Outwit, outplay, OUTLAST

Sometimes I envy my friends whose wives go to bed at 9:30 every night.

Mine does not. In fact, she is a genuine night owl. Even when she does talk about going to bed early, 9:30 is the absolute earliest it would be. And even then, she'll usually potter around until at least 10.

This is no dig at her -- every person is entitled to their particular ways of doing things. And in fact, I kind of love that my wife burns the midnight oil. It's the best indicator we have that we're not over the hill, the fact that we we like to still stay up late and have fun together.

And it would not be a problem, except that she has also lost her interest in watching movies.

Not totally, of course -- she watched plenty of movies with me down the stretch, as I was wrapping up my 2010 rankings. But in general, she would rather consume a number of short units of entertainment, half-hour or hour-long shows on our DVR, than commit to a whole movie.

My problem is, I try to watch at least five or six movies a week, and a lot of times, they're movies she wouldn't be interested in watching anyway. Merely mentioning the quantity of movies I have on the docket, to see if she'd be interested in watching them, can put her off her game. It can provide her an unpleasant reminder of my obsessive focus on consuming cinema -- an obsessive focus she endorses in the best of times, but greets with some wariness when things aren't running on all cylinders. (Like, when the baby has deprived her of precious sleep six nights in a row.)

Which means if I want to keep up with my own pace, I need to outlast her. I need to stay up past when she plans to stay up, and start my movie then.

As I said, this can be hard, even when she says she's turning in early.

Take this past Tuesday night. Tuesday night is usually project night, when we don't turn on the TV at all, in deference to accomplishing some task that seems impossible while our son is awake. But this past Tuesday, we were both tired, so we decided to cancel project night.

She started to make noises about going to bed as early as 9 o'clock. I knew this meant I'd probably be able to watch a movie after she turned in. In fact, I had Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy all lined up. I'd borrowed it from my boss, and he'd already asked a couple times if I'd had the chance to watch it. I knew that chance would be even harder once her sister comes to town for a week, starting tomorrow. So when I promised I'd watch it within the next week, my ability to keep my word seemed contingent on taking advantage of any opening I could find. And since it was Hitchock, I wanted to give it the respect of watching it on a big screen, at night, rather than on my portable DVD player, a snippet here and there throughout the day.

But we had lasagna for dinner, and Italian food invariably activates my craving for red wine. I'd had two glasses by the time my wife started truly winding down. So I was really stacking the deck against myself to watch a 116-minute movie starting after 10 p.m.

I might have been able to start earlier, because she actually did start clearing out of the living room by about 9:40. But outlasting the other person who has claims on the TV is a somewhat delicate process. If you jam your movie into the DVD player the moment they get up from the couch, it becomes clear that you've just been waiting them out, that they have essentially been serving as an obstruction to your desires, that you would have been happier if they went to bed hours ago. This can lead to sadness.

So it really was 10 p.m. before I ventured to put in Frenzy. I was heavy with sleep and my vision was somewhat blurry.

I actually did pretty well, considering the factors -- like my son waking up around 10:30, and again around 11:30. After about 13 minutes of the movie, I made myself a bowl of ice cream, hoping the sugar rush would help. (I didn't actually "make" it -- I scooped it out of the container.) Then later I had a can of Fresca, relying on the carbonation once I realized it was sugar free. I also ate a whole sleeve of Saltines, not because I was hungry, but because I thought the repeated activity of eating would prevent me from dozing off. Unfortunately, repeatedly eating Saltines means you go through a sleeve in about eight minutes.

I succumbed with about 15 minutes to go in the movie, just after midnight. I finished at about 2:30. And just to make sure I had gotten everything there was to get from Frenzy, I fast-forwarded through it a second time, to make sure I remembered what had happened in every scene, hadn't missed any subtle details when I was hovering in purgatory between consciousness and unconsciousness. A pretty useful thing to do, I decided. (And to comment briefly on Frenzy -- it's Hitchcock's second-to-last film, made in 1972, which in itself is a strange thing to see. He's past his prime, sure, but there's enough classic Hitchcock in there to be worth watching.)

The "outlast" strategy is flawed at best. In trying to maintain my regular quantity of movie watching, I'm probably sacrificing quality. So I guess it's best to watch things that you don't think you're going to like, when you're getting a late start with a belly full of wine. And I guess some amount of viewing quality is going to be sacrificed whenever you watch movies at a fast clip. Every cinephile has to make peace with the details of lesser movies fading into oblivion. Hey, that's why they're the lesser ones.

I've been trying to keep up my same movie-watching pace in the baby era, and so far, I've mostly succeeded. But it's hard when you're literally taking every single moment your partner isn't home, or isn't awake, to squeeze one in, even if you are also trying to keep a baby entertained at the same time. It's almost like watching movies has become a shameful habit, one I must keep hidden, as though it were pornography. When really, it's just wanting to watch an Alfred Hitchcock movie at a speed that my boss considers timely. It's especially difficult because the more I write this blog, and the more I engage with others on the film blogosphere, the more movies I realize I want to see, or want to see again.

Maybe the real key is that in addition to project night, we also need movie night. Maybe it's Wednesday, maybe it's Thursday. One night each week that definitely involves a movie. The danger is, of course, that this could cut into other impromptu viewings. I don't want the existence of a movie night to mean that movies don't get watched on other nights.

Well, one thing's for sure: Outlasting is for the birds.

Since we're talking about Hitchcock.

May I borrow a word?

Note: From Prada to Nada snuck up on me and came out last Friday. Shoot. I could have written this post then instead of my wordless dismissal of The Rite.

When I saw that there was a movie called From Prada to Nada coming out, I thought two things:

1) "That's sort of a clever title."

2) "Any box office it gets, it will owe to The Devil Wears Prada."

It's not a new trick to "borrow" one of the words in the title of a popular movie -- especially if the borrower is from the same genre -- to help create awareness about the borrower, which tends to be an underdog. This occurs in its most extreme form with mockbusters, discussed here. These are essentially blatant attempts to fool the public, such as trying to convince them that the straight-to-DVD movie The DaVinci Treasure is actually Ron Howard's The DaVinci Code.

But more legitimate films do it all the time, sometimes in ways that are covert enough not to draw suspicion (except in bloggers like me who have nothing better to do). For example, I felt pretty certain that the original British version of Death at a Funeral -- an ensemble set in England featuring a lot awkwardness and absurd shenanigans -- was a transparent attempt to capitalize on the name recognition of Four Weddings and a Funeral. Then there are the more obvious examples, like Sunshine Cleaning and Little Miss Sunshine (both films even starred Alan Arkin). Then there are the movies that seem like they're borrowing, but it's actually just a coincidence. Take District 13: Ultimatum. A blatant grab at the District 9 brand, right? Nope -- a sequel to District B-13, which came out in 2004.

So I thought that today, in honor of From Prada to Nada, I would try to present some other titles we might be seeing in the next year or two. Such as:

Ain't Nothing But a Slumdog
The Shirt Locker
Attack of the Avatars
The Iron Fist
The Social Contract
Hung Over
The Secret Life of Toys
Caribbean Adventures
Frank-E
Total Eclipse
It's Greek to Me
Some Like It Hot Tub

Question: Did I think I was going to come up with a funnier list of fake titles when I started this?

Answer: Yep.

