Question your assumptions: Toy Story 2

So the first two times I've written posts under this banner, I've considered movies one might think of as sacred cows -- classics whose value is almost unquestioned. I revisited The Graduate and Rosemary's Baby the first two times I questioned my assumptions, four months apart from each other. Randomly, another four months later, I'm doing the series again.

This time, I'm doing things a bit differently by focusing on something much more recent, though still from last century. As with the other two, though, there are a set of clear assumptions I am grappling with, and it's still been long enough since I've seen it that I knew a new viewing would answer some of my questions.

I hadn't seen Toy Story 2 in something like 15 years. My #2 movie of 1999, it was one of those I saw in the theater and then saw on video almost as soon as it was available. I may have even seen it twice on video, possibly as recently as 2001 or 2002. Since then, though, nothing. On the contrary, I'm quite familiar with Toy Story, having received it on BluRay as a gift. That means its total viewings outnumber Toy Story 2 something like 8-2.

In those 13 to 15 years, I've gone from being uncertain if I could distinguish a meaningful difference in the quality of Toy Story and Toy Story 2, both five-star movies, to pretty clearly preferring Toy Story. The best example of that is my Flickchart rankings, which have Toy Story all the way up at #6 overall, and Toy Story 2 as "only" 118th. Further stimulating this consideration of Toy Story 2 was having caught part of Toy Story 3 last weekend when our family was away for the weekend with three other families. The kids were all watching Toy Story 3, and I got to sit in on the emotional ending. It was all I could do not to bust out crying, something that would have been hard to explain to a bunch of five- and ten-year-olds. I started to wonder if Toy Story 3 weren't better than I thought it was -- perhaps even challenging the quality of Toy Story 2.

(Favorite moment from the viewing, though: When the characters survive their close scrape with the incinerator at the end, my son looked up at me with a look of earnest glee and said "They made it!" The others sitting with him, all older, were nonplussed -- or at least were not similarly vocal. I will treasure the time that my son responds to happy endings totally without cynicism or skepticism.)

So when a BluRay of Toy Story 2 popped up at the library last week on a visit with my sons, I gobbled it up. I thought my older son would be especially ripe for a viewing, having just so enjoyed the next chapter in the saga. (And not really getting that he missed a part in the middle.)

I didn't know if I'd actually get to watch it with him, but the opportunity arose on Sunday morning, when he started the day by vomiting on the carpet. Now that he was officially sick, all kinds of previously inexcusable activities were now on the table -- like him getting to watch TV for most of the day, and me getting to plop down with him for the length of a whole movie. (The fact that he threw up twice more during the day removed any question of whether he was truly sick.)

Toy Story 2 is still a great movie, but there are in fact certain things that bothered me during this view, ranging from the minor to the major. I'll list them in no particular order:

1) The writing is not as casually sharp as it is in the first movie. One of the things that makes Toy Story such a pleasure is that its dialogue is almost exhaustingly clever. You don't truly become exhausted by it, of course, but it's densely packed with double entendres and other witty turns of phrase, without ever once feeling overwritten. Toy Story 2 does not feel overwritten either, but a lot of the incidental cleverness is lost, I noticed.

2) The villain -- Al of Al's Toy Barn, voiced by Wayne Knight -- would never fall asleep with an entirely full bowl of cheesy poofs on his chest. They make him out to be so repulsive and corpulent that he would have had to down at least half that thing, especially to get that quantity of artificial cheese topping on his fingers. It's a smart set piece that Woody needs to walk through the fallen snacks like a minefield in his attempt to keep Al from awakening, but I got stuck on the notion of just how many cheesy poofs escaped a fate in Al's stomach. (Remember, I didn't say all my complaints with Toy Story 2 were major ones.)

3) The exact rarity and value of Woody and his pals as toys seemed exaggerated. I'm no rare toy aficionado, but I have to assume that a museum in Japan would have other ways of acquiring a Woody's Roundup Gang without relying on an American toy store owner finally getting his hands on a Woody to complete the set. Also, was this deal perpetually in place, pending the finding of the Woody, so that Al only has to call up the Japanese once he's finally succeeded in his mission? Which happens without any premeditation, during a random Saturday morning yard sale? And even if this Japanese museum is as obsessed with this acquisition as they appear to be, how much could they possibly be paying Al? A couple grand at most? Surely not enough for Al to fly the toys to Japan himself, as if this cost would immediately become a drop in the bucket of the wealth that would soon be his. But perhaps the strangest moment in this transaction involves Al thinking he's gotten the upper hand and requesting that they "add a zero" to the end of what they plan to pay him. So suddenly he thinks the rare toys may be able to sell for ten times an amount he already thought was going to change his standard of living?

