Harnessing the power of the omnimind (and perhaps a little groupthink), the Internet Movie Database compiled ratings on films made this century. Since their userbase is far more massive than the sample size used in most polls (and contains entirely self-selected film lovers), I do in fact give more weight to their choices than I would a poll produced using the usual methods, so I was happy to see it.

On the whole, I think the results are really quite strong. There is still a bias here, in that American users of IMDB outweigh users from other countries, so naturally the results favour US or English speaking movies, but apart from that inherent problem, I think you’ve got a good guide — broadly speaking — to some of the best films anyone’s actually heard of in the last nine years. Certainly this is a list of films I can recommend most people try and see. The only film on the list I myself haven’t seen is The Departed, since that genre’s not really my cuppa, but I’m willing to take the word of the assembly that it’s a winner.

But, inasmuch as I’m a critic, I have to pedantically point out that IMDB have made a dreadful error which I simply must correct; two of the entries are from the year 2000, and as such don’t qualify to be in a list of Best Films of the New Millenium, since as every calendar geek knows, the new millenium didn’t start until 2001. To be sure, Memento and Requiem for a Dream are very fine films indeed, but I’m nonetheless going to use their rightful omission as an occasion to throw in two films I think should be on the list, because they were made in this new century of ours.

Before we get to that, however, let’s look at what is properly on the list, and also what’s noticeable by its absence. For example, all three Lord of the Rings films made the cut, but not a single Harry Potter movie. Half the films Pixar has put out this decade are mentioned, but not a single Dreamwerks or non-Pixar Disney movie (no surprise to me, but might come as a shock to some). Some are on the list not because they’re great (though they are) so much as because they are recent (Wall•E is better than The Incredibles or Finding Nemo? The Departed is better than Gangs of New York or No Direction Home? The Dark Knight is better than everything else on the list? Sorry, don’t think so).

Kudos to the userbase, however, for the remarkable scope of the films they’ve picked. Light-hearted entertainment and big epics always do well in these sorts of round-ups (as evidenced by Pixar and LOTR, as well as The Dark Knight in the #1 slot — to be fair, Heath Ledger’s reinvention of the Joker turned out to be culture-changing moment, not just a great performance), but they went beyond that and chose some excellent foreign-language films like the intense drama The Lives of Others, the visual feast that is Amelie, and the Japanese anime film Spirited Away, none of which fit the mould of a Hollywood blockbuster. There’s also nods given to The Pianist and City of God, both high-quality films that didn’t get a huge audience during their theatrical run. And downright quirky but effective films were also given a shot; in addition to the aforementioned Amelie, we have The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which somehow did score significant box-office largely on the strength of word-of-mouth, the only way you can really explain a film like that to enough people to have it be a hit.

I certainly would have ranked these films in a different order, and changed a number of the choices to suit my own tastes, but I see no need to reinvent the wheel when a list comes out that actually gets it mostly right. My only real qualm is the complete lack of documentaries on the list, though admittedly a few of the films (The Lives of Others, City of God and The Pianist) kind of fulfill that role.

So, my first nomination to fill the two “holes” in the list is Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), the top-grossing documentary of all time, first to win a non-specialty Oscar, first to win the Palm D’Or and so on and so forth. Building on the strength of the revolutionary Bowling for Columbine, Moore continues his exposé of the marriage of the corporate media and power politics, though I think most of the people who dismissed it thought it was just a personal vendetta against George W. Bush, the unelected president. But it wasn’t — Bush (being an idiot) merely tore down the curtain and revealed the ugly elitism behind it — that America (or at least the Republican part) had long ago given up fighting for a better tomorrow and had instead decided that raw, naked capitalism was the new science, sure to solve every problem with “truthiness” and that the public were just a herd to be managed, set against one another for the pleasures of the rich. Fiddles, Rome, you get the idea.