Yesterday's news

If you were to place all consumable information on a continuum representing its ability to endure, with newspaper articles on one end and novels on the other, most feature films would be a lot closer to the novel end of the spectrum, and most documentaries would be a lot closer to the newspaper article.

A newspaper article, in its essence, is something consumed quickly, perhaps not even completely, then thrown away. A novel, on the other hand, can be timeless, something you would still want to read more than 500 years after it was written. (Even though there were more plays and epic poems being written 500 years ago than novels as we understand them today.)

It's too early to know how films will endure relative to the great works of literature, but I think it's safe to say we'll care about fiction films a lot longer than we'll care about documentaries. At least culturally, if not historically.

This past weekend, I saw Charles Ferguon's Oscar-nominated documentary No End in Sight, which was released in 2007. It's a very good film and it's only four years old, but there's a reason I got approved to review it in October of 2009 and am only just now getting around to watching it.

Namely, the "end" of the Iraq War actually is in sight. Troop withdrawal is picking up speed as we speak.

You might say that there's an end in sight for the relevance of No End in Sight.

Just because the film's title is necessarily fleeting, tied to the specific moment in time in which it was made, doesn't make it less worthwhile as a viewing experience. But I'd argue that it does make a 2011 viewer slightly less eager to seek it out. Perhaps more than slightly.

And as this idea occurred to me, I realized that many documentaries out there have sort of an "expiration date" -- a date after which the topics in the film no longer have the social resonance they had when the documentarian first envisioned making the film.

Consider this: How often do you go back and watch old fiction films? If you're a big film fan, it's pretty often, right?

Now, how often do you seek out old documentaries?

[Sound of crickets chirping.]

That's because we generally don't. Perhaps without even realizing it, we limit our documentary intake to those documentaries made within the past five years. However, as No End in Sight indicates, even five years can be long enough for the film to have lost its immediacy.

Now, this certainly does not apply to all documentaries. Some documentaries are purely historical in nature, where all the footage is archival, and all the interview subjects are reflecting on something in the past, at some point after the fact, with the date of their reflection being somewhat irrelevant. And then there are those documentaries that are essentially divorced from time altogether, such as Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, in which Errol Morris looks at the lives of four men who are obsessed with their various professions (a lion tamer, a topiary artist, a hairless-mole expert and a designer of bug-sized robots).

But even films like Fast, Cheap and Out of Control have probably been lost to all but the most dedicated fans of documentary filmmaking, who would be inclined to study the entire career of a great documentarian like Errol Morris. Merely by being a documentary, this film gets lumped in with its of-the-moment brethren, eventually lost in oblivion as far as most movie fans are concerned.

And although Fast, Cheap and Out of Control did not get nominated for an Oscar in 1997, the nominees from that year more or less bear out my theory. Only Spike Lee's 4 Little Girls is a film I'm sure I remember, though I did not see it. The others are The Long Way Home, about the creation of the Israeli state after the Holocaust, which won the Oscar; Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life, about writer Ayn Rand; Waco: The Rules of Engagement, about the 1993 standoff between the Branch Davidians and the FBI; and Colors Straight Up, about at-risk teens in Los Angeles trying to stay off the streets through various arts programs (though I had to search beyond wikipedia to get even that description of the film). The Waco movie in particular is a perfect example of the kind of documentary that's pegged off a news event from a particular moment, which may not speak to a 2011 documentary audience in an ongoing way that would make them seek it out.

So what point am I trying to make here?

I guess it's this: As discussed here, documentaries are some of the most consistently high quality examples of filmmaking we have, but if you don't see them during their brief window of maximum relevance, you might as well forget it. Even with the documentary that many people consider the greatest of all time -- Hoop Dreams -- you don't hear fellow movie fans talk about revisiting it, do you? And if they didn't see it back in the early 1990s, you don't hear them talk about paying it a first visit at all.

The greatest feature film? Citizen Kane, maybe? Casablanca? The Godfather? New film fans are discovering these movies every day, even though two of them were released in the 1940s and the other released in the 1970s.

And this could be because in the universe of fiction, there's no way to know exactly what came next, to know whether subsequent events invalidated what we're seeing in the movie. Even where there are sequels -- such as Godfather II and Godfather III -- those sequels build on the narrative of the original in (hopefully) satisfying ways. And no matter how many sequels there are, we still don't know what came after the final sequel.

It's a bit different with documentaries. When a film bemoans the "quagmire" -- to quote a word from which Donald Rumsfeld famously dissociated himself -- of a misguided war that's seemingly without end, and you watch it during the period of time when the war is actually sort of ending, you lose a little something. It's like real life should have given you a spoiler alert.

Don't get me wrong -- I found No End in Sight captivating. I learned things I didn't quite know previously, like what a foolhardy thing it was to dissolve the Iraqi National Army. That decision -- made recklessly and without consulting the proper experts, as the film demonstrates -- left thousands of military-trained Iraqis out of a job, angry, primed and ready to become insurgents. That decision alone may have cost a thousand American lives. Without seeing the movie, this is a part of the Iraq War whose significance may have been permanently lost on me.

But let's be honest. I watched the movie because I was getting paid to review it. This makes me very different from the average viewer seeking out No End in Sight in the year 2011.

Or more likely, not seeking it out at all.

Getting acquainted

Remember when I used to have a feature where I'd watch old movies, three per month according to a certain theme, to broaden the number of films I've seen from other decades?

You should -- I did it as recently as December.

Actually, from July through December, I watched three movies per month from a different decade, choosing randomly between the decades from the 1920s through the 1970s until I'd hit each one. It was a good system to force me to expand beyond the new release section at the video store. Not that I'm otherwise disinclined to watch older movies, it's just it's easy to procrastinate in favor of a comedy that was in theaters in the past six months.

And though I enjoyed the Decades series, there was something a bit too broad about it. Any film from the decade? Ten years is a long time in the ever-changing world of cinema. A movie released in 1930 would not look very much like a movie released in 1939. In 1930, we were barely into the talkie era, but by 1939, films were being released in color. That's a rather extreme example, but you get what I'm talking about.

So after Decades ended, I wanted to continue the project in a slightly more focused way -- a way that would better allow me to relate the three movies I see each month to each other. Having taken January off to concentrate on 2010 films, I'm now refreshed and ready to do that.

At first I thought of taking the essential idea of Decades and turning it into Years. Like, each month I'd choose a year -- say, 1967 -- and watch three movies I hadn't previously seen from that year. I might even tell you what was going on in the U.S., or in the world, during that time, and see how the films either reflected the times or served as counter-programming to what was occupying us on a larger scale.

But there was something about having no endgame for the project that kind of bothered me. There would be no way to complete it, like I'd done with Decades. Or at least, if I did complete it, it could take the better part of an actual decade, depending on the parameters I set for myself -- depending on what years made up the range of years eligible to be selected. And since I'd already decided that I could venture into the 1980s or even the 1990s with this project, it really would be the better part of a decade. Who knows if we'll even be writing blogs in 2021?

So I've chosen a different way to focus things, one that will not have a clear endgame either -- but at least will be open-ended enough that it won't seem to demand a particular endgame.

I've decided that I'm going to choose a personality in cinema -- be it an actor, a director, perhaps even a screenwriter or producer -- that I'm not familiar with, or not as familiar with as I'd like to be. That personality will drive what movies I see, will appear either in front of or behind the camera of all three movies I see that month.