4) The toys are capable of too much in this movie. The adventure in Toy Story had the benefit of being life-sized, or perhaps I should say toy-sized -- going outside the house into the neighbor's yard and down to the local pizza restaurant was astounding enough. Needing to up the ante for the sequel, though, the writers had the toys not only get down to the local toy store (that's fine, I buy that an Etch-a-Sketch map copied from an ad on TV could help them accomplish this), but they also drive a car to the airport. Even allowing for the possibility that a team of intelligent toys could manipulate the controls of a car in the exact unison necessary to pilot the thing, how could they then steer it down busy streets and all the way to an airport, following another car quickly disappearing on the horizon? Even stranger may be the explanation about how they got back to Andy's house, which occurs entirely off-screen and is explained only be showing one of those luggage trains parked in the yard across the street. The return from the airport alone, after the primary conflict has been resolved, should have been a harrowing adventure that got all of them killed.

I'll stop at four complaints because look, this is still a Toy Story movie and it's still wonderful. I just might knock my five-star rating down to 4.75 stars ... and my #118 ranking on Flickchart down to 150-175.

How does it stack up with Toy Story 3? I guess I'll need a proper second viewing of that to say for sure.

Join me again next time -- maybe four months from now, maybe sooner -- for another exciting episode of Question Your Assumptions.

A young Sid in the making?

We've been talking a lot in our house about how our three-year-old is a bit of a terror these days. He's just gotten into guns (since moving to Australia, oddly, where there is no gun problem), and everything he does is aggressive. Even his signs of affection often leave one of us saying "Ow ow ow get off get off!"

But I didn't worry about the scope of the problem until we watched Toy Story on Wednesday for the first time in a month.

We were watching along fine -- him mostly involved in it, me popping in and out and alternating with adult activities -- when it came to the part where Sid, the sadistic next door neighbor, has Buzz and Woody in his "lair," ready to "interrogate" Woody.

Suddenly, my son started speaking.

"Talk!" my son and Sid both said.

"We have ways of making you talk ..." my son and Sid both said.

Sid focuses the rays of the sun through a magnifying glass, beginning to bore a small hole in Woody's head.

"Where are your rebel friends now?" my son and Sid both said.

Uh oh.

If my son has indeed turned to the dark side -- and quoting no portion of Toy Story except Sid's lines would indicate that -- then perhaps I have no one to blame but myself. Like father, like son.

See, when I reached a certain age -- old enough no longer to play with Star Wars and G.I. Joe figures, but still too young to be using power tools -- I "tortured" some of my own toys in my dad's workshop. My dad, a very handy gentleman, had all sorts of lathes and power sanders and buzz saws, terrific ways of doing things to toys that should never be done. There was no lock on his shop -- in fact, there was nothing but a couple cabinets to provide a barrier between where he worked and where I watched TV. It was all too easy to get in there and play around with the tools when no one else was around. (Apparently, I was old enough to be left alone -- the sound of any of these tools would have sent adults running from even the furthest reaches of our house.)

I don't know how much of this torture I actually did, but I do have a distinct memory of using the power sander to sand Princess Leia's face off. This was not the traditional Leia, with the hair buns, but Leia in the outfit she wore on Bespin. I suppose by writing this I am willingly offering up the only piece of evidence anyone would need to nod their head solemnly if one day I am arrested for being a serial killer of women.

I do remember feeling some kind of remorse at having defaced -- literally -- some of my toys, which probably still had enough meaning to me that I valued them as parts of my collection. More than anything I think I just wanted to see how the power sander worked. (Note for those who know their way around a shop better than I do: The tool I used is not really called a "power sander," of course, but that's the only word I know to describe what this particular tool does. I suspect it was more often used to smooth the edges of metal than to sheer off the faces of action figures.)

So, maybe the apple doesn't fall far from the tree? I'll think twice before I set up a shop in our house.

When I shared this story with my wife -- the part that relates to Toy Story, not the part about Princess Leia -- she laughed it off, reassuring me that them being Sid's lines was only a coincidence. She said she thinks our son has reached a new phase in his memorization of his favorite entertainments. He's already shown this aptitude with storybooks, and now he's transferring it to movies and TV. As an example, she said she also heard him repeating back lines in an episode of the harmless kids show Postman Pat.

Well, I don't know. I've got my eye on him.

And I'm keeping all magnifying glasses well hidden.

Dreamworks' inadvertent rival pimping

This is the story of how my son's interest in watching Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit always ends in a viewing of Toy Story.

