Beltmann

Yep. Had the good fortune of living in Green Bay when they last won the Super Bowl (that whole season I interned at the TV station where they filmed The Mike Holmgren Show.)

Maybe. It's pretty great, despite a few reservations. Tenenbaums defies classification, and its weird balance of deadpan farce, stylized pathos, and sincere emotion strikes a chord with me. But in hindsight it still feels like the movie where Anderson's inspired style was starting, ever so slightly, to sour. There are rare passages in Tenenbaums that make me cringe--but the curdling wasn't fully evident until Life Aquatic and Darjeeling Limited. Which is why I found the loose and groovy Fantastic Mr. Fox so refreshing, and why it might be my second favorite Anderson movie.

Hi Kate! What a nice surprise!

Now I agree.

After several of the characters were set on fire, my five-year-old daughter leaned over and dryly said, "Well, they need to stop, drop, and roll." That's fairly representative of her sense of deadpan humor, so I thought she'd be primed for Wes Anderson's typically wry tone. Unfortunately, a few minutes later she leaned over again and said, "Dad, is it almost over? I don't think I like this." She doesn't always like scenes of menace or danger, and I think that's what turned her off. But I really liked it, and so did my wife. We agreed that it is perhaps Anderson's best movie since Rushmo

Yet another year with this one. I am a creature of habit.

I've always had a love-hate relationship with Lars von Trier movies, and that ambivalency was thrown into sharp relief while watching Antichrist, which is his most provocative, most moving, most ludicrous, most gorgeous, and most maddening film yet. That bastard has made something, that's for sure.

Silent Light is a good film, but it's impossible to watch and not think of Dreyer's Ordet--and the new film suffers in comparison.

Excellent. Thanks for the link! This is a great track; I've probably watched the video a dozen times over the last few days.

I don't care for Community, either. It has no personality; in fact, it has nothing but the high-concept premise, which means that none of the characters are more than their cookie-cutter, one-sentence descriptions. Abed as Batman was pretty funny, though.

Yes! Wow, I'd forgotten that movie--but it was a terrific little story. I'll also second the kind words for Spanish Prisoner and Secret Lives of Dentists. (I really, really liked aspects of both Roger Dodger and Off the Map, but neither strikes me as a great whole.)

I agree that the Democrats' plan does not do enough to control costs, but tort reform is no answer. While I'm not opposed to tort reform--if we can find savings there without undermining patients' rights, let's do it--it is wrong for Republicans to focus on that as a silver bullet. Consider this: “It’s really just a distraction,” said Tom Baker, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and author of “The Medical Malpractice Myth.” “If you were to eliminate medical malpractice liability, even forgetting the negative consequences that would have for safety, accountability, and

I understand this point, but what it suggests is that the current model is unsustainable--which is why real reform is so desperately needed. The rising costs of health care are stifling small businesses across the country. Reform is an economic need at least as much as a medical one.

Losing the digital files is a major concern. I am now rather vigilant about using DVDRs to back up the files, which are also stored on an external hard drive. I need to know they are stored safely where a computer meltdown will not eat them up. I've been vigilant ever since my computer crashed two years ago; fortunatately I didn't permanently lose very much because most had either been backed up, or ripped from physical CDs, or purchased via eMusic. It was time-consuming, but I was able to re-rip all the missing CDs, and re-download everything from eMusic. That's one major advantage of eM

All of those missed my list by thismuch. Nice call, especially, on Broken Wings. That movie really got to me. Glad to see you include Lukas Moodysson (I went with Lilja 4-ever, but what I really wanted to include was Fucking Amal [show Me Love], which I saw in 2000 but technically was released in the U.S. in '99). What happened to Moodysson? Six years ago I would have cited him as one of the most exciting filmmakers alive, but since then, not so much...

Thanks, Dude, for sharing those memories. I enjoyed reading that.

It's also the bible of many school administrators--it's one of the latest shiny, trendy things to worship and mine for half-assed initiatives.

Huh. Some of my favorite books are listed in here: Great Expectations, A Separate Peace, Beloved... I can't say I "hated" Moby-Dick--its artistic merits strike me as self-evident--but I never warmed to it. That was tough to get through. I suppose it's a great book written for other people. I liked pretty much everything I was assigned in high school or college, to one degree or another. But I do remember one that I hated: Middlemarch. It's the only book in school I never actually finished. Couldn't take it.

Seconded.

Traffic just missed my list--it would have been number 6 on my 2000 list. I went with Requiem for a Dream instead. At the time, I preferred Traffic, but Requiem has held up better, I think.

Same here. Wilco was on my radar before YHF, but it was that album that made me a Wilco geek. It has been in regular rotation ever since I bought it. It's one of those rare records that simply never wears out for me. I am always hoping that the next Wilco record will be like YHF--not in the sense that I want them to revive that particular sound, but in the sense that whatever new sound they try I will love it as profoundly as I love YHF.

That's a good post, and it articulates how I felt about Max, too. Naysayers might reply that this particular arc is not portrayed with enough concrete dramatic signposts, and so therefore remains a vague and lazy arc. I'd say that what Jonze does is the opposite of lazy: Instead of relying on well-worn dramatic conventions--the easy route--he instead telegraphs this emotional and psychological arc through a wealth of minor, subtle, acute observations that accumulate into something large and coherent. He makes it hard on himself but pulls it off--which is partially why I found it so powerful

Here's a preliminary list, based mostly on whim. Allowed myself 5 feature titles per year, which wasn't perfect--some years, it was hard to narrow it down, while other years it was hard to find five worthy candidates. I also threw in one short film per year, mainly for sport. Alphabetically: 2000 Ali Zaoua, Prince of the Streets / Nabil Ayouch / Morocco The Circle / Jafar Panahi / Iran The Day I Became a Woman / Marziah Meshkini / Iran The Gleaners and I / Agnes Varda / France Requiem for a Dream / Darren Aronofsky / USA Short film: The Heart of the World / Guy Maddin / Canada 2001

Ouch, man. I do that all the time. Can't help it.

That's one of the things I most loved about The Aviator, too. It's really one of Scorsese's most under-appreciated movies. Strangely, my experience with The Departed was the opposite of yours. I liked it upon first viewing, but felt it was minor Scorsese. But when I watched it again on DVD, and was free to pay attention to things separate from story (since I already knew the plot), my appreciation only grew. It might not be Taxi Driver, but it's a damn good Scorsese movie. (I don't know what effect this had on my experience, but I had seen the original source film Infernal Affairs sever