Moore’s documentaries are a call for the public to wake up and take (metaphorical) arms against leaders who no longer care about them, and yes he’s ultimately tilting at windmills — but like Quixote before him, Moore is at least engaged in a noble if ultimately futile battle. The film got the powerful (and their enablers) a little hot under the collar for a while, and while it’s about all Moore is able to accomplish, it was enough. He didn’t get Bush thrown out of office (Diebold saw to that), but he punctured the balloon of the administration’s infallibility myth and slowly let the air out, slowing (perhaps) America’s determined march to obsolescence and irrelevance. He woke a lot of people up.

Filling the first “gap” was easy, but filling the second one is difficult. Trying to pick just one film of the many, many (too many) I’ve seen over the past few years, even among the dozen or so I would call “the absolute best” of their years of release, you feel like you’re insulting the ones that you leave out.

So finally I came to the conclusion that the last spot should be filled with with a movie that gave me utter and absolute joy to be watching it. One such movie, Pixar’s Up (2009), is already on the list, and I thought long and hard about giving that spot to In America (2002), a completely moving and amazing take on the struggles of the immigrant that almost nobody reading this has seen. I thought about giving it to Monster (2003), a film who’s Florida-set tale is as unnerving as Charlize Theron’s performance, or to The Dreamers (2003), a fabulous erotic adventure that never dips into porn, never falls short of exquisite, and never fails to impress.

But, oh we really should give that spot to another documentary as they’re so criminally neglected amongst IMDB voters. What about Spellbound (2002), the utterly charming story of the drama within the National Spelling Bee (and which kicked off a whole wave of like-minded docs about our love affair with language)? Or perhaps An Inconvenient Truth (2006), the ultimate slideshow lecture that reinvented Al Gore and brought climate change to the mainstream? What about 49 Up (2005), the seventh entry in a series of documentaries chronicling the lives of a handful of British kids every seven years, presumably until death? It’s one of the greatest ideas for a film series ever, and it’s proven amazingly illuminating and … well, human as it’s gone along. What originally started as an experiment to see how soci-economic class influences your life has turned into a diary of change and growth, and a mirror of ourselves.

Finally, inspiration. I would give the sole remaining slot to a documentary, yes, but one that made me squeal with delight the whole time I was watching it. I was a young man in the late 1970s, and that was a good time to be such if I do say so myself. So when The King of Kong (2007) came out, the number of buttons in the pleasure centre of my brain that it pushed can only be surpassed by certain kinds of orgasms.

This incredible documentary, which detailed the life-or-death struggle of two arcade-game champions to be the biggest fish in an incredibly small and nerdy pond, was a vision of pitch-perfect fantasy made reality. The people involved — “new kid in town” Steve Wiebe (a dork name if ever there was one), “the champ who refuses to let go” and comically arch-villainish Billy Mitchell, plus the über-dork who built his own fantasy empire (and then proceeded to turn it into a tawdry soap opera) Walter Day are just too perfect to be real, but there they are. If there’s such a thing as the ultimate documentary, this might be it (at least for me). I’ll admit that I saw this on a triple-bill with Air Guitar Nation and If It Ain’t Stiff (about Stiff Records), so that was one of the greatest evenings of my life (while sitting down, anyway), but the fact that King of Kong went on to win actual honest-to-gosh mainstream distribution, cult status and became one of the few documentaries to make any money at the box office says that others of my generation saw it like I did.

Really, this exercise could have waited another year or so and become “Best Films of the Decade,” but I guess IMDB were eager to play with their new-found data-mining toy. But we’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg — again it should be stressed that ultimately the greatest purpose of the internet will be to redefine polling forever, giving us new and much more accurate insights about ourselves through the power of enormous sample sizes. Well, that and making porn ubiquitous, but you already knew about that part.

It’s undeniably fun to be at the beginning of a new century, though, if for no other reason than list-makers like IMDB and myself get to say that this or that thing is “the (blank) of the century!”, at least for a while. As far as you know, it’ll be true forever. 🙂

A hat tip to Roger Ebert, who pointed me to this delicious find on YouTube: a 10-minute colour (sort of) film of London from 1927, yes, 1927. They didn’t have sound, but at least one man had invented a process called BioColour (straining B&W film through red and green filters) to produce a painted colour look.