My son is allowed to watch as much as two hours worth of TV when he wakes up on weekend mornings. Scoff all you want, fellow parents. Deep down, you know you treasure those two hours as an invaluable time to do things around the house. (Even if the things you're doing are not very meritorious, such as updating your blog.)

So each morning after I get him up, we go through an often-circuitous rigmarole about what he wants to watch. This process is complicated by the fact that he sometimes doesn't know the name of the thing he wants to watch. Often I use our Recently Watched section of Netflix streaming as a major crutch, and many mornings, we fill these two hours by stringing together a number of half-hour shows.

However, a feature also does the trick of getting us most of the way there. This is where it gets a little tricky. When he's requesting Cars, does he want to watch so-called "Fin Cars" ("Different Cars"), a series of tall tales told by Mater, which runs 36 minutes? Or is he talking about the two-hour feature, which we just bought about a month ago?

Another area of ambiguity relates to Wallace & Gromit. The short films (A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave) used to be available for streaming in a package. I don't think they are anymore, so when W&G get requested nowadays -- as they did this morning -- I put in our DVD of The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

And then usually take it right out again.

See, something about seeing the Dreamworks logo come up makes my son want to watch Toy Story instead.

I had no idea what it was until this morning, when the phenomenon happened again.

"Ina watch Toy Story," he said in that tone of voice that's almost a whine, but not quite, as those balloons float up into the clouds, and the boy starts fishing on that crescent moon.

This morning I tried to take note of what is causing this association in my son, and it occurred to me pretty quickly once the Toy Story BluRay had gone in.

See, the opening screen of the BluRay, where they ask you your preferred language for the disc options, is Andy's wallpaper -- which happens to be a big screen of blue broken up by regular intervals of clouds.

Bingo.

You know, Dreamworks' is probably screwed no matter what it does. I'm kind of surprised the Dreamworks logo doesn't make my son want to watch a different Pixar movie, Up, which we also own. After all, the logo prominently features balloons as well.

Then again, it's very unlikely that my son knows the title Up. It's a bit abstract for a child. When he does request it -- which is rare -- I believe he refers to it as "Balloons." Or "buyoons," which is how he pronounces it. (My son is learning Spanish at daycare, and may have heard that word spoken with the Spanish convention of turning double L's into a Y sound.)

Of course, if we're talking patterns, here's another predictable one that also relates to my son changing his viewing preferences based on a visual trigger:

Once he's set up with his viewing option, I like to set myself up with my laptop at our kitchen table, which looks in on the living room where he's watching his shows. If I can see him, he can see me, and my laptop immediately reminds him of his absolute favorite viewing option:

"Diggers."

"Daddy, ina watch diggers," he says/whines.

See, before we showed him any TV, we allowed him to watch construction equipment ("diggers") on youtube on my computer. In time, "diggers" came to refer to anything watched on the internet on daddy's computer -- trains, helicopters, even shows on potty training. Although TV is now an option for him and has been for almost a year, "diggers" has never been fully supplanted.

And more often than not, when I've got my computer out, my son will slink over and try to start climbing up on my knee, and begin full-on whining if he is even remotely denied.

So here's another skill parents have gotten down: adaptation. Now, I bring my work computer home every weekend, so he can watch diggers on my work computer, while I use this one to write this post, the one I'm finishing right about ...

... now.

Forty-eight reasons to see The Hobbit

It seems that nearly everyone has some angle of wariness related to The Hobbit.

A friend of mine phrased one of these angles of wariness very succinctly earlier this week on Facebook:

"Just bought our tickets for The Hobbit. I'm excited to see it (and the other movies), but I'm pretty unconvinced that you need 2 hours and 45 minutes to tell 1/3 of a 300-page novel."

I've also heard that the credits alone run for 16 minutes. So even though I usually like sitting through as many of the credits as time will allow, at least I know I can get out of there in 2:29 for this one, if need be.

However, my own greatest source of wariness about the movie has now become the biggest reason I'm interested in seeing it.

Yep, the infamous 48 frames per second projection rate.

I won't rehash the flogged-nearly-to-death discussion of the strengths (few?) and weaknesses (many?) of this gambit by Peter Jackson, but in case you don't know what I'm talking about at all: Almost every movie you've ever seen was shot at 24 frames per second. With twice as many frames per second, the image is far more crisp and there's less blurring. Most people don't notice the blurring of 24 fps, in part because it's been the standard practice throughout history. But 24 fps is part of the reason why some people don't like 3D -- they find the image darker, and it leaves them feeling queasy. The faster projection rate is supposed to fix those problems, but it has a side effect that some people hate and some people embrace: The images look hyper-real, to the extent that it sometimes makes them look cheap, like they were shot on video, or (as I have often referred to it) belong on some bad BBC show from the 1970s.

