Hot Rod (2007)

IMDb plot summary: Self-proclaimed stuntman Rod Kimble is preparing for the jump of his life - to clear fifteen buses to raise money for his abusive stepfather Frank's life-saving heart operation.

Directed by Akiva Schaffer. Stars Andy Samberg, Isla Fisher, and Ian McShane.

Hot Rod stars Andy Samberg as a man-child wannabe stunt man who decides he's going to do a massive stunt, one-upping Evil Knievel's bus jumping record, so that he can raise money to provide his stepfather with an organ transplant ... specifically so that his stepfather can recover and Andy Samberg can beat him up to earn his respect. I really enjoy the ludicrousness of the stakes at play here. It's a good window into what the rest of the film is like. I love Lonely Island and other things they've done, such as Popstar. This one has fewer moments that are perfect, but it has all these little tiny throwaway lines that may be improvised, may just have pitch-perfect delivery. They hit me the same way that Napoleon Dynamite did -- where lines are not necessarily comedic but are said so dryly that they become funny. For example, in one scene, they're filling up a little kiddie pool in the backyard, and Bill Hader casually says, "Man, you know what? Pools are really perfect for holding water." It's such a dumb sentence, and it made me laugh super hard because it's delivered so sincerely. So it's full of little things like that and little moments that really work. Overall a really fun movie. A lot of people I knew really got into this in college, and I can see why. It's made of the same stuff as a Napoleon Dynamite or an Anchorman that so easily become a beloved film with no end to quotable moments.

🎥 Hot Rod (2007)

📊 Ranked #1005/4215 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 76

beat An Innocent Man (#2159 → #2160)

beat Match Point (#1133 → #1134)

lost to Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (held at #616)

lost to Monsieur Lazhar (held at #873)

lost to The African Queen (held at #1002)

beat The Voices (#1067 → #1068)

beat Man on the Moon (#1034 → #1035)

beat Fargo (#1018 → #1019)

beat Apollo 13 (#1010 → #1011)

beat The Paper (#1006 → #1007)

lost to Wicked: For Good (held at #1004)

The Descent (2005)

IMDb plot summary: A caving expedition goes horribly wrong when six explorers become trapped and ultimately pursued by a strange breed of predators.

Directed by Neil Marshall. Stars Shauna Macdonald, Natalie Mendoza, and Alex Reid.

The Descent is a horror film about a group of women friends meeting for the first time in a while to go spelunking in an Appalachian cave. When they get there, they become trapped. There's nobody coming to rescue them, and there are also creatures down there in the dark with them. I watched this one on Amazon Prime, and it was extremely helpful to have the Amazon X-ray the Prime X-ray function available so that when I couldn't figure out which of the seven identical women was on screen, it told me who it was. Otherwise I would never have kept any of these women straight. This movie is claustrophobic and brings that vibe out strongly throughout. The characters are a little bit slower than I'd like in gathering or inferring information about the creatures... although of course, they're panicking, so they're not going to be as focused on discovery as I wanted them to be. I didn't like the ending at all. I found to be a needlessly stupid jump scare style ending that wasn't helpful at all in terms of the story or the scares. I liked the film up until that moment, and that brought it way down in my estimation. That aside, though, if you want a creepy claustrophobic people-in-the-dark movie, this is a pretty good one.

🎥 The Descent (2005)

📊 Ranked #1382/4214 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 67

beat An Innocent Man (#2158 → #2159)

lost to Baby Driver (held at #1132)

beat The Tragedy of Macbeth (#1642 → #1643)

beat DragonHeart (#1388 → #1389)

lost to Airheads (held at #1260)

lost to A League of Their Own (held at #1324)

lost to She's Gotta Have It (held at #1355)

lost to L'Atalante (held at #1371)

lost to Watchmen (held at #1379)

beat Overboard (#1384 → #1385)

lost to Just Imagine (held at #1381)

Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995)

IMDb plot summary: When Raj meets Simran in Europe, it isn't love at first sight but when Simran moves to India for an arranged marriage, love makes its presence felt.

