And something of a post-mortem on the Top Fifty Films of the 00s. You know. While we’re here.

When I embarked on that little jaunt across the past ten years of moviemaking, trying the best I could to rank the films I loved most, and identify why I loved them, it was with the hope that grappling with each of the entries would be a rewarding challenge. It was that, and then some. I’m not sure if the unexpected praise I received after typing out those last thousand words or so upon reaching the number one film on New Year’s Eve was reflective of the enjoyment I got out this process being shared by others, or if it was merely some champagne-fueled generosity in the waning hours of 2009. Regardless, it further emboldened me to take on a new, but noticeably similar, project that I’d decided on several weeks earlier.

As I noted when I tapped out the introduction for the “Top Fifty Films of the 00s” endeavor back in July, this particular exercise in counting backwards was based on a challenge put forth by my old radio show partner (and current blogging sensation) a decade earlier. We started our weekly movie review program in the fall of 1990 and kept it going for the next several years. We both continued the practice of seeing damn near everything in the theater throughout the nineties so we could keep talking informed smack about cinema, sometimes on the radio, sometimes just in extended phone calls that generated eye-popping numbers on long distance bills. So when 1999 was fading to black, he suggested we cook up personal Top 50 lists of the ten years that shared the characteristic of a nine in the third spot, with a special emphasis on the films we enjoyed most, those we couldn’t help but revisit, those that held a special thrall over us. Quality of the films was still a major criterion, but our helpless affection, that sometimes undefinable quality that led certain films to grab us more tightly, more urgently than others, was to hold a greater sway. That was the same mindset I took into compiling the “Top 50 Films of the 00s” list.

I found that crafting these essays the last few months was thrilling, grueling, and energizing. It pushed me to do what most enlivened me when I first started writing review for that humble little broadcast around twenty years ago: identify what I responded to in a film, what pieces of it inspired my admiration or revulsion or any of the feelings on the spectrum in between. I wanted to keep it going, even after the project was done.

At the same time, I wondered what I would be like to revisit that list of fifty films I stitched together at the end of the nineties. If the films were ranked largely in accordance to which stuck with me the most, which demanded repeated viewings, and which faded from memory, how might that change another ten years gone by? Without even glancing at the old list–which, truthfully, I’m not even sure I can find any longer–I started building a new version of that old list. There are some films that I know I excluded previously that made the cut this time, and some others that I’m certain rank much higher or much lower than they did before.

Tomorrow I’ll start tracking through them, probably at a rate of about one a week, which–would you look at that–means finishing up at right around the last day of the year. Funny how that happened. In accordance with my own tradition, I’ll note in advance that the film at number fifty is just a pure favorite. Just as I was stretching the truth somewhat to designate Triviatown the fiftieth finest film of the 00s, so too is the film I spotted to begin the countdown probably not genuinely better than any number of the movies that I’ve mentally scattered into the unnamed runner-up spots. But it’s a film that I enjoy immensely each and every time I stumble upon it, a film that I’ve warmed to more and more over the years. After all, making a silly little list like this ten years after it’s actually timely should allow for just that sort of movie, the sort that grows on you in almost inexplicable ways, to get touted joyously. So that’s just what I’ll do tomorrow.

(Posted simultaneously to “Jelly-Town!”)