I'm wary about having my own experience of The Hobbit ruined if I find this technique distracting, as I always have in the past when my TV has been on a setting that mimics 48 fps (or actually uses 48 fps -- I don't pretend to understand all the technical details). But I've decided that I owe it to myself to see it this way, in 3D, for one simple reason:

How often do you go to the movies and see something new? I'm not talking about new in terms of plot, subject matter or narrative structure -- but something new in terms of technique?

Even if my viewing of The Hobbit is destined to be a failure, I want to expose myself to this new paradigm, which some people have said will be the future of how movies are made, and others say will go the way of the dodo bird once these three movies have come and gone. 

After all, wouldn't you have wanted to go see The Jazz Singer in the theater, if you had been there in 1927 when it came out? Wouldn't you have been so exhilarated by hearing Al Jolson's voice that you would have nearly wept? Or what about nine years before that (I'm just now learning this bit of trivia, mid-way through this paragraph, whose order I am nonetheless not going to restructure to be chronological), when a silent film called Cupid Angling was the first color feature? You could say the same thing about the first animated movie, the first 3D movie, even the first movie where you saw nudity, depending on how far you want to stretch the notion of what constitutes something truly "new." There was even a thing called Smell-O-Vision once. If I'd been around then, I would have been the first one in line. (It would have been the 1960 movie Scent of Mystery, the only film ever to use this obviously unsuccessful and impractical gimmick.)

I'm not saying The Hobbit is going to represent this kind of sea change, but I'm also not saying it isn't. And since all of the techniques listed above predate 1960, that just tells you how rare it is to get something truly "new" -- and therefore, how important it is, as serious film fans, to embrace our opportunities to experience these new things when we do get the chance.

In fact, in trying to find examples from my own life as a film fan, I'm forced to choose viewing experiences that contained far less revolutionary changes in what we experience with films. Unsurprisingly, most relate directly to visual effects. I'm thinking of the T-1000 in Terminator 2, with its unprecedented (to me) use of digital technology. I'm thinking of the first time I saw a Pixar movie, Toy Story; I was so impressed that I saw it again the next day. I'm thinking of the first movie I saw on an IMAX screen. I'm thinking of Avatar, which was clearly an evolutionary step forward in how realistic and immersive 3D can be.

What these viewings all have in common, though, is that the change I was witnessing was undoubtedly a positive thing. Even though Avatar left me a little disappointed overall, that's primarily because I couldn't separate my experience of its visuals from my experience of its story. A movie like The Hobbit threatens to make that separation all the harder to achieve, except this time it would probably the story that's good and the visuals that aren't so. 

Still, I'm not so in love with Middle Earth that I can't take this risk. Because another concern I have about The Hobbit is not just its bloated length, but the fact that it's a prequel to events that I think most people would argue are far more dramatic and have far greater stakes -- if only because there are certain characters you just know will survive. If you think Bilbo Baggins, Gandalf or Gollum might die in these movies, you obviously haven't seen the LOTR trilogy. And there are a half-dozen other characters who appear in these new films who also appear in the trilogy that comes later in Tokien's chronology. (Let's just hope they do a convincing job making the actors look younger, which is already an early problem I've noted with Ian McKellan.) When I watched the Rankin/Bass Hobbit from the 1970s, I always remember thinking it seemed pretty light and goofy -- and that wasn't just because of the animation style. Even back when I was a kid, I sensed the story's lack of dramatic weight. There's a reason Jackson started with Lord of the Rings and not this.

So I'm the perfect candidate to seek out my local 48 fps showing of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. I'm not some Tolkien nerd who has only one chance for this film to make its first impression on me, and can't afford to blow it at the risk of my geek soul. And besides, the most interesting outcome for me might be to hate the 48 fps but still like the movie. As much as anything, I'm curious to see if there is a definite correlation between the way the movie looks and the impression it has on me as a piece of narrative art. It would be a similar experiment to making yourself watch Avatar for the first time on an iphone. Okay, better example of a spectacle whose story is actually a success: It would be like making yourself watch Titanic for the first time on an iphone. 

In a way, the verdict is already in on The Hobbit, anyway. Regardless of its fps, it isn't wowing critics in terms of its quality as a film, as it's been conspicuously absent from the year-end awards that Peter Jackson made his bitch the first time around. Most conspicuously, yesterday's Golden Globe nominations didn't feature a single mention of The Hobbit, at least in the major categories I perused. That's ouch-worthy.