You might wish to pair this with some music (some have suggested that Stephen Baystead’s “The Long Road” repeated to fill the full time works well), but if you’ve ever been to London you will be surprised at how little the city really has changed:

Whenever we talk about the things we miss from our lives in Florida, our first breath on the subject is always devoted to the great people there: not just family and the smaller circles of close friends, but the many, many fascinating/insane/beautiful folks we knew on one level or another. But after that, you’ll often hear us talk about the great places of the metro Orlando area. Right at the top of that list is a miraculous movie theatre called the Enzian.

If you haven’t been there, it’s not like any other cinema. Period, full stop. I’ve been to many great movie houses of yesteryear, like the insanely beautiful Fox Theatre in Atlanta. Enzian is nothing like them. I’ve been to many modern art-house cinemas. Again, no. I’ve been to my share of “Cinema Drafthouse” type places, and you’re getting warmer but still far off the mark. The Enzian is really quite individual in this world, and not even the many warm memories I have of the Rhodes Cinema in Atlanta or the Grove Cinema in Coconut Grove or the other film dives that came alive only when the lights went down and the movie came up can erase my love of the Enzian, it’s owners and staff, it’s festivals and events but of course it’s wholistic movie experience, which goes far beyond just the good stuff on the screen.

Having said all that, the Enzian has a rival. They don’t even know about it (till some of them read this post and I know they will!), but it too flirts for my affection. It is called CineCenta, a part of the University of Victoria, and it is different from the Enzian, but in a kind of “kid brother” way. I’ve been lazy in not finding it till recently, trying out the other cinemas in town both mainstream and off-beat; Victoria has a strong art-film sensibility and you can find foreign and highbrow works all over town, particularly during the Victoria Film Festival. I am ashamed to have avoided driving “all the way across town” (15 minutes) to the UVic campus for almost two years.

Like Enzian, the prices at CineCenta are insanely low. They offer memberships in the society, they frequently mix “revival” prints and other curiosities into the mix, they host mini-fests of their own and yes, Enzian — they put real butter on their popcorn.

Oh, there are differences, to be sure. CineCenta operates on a shoestring, their theatre is smaller (300 seats), their advertising is virtually non-existant off-campus and they don’t serve wine or beer.

What they do have, though, is an appealing “student” atmosphere, a frankly fantastic sound system that squeezes the sweetest highs and shakes the bottoming bass with astonishing clarity; the pre-screening jazz we heard was melting my brain with audiophile delight, and of course, a plethora of wildly diverse but mostly amazing movies.

As I write this, the 60th anniversary print of De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (see my review here) has given way to Rocksteady: The Roots of Reggae, which will be replaced this weekend by showings of Pixar’s Up and Duncan Jones’ Moon, with an almost obligatory screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show next week. And much, much more. Wow.

I’m now down to missing mostly Enzian’s rolling, reclining chairs and tables, their high-quality menu and their wonderful staff, because CineCenta is meeting my needs on most of the other fronts pretty nicely now.

I feel a bit like a cat who’s gone to live down the street, where they feed me more yum-yums. 🙂

Torchwood writer and Twitterpal James Moran turned me on to this righteous trailer that brings back that coffee-black blaxsploitation groove you know we were all hurtin’ for ever since The Man took it all away from us. Set in the early 70’s, if this thing is half as good as the trailer makes it look, we may be in serious need of some new Dolemite action in the not-too-distant future!

I have seen, in my life so far, at least 1500 movies.

That’s not an idle boast: I have supporting documentation from the film festivals I’ve covered, the reviews I’ve written and other sources to confirm at least that number. On the AFI’s list of the 100 Greatest (American) Films (2007 Edition), I’ve seen 73 of them. I would guess that there are a handful of movies I’ve seen more than 50 times, dozens I’ve seen more than 20 times, and hundreds I’ve watched more than once

In short, I am a serious movie geek. And yet after all these years, and all those films, someone like me can still get excited and “hyped up” over a forthcoming movie.

Of course, I’m a trickier customer to please than your average schmoe who actually goes out to the cinema maybe six-to-eight times a year. I know these plotlines. I recognise storytelling techniques. I notice shortcuts, edit points, lighting, cinematography, the whole mix. And I can tell when a trailer is giving me a distorted view of what the film’s really about, or when it’s trying to salvage a turkey, or just trying to get by on quick cuts, explosions and a touch of T-n-A.