Directed by Aditya Chopra. Stars Shah Rukh Khan, Kajol, and Amrish Puri.

Dilwale Dulaniya Le Jayenge, or DDLJ as it is known, is a 1995 Bollywood film that stars Kajol and Shah Rukh Khan as a young couple that meet and fall in love. She, however, is engaged to a rich man back in her hometown, so he vows that he's going to come and win over her family so they will agree to their marriage instead. I was first introduced to this movie in the film A Nice Indian Boy, where it's held up as the pinnacle of idealized romance for our main character, and I totally get it. It is beautifully put together. The characters are so delightful, the dance and musical numbers are some of the best that I've seen... it is impeccably created. I love these characters and how sweet they are together and how kind they are to the people around them while they're trying to make this work.  If you like either rom coms or musicals, it's a really great one if you haven't seen it. It's one that I think I'm going to come back to again and again.

🎥 Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995)

📊 Ranked #552/4213 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 87

beat The Butter Battle Book (#2158 → #2159)

beat Match Point (#1132 → #1133)

beat Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (#616 → #617)

lost to Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (held at #311)

lost to The Parent Trap (held at #479)

lost to Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (held at #551)

beat Ex Machina (#582 → #583)

beat Bend It Like Beckham (#566 → #567)

beat The Basketball Diaries (#558 → #559)

beat Grease (#554 → #555)

beat A Man for All Seasons (#552 → #553)

Local Hero (1983)

IMDb plot summary: An American oil company has plans for a new refinery and sends someone to Scotland to buy up an entire village, but things don't go as expected.

Directed by Bill Forsyth. Stars Burt Lancaster, Peter Riegert, and Fulton Mackay.

Local Hero stars Peter Riegert as a man who is sent by his oil company employer to a small town in Scotland, where he is offering to purchase all the land from them and is sent there to negotiate a price. The people are excited and ready to sell, but they want to negotiate a higher price, and so they keep him around for a while. While he's there, he ends up falling in love with the village and the people there and questioning whether he wants to facilitate this sale after all. This is a very quiet, slow film. Because of that, it took me a while to register the kind of story that I was seeing. It didn't hit the traditional hallmarks or beats I expected, which is a good thing on one hand because it was outside of the box, but on the other hand it meant that it took me a long time to get settled into the story and to figure out whether I was meant to look at our protagonist as a hero or a villain. It took me a long time to get emotionally invested in the story. If I went back and re-watched it, knowing what kind of vibe it was going for, it might be a much easier sell and a much quicker investment in the characters. There are so many different characters being shown to us that I can't process all of their plot lines on a first watch, so I do feel like one viewing doesn't give me the full picture of it. But after one viewing I wasn't sold on it the way I hoped I would be.

🎥 Local Hero (1983)

📊 Ranked #2307/4212 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 45

lost to Phantom of the Opera (held at #2140)

beat The Forger (#3184 → #3185)

beat Easy Virtue (#2661 → #2662)

beat Neighbors (#2401 → #2402)

lost to Waves (held at #2268)

beat The Last Temptation of Christ (#2335 → #2336)

lost to Holiday Affair (held at #2302)

beat The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things (#2318 → #2319)

beat A Complete Unknown (#2310 → #2311)

lost to Malignant (held at #2306)

beat Just Like Heaven (#2308 → #2309)

Rodney King (2017)

IMDb plot summary: Roger Guenveur Smith performs his one man show focusing on the life and times of Rodney King.

Directed by Spike Lee. Stars Roger Guenveur Smith.

Rodney King is a filmed spoken word performance piece, directed by Spike Lee. This one-man show stars Roger Guenveur Smith as he dissects the life, death, and legacy of Rodney King. I was so young when King's beating and the aftermath happened, that my primary reference point for it was pop culture references years later. This is definitely, as I said, a spoken word performance rather than a play. There is deliberate poetry with the choice of words and cadence. Smith is an electric performer, embodying all these different characters in really engaging ways, and putting together a really compelling and occasionally gut-punching exploration of this story. Not necessarily something I'd revisit, but it was well done. And, truly, I love that Spike Lee does weird things like this and Passing Strange. Heck yes, find these marvelous performance pieces from the Black community and get them preserved so that these are available for people later. I just really appreciate that that is something that he has decided to do with his career.