But however you choose to consume it, here's hoping that you get something out of The Hobbit that reminds you even in some small way of the original trilogy, which I consider to be one of the great achievements in film history, even though I'm not a Tolkien nerd. We should be glad there's an artist out there with the vision and ambition to give these films such a lavish big-screen realization -- whether he launches a new cinematic paradigm or not.

The era of partial viewings

My son turned two on Saturday.

Before the day was out, he had seen both Up and Toy Story.

Parts of them, anyway.

In his two years of existence, we've had a strict rule not to introduce him to TV. That doesn't mean we'd make sure the TV was off if he were in the room. We just made sure that whatever was on TV didn't interest him. Baseball has been my programming of choice in that regard. It doesn't interest my wife, either -- two birds with one stone.

But we always knew that when he turned two, we would slowly introduce him to the kind of programming where he was the intended demographic. I decided to take that literally by showing him Up on the morning of his second birthday, even though he technically didn't turn two until 9:35 a.m.

Why Up? I have no great love for it. I appreciate it more upon every viewing (this would be my third), but I still consider it to be in the lower half of Pixar's movies. We only own it at all because my sister gave it to me as a Christmas present that year. Loved the idea of trying to get me DVDs she thought I'd like, and though she scored only a minor hit with this one, she scored a major one with Inglourious Basterds.

I considered showing him Inglourious Basterds, thinking he might really get something out of the scene where Eli Roth cracks open that Nazi's head with a baseball bat. But Up was the movie of choice, because my son had taken it off the shelf a couple times and given a long look at Kevin, the colorful bird sought out by Charles F. Muntz come hell or high water. (As I've always said -- just go back to society and show everyone you've invented a collar that translates the thoughts of dogs into speech. Much more impressive than proving the existence of an elusive bird.)

"Duck!" my son proclaimed upon looking at Kevin. In his world, all birds that look even vaguely like a duck, are a duck. (He loves dogs even more than ducks, but the satellite dish around Doug's head may have kept my son from identifying Doug as a canine.)

So I decided to show him the movie with the duck in it for his birthday.

Of course, the duck doesn't come into the movie until 30 minutes in. So I had to ask myself: Do I show him Up from the beginning, or from 30 minutes in?

But the question was really this: Am I showing him Up for him, or for me?

You see, if you know me, and if you read this post way back in 2009, you know that I don't really love watching parts of movies. This wasn't always the case. But when I started keeping track not only of the new movies I watched, but also of the favorites I revisited, everything started to "count." Strict adherence to lists has a way of doing that. Since I didn't want to face the dilemma of whether watching 25 minutes of a movie means that it "counted" as a viewing, I decided to just stop catching bits of movies here and there. I'll either watch all of it or watch none of it.

See, that kind of absolutism is not possible with children. And I ought to resign myself to it sooner rather than later. My friends who have older children have seen parts of some Pixar movies in the multiple dozens of times. I imagine I soon will be that guy, too.

Soon, but not yet.

Terminal completist that I am, I showed him Up from the beginning.

And was amazed at his apparent capacity for absorbing the movie. He sat there, sucking his fingers, staring raptly at the screen, long past the point I dared hope he'd do so. Those first 30 minutes, until Kevin makes his entrance, are pretty adult-oriented, all told. Yeah, you get a little bit of young Carl and young Ellie, but then you get a montage of their life together and old Carl's cantankerous interactions with various city officials. It would be easy for a child of four, let alone two, to lose his focus during that part.

And so I breathed a sigh of relief when Carl unveils the massive bunch of balloons that will carry him to Paradise Falls. I knew this would hold my son's attention for a bit longer, even if it had been flagging to that point. And it did hold his attention, though his attention hadn't seemed to be flagging.

Strangely enough, it was right at about the point that Kevin was ready to appear that he finally stopped being interested in the movie. And maybe he's just my son in that regard. He knew that the movie was on track until that point, and that it kind of starts to meander once Carl and his rotund boy scout stowaway Russell land near Paradise Falls. Maybe he, like me, thought it was a curious choice to shift the action from their wondrous airborne adventures, to their adventures lugging around the house like an overgrown kite, followed around by an annoying bird and an idiot dog. 

He did show limited interested in both Kevin and Doug, but by then, he had other jobs around the living room that needed his attention.

Me, I kept watching as long as I could. I missed big chunks of the third act while preparing his birthday pancake breakfast, but I still felt that it "counted" as a viewing, and recorded it in my lists as such.