But certain trailers still get me excited, usually if they have a very distinct look to them, or communicate clearly that this is the sort of film that will only really work well if you watch it in a cinema, or make it obvious that everyone involved is very proud of how it turned out. A good example of these sorts of trailers would be the ones for Amalie, City of Lost Children, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lord of the Rings, and Pan’s Labyrinth.

This trick doesn’t always work: the trailers for the recent remake of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Speed Racer and Star Trek actually served to lessen, not raise, my interest in these films. It takes more than just fantastic visuals to get me worked up, there has to be a promise of a story, of the creative vision and imagination necessary to really take me somewhere.

As I sat in the cinema recently for the most recent Harry Potter movie, I noted with some alarm that out of six trailers for upcoming films, five of them were based on TV shows, comic books or toys of the 70s and 80s. Only one was for an original story. How depressing.

Happily, I just stumbled across an HD version of the one trailer I’ve seen in the last year that has me chomping at the bit to see it: the one for The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.

I’ve been a fan of Terry Gilliam since about 1971 or so, when I got my first glimpse of him in “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” and have since discovered and enjoyed nearly everything he’s ever done before or since that point. He’s definitely one of my favourite directors, despite his ability to sometimes miss the mark. He’s had a dud or two, and indeed the last one starred Heath Ledger, as does Imaginarium.

I hope audiences will have long forgotten the similarly-named but pretty-bad Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium and that it being Heath Ledger’s final film will push mainstream filmgoers to give this a chance, even though the trailer just screams “This is weird! It will disturb you! It will challenge your comfortable notions!!” I would so love this to be widely seen, and having almost every popular male screen idol in the thing (Jude Law, Johnny Depp and Colin Farrell stepped in to finish the film in Ledger’s stead after his accidental death) might ironically not only salvage the film but make it a mainstream hit.

Have a look and see for yourself. I personally can’t wait.

What follows is, rather unusually for this site, not a film review of a movie shown in cinemas, but a video on the inter-tubes. I don’t plan to make a habit of this, but this one is extraordinary enough on various levels to warrant the same kind of attention given to traditional movies.

You can find out more about the young man who made the video via his website (currently overloaded) if his story interests you, so I will only recap it very briefly here: Chris Rehage walked almost the entire width of China, from Beijing to Ürümqi over the course of a year. Rather than just “take pictures and/or video” as most of us would have done, he was inspired by the “picture per day” videos that have become a fashion on the net, but took it a definite notch up from there.

This is a brilliant fusion of photo-journal diary, time-lapse travelogue and music video, beautifully edited to a fabulously incongruous soundtrack. I think it really “raises the bar” on self-made travel videos and rises to the level of a genuine work of filmic art.

The first time you watch it, you will likely (and should) focus on Rehage’s own metamorphosis over a year’s time; as he says, “one year walk/beard growth time lapse.” But there’s a lot more going on there; you’re watching a man step into the unknown, and it doesn’t always go to plan. It’s part of the fascination of these sorts of self-portrait videos, looking directly into their eyes.

The second time you watch it, try to look past Rehage most of the time and notice his various surroundings; where he lingers, what goes by fleetingly, all the detail captured in the background. You may be surprised what (mostly) rural China has in store for you …

I also suggest a third, more frame-by-frame (or at least slowed-motion) view so you can catch captions and combined details of each photo (and often, photo-sequence) composition.

One of the best things about projects like this is that modern photography is very “high-def” and so while we are constrained by annoyances like “economical file size” and “bandwidth” in determining how “big” a picture we can see, the “original” in Rehage’s possession is entirely suitable for future, larger presentations. I look forward to seeing a real “HD” version of this again soon.

Now this is a clever idea, and really the way it should be done. BoxOfficeMojo.com has crunched the numbers and given us the real skinny: Gone With the Wind is still the all-time-so-far* box office champion.

