Every year people ask me what my top ten films of the year are. And every year I have to tell them the same thing.

“I don’t know. Ask me again in a couple of years.”

Because that’s how long it’s going to take me to see all the really notable films of any given year. Yes, I watch lots of movies. But most of what I watch comes from other points in the 100+ years of cinema history. Sure, I’ll get around to seeing all the big releases of 2005. But it’s going to take me awhile. And since I get out to the theatre less and less these days, I have to wait for the DVD release of everything but the most essential movies that DEMAND my presence on opening weekend.

Top-ten lists of this nature are bullshit anyway. No film critic sees every movie that gets released. They’re happy to sit on their bloated asses and stare at whatever distributors decide merits a domestic screening. None of them hunt for those rare finds, underground classics, and imported oddities. So what the hell do they know?

In the interest of getting people off my back, I offer this humble list of some of my personal faves of the last year. Only a few of them were actually released in 2005, but they were all new films to me. And a great new find from 1939 is every bit as important to me as a great new find from last Friday. There’s twenty of them because it was already hard enough trimming the list down that far.

20. Zero Day
Forget the execrable Gun Van Sant snooze fest, Elephant. This is the real Columbine movie. My recent high-school reunion only served to remind me just how many teenagers out there fantasize about mass murder every bit as much as sex.

19. Alexandra’s Project
Revenge has been a major theme in cinema these last couple of years. Usually they’re tales of blood and guts and heads coming off. Not this one. Yet it probably manages to be the nastiest of the bunch.

18. Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary
Up until this movie, I found Guy Maddin films to be nigh unwatchable. I love his style, but the content always felt too much like sitting through a boring film class. Despite being a silent film set to Mahler and featuring lots of ballet, this manages to be one of the most faithful adaptations of Dracula ever put on the screen. Go figure.

17. Good Bye Lenin!
The fun premise of fooling a newly-awake coma victim into thinking the cold war is still raging is only the surface of this film, which has a lot to say about the lies we tell each other and the motivations behind them.

16. The Fog of War
Sure, Robert S. McNamara may be playing to the camera, looking for sympathy by being shockingly frank, but this is one of the most compelling documentaries I’ve ever seen. The Philip Glass score only adds a great feeling of dread to the whole affair. Ah, remember when our war criminals were clever bastards, unlike the incompetent fucktards we have running the show today?

15. The Battle of Algiers
This oldie enjoyed a sudden revival when it was revealed it had been put on a White House must-see movie list. The Bush administration thought their staff could glean some tips on how to win the war in Iraq by watching this tale of Muslim insurgency against the French. Do you think any of them clued in to the fact that all this film has to tell them is why they can never actually win their war? Sadly, I doubt it.

14. Stagecoach
One of the few mega-classics I had never seen. Now I know why it’s such a classic. Forget it’s a western and think of every movie in which a diverse group of people undertakes a great journey and faces a major peril or disaster. There’s too many of them to list here, but I’m sure you can come up with a dozen titles off the top of your head if you think about it. Well, this movie was the template for all of them.

13. Land of the Dead
I can’t tell you how delighted I was that George Romero‘s fourth zombie film turned out to be a good as it was. A lot of filmmakers lose their spunk when they get older, but George still has his balls on. While all his imitators focus on gut-munching, Romero continues to layer in actual political and thematic content to address contemporary American issues. And then dumps a lot of gut-munching on top of it.

12. Napoleon Dynamite
I saw it late, compared to everyone else, with the warning I might find it really annoying. Nope. It was great. One of those comedies where you either get on the same wavelength as the filmmakers or you disconnect. If you manage to get in their headspace, it’s hilarious.

11. King Kong
I’ve been waiting years to see what Peter Jackson was going to do with one of the most beloved movies in history. Too bad it was timed to come out in the middle of this glut of crappy remakes, because this is what remaking a film as all about. It isn’t a slavish shot-for-shot recreation (like Psycho), nor a radical departure that ignores the source material (like…well…all too many modern remakes, frankly). Peter approaches the material with a loving reverence, but isn’t afraid to reinterpret or reinvent to surprise and delight Kong fans, even when he’s making direct references to the original film. Running nearly twice as long as the 1933 version, it’s fascinating to see what the ultimate Kong fan fleshes out and what he casts aside. Yes, it’s too long, yes it’s incredibly self-indulgent at times, yes that subplot with the sailors goes nowhere. But who cares when you can feel so much love radiating off the screen? And the V-Rex fight is the hands-down best action scene of the year. When Ann Darrow looks at the big boy after that scene, you totally know she would so do him right then and there.