This will be a more systematic way to govern my viewing, one that will not be so subject to randomness. Whereas before, the only criterion was "Did this movie come out sometime in the years 1950 to 1959?", now I will be making specific choices for specific reasons. And when I write a piece at the end of each month to summarize what I've observed, it'll have a certain internal integrity, and may be a much more interesting read. I'll call this series Getting Acquainted, and each month's post will be titled something like "Getting acquainted with ... Carrot Top." Only, it'll probably be someone with a bit more of a reputation and body of work than Mr. Top.

Now, I'm not going to pretend this will be easy. I've got a busy life, and even with the relatively loose standards of the Decades series, there were still months when I was scrambling to make sure I got a movie that fit that month's theme before the end of the month. There'll be no more swinging by the library with the likely expectation that I'll come away with a title that suits my needs. It's going to take pretty tight management of my Netflix queue, possibly at the exclusion of other movies I want to see. And I've started it in the shortest month of the year, when there are only 28 days in which to watch these movies.

But I think I can do it. Or at least, I'm going to try my damnedest. Besides, my Netflix streaming should help. Even if I fail to manage my queue as well as I'd like, the artists I choose will be prominent enough that some of their stuff should be available on streaming. There'll just be no leaving it to the last minute -- no procrastinating in favor of a recent comedy. And we can probably agree that's a good thing.

To whet your appetite -- such as it is -- I thought I'd let you know the first guy who's up to bat. (Whether I'll reveal the upcoming month's artist at the end of each piece, I don't know -- let me think about it. It may help not to commit myself to a particular person, if it doesn't end up working out to see their stuff that month.)

So in February I am going to get acquainted with ... Mr. James Cagney. He's the perfect example for this project, and in fact is the actor who kind of inspired me to choose Getting Acquainted as my next recurring blog feature. See, Cagney has 69 titles listed on IMDB -- that includes TV, but I'm not going to parse the list to see how many are actual movies -- and I haven't seen a single thing in which he's appeared. Actually, that's not true -- he was an uncredited extra in Mutiny on the Bounty, which I saw during 1930s month of the Decades project. (And that's funny that he would have appeared as an extra, because he already had a busy career going by 1935.) But I haven't seen a single film in which Jimmy Cagney was actually credited, and I think that's something I need to correct.

Starting ... pretty damn soon. My first Cagney title is already on its way to me from Netflix.

See you here on the flip side of February to discuss.

Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer still suck

As I learned from a movie by Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer earlier this week, vampires suck.

But they don't suck as much as Friedberg and Seltzer do.

I watched Vampires Suck on my last day before the end of ranking my 2010 movies because it was short and I had a block of time to fill after getting home from work. Plus, as stated here, I had the masochistic desire to flesh out the bottom of my rankings.

However, if I had consciously known it was "a Friedberg-Seltzer joint" (Spike Lee, forgive me), I would have definitely avoided it.

But if it walks like a Friedberg-Seltzer movie, and it talks like a Friedberg-Seltzer movie, then it's probably a Friedberg-Seltzer movie.

If I'm losing you with these names, let me tell you about these two guys, who I loosely consider to be two of the worst people in Hollywood. But first, let's take a look at who we're dealing with.

Here are Jason and Aaron:


And oh look! Some kind soul on the internet has already done the work for me. Jason and Aaron do, in fact, suck.

And I'm glad they find themselves so funny, because no one else does. Or no one else should -- but apparently, some people do, which is why Friedberg-Seltzer movies still make money, which is why they get to keep on making them.

After being not-totally-terrible in Scary Movie, where they shared the writing credit with four others, here's what they've gone on to unleash on the world:

Date Movie (2006)
Epic Movie (2007)
Meet the Spartans (2008)
Disaster Movie (2008)

Each of these films has been given one star by the website I write for. And even that might be too generous, except that the website refuses to cut a single star in half. One is as low as they go. That's got to be the lowest number of stars for any four movies in the careers of any writer, director, writer-director or team of writer-directors.

Vampires Suck was given one-and-a-half stars, although no review exists -- in fact, I may be the one who reviews it. Vampires Suck, in fact, is one half start better than the two other Friedberg-Seltzer movies I've seen, Date Movie and Epic Movie. It's nice to know that over the course of almost exactly four years since I last checked in with them (I went to Epic Movie in January 2007, in the theater, because I was desperate to start my new yearly rankings), they've managed to raise their overall aesthetic from an F grade to an F+.

So they still suck -- they still suck big time. They just suck marginally less than they did before.

Why is Vampires Suck "better" than the other Friedberg-Seltzer parodies? For one, at least it manages to stick pretty much to a central plot. The first two Twilight movies are the unambiguous target of this film. Fuckwad #1 and Fuckwad #2 use that architecture to keep the plot, even the jokes, relatively streamlined. Whereas in their other two movies I saw, Date Movie blended the plots of Hitch, Meet the Fockers, My Big Fat Greek Wedding and others, and Epic Movie was so confused, I don't even remember what its plot was (but did you know that Snakes on a Plane and Nacho Libre count as an "epic movies"?).

And that's really the "big secret" about these two -- no matter what goes in the ______ of _____ Movie, all they really want is an excuse to lampoon up-to-the-moment cultural trends. And that's what was my true tip-off that Friedberg and Seltzer were the ones who shat out Vampires Suck. It wasn't the fact that it was a parody -- others have dabbled in parodies during Friedberg and Seltzer's dubious reign, including the Wayans brothers and the Abrahams-Zucker team. It was the moment when a character throws a cell phone and it hits Alice in Wonderland in the head. It was when there was an inexplicable riff on Dear John that lasts about 15 seconds. It was when Lady Gaga makes an appearance. It couldn't have been a Seltzer-Friedberg movie released in 2010 without the requisite cameo by Lady Gaga. (Not the actual Lady Gaga, of course, but a person playing her.)

I've said it before, I'm saying it now, and I'll probably still be saying it in 2017, after they've inevitably made five more movies:

Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer suck.

Unfortunately, I'm not done with them yet. I'll be seeing Meet the Spartans sometime soon. I've already been approved to review it.

I suck.

Retro DVD trailers

As I mentioned previously, Buried was the last film I watched before I closed the rankings on my 2010 movie list.

But when I first put it in the DVD player, you might have thought I was working on my 2003 movie list or my 2006 movie list, rather than 2010.

In fact, I was quite sure I did not have Buried at all, but some impostor wearing the Buried DVD artwork.

See, the first trailer that came on was for Open Water. Not Open Water 2: Adrift, which would have been a slightly more recent movie to be pimping. Even if Open Water 2 came out in 2006, that would have been better than the 2003 release date of the original.

An anomaly? No. Because the next trailer that came on was for An American Haunting, which came out in 2006. It took until the third trailer to get something from 2010, at which point I breathed a sigh of relief.

Can you ever remember seeing DVD trailers for movies that were this old? Usually you can be pretty sure that the movies advertised have only just hit DVD, or, more likely, aren't even on DVD yet. In fact, sometimes they aren't even in the theater yet. You can so take this to the bank, that it can be fun to watch older DVDs just so you can be reminded of the time when this film and these other four films were all current releases. It's like a snapshot of a bygone era, a little time capsule.

The sudden inexplicable hawking of these older movies could only be explained by one thing: that Lionsgate, which released Buried, was attempting to clear out its old catalogue. But only Open Water was also released by Lionsgate; An American Haunting was not. Even if they'd both been from Lionsgate, why these movies? Why now? Did they have 10,000 copies of An American Haunting just sitting around in a warehouse somewhere, because the movie is total crap?