When my wife decided to show him Toy Story in the afternoon, I caught little bits, but mostly decided to stay out of it. I watched about 20-25 assorted minutes and decided that this did not "count." (Besides, we just watched Toy Story earlier this year, and I didn't want to have my enjoyment of it ruined by another viewing so soon afterward -- especially since my most recent viewing was the least enthused I had felt about it in any of my half-dozen viewings.)

But if my son's childhood is anything like the childhoods of my friends' kids, I'll soon have my appreciation of plenty of terrific animated movies ruined.

Maybe I'll just strategize to buy him only the crappy ones, so I won't care if I start hating them.

$3.99 DVD smackdown

Yesterday was my birthday, but on my lunch break, I found myself buying a card for someone else. It was a thank you card, and it was for my dad and his wife, who have been in town since Saturday meeting their grandson and step-grandson. They're leaving today.

The part of this story that's germane to movies is that the Walgreens where I was buying the card was having a sale on DVDs. A pretty good sale, I thought: $3.99 apiece.

Movies that make it into these sale bins are usually nothing you'd want to see. If you've even heard of the titles, they're things that are 15 to 20 years old, and were considered some of the biggest flops of those actors' or directors' careers. But not yesterday. Yesterday, there were some good pickins. In fact, so good, that when I decided to limit myself to just one, it was a tough choice. I was feeling celebratory enough to treat myself to a $3.99 movie on my birthday, but too fiscally conservative to treat myself to a second.

So, here were the contenders:

1) Shattered Glass (2003, Billy Ray)

For it: A fascinating study of the desperate measures a man will take while trying to cover his tracks. Shattered Glass is the true story of Stephen Glass (Hayden Christensen, at his career best), a former wunderkind writer for The New Republic who blatantly fabricated some or all of the details of stories he wrote for the magazine. When rival journalists pick holes in one of his stories, he goes to great lengths to try to retroactively support the existence of sources, events, even entire companies that never existed. It's thrilling and extremely well done.

Against it: Just watched it again about six months ago. When I buy a DVD, I like for it to be something I haven't seen in awhile, so there's at least the possibility that I'll watch it soon after buying it, even if I probably won't.

2) Away from Her (2006, Sarah Polley)

For it: A wrenching and heartbreaking story of a woman (the excellent Julie Christie) whose life radically changes after the sudden onset of Alzheimer's. Not only are the performances great (Gordon Pinsent is also terrific as the husband who is no longer recognizable to his wife), but it's an extremely impressive and mature debut for its director, Polley, who was only 27 at the time of the film's release, and is known to us primarily as an actress (Go, Splice).

Against it: Too depressing. Movies with heavy subject matter fall into that category of films that I may really love, but may also not feel the need to own. I consider Schindler's List one of the greatest films of all time, but I don't really want to own it.

3) The Lives of Others (2006, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck)

For it: An exquisite and moving portrait of East Germany under the Stasi, the secret police who monitored artists and other liberal thinkers for signs of political dissidence, told through the eyes of one of the most fervent pro-government surveillance experts (played by the terrific Ulrich Muhe, rest in peace). The ways in which his own world view crumbles are fascinating as this Stasi captain becomes moved by the lives of a playwright and his girlfriend. But even more impressive is his own cat-and-mouse game to avoid being suspected of losing his resolve by his own superiors and former ideological comrades.

Against it: Both copies of the DVD were emblazoned with a sticker that read "Previously Enjoyed," even though it was shrink-wrapped and in all other respects looked new. Even if I'm buying DVDs cheaply, I sometimes think they seem tainted if they're used, although it's a good way not to waste a perfectly good DVD.

So who came out on top?

Winner: The Lives of Others

Even though I have similar levels of affection for all three films, I decided that The Lives of Others was the one I most felt I needed to own. I've seen it only once, which gives it an advantage over Shattered Glass, and even though it's sad in parts, that's not the dominant mode of the film, which gives it an advantage over Away from Her. And at least the DVD looked new, so I felt I could ignore its pre-owned status.

Now I just have to figure out when I'll get to carve out the two hours and 18 minutes needed to watch it again.

So which would you have picked?

The Lives of Others ended up being only the first of three movies I received on my birthday. Here are the other two:

1) Toy Story (1995, John Lasseter). I currently have this classic film ranked #2 on Flickchart, meaning that I should at least own a DVD copy of it already. I owned it on VHS, but never quite found myself in a situation to upgrade to DVD. So yesterday's gift skipped the DVD step and went straight to BluRay, making this the official third BluRay in our new collection.

2) Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008, Darren Lynn Bousman). And then this became our fourth. Even though the friend who sent me this one sent it as kind of a joke, because he hated it, I didn't receive it in that way -- I actually really liked this film (which he knew), and watched it twice when I first rented it two Januarys ago. That means it's just about time for a third viewing.