10. Sideways
I saw this leading up to last year’s Oscars. Suffering from overexposure, many people didn’t know what to make of this quirky little relationship-type movie, and I’ve heard a lot of backlash against it. But once it clicked for me that the whole film was really about timing (not as in the pace of the film, but timing in life) and that wine was being used as a metaphor for that, I was totally onboard.

9. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
The first part of Park Chan-Wook‘s revenge trilogy is just brilliant. With only a few films, he’s established himself as one of the top filmmakers in the world today. The key word in the title is “sympathy” because in the world presented here, everyone who’s got it comin’ is also a victim in their own right.

8. Batman Begins
I knew Christian Bale was a star from the moment I saw him as a child actor in Empire of the Sun in 1987. I was disappointed when he wasn’t cast as the new Bond (although, given the toilet bowl that series currently finds itself circling, maybe it’s for the best). But hiring him as young Batman was a masterstroke. After the original four-part series drove itself off a cliff, it seems like a miracle that Christopher Nolan resurrected the character this well. That’s what’s so cool about Batman though. He’s an icon that can be reinterpreted a million different ways, but he’s always Batman no matter what you do to him. What I love so much about this version is that it’s a character study in which we see someone’s personal philosophy evolve over time. In that way, it’s a superhero origin story more akin to Malcolm X than X-Men.

7. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
I’ve waited too long for Shane Black to write another movie. When he finally came back to the silver screen, he returned wearing a director’s hat as well. This past year saw two gigantic achievements in post-modern film noir and this is one of them. Probably the most self-aware movie every created, it never fails to be fantastically amusing and inventive. I expect this to be the biggest DVD cult hit of the year once everyone who missed it in its initial run rents it off the new releases shelf and gets knocked flat by how good it is.

6. The Americanization of Emily
A Julie Andrews movie? No, a Julie Andrews movie written by Paddy Chayefsky, the patron saint of all screenwriters. No one did American satire better. I won’t bother to summarize it, just see go it.

5. Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Werner Herzog vs. Klaus Kinski in their first collaboration. Spanish conquistadors travel the Amazon in search of El Dorado and only find a journey into the pits of hell for their trouble. The same could be said for the film crew, who endured what must have been one of the most difficult shoots in history.

4. Closer
I was thrilled by how harsh this love/hate story was willing to get. Mind you I’m still a little concerned I enjoyed a film that stars the likes of Julia Robert and Jude Law. I keep telling myself it’s all Mike Nichols‘s fault.

3. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
I wanted to see this movie for decades. It took a DVD release for me to finally get my hands on it. I expected to be gravely disappointed. I like Sam Peckinpah, but I don’t love him. And could this gritty little crime flick hope to meet my expectations? Meet and surpass it turns out. Universally despised when it came out, Garcia even managed to make it into The 50 Worst Films of All Time by mentally handicapped critics/authors Harry Medved and Randy Dreyfuss. Such is the fate of most films that are decades ahead of their time. By modern standards, you can see how this is one of the most influential movies ever made. Case in point…

2. Sin City
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is just one of dozens of obvious sources of influence for this, the template for so much future cinema to come. Violently ripped from the pages of Frank Miller‘s Sin City, this is not only the most faithful adaptation of a comic book ever put on the screen, I also declare it the most brutal American film of all time. Rodriguez and Miller would never have gotten away with it if the results weren’t so hyper-stylized. Even then, I’m shocked those hypocritical tools at the MPAA even assigned a rating to this movie that didn’t condemn it straight to DVD. Like it or loath it, expect to see a lot more of it from now on. This is the film, above all previous efforts, that proves digital filmmaking and virtual sets are not only viable, they’re the future.

1. Oldboy
Part two of Chan Wook-Park’s revenge trilogy. And wow. Simply, wow. I don’t think I care to elaborate much beyond that. Rent it. It will be more fun if you go in knowing nothing about it.

And that’s my list. Which inevitably leads us to the question, “So what were the worst movies of the year?” Well, I don’t like to pick on bad movies. I see plenty of them, but most of them are good in their own special way. Bad movies tend, more often than not, to be failures that were trying to do something new and interesting and wholly different. They just fell on their asses in the attempt. This was the year I saw They Saved Hitler’s Brain, Double Agent 73, Olga’s Girls, The Brown Bunny (Roger Ebert was right the first time), War of the Worlds (no one will ever have to argue which Spielberg film is the runt of the litter again), Catwoman, Street Corner, and Secrets of Sex.

But if I absolutely HAD to make a worst movies of the year list, it would read like this:

1. Alexander
Oliver Stone sucks. As does this movie. Even then, I can still find one good thing to say about this movie.

It kept me out of the rain on my last day in Dublin nearly a year ago.

My office looks like it’s been bombed. No, I haven’t been a victim of the latest self-indulgent trend of disenfranchised youth who have decided that blowing themselves up is an even better way of shocking the system than getting a really bad haircut. Rather, I’ve just been a slob. Papers, notes and discs are stacked high all around me and threaten to collapse with the force of a redwood being felled.

So I’m finally getting some order back in my life. My fingers are black from going through all the dusty newspaper clippings people keep handing me on a variety of subjects they think I’ll find interesting. They’re as diverse as Artie Shaw’s obituary, urls for the latest in online fanboy flicks, and details about a replica of Billy Bishop’s SE.5a used in The Aviator. The useful ones are being filed, the fleeting diversions are filling the recycling bin.

It’s going to be a long hard climb out from under the mountain of paperwork that includes illegible notes to myself, business expense accounting, and screenplay proofs. Oh, there are lots of those these days. The Eyestrain mill has been churning at full force, working on three different TV shows at once.

You already know about Paddywhacking. Last week was devoured by another session of meetings that, thankfully, took place in Montreal this time. A few dozen more drafts and I think we might finally be able to nail down exactly what the show is supposed to be. Something about Irish mobsters, I imagine. That or an afternoon cooking show hosted by Regis Philbin. Flip a coin, it could go either way.

Pucca was covered in the last entry. I’ve written five of those so far and continue to jockey for more. But there’s another, newer, animated show I’m on now that I haven’t mentioned yet. This one is called Yam Roll, and unless I’m very much mistaken, this will prove to be the all-time greatest television program about talking sushi in the history of the medium. Have you ever seen such a compelling, true-to-life depiction of articulate raw Japanese delicacies? I think not.

I’m not the only one who’s been jumping into animation with both feet lately. Ashes to Ashes director, Mike Stamm, has recently resurfaced with his new project, Ebon. In his ever widening search to find the most expensive city in the world to live in, Stamm has relocated from Tokyo to New York — specifically Roosevelt Island, which was recently featured prominently in the American remake of Dark Water. I can only hope his new apartment is nicer and considerably less haunted. There he’s working on his solo epic which should challenge his obsessive-madman work ethic I admire so much.

I can hardly fathom the amount of man-hours Mike has laid out before himself. I’ve lacked the juice to finish a new Longshot Comic for years, and his project makes my dot comics look like an afternoon of tinkering with an etch-a-sketch. I’ll just have to excuse myself with the usual bullshit. It’s hard to concentrate on my own material when I have to turn around drafts for other people in less than a day. Lame, I know, but true enough. In fact, why am I even bothering to update this bloody blog? I have two drafts due over the next couple of days and I haven’t even read the notes yet. Time is so short, I don’t even have enough time to finish this sen

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She’s cute, she’s cuddly.

She’s ten years old and she’ll kick your ass.

This is the phenomenon that is Pucca.

Not since the mighty merchandising industry that was (and remains) Hello Kitty has Asia produced such a juggernaut of wallet-emptying pre-pubescent appeal. Adorning the clothing, accessories and toy shelves of many a Pacific Rim kiddie, Pucca is now poised to invade the Western mindset.