You could also posit a thematic relationship between the movie I came to see and Open Water, at the very least. Being trapped in a coffin is an equivalent impossible situation to being stranded at sea in shark-infested waters. But that just gives An American Haunting a second reason to be an illogical choice for this particular DVD. Or third, if you're counting its lack of a contemporaneous release date, its origins at a different studio and its failure to have anything to do with Buried.

I guess I will just scratch my head and move on.

The Wrong

Banksy's best joke may be on the Academy

There's almost universal agreement, among people who've seen Exit Through the Gift Shop, that it's a terrific film.

Where people don't generally agree is the following: whether it's a genuine documentary or an elaborate hoax.

Which makes it all the more strange that the Academy has bestowed it a nomination for best documentary feature.

Every year you hear about one, or two, or three great documentaries that are not deemed eligible to compete in the documentary feature category at the Oscars. The reasons have ranged from Michael Moore's (overrated) Fahrenheit 9/11 running on TV once prior to playing in theaters, to Grizzly Man being constructed almost exclusively of archival footage (which it wasn't, actually).

But even when meeting the eligibility requirements, you always hear about famous snubs, such as probably the most talked about documentary of this year (Waiting for "Superman") getting left off the short list at the expense of two other films I'd never heard of (Waste Land and Gasland). (I'm actually lying about Waste Land -- it was the other 2010 documentary directed by Lucy Walker, who directed Countdown to Zero, which I wrote about here, while also briefly mentioning the existence of the movie Waste Land. But outside of that little bit of research I had never heard of it.)

Back in the old days, even a goofy voting system led to what is now widely considered the greatest documentary of all time (1994's Hoop Dreams) failing to secure a nomination. According to wikipedia, members of the nominating committee had a system where they would wave their flashlight at the screen to indicate that they no longer considered the film in question to be in contention. Apparently, they gave up on Hoop Dreams before it even reached 20 minutes. The system makes a certain amount of sense on some level -- if a film doesn't grab you in the first 20 minutes, it's done something wrong. My wife uses a similar system when forced to wade through hundreds of entries in screenplay competitions -- she simply doesn't have the time to read each one through to completion, if it hasn't done something interesting in the first 15 pages. I don't remember the first 20 minutes of Hoop Dreams and whether they were good or boring, but clearly that film revealed the flaws in their system.

So considering all this, it's truly amazing that Exit Through the Gift Shop found its spot, because it may not even be a documentary at all. Sure, it wears the clothes of a documentary and calls itself a documentary -- but so did I'm Still Here, which Joaquin Phoenix has admitted was a hoax.

If you've made it this far (the equivalent of the 20-minute rule???) and don't know what Exit Through the Gift Shop is, I think it's time for me to throw you a bone.

Exit Through the Gift Shop is a "documentary" by a mysterious British graffiti artist named Banksy, whose true identity and appearance are not known. Over the course of two decades, he's managed to paint graffiti (it's actually more beautiful than "mere" graffiti) in some of the strangest places, including on the wall of the Israeli West Bank barrier -- that particular image included two children digging a hole through the wall, with some kind of tropical paradise visible on the other side. He's known for the high degree of difficulty of his stunts, and the fact that he's never gotten caught. He's a true mystery.

Only, he's not even the original "filmmaker" in this film.

Much of the footage in Exit Through the Gift Shop was shot by a mustachioed man named Thierry Guetta, a French national living in Los Angeles, a man with a passion for video cameras. Guetta originally filmed almost everything in his day-to-day life, from his kids brushing their teeth to whatever he was watching on TV, before eventually latching on to the underground street artist movement, and starting to film the feats of both anonymous artists making basic tags, and near household names such as Shepard Fairey (who designed the iconic images of Obama used in his presidential campaign). This is the most level of access any one outsider has ever gotten to the street art scene, and the moving images he collects are astounding for their sheer lack of precedent.

Except, Thierry Guetta may not actually exist.

Oh yeah, there's a guy who's playing the role. But his name may not actually be Thierry Guetta, and he may not have actually done any of the other things the film claims he's responsible for, of which there are many -- I really should not reveal them here. In fact, Thierry Guetta could be a total fabrication by the great practical joker Banksy. Banksy wants us to believe that Guetta started to make a film about him, but Banksy turned the tables on Guetta and made Guetta the subject of Banksy's own film. And that's all I really want to say about it, because the film's surprises are some of its most exquisite joys.

Exit Through the Gift Shop, if actually an elaborate hoax as theorized, hoodwinks not only numerous real people (famous people) within its own narrative, but may now also be hoodwinking a group as traditionally stringent and stuffy as the Academy.

But will it win? That would be Banksy's greatest victory, wouldn't it? He'd have the last laugh and then some. Heck, he also had the first laugh, so he'd get both the first laugh and the last laugh. You might say he'd "exit" laughing.

But a win is doubtful. It seems much more likely that either Restrepo (a film documenting another kind of unprecedented access -- to military engagement with insurgents in Afghanistan) or Inside Job (Charles H. Ferguon's timely look into the financial crisis) will take home the statue. Exit may be better than both of those films -- I haven't seen Inside Job so I can't say for sure -- but my guess is that the Academy has already gone way out on a limb by nominating it in the first place. Hopefully that will be victory enough for Banksy.

And it occurred to me (in a conversation yesterday with Don -- in fact, I think it occurred to him and he shared it with me) that the Academy could actually be trying to pull one over on Banksy. In throwing his film a nomination, perhaps they are trying to lure him out of the shadows -- to appeal to some kind of vanity, which would make him unable to stay away from the Oscars. And then the mask would finally be removed, right?

Never happen. Banksy's much smarter than that. Regardless of whether the movie is real or fake, his ability to orchestrate these many different interpretations, not to mention make a film that is damn entertaining just at face value, all while remaining an enigma personally, proves how bottomless his smarts are.

If anything, he'd be at the Oscars in disguise. He'd get the job as a seat filler -- you know, the people who sit in your seat when you're in the bathroom, so it doesn't look like there are any empty seats. Or he'd be working the bar outside. Or he'd find some other co-conspirators who would allow him to show up as the 17th collaborator on their best animated short, when only 16 collaborators truly existed. He might be there, even if only he knew about it, even if only he got to laugh about it to himself.

And if Exit Through the Gift Shop actually does win, he'd have the option of rushing up on the stage and accepting the trophy in a maitre d's outfit. That probably wouldn't work -- security would stop him before he got within 20 feet of the stage. But it sure would be a glorious way to crown this achievement, wouldn't it?

Nah. Only by staying in the shadows will Banksy be able to keep thrilling and marveling us in the future.

Solo men in dire straits

Now that I've revealed my favorite movie of 2010, I can freely discuss a recent pattern in my movie preferences.

For the second year in a row, I've awarded my top spot to a movie that's been carried almost exclusively by a single actor.

A single actor up shit creek, at that.

Last year, the weight of my favorite movie, Moon, fell on Sam Rockwell's shoulders. This year, 127 Hours was in the capable hands -- so to speak -- or arms -- so to speak -- of James Franco.

And boy did they knock my socks off.

