Mon, August 7, 2006

I was reading the Kung-Fu-Licious John Rogers's list of top movies so far this year, which is a very good list, and raises a great point: "Either my tastes have shifted, or the movies have shifted my tastes for me." It also points out yet another way in which technology does my thinking for me.

I take the ridiculously anal step of documenting every movie I see on onebee, and assigning it a rating from 0-100. That relieves me from having to think about what my favorite movies are. I just login and ask the database to show me the highest scores thus far. Here we go!

1. Lucky Number Slevin, 92/100
2. Inside Man, 86/100
3. Mission: Impossible III, 83/100
4. Cars, 80/100
5. An Inconvenient Truth, 76/100
6. United 93, 76/100

Wow. See, this is why it's good to have a database telling you what movies you like, because I never would've come up with that on my own. I'd have thought my list would be a lot more like Rogers's, except for Thank You for Smoking (which I liked fine – 69/100 – but not as much as he, plus IMDb says it's a 2005 film) and The Descent (which you couldn't threaten me enough to get me to watch).

Apparently, my tastes have not shifted as much as I had thought. Then I realized: oh yeah! – I haven't seen Slither or Brick. (Not my fault: they barely played here, and I know I'll love them when I finally get my chance on Netflix. I'm sure Little Miss Sunshine will play here, but not yet.) So, out of his seven, I've seen three, and I wasn't that crazy about one of them. Maybe I thought I liked Monster House more than Cars? That can't be right, no matter how hard Rogers tried to convince me that I would. (It was close, though. He had more than a little help from the makers of Cars.)

It seems a number of things are in play here. For one, my memory of how much I liked a movie a week after the fact is often different from how much I liked it as I left the theatre. Movies like Superman Returns and Pirates of the Caribbean have aged well, because they're so big that my brain can omit the slow parts and still have a solid 105 minutes of entertainment. Movies like United 93 have not fared as well, because my persistent belief that it was a bad idea for a movie has been reawakened by Oliver Stone's World Trade Center and the inability of the film reviewing industry to give a less than stellar grade to a movie about 9/11, due to some dreamy-eyed sentimentality about what that day meant and might still mean (or worse – a fear of being labeled unpatriotic). Still, I like preserving that first impression, even though it is a double-edged sword (Five-Year Rule, after all). And I do remember thinking that MI: III was very difficult to find fault with, even if it is a summer action sequel. Also, I saw better movies this year than just the movies that were released this year, because of late viewings like Munich and Netflix viewings like The Secret Lives of Dentists. And, there's the aforementioned access problem, which kept me away from two movies I was really excited about this year, and was the #2 reason it was hard for me to leave Los Angeles.

Don't get me wrong: I still think this has been a better year for movies than we thought it would be. And these are all fine films. I simply would not have expected that United 93 would have tied for my #5 favorite theatrical release of 2006. I'm amazed that there were not ten movies I saw this year that I liked better.

(But there will be. Have we seen the trailer for The Prestige? Stranger Than Fiction? Whee!)