She’s already forged inroads here. Take a bus ride down to your local Chinatown and ask for something, anything Pucca-related at one of the gift shops. You’ll be inundated with a broad spectrum of trinkets, the variety and kitchiness of which haven’t been seen since the days when Fonzie was the pop cultural touchstone of children everywhere.

Don’t know what I’m talking about? You will. Like her Hello Kitty precursor, Pucca will be infiltrating our airwaves every bit as aggressively as she pursues her ninja paramour, Garu. Jetix, in the U.K., is the first broadcaster on board, but I’m sure it won’t be long before some North American network, hungry for product-product-product as they all are, will hop on and start beaming images of this adorable little kung-fu powerhouse into the heads of your offspring.

I’m frightened and I don’t even have kids to bug me to buy them Pucca crap.

This is what I’m writing these days. The format for the first season is twenty-six episodes made up of three seven-minute cartoons each. I’m doing the Michael Maltese thing, writing a bunch of these shorts to fit the “Funny Love” theme.

The story so far, if you haven’t been following the series of flash animation films out there on the web, is this: Pucca loves Garu. Garu is a ninja who’s always getting into fights with his many enemies. But when the fighting interferes with her romantic agenda, Pucca beats the hell out of anybody who gets in her way. Meanwhile, Garu, being a little boy, thinks girls are icky. But since Pucca is infinitely powerful, he doesn’t have much choice but to be victimized by her unwanted affection.

Wackiness ensues.

There’s a cast of supporting characters and plenty of locales along for the ride. These have been generated by the Vooz Character System which, it seems, operates as something of a mill for iconic figures that look good on a t-shirt or tote bag. Their website for Pucca used to be filled with all sorts of goodies like cartoons, desktop backgrounds, broken English and screensavers. Now, of course, just when I want to direct you there, the site seems to be undergoing some major revamping and all you can do is play with the homepage colour scheme.

I’ll let you know when something more substantial comes back up. Then you too can wallow in the Funny Love universe as I’ve been doing every day for weeks now.

Wallow! I command you! Wallow in the cuteness!

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Typical.

I’ve been so busy working on new projects, I’ve had no time to tell all of you what they are. Word will be coming shortly, but until then let’s put my last show to bed once and for all.

Complaints about YTV’s decision to halt production of further Fries With That? episodes continues to trickle in here at Eyestrain Productions. If I, who can do absolutely nothing about the fate of the show, am getting letters from disgruntled fans, I imagine YTV itself might actually be getting a few too. Not that this will change a damn thing, but it’s nice to let them know someone cares. It may skew them to the idea that all the people who worked on the show did a decent job of it.

From one disappointed fan comes this email:

Way to be the bearer of bad news :(

I won’t shoot the messenger *writes a letter to YTV and Corus*, so instead I’ll just thank you for the work you did on Fries with That? I watch almost no TV, but since the show stole my soul a few months ago, I’ve been watching it every time slot it’s on. Well, not at 4 in the morning, but I tape that instead. ;) The desire to be able to be a part of such a thing was part of what finally pushed me to transfer into Drama at the University of Calgary this fall, so you can pat yourself on the back that you may have totally shifted the focus in the life of somebody. :)

While Supplies Last was a work of art, and it was totally something I could relate to. Being one of the geeks turned… well, just not-so-geek, I guess, I found it simply wonderful. By far my favorite episode.

One last thing before I leave you alone again, do you know where the Bulky’s uniforms were produced? I think it’d be a kick to get my hands on one, even if I have to get it made myself…

Super work with the series – you and all the other writers deserve total props, and after Radio Active and Fries with That?, I totally look forward to seeing what you do next.

Enough from me. Feel free to show the co-workers and get the restraining order, I’ll still hunt you down. Little Jimmy told me to. Marissa is telling me not to though, so we’ll see. ;)

Looks like we missed out on some of that sweet, sweet merchandising cash. For the record, no, I don’t know where you can score any Fries props. I was present for the last day of shooting on Radio Active when we knew we were wrapping for good. I got to see the feeding frenzy as the cast and crew dismantled the set and claimed entire chunks of it as their own. Melissa Galianos, for one, bought the famed ante room couch for five bucks (a piece of furniture notable for being so comfortable, everyone involved in the show fell asleep on it at least once, myself included). The situation with Fries, however, was different since no one knew for sure if we were closing for business. I imagine much of Bulky’s remains in storage somewhere.