I'm assuming you know plenty about 127 Hours. Not only is the subject ostentatious enough to have gotten your attention, even if the film was not otherwise on your radar, but both the film and its lead just got nominated for Oscars. (I did a little fist pump when 127 Hours was announced as one of the best picture nominees, because some conventional wisdom had The Town claiming that spot -- which would have been fine with me, if it weren't coming at the expense of the best movie of the year.)

But let me explain to you a little bit about Moon, if you don't know about that one. Moon is the story of an astronaut (Rockwell) who's the only human on a lunar base, with only a computer (voice of Kevin Spacey) to provide companionship. The base is owned by a lunar mining company, which employs humans for three-year stints. Rockwell's Sam Bell is in the final two weeks of his own three-year stint, and is starting to get just a little bit batty. But when he takes a patrol vessel out to examine some damaged mining equipment, things take a turn for the ... surreal. To say anything more than that would be a disservice to those who haven't seen it. (And if you're in that group, by all means, get out there and watch it.)

I'm trying to figure out what impresses me so much about these movies and these performances -- why I'm drawn to them at the expense of other films. I'm sure part of it has to do with the basic commitment shown by the actors. Put another way, I'm impressed by how hard it is for them to do the thing they're charged with doing: keeping us entertained for the better part of two hours, without an assist from any other performers. Both Moon and 127 Hours do have other actors who appear sporadically, but they are mostly either in video transmissions or dreams/hallucinations. At the core, Rockwell and Franco have been given the responsibility of engrossing us, all by themselves, and they each hit the ground running.

But I'm also wondering if this is a broader thing for me, something that stretches back longer than the last two years. Moon and 127 Hours are distinctive for their lack of other actors, but the character type may be something I've been rewarding for longer than that. And once you expand the definition of a "solo man," you can go back most of the last decade.

Each of the films I've crowned as my best film of the year -- dating all the way back to 2002 -- have a strong performance by the lead male, playing a character known for his loneliness and isolation, or more generously, his independence. Shall we take a look?

2008 - The Wrestler. Mickey Rourke's Randy "The Ram" Robinson is definitely approaching the twilight of his career -- and possibly of his life, if you look at those heart issues -- alone. He lives in a trailer, and his life is comprised of benign but disinterested neighborhood kids, co-workers in the wrestling industry who are more acquaintances than friends, and the occasional stripper who makes the mistake of being nice to him. He's trying to reach out to his estranged daughter as a last-gasp effort not to die alone.

2007 - There Will Be Blood. Daniel Day-Lewis' Daniel Plainview is a self-made man in every respect of the word. Not only does he not need anyone else, but he imagines it would weaken him to let anyone get close enough to him to take the credit for his achievements. His natural suspicion of others and their motives further alienates anyone who might wish him well. In fact, after bearing at least partial responsibility for the deafening of his adopted son, he sends him away, widening the gap between himself and other human beings.

2006 - Children of Men. Although the quest to safely shepherd the first pregnant woman in 20 years is, in its most essential form, a collaborative effort shared by a handful of dedicated individuals, Clive Owen's Theo Faran is essentially bearing this burden himself. He's carrying the weight of his own dead child, and as the story progresses, the others who have tenuous connections to him start slipping out of the picture as well. In many ways he is the portrait of loneliness, doing his stoic duty in the public eye, but bursting into floods of uncontrollable emotion in private.

2005 - Hustle & Flow. Terrence Howard's D-jay is surrounded by prostitutes of varying levels of loyalty, but he is a fiercely independent man who has carved his own world out of his own raw materials. His quick temper and deep-burning passion make him a lone wolf walking through his own environment and playing by his own rules.

2004 - Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Jim Carrey's Joel Barish is painfully shy. He's drawn out by Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet), but his essential shyness and alienation are only highlighted by the procedure he undergoes to have Clementine erased from his memory. It's like Clementine's influence was never there, and left to his own instincts, he's cut off from the world, unable even to sustain eye contact without becoming acutely aware of himself.

2003 - Lost in Translation. Bill Murray's Bob Harris is so alienated, he has to go to Tokyo just to symbolize the idea that he's a foreigner in his own life. Like all these other characters, he flirts with making connections, and perhaps Bob succeeds more than these others with his necessarily fleeting connection to Scarlett Johansson's Charlotte. But we can tell that Bob's sadness and isolation cannot be cured by a single positive interaction -- they will reset upon his return to America, which makes this beautiful film a kind of tragedy as well.

2002 - Adaptation. Nicolas Cage's Charlie Kaufman is perhaps a more exaggerated (and less handsome) version of Carrey's Joel Barish, which is appropriate since the real-life Kaufman wrote both scripts. Socially awkward to the point of distraction, Cage's Kaufman stumbles through life sweating, stammering, unable to make eye contact, and living in a prison of his own overactive mind, with the mitigating factor that he's capable of producing absolute brilliance on the page.

At this point we run into a clear exception to the rule. In 2001, I awarded Robert Altman's ensemble film Gosford Park with my top honors for the year. However, even with this there is a bit of an asterisk. Although I stand by the choices I've made with every film I've honored as my favorite, I secretly believe that I was blown away by Gosford Park in a way that was somewhat temporary. The film that had been holding the top slot all year, and is what I sort of now believe was my true #1 of that year, was Christopher Nolan's Memento, which has got isolation and loneliness written all over it. (My actual favorite film of 2001, which I didn't see until two years later, meaning I couldn't rank it, is Donnie Darko. But there's no alienation or isolation in that movie, is there?)

In 2000? Yeah, it was Michael Almereyda's modern update of Hamlet starring Ethan Hawke. Has there ever been a character in the history of the world who embodies isolation more than Hamlet?

Okay, the streak officially stops at this point. My favorite film in 1999 was Run Lola Run, whose main character was a woman, a woman not particularly known for her isolation. And then my favorite film of 1998 was Happiness, another ensemble. I think a dozen years is a good place to stop.

(Not only are those 11 different directors -- Danny Boyle, Duncan Jones, Darren Aronofsky, Paul Thomas Anderson, Alfonso Cuaron, Craig Brewer, Michel Gondry, Sofia Coppola, Spike Jonze, Christopher Nolan and Michael Almeyreda -- but they're also 11 different talented actors: James Franco, Sam Rockwell, Mickey Rourke, Daniel Day-Lewis, Clive Owen, Terrence Howard, Jim Carrey, Bill Murray, Nicolas Cage, Guy Pearce and Ethan Hawke. Not bad.)

So as I dig deeper into this post -- which is going places I didn't even imagine when I started writing it -- what am I discovering about myself? Am I some kind of loner? Or is there at least a loner part of me that I see mirrored in the cinema that affects me most profoundly? And what does it say about me that almost all of these films are depressing in one way or another?

It's something I'll have to chew over, I suppose. And it's something I will certainly keep in the back of my mind as I start ranking for 2011.

Before I go, I do think I should return quickly to the original idea of a single actor using a brilliant performance to carry a film. I thought I should tell you that I don't consider this an automatic recipe for greatness. The last film I watched before my deadline on Monday night was Buried. You know, the movie where Ryan Reynolds spends 98 minutes trapped inside a coffin. (It says on the right that the last movie I watched was Casino Jack and the United States of Money, but that's because I started watching Casino Jack first and still had about 30 minutes to watch after finishing Buried.)