Unfortunately, I didn't get my other birthday wish as stated in yesterday's post, the Texas Rangers beating the New York Yankees. But that's for me to whine about on a sports blog, not a movie blog.

A new way to rank (Warning! May cause dizziness!)

Last Thursday, my friend Don turned me on to a nasty, wonderful little time-waster, which has since become my obsession.

I should say, for the average person it would be a time-waster. For Don and me, it is downright revolutionary.

It's called FlickChart (www.flickchart.com), and it does nothing short of help you rank your favorite movies of all time. But it's not just your favorite movies, either -- it's all the movies you've seen. All the movies you've seen that they have in their database, anyway. And that's quite a lot -- I've already ranked 2,279 of them, and am still going.

So how exactly does this work?

When you go the website and sign up for a free account, it immediately gets you started on ranking your movies. And it does this in a way that's so simple, yet so effective, that I can't believe it didn't occur to someone before now.

Quite simply, you rank your movies as a series of duels. On one half of the screen, you see the poster for one movie. On the other half, you see a poster for another movie. Whichever poster you click is the movie you like better. And each time you click a poster, you are presented with two new films to compare. If you haven't seen one of them, you click a button that says "Haven't seen it," and you are presented with a new film in its place. As you click -- and click, and click, and click, and click, and click, and click, and click, and click, and click, and click, and click, and click, and click -- the films develop rankings.

At first these rankings are goofy. Say your first two movies are (I'll take two that I don't think are all that great) Burn After Reading and Dead Poets Society. (I hate Burn After Reading, and was in the minority in finding Dead Poets Society manipulative and melodramatic). I would pick Dead Poets Society in this duel, which means that Dead Poets Society would be my #1 movie, and Burn After Reading #2. Then I will get two different movies, and then two more different movies, and then two more different movies, and then eventually duels between some of the same films I've already ranked.

The thing is, Dead Poets Society will stay at #1. Until, that is, it comes up against something better than it -- say, X-Men: The Last Stand -- at which point it will move to #2. When something better comes up against X-Men: The Last Stand -- say, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (which is a lot better) -- Dead Poets Society will move down to #3. And so on. After much clicking and many duels, Dead Poets Society will eventually end up in its proper place. Each time you get a new film, it adds one to the total number of films you've ranked, and each time you choose one film over another, it adds one ranking.

I found out about Flickchart shortly after I got to work on Thursday, and that's also when I found out two other things: 1) One of my bosses was leaving to spend the entire day at our corporate headquarters, and 2) My most anal other co-worker was out sick. When you added this to the fact that my other boss was already on a scheduled day off, it created the perfect storm for endless amounts of clicking.

And click I did.

All day.

In fact, I ranked so many movies, competed in so many duels, that I literally lost track of time. I almost forgot to eat lunch, and I entered some kind of dizzy fugue where my vision got fuzzy, and I had only a peripheral awareness of the events around me. When I had to do actual work, it was quickly, and with barely concealed annoyance. Sometimes I was so out of it that I realized I'd been staring through the posters, thinking for five seconds about whether The Empire Strikes Back was better than Saw II -- a decision that would have been instantaneous if I weren't half-dead from overindulgence. I was not only hooked, I was an actual addict.

You see, even though I keep a list of all the movies I've ever seen, I have never even considered ranking them. I always wished there was a way, but it's just too enormous a task. How do you decide that movie #1363 on your list is better than #1364? Simple: You can't.

Until now.

See, it's not one big decision about what goes where -- it's a million little decisions. Is Clash of the Titans better than Baby Mama? If so, there's one choice. Is It's a Wonderful Life better than Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls? There's another. And so on. And so on. I make the choices -- I leave the algorithms up to Flickchart.

I rank my favorite movies released in each calendar year as the year is unfolding, and one time, I tried to rank my favorite movies released from 1996 to 2006, just as an exercise. But ranking all the movies I've ever seen? How? How?

I should tell you that at first, it did not seem like Flickchart would be able to provide such an enormous service. As Don and I were both furiously clicking throughout the day -- he had limited boss supervision that day as well -- we both noticed that after awhile, we stopped getting new movies. At about 380 movies -- only 21 of which I hadn't seen -- I noticed no new titles being provided for my consideration. Which was a little disappointing.

But only a little. With a relatively small group of films to focus on, at least I would get a pretty much definitive ranking of those films. Maybe it would take 10,000 rankings, but by that time, I would really know whether I thought Back to the Future was better than Raiders of the Lost Ark, Lost in Translation was better than Children of Men, and Goodfellas was better than Citizen Kane. These are all movies I absolutely love, and eventually, I would have to make the choice between them. (And I can't even tell you how agonizing it has been at times. When I got Donnie Darko vs. Star Wars, I was so angst-ridden I had to email Don then and there. I eventually chose Darko).

If I believe that Flickchart is working its algorithm correctly, I will also have the answer to the question I have previously been unable to answer when anyone asks me:

What is my favorite movie of all time?

It gives me a chill just to think this could be possible. As a film critic, I get this question a lot.

So Don and I agreed that we would rank these 380 films -- or however may of them we had seen (and he had seen seven more than I had, darn him) -- 10,000 times, and then compare our lists. And we would do it by the end of the weekend.

I got halfway there on Thursday. That's right, I made a choice between two movies 5,000 times that day.

Now do you get the dizziness?

But, as I alluded to earlier in the post, there was a stunning realization still in store for me. While Don and I were no less interested by the task, all this clicking gets tedious, especially when you are seeing the same titles over and over and over again. (But not the same posters -- one of the most wonderful things about this website is that there are numerous different posters provided for each film, representing other languages, limited campaigns, etc. etc. That alone makes it a film lover's dream).

But on Sunday morning, I discovered that we had been filtering the movies incorrectly. Somehow, the default setting on Flickchart is for you to receive this initial selection of 380 movies, but nothing more. It's under a strangely and misleadingly named filter called All Movies. On Sunday, however, I discovered that there was a filter called Only Unranked Movies. And as soon as I filtered it that way, all variety of new titles started spilling in -- both totally thrilling me and totally overwhelming me at the same time. At least the goal of 10,000 movies by the end of the weekend would no longer mean anything.

So instead of obsessively ranking the same movies against each other in order to fine-tune the order more and more, I shifted my goal to adding new movies to the list -- and did that most of the day on Sunday, until my wife made me stop and watch a movie with her. I'm never one to turn down my favorite pastime, but a new one had since taken a stranglehold on me, so I relished every break in the action, when she got a phone call or had to go to the bathroom. I had that laptop on my lap less than five seconds after she hit pause. And as soon as we finished the excellent Transamerica -- which I enjoyed no less as a result of my Flickchart distraction -- I immediately added it to my ever-growing list.

I now realize that Flickchart is not a finite project, but a way of life. I will continue adding movies to my list -- there's a place where you can do that as well, instead of just waiting for them to pop up randomly -- and I will continue dueling them against each other over the course of weeks, months, years. It'll be the perfect way to pass the time as I veg out in front of the baseball playoffs for the next couple weeks.

But I did reach 10,000, our original goal, at the end of the night last night. So I thought I should present you my top 20 at this juncture, which now seems like just the beginning.

Without further ado:

1. Toy Story
2. Pulp Fiction
3. Donnie Darko
4. Dumb and Dumber
5. The Seven Samurai
6. Toy Story 2
7. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
8. Dances With Wolves
9. The Princess Bride
10. The Empire Strikes Back
11. Raiders of the Lost Ark
12. Children of Men
13. Unforgiven
14. Citizen Kane
15. Ferris Bueller's Day Off
16. The Untouchables
17. Requiem for a Dream
18. Fargo
19. The Professional
20. Die Hard

As evidence of how this is a work in progress, there are some films on here that are way too high. For example, though I love The Seven Samurai, it is not my fifth favorite film of all time. Nor do The Professional, Requiem for a Dream and Dances With Wolves belong in the top 20. But otherwise, you are looking at some of my creme de la creme. However, by the "end" of this process -- I put it in quotation marks because there is no end -- it's possible that only a few of these titles will still be in the top 20. There are dozens of wonderful movies in the second half of my current list, just waiting for their chance to move up. Never mind the movies I may one day love that I haven't seen yet -- or that haven't been made yet.

Then there's the question of #1. How long will Toy Story stay? It's hard to say, but I can say that it has been #1 for the entire 10,000. Toy Story happens to both be one of my favorite films of all time, and one of the first two I ranked. So it has ruled the roost from moment one. That's why it gets the poster art for this post -- in addition to the fact that it's also timely, as the film has returned to theaters, along with its sequel, for a two-week 3D run.

So if you are a big movie fan -- which you are if you're reading this blog, or else you're one of my relatives -- and if 2,000 words on Flickchart has not exhausted you too much already, I recommend you get started on it. Now. You'll remember this day as the day your life changed forever -- though whether you thank me or curse my name depends on how you take to the addiction.

And don't blame me if you start to get dizzy. I recommend taking a walk -- and having your bosses out of the office.