Finding merchandise for my next show won’t be nearly as difficult. In fact, once it makes its North American debut, you may have a hard time avoiding it. It’s already a marketing phenomenon in distant lands. I don’t want to tip my hand as to what it is yet (and you’ve probably never heard of it anyway), but let me give you a taste in the form of fashionable footwear.

More soon.

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You won’t have to hear me complain about it anymore. After several dissatisfying years as a card-carrying member, I’m now withdrawing from the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television as of this July. The fact is I’m just not getting much (if any) bang for my buck. And that buck runs me $172.54 a year now. It’s too bad really, because I always wanted to be a member of some film academy, and it felt like a long hard journey to earn the privilege of voting on the jury for some major televised awards shows. But as the Academy celebrates its silver anniversary with a silver membership card, the sheen has dulled, and the colour under the chipped paint seems to be more of a shit brown shade.

You may have read about some of my grievances before, but there’s more. Here’s a few that have been added to the list (above and beyond me not getting any goddamn screeners). First, as a member, I’m supposed to get a modest discount at certain industry-related stores. Well, I’ve brought my card to the cash on a number of occasions at one of these stores in Toronto, and all I get are blank stares and cashiers telling me “we don’t accept these,” which is clearly not the case if you read the Academy’s literature. So much for making some of the annual fee back on savings.

More recently, the Famous Players theatre chain has arbitrarily decided not to accept the ACCT card anymore either. Half the attraction of being a member in the first place was seeing free movies. Now they won’t even let me in the door to see a freebie Canadian flick (which, believe me, nobody’s lining up for) let alone an Oscar contender. And since the main release venue for Canadian cinema in Montreal is (guess what) a Famous Players house, I’m locked out from seeing most of the movies I’m supposed to vote on at the end of the year. Not cool.

But they’re not even the only chain giving the Academy the finger. The Guzzo theaters never let us see anything for free, but we used to be able to get a couple of tickets anytime for the cheapie Tuesday price. Now that’s been reduced to one. So much for taking a guest out to a reasonably priced night at the movies. Too bad, because all their theatres are out in the middle of nowhere and I needed some sort of bait to con folks into driving my non-driver ass out there.

I’m a little bit sad about my short tenure as a member. Now and then, when I mentioned it, people sounded genuinely impressed. At least until I explained to them that no, this isn’t the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science, so I won’t be able to vote for Johnny Depp to win an Oscar for Pirates of the Caribbean no matter how hard you petition me. But on the bright side, I’ll never again have to hold up a queue forever while some student worker phones a series of supervisors from the ticket booth, trying to find someone, anyone, who knows what my Academy card is for. It took me long enough but I, at least, have finally figured out what my card is for.

Landfill.

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So much news, so few updates. I should make a resolution to write little one-paragraph updates when something happens instead of waiting weeks and composing an epic to cover all the bases. I really should make that resolution. But I’d probably ignore it and go on doing what I’m doing, so why bother?

Fries With That? is over and done with. YTV isn’t ordering another season. The show now exists in a television netherworld. It isn’t cancelled. Quite the contrary, they’ll run it for years to come. But we won’t be making any more of them. Those same fifty-two episodes will play over and over again until anyone who watches the show regularly will have seen them dozens of times.

I went through the same thing with M*A*S*H when I was a kid. I saw them all so many times I can’t even look at the show now, even with the tempting DVD releases that offer the opportunity to watch it without the god-awful laugh track. But at least there were eleven years worth of episodes to go through as it ran five times a day (literally) when I was watching them in high school. Not so with Fries, which will have a much shorter shelf life I expect.

With all my remaining episode ideas dying on the vine, my greatest hope for the show now is that other networks out there will continue to buy broadcast rights well past the five-year buyout. That’s when I get to see some royalty cash, and there’s nothing I like better than to be paid money for something I wrote years ago and can hardly remember. Believe me, I savor every one of those three cents I get for the Student Bodies clip show episode each time a cheque shows up. I hope to one day get enough pennies out of that particular royalty to buy a stick of gum. It may yet happen while I still have teeth in my head to chew it.

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