Buried ranked only 48th in my year-end rankings. Granted, the last film of the year always kind of gets the shaft, as you end up finishing it only an hour or two before you finalize your rankings. We all know it's helpful to let a movie marinate for a bit before you can be sure what you think about it. However, having to rush to judgment can actually result in too high of a ranking -- in fact, I'm not 100% sure that the film I saw on Sunday night, Animal Kingdom, deserved to be ranked as high as tenth.

Ryan Reynolds is good (though not brilliant) in Buried, and the set-up is good (though not brilliant). But where the movie really fails -- relative to the success of Moon and 127 Hours at least -- is that you feel the minutes passing the way you don't in those other films. That's probably director Rodrigo Cortes' point, to some extent. The film is clearly trying to feel claustrophobic, to simulate the experience of time passing interminably in such an enclosed space, and in fact, when at one point it's discussed that Reynolds has been in the coffin for two hours, it feels like it's been much longer. Points to Buried for that. Meanwhile, Moon and 127 Hours are not really trying to make you feel the claustrophobia of their situations, and the passage of time is not a significant detail. (That's a funny thing to say about 127 Hours, whose title involves the amount of time Aron Rolston is trapped by that rock, but Danny Boyle is not that interested in making time seem to pass slowly in the film -- that's my point.)

I should pause here to say that I was also bothered by various narrative choices in Buried -- the petulant reactions Paul Conroy has to the people who try to help him, how wantonly he uses a limited amount of Zippo fluid (before he even knows that there are at least four (!) other light sources available in the coffin -- a logistical necessity of the camera having to see Reynolds' face), and how wantonly he uses his limited cell phone battery, which those trying to help him are using to attempt to track his location.

But why those other two films are great and why Buried is only pretty good is because ultimately, Buried makes you tire of Ryan Reynolds. The feat Sam Rockwell and James Franco achieved is so amazing precisely because it's so counterintuitive -- you should need to see other actors in a film in order to be entertained the whole time. Buried's pretty goodness, then, is the logical thing, while the other films' greatness is the surprise.

And when it comes to films I love, surprising me is a really good start. Especially since few films actually do surprise us these days.

2010, your hours have run out

Another year, another Oscar nominations morning, another list of my favorite -- and least favorite -- films from the previous year.

If you haven't been present for my several weeks of hype leading up to the big event, I always reveal my list of movie rankings, from first to worst, on the morning Oscar hopefuls wake up at 5:30 our time (it's 5:27 right now) to watch the reading of the Oscar nominations. (I always watch it on ABC, for some reason.) My reward for waking up early is that I have time enough before going to work to make myself a breakfast complete with eggs and breakfast meat. Mmm, breakfast meat.

The reason I deviate from the usual tradition of publishing my list during the week between Christmas and New Year's is simple -- I need a few extra weeks to watch the movies that get released late in the year. The morning of the Oscar nominations has always seemed like a good amount of extra time. Of course, I don't limit myself to just those movies during these extra couple weeks -- I also watch plenty of bad movies released in February, which have been available on DVD since July.

I fell just short of last year's record total, which was 113. Then again, last year, the Oscar nominations were revealed a full week later, on February 2nd. An extra week this year would have netted me an additional ten movies for sure. But since I'm always suffering from major movie fatigue this time of year, I'm just as glad not to have that extra week. Looking forward to returning to business as usual after the big crunch.

Okay, Mo'Nique is coming out on stage right now ... excuse me for a moment as I watch the nominations live.

A best picture nomination for The A-Team? I didn't see that coming.

But seriously, I've seen ten of ten best picture nominees. I'm getting good at this. Particularly glad to see my favorite film of the year nominated ... no better moment to get down to business ...

Without further ado, my top 109 films of 2010, listed in no particular order. (Wait, scratch that last part.)

1. 127 Hours
2. Tangled
3. The Social Network
4. Agora
5. Winter's Bone
6. Mother
7. Rabbit Hole
8. Exit Through the Gift Shop
9. Cyrus
10. Animal Kingdom
11. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
12. Greenberg
13. Kick-Ass
14. The Human Centipede
15. Four Lions
16. The King's Speech
17. Toy Story 3
18. The Town
19. Black Swan
20. The Living Wake
21. Mother and Child
22. Please Give
23. Easy A
24. Lebanon
25. Blue Valentine
26. Inception
27. Date Night
28. Never Let Me Go
29. I'm Still Here
30. The Kids Are All Right
31. The Ghost Writer
32. Countdown to Zero
33. Let Me In
34. The Last Exorcism
35. Restrepo
36. After.Life
37. Piranha 3D
38. Catfish
39. How to Train Your Dragon
40. The Fighter
41. City Island
42. Get Him to the Greek
43. Daybreakers
44. Splice
45. Shutter Island
46. Micmacs
47. Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work
48. Buried
49. Casino Jack and the United States of Money
50. Extraordinary Measures
51. Hot Tub Time Machine
52. The Square
53. The Book of Eli
54. The Losers
55. She's Out of My League
56. I Am Love
57. The A-Team
58. Saint John of Las Vegas
59. Frozen
60. Ondine
61. Dear John
62. Youth in Revolt
63. Remember Me
64. Babies
65. Creation
66. Knight and Day
67. Tron: Legacy
68. True Grit
69. Tiny Furniture
70. Sweetgrass
71. Somewhere
72. Machete
73. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
74. Holy Rollers
75. Solitary Man
76. The Killer Inside Me
77. Unstoppable
78. Happy Tears
79. Phish 3D
80. The Joneses
81. The Bounty Hunter
82. The Other Guys
83. The Runaways
84. The Last Airbender
85. MacGruber
86. Easier With Practice
87. The Crazies
88. Edge of Darkness
89. Repo Men
90. Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole
91. Centurion
92. Killers
93. Brooklyn's Finest
94. Just Wright
95. Finding Bliss
96. Valentine's Day
97. Little Fockers
98. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
99. The Expendables
100. Devil
101. Jonah Hex
102. Operation: Endgame
103. Dinner for Schmucks
104. The Wolfman
105. Vampires Suck
106. The Back-up Plan
107. Legion
108. When in Rome
109. Furry Vengeance

Most regret not seeing before the deadline: Another Year, Biutiful, The Company Men, Get Low, The Tempest, Waiting for "Superman"

Okay, I am waiting -- waiting -- with bated breath for your comments. Even if you don't usually comment, I would love to hear your comments today. I know I've outraged you with certain choices, but I imagine I've also pleased you with others. Tell me about it. This is why I do this.

On to 2011. My rankings so far:

1. The Green Hornet

Discuss.

The original version got it wrong

My wife and I attended a performance of the musical Hair on Saturday night at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood. Since that's her favorite show, I got us a pair of tickets as a Christmas present for her. (Always love the Christmas presents where the giver gets to be an equal beneficiary.)

We really enjoyed ourselves, especially at the very end. After the bows, the cast waved us up on stage, and anyone who wanted to could go up and dance to a reprise of "Let the Sunshine In." (Incidentally, we had a debate about the lyrics of this song -- is it "Let the Sunshine In" or "Let the Sun Shine In"? I actually like the second one better, but the first one is correct. However, the poster you see above lists it the second way. It's a mystery.) Not only was it glorious just to be on the stage, in among the sets and actors, singing this epic song, but we also happened to be dancing next to Kate Beckinsale and Columbus Short, with their respective spouses.

However, just before the very end was perhaps our most puzzling moment.