*I really hate the use of the term “all time” without qualifiers, as though Time is officially coming to an end this Thursday and we can finally settle the score. Even worse, most of the time the use of the term “all time” is weighted incorrectly, as box office returns have been up until the publication of this list. You really can’t properly use the term “all time” on anything unless your name is Yahweh. It would really be much better if people put out definitive lists on those things that can actually be considered closed matters, like “best-selling books of the 1800s” and “most popular sandwiches of the 1990s.” These are things we can know. We can never know the best song, or top movie, or worst politician “of all time” because, as Sarah Palin showed us, just when you think you knew who the worst of all time was, another one comes along …

Anyway, the list holds several nice surprises, as well as vastly increases the diversity and timeline of the films that have ascended to the top. Not all of the top films are great classics, but many of them certainly struck a chord with their audiences and the ones at the top are, without exception, the kind of movies that people watch more than once, often routinely.

One of the biggest surprises in the list is that (when you adjust for inflation) the very top film, the aforementioned GWTW, “only” did $1.5B (all figures US$). This suggests that it might be possible for a film to top this someday (as the totals allow for re-releases), as the worldwide market continues to grow. You have to expect the Lord of the Rings films to move up the charts a bit when the inevitable re-release happens, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the Harry Potter movies are re-released one more time just before the final film unspools.

I was disappointed to see that E.T. did as well as it did. It’s almost certainly just me, but I have never liked the film, thought it very schmaltzy and better-suited to TV at the time, and the re-release and re-edit/re-visionism was just … an abomination. Even worse than the “Han Shot First” revisionism of the Star Wars re-releases.

The fact that the totals allow for re-releases is the main reason why Disney movies are so well-represented here. Snow White has made many times more money in re-release than it ever did originally. The highest-grossing movie of which I cannot find reference to any sort of theatrical re-release was 1956’s The Ten Commandments, which scored the #5 slot.

I was quite shocked to see that The Rocky Horror Picture Show limped in at a mere #70, a rating that can only mean that midnight screenings don’t count with the compilers of this list as a “theatrical re-release,” because I assure you that film has made way more than (just under) $400M. Heck, I am myself alone probably responsible for 1% of that (I’ve seen that movie many times, though I’m now fairly retired from watching it).

I would be interested to see an adjusted-for-inflation version of the worldwide gross boxoffice chart, rather than just domestic US, but this is a good start that will hopefully inspire a few people to check out some “old” movies.

Speaking of old movies, I note with interest that the all-time-so-far top-grossing B&W movie is the 1945 Bing Crosby film The Bells of St. Mary’s (#49). Other B&W films that made the list are The Best Years of Our Lives (1946, #72) and Sergeant York (1941, #95). I was kinda hoping that 1974’s Young Frankenstein would have made the list, but no such luck.

Hollywood plans to make a movie of the videogame “Asteroids.”I think that’s it, we can officially now say that they have hit bottom.

EDIT: I knew when I wrote that I’d be eating my words, but I didn’t think it would only take a day. A movie based on ViewMaster. Oy vey.

Where no marketing has gone before:

No, your eyes do not deceive you — the chevron logo and the Kirk and Spock figures (among others in the package) are printed directly on the food.

Part of a complete (-ly nerdtastic) breakfast.

We don’t normally cover short films on this blog, and are even less inclined to cover or promote web-only films, but for this one — Responsible Relationships and You: Facebook Manners — we’ll gladly make an exception.

First of all, as a parody this short is note-perfect. Not since the days of Night Flight on the USA Network in those bygone early days of cable has their been such a beautifully realised parody of the generic 50s-era “educational” film. Second, enough readers are on Facebook or at least know about it for the concept to carry beyond the confines of the web. Finally, it’s cleverly retro-futurist “steampunk” design recalls both Brazil and the 1939 World’s Fair with equal aplomb, and rich reward for those willing to freeze-frame and read the text flashed on-screen. I predict “Timmy Gordon is uh oh” to join other Net-centric catch-phrases like “I KISS YOU!!” and “All Your Base” in short order. Remember, you read it here first!

The best way to experience this mini-masterpiece is to visit YouTube and enjoy it in its full HD glory, but I give you a bite-sized version here in HD to whet your appetite: