-school guy who mourns every such change (the closing of the music stores hit me particularly hard) -- my inability to find the first two movies I was looking for made it all the worse.

The other thing I am trying to accomplish this month is to re-watch some favorites from the last decade, in order to come up with a best-of-the-decade list. Toward that end I wanted to bring home Hustle & Flow, my favorite film of 2005, which my wife had just endorsed watching again with me. Needless to say, I could not find it yesterday at Blockbuster, and their new method for stacking the DVDs made it difficult to tell whether they even carried it anymore. This seemed strange -- Hustle & Flow struck me as a highly mainstream title, which won the Oscar for best original song only four years ago (and had a best actor nominee that year for Terrence Howard as well). But here it wasn't, unavailable at this Blockbuster. I scoured the drama section multiple times before giving up. Seeming to anticipate this very moment of customer dissatisfaction, there were signs throughout the drama section that read "Can't find the drama title you're looking for? Don't be sad. We can mail it to you. Over 95,000 titles available." So there they are, openly acknowledging that it no longer makes sense to stockpile inventory. The times, they're always a-changin'.

It was looking for my second movie, Big Fan, that made things even worse. I had seen Patton Oswalt appear on Conan O'Brien almost a week ago, last Monday, to promote the upcoming DVD release. So I had assumed it was coming out the next day -- DVDs almost always release on a Tuesday. Yet it was nowhere to be found among Blockbuster's new releases, and it was also not advertised up on their Upcoming Releases board. I took this as a really bad sign -- that Blockbuster wasn't even ordering all the new releases anymore, even ones that feature a performance that may receive an Oscar nomination. (Upon getting home, I discovered that the movie wasn't actually being released until tomorrow, so Oswalt just went on Conan's show unusually early. Maybe he needed to get on before Conan started becoming surly about his future at NBC.)

So instead of Hustle & Flow, instead of Big Fan, I rented Woody Allen's Whatever Works, starring Larry David. Another film I have not heard great things about. Another perfunctory rental.

I guess what really bothers me is that I don't know any other way to be. I love movies and I love making my list. I wouldn't trade it. Of course, if either one started really troubling me I could just stop doing it. I wouldn't stop going to the movies, but I could do what most people do -- only see the ones they really want to see. The list of yearly rankings could just fall by the wayside if I really started to find my own standards too tedious to meet.

Obviously, the answer is that I would never do either of these things. I just have to understand that it isn't always a joyful pursuit -- sometimes it has a trudging, mechanical quality to it. Sometimes you just have to do "whatever works" to get the job done.

Three more weeks. Eyes on the prize, Vance. Eyes on the prize.