See, my wife and I are both most familiar with Milos Forman's 1979 film version of Hair, not the stage version, which debuted on Broadway in 1968. I've only seen the film once, about five years ago, whereas she's seen it countless times, enough to know the songs by heart. Neither of us had seen any other version.

And you know what, the original stage version does not have the dramatic punch at the end that the movie has. Nor does it have as strong a narrative spine as the film version, though we're speaking in relative terms here, since neither version is particularly heavy on plot.

Now, this could clearly be an instance of liking the first version of something you're exposed to better than other versions. I discussed that phenomenon at length here. But in most instances of remakes -- or in this case, film adaptations of Broadway musicals -- the essential plot elements are virtually identical. In Michael Weller's adaptation of Gerome Ragni and James Rado's book, there are some big differences -- differences Ragni and Rado were not pleased about, but that's their problem.

From all my previous understanding of Hair, the main character/protagonist is George Berger, played in the film by Treat Williams. He's the first hippie you're introduced to, and he's a touchpoint throughout, kind of like the gravitational pull at the center of all the hippies we meet along the way. The other primary character is Claude Hooper Bukowski, played in the film by John Savage. Claude is also a hippie, and he's got his own song about himself, imagining himself from Manchester, England -- even though he was raised in Flushing, NY. (A sample lyric from the song: "I believe in God, and I believe that God, believes in Claude, and that's me.") In the film version, however, Claude is a country bumpkin just awakening to the hippie movement, fresh into New York City from Oklahoma. Claude and Berger both have feelings for Sheila (Beverly D'Angelo), but keeping with the free love themes of the play, they aren't rivals for her affections, but rather, share each other. (Now that I've seen the stage version more recently, I can't tell you if there's an edge to their relationships in the movie.)

Throughout the course of an admittedly minimal narrative, Claude gets drafted to go to Vietnam. He attends a ceremony in which a lot of other young hippies are burning their draft cards, but he can't do it. In the film, however, when he's right about to show up to the military induction center, Berger takes his place at the last minute, leaving an innocent Claude to explore the new zest for life he's discovered, and possibly his feelings for Sheila. It seems that Berger believes he'd be able to survive Vietnam whereas Claude wouldn't, but that's beside the point, because Berger thinks he'll be able to get "Claude" disqualified from having to go. When it doesn't work out that way, the last thing we see, during the rousing reprise of "Manchester, England," is Berger in uniform, marching onto a plane for his deployment to Vietnam -- where he either actually dies, or where it's understood that he'll die. I don't remember exactly how the film ends, I just remember Treat Williams' scared but stolid face as he marches onto the plane, accepting the sacrifice he's made for Claude. It's a classic hero's sacrifice, one that I'm sure appears in many films -- it's too bad the only one I can think of right now is Armageddon, where Bruce Willis takes Ben Affleck's place at the last minute, as the guy who has to stay behind for the suicide mission of detonating the nukes they drilled into the asteroid.

But Berger doesn't have his Armageddon moment in the original stage play. In the original, Claude is the one who goes off to war. In fact, the last image in the show we saw on Saturday is Claude's still body, in uniform and perfectly straight, lying on an American flag. He went to Vietnam and he died.

It's a striking image, but it doesn't have the same impact as the end of the film. For starters, it means that Berger is basically a glorified bystander. He never makes a sacrifice for Claude, so why is he even picked out as the "main character," the guy we meet first? Berger's role as the main character is only important if he gets to make his sacrifice for Claude. Other than that, he's just another hippie who failed to convince Claude he should burn his draft card.

This is certainly a strange indictment to be making. Hair was a popular musical for 11 years before it made it to the screen, so for those 11 years, the only Hair anyone knew was Claude going to Vietnam and dying. I can understand why Gerome Ragni and James Rado were pissed off about the film version, which essentially says, "The original musical that everyone loves is not good enough as is. It needs to have more dramatic conflict and more of a heroic sacrifice in the third act."

But you know what? It's true. It may have been highly presumptuous for Michael Weller and Milos Forman to come along and change the musical, but their changes work.

But that could just be because a film and a stage show have different needs. On stage, you can get away with going light on plot. You can loosely connect a bunch of rousing musical numbers and lightly sketched out characters, and it's enough for a show. In fact, in a post-show discussion of other live theater we've seen, I told my wife about the musical Fosse, to which I'd gotten free tickets when I lived in New York. The show has no narrative throughline, but rather, is just a collection of stagings of Bob Fosse's most famous numbers (from such shows as Cabaret, Chicago, All that Jazz, etc.). It's no wonder I didn't think very highly of that show. But the point is, you can get away with it. It's theater, and different rules apply.

In a film, you need a strong narrative. In most cases, anyway. The characters need to have characters arcs, journeys. And I think Forman and Weller detected that George Berger needed to have a journey. He needed to start out as a free-loving hippie who's fun to hang out with, but is defined by his lack of commitment. He needs to start out as charismatic but unreliable. Over the course of his journey, he must develop the personal fortitude to stand up for something, do something for somebody else, and suffer the consequences of his new enlightenment.

That's what gives a loose story about the liberal revolution of the 1960s its emotional core. I don't want to call the stage version "unemotional" -- after all, Claude going to Vietnam and dying is certainly tragic. But it's predictably tragic. Berger taking his place is one of those unpredictable things that teaches you something about the capacity for goodness in the human soul.

Because we had such a fun time at the Pantages on Saturday night, with such a joyous climax, this discussion is largely academic. I don't want you to think that we sat there all night, criticizing the choices made by the person who originally dreamed up Hair. The real takeaway from the show was the energy, the rousing production numbers, the soaring vocals ("Aquarius! A-quaaaa-reeee-ussss!") and the cast breaking the fourth wall in such delightful ways, including running up the aisles and occasionally interacting with the audience. Not to mention the fact that were actually up on stage at the very end.

But I do think it's interesting to consider how, at least in the case of Hair, a dramatic work can be a work in progress, possibly not having reached the definitive version of itself in its original form -- even if that original form is staggeringly popular. Instead of being annoyed, Ragni and Rado should have felt proud that Weller and Forman embraced the raw materials they provided, and tried to make Hair the best version of itself it could be.

We should all be glad they did.

Karmic retribution

Over the years, I have stolen exactly 48 movies, by virtue of going to the theater, paying for one movie, and then sneaking in to a second.

Thursday night, the movies stole back.

In fact, they lifted my wallet.

Which didn't actually have any cash in it. As luck would have it, I spent my last dollar on snacks just before the movie -- the first of two movies in one of these illegal double features I mentioned above.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

So I went to the movies on Thursday night, intending to pay for Blue Valentine and sneak into Another Year. The times lined up perfectly, and I'd actually cased the joint earlier in the week to make sure both films were in the same wing of the theater. The Landmark on Pico has an upstairs section and a downstairs section, both of which have a ticket taker at the entrance. Once you're past the taker, you're free to roam from theater to theater. Upstairs, you even have a bathroom that's accessible, so you can do your duty between movies without having to cross the ticket-taker threshold. That's not true downstairs, which is where both movies were supposed to be playing. But I figured, if I really needed to pee between the two movies, I could purposefully march out and purposefully march back in. If I were stopped, I could present a legitimate ticket stub and explain that I was going back in to meet my date. See, she stayed for the end credits, but I had to piss like a racehorse. By this point he or she would scream "TMI!" and wave me through.

I say the films were "supposed to be playing" in the downstairs wing because they pulled a fast one on me. They shuffled which films were playing on which screens. You expect this kind of thing from week to week on a Friday, but they'd done it since I was there to see Rabbit Hole last Saturday. Another Year was still downstairs, but both screens playing Blue Valentine were now upstairs. And since Blue Valentine was my priority out of those two, it meant I'd need to watch Blue Valentine and a second movie playing upstairs if I wanted to pull off the double feature.

So I had to make a quick decision. I saw that The Green Hornet was playing upstairs with about the same start times as Blue Valentine. Normally, I'd buy the ticket to Blue Valentine and sneak into Green Hornet -- if it makes no difference in terms of the start times, you need to schedule the movie you're most interested in first, in case you don't make it to the second. Besides, I'd rather give my money, officially, to a small relationship drama, than a 3D superhero movie with bad buzz. But there was an extra variable in this scenario: the 3D. I needed to buy the actual ticket to Green Hornet (for a whopping $15.50) because I needed to get the 3D glasses. So I bought the ticket for the 7:40 Hornet and lined up a sneak-in to the 9:50 Valentine. Since the Landmark doesn't play commercials -- God bless 'em -- I was actually about a minute late to the start of Hornet, but I don't think I missed much.

[Pause for a moment to recognize the inadvertent theme of this double feature: There's a color in each title.]

Getting into Valentine proved easy. As mentioned, now that my two movies were upstairs, I had a bathroom to hang out in between movies. But I didn't need to hang for long, because one benefit of Hornet's excessive running time is that it shortened the window before my second movie. I spent only about five to ten minutes in the bathroom, enough time to make the ushers forget I'd come out of one movie when they saw me walking into another -- or so I surmised. And it worked. Or if it didn't, at least nobody said anything.

As an added bonus, the 9:50 showing of Valentine was playing in the Screening Lounge, unlike the 7:50 showing. The Screening Lounge -- there are actually two such theaters at the Landmark -- is a theater with only about 30 seats. And they're not just your regular seats. They're leather couches and other comfortable-as-hell accommodations. Given the lateness of the hour, the theater was less than half full, meaning I had a whole three-seat couch to myself.

And this, I think, is where the theater grabbed my wallet.

Losing my wallet was my fault, but it's easier to blame those couches.

Stretched out as I was, I had to remove a number of items from my pockets for greater comfort. I can't be sure, but this seems like where my wallet became permanently separated from me. But because I did have keys and phones and drinks and other items -- like maybe a wallet -- spread out in my available space, I scanned pretty thoroughly at the end. However, we're talking about a dark brown wallet against a black couch, in dim light. I totally could have missed it.

I didn't notice until this morning that I didn't have it, and for that I blame the multiplicity of other items I had with me, which also included my ipod, a pack of gum and a tin of Altoids. (I brought a ton of things to keep me awake, having learned from my experience of the Tron: Legacy/True Grit double feature, when I was fighting sleep the whole time.) In my day-to-day life, it's always when I've got too much stuff in my pockets that I leave something important at home, like my phone or my wallet. See, you don't notice something's missing. Which was the problem last night.

I did a cursory search of my house and the areas next to the driver's seat in the car, before deciding to just head in to work -- driving carefully, of course. Wouldn't want to compound things by getting pulled over and not having a driver's license. I was a bit worried, but not panicked -- I knew the most likely outcome was that I would call the theater's lost and found when the concierge got in, and they'd tell me they had my wallet. Nonetheless, I was clearly worried enough to call every ten minutes, until someone finally picked up at 9:45.

My heart started beating rapidly when the woman put me on hold to check. "Nope, nobody turned it in."

Damn.

"Okay, I'd like to come there to check where I was sitting," I told her.

"Which movie did you see?"

Damn.

"Well, I saw two. I went to The Green Hornet and Blue Valentine."

Busted? Nah. She never asked if I'd paid for both tickets. ("Of course" was going to be my immediate response).

That's the good news. The bad news has yet to come.

Driven onward by my increasingly agitated nerves, and unable to endure the slightest stoppages at traffic lights, I made it to the theater at quarter past 10. (Having left my office without even saying anything to anybody.) The concierge led me first into the couch theater, which I considered the likeliest spot. Nope, nothing. We removed couch cushions and shined flashlights. It was clean.

Now I started to worry.

Next stop was where I watched The Green Hornet. I expected the wallet to be wedged between the seats. It had to be, right?

Nope. Not there either.

I had one more trick up my sleeve -- I would check the bathroom itself. I convinced myself it was possible I'd set down my wallet while I was in the cubicle. (I didn't actually have to go #2, mind you, but I thought sitting in the cubicle was a better way to kill ten minutes than hanging around the sink area, looking suspicious.)

It was not there either.

Flooded by equal parts stress and defeat.

The concierge took my phone number and assured me that their janitorial staff always turns in lost items. I consoled myself, only slightly, with the notion that because there was no cash in it, there would be no incentive to steal it. Heck, because my wife is leading the charge to reduce our credit card debt, I wasn't even carrying any credit cards.

Which was really nice when it came to the things I had to cancel yesterday. I should say "thing" -- only my ATM card needed to kept out of the hands of potential thieves. I'm still in denial over the fact that I'll have to replace my driver's license.

Well, I guess it was just my time. I've narrowly avoided losing my wallet countless times in recent years. In most cases, it's fallen out of my front pocket while I was driving, meaning I'll find it either under or next to the driver's seat. But there is danger in that, because it could fall out when you open the door. Then there are the more concrete narrow misses, most recently, when I left my wallet in my company's suite at the Staples Center for the Roger Waters concert in November. I'd gotten all the way to street level before noticing, meaning I had to be led back up by various security guards, against the flow of traffic, before finding it wedged between the seats. There have also been several incidents at other movies, the most memorable of which was when my wallet fell out during Paris Je T'Aime at the arthouse theater in Encino. I didn't discover it was missing until 15 minutes later, at a coffee shop. I wound my way back to the theater in a near panic, before breathing a sigh of relief upon finding it. The other movie incidents were resolved more quickly, meaning I don't even remember what the titles were.

So you would definitely agree that I had this coming. And that it's a massive failure on Darwin's scale of adaptability. Having nearly lost my wallet all these times, I should know, by now, to be more careful in situations with a high potentiality for wallet loss. Having found it every other time, I guess I got complacent. I guess I needed this wake-up call. Next time it'll be something more important than a wallet.

And fortunately, my wallet really isn't that important a thing to lose. I still have my family and my health. In all seriousness, though, the most excruciating thing in situations like this is not knowing what you lost -- not remembering exactly what cards you were carrying, or what irreplaceable keepsakes may have been hiding in the folds. And on that front I'm covered. Last June -- probably prompted by a similar incident with a better outcome -- I had the presence of mind to do a "wallet inventory." That's right, I made a list of exactly what I was carrying in my wallet, and saved it in a Microsoft Word document. Sure, I won't have that bank receipt on which I recorded the frame-by-frame scores of my best game of bowling. But this is a perfect example of the kind of thing I probably should lose, just to clear out some of my static. Just as forests must burn every once in awhile in order to come back stronger, wallets must get lost, to help us expel the clutter from our lives.

It's just too bad I like my clutter so much.

Ah, well. Maybe those 48 free movies were worth the inconvenience of replacing my bank card and driver's license.

Still, karma's a bitch.