🎥 Rodney King (2017)

📊 Ranked #1945/4211 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 54

beat In the Mood for Love (#2140 → #2141)

lost to Re-Animator (held at #1101)

lost to 7 Plus Seven (held at #1618)

lost to A Warm Corner (held at #1884)

beat The Fixer (#2011 → #2012)

beat The Little Things (#1947 → #1948)

lost to Daria in 'Is It Fall Yet?' (held at #1915)

lost to Fanboys (held at #1931)

lost to One Way Pendulum (held at #1939)

lost to Batman (held at #1943)

beat Toy Story 4 (#1945 → #1946)

I Lost My Body (2019)

IMDb plot summary: A story of Naoufel, a young man who is in love with Gabrielle. In another part of town, a severed hand escapes from a dissection lab, determined to find its body again.

Directed by Jérémy Clapin. Stars Hakim Faris, Victoire Du Bois, and Patrick d'Assumçao.

I Lost My Body is a French animated film with elements of the surreal. Its story is divided into two halves. One is a fairly realistic story about this young delivery man who ends up developing feelings for one of his customers. Alongside this, we have a plot where a severed hand escapes from a lab and makes its way across the country. I couldn't see how these two fit together until the very end, and even then I'm not entirely sure. I do think that the final connection of these two stories was very emotionally impactful, but not in a way that I could articulate what it means, it just made me feel things. I really like our central character -- his journey is worth watching even when he's making terrible decisions. The segments with the hand are funny and weird and creatively told, and I never minded when we interrupted the clearer story for a severed hand scene, because I enjoyed watching them. There are some really good moments for this but it doesn't cohere as nicely as I want it to. I also might just need to think about it a little bit longer and see if it rises in my estimation.

🎥 I Lost My Body (2019)

📊 Ranked #1890/4210 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 55

beat Mongol: The Rise of Genghis Khan (#2141 → #2142)

lost to Blink Twice (held at #1102)

lost to The Phoenician Scheme (held at #1619)

lost to White Heat (held at #1885)

beat Alice (#2012 → #2013)

beat The Ghost and the Darkness (#1948 → #1949)

beat The Trouble with Harry (#1916 → #1917)

beat Secret in Their Eyes (#1900 → #1901)

beat Rush (#1892 → #1893)

lost to Trading Places (held at #1888)

beat 8-Bit Christmas (#1890 → #1891)

42 (2013)

IMDb plot summary: In 1947, Jackie Robinson becomes the first African-American to play in Major League Baseball in the modern era when he was signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers and faces considerable racism in the process.

Directed by Brian Helgeland. Stars Chadwick Boseman, T.R. Knight, and Harrison Ford.

42 is a biopic based on the life of Jackie Robinson, the first African-American player brought onto a Major League Baseball team. It stars Chadwick Boseman as Robinson and a wide supporting cast, including Harrison Ford as the progressive team owner who makes the decision to actually bring him onto the team and tries to pave the way, while knowing it's going to be a really difficult time for Robinson. What makes this film stand out and makes it worth watching is Boseman as Robinson. He does a great job of showing the humanity of this character. He makes him truly feel like just a regular human instead of some larger-than-life character, and we get to see how difficult it is for him to hold back and not retaliate against racist behaviors, because he knows anything he does is going to be used as an excuse to never bring another Black player in again. I think the film does an especially good job of showing how little power Robinson had to respond to the racism around him because anything he did would be framed as an overreaction, and I really like how the film does put the onus on the white people around him to put themselves on the line to defend him, since they have more power and less to lose. Obviously that can tread a "white savior" line, but I think it does a pretty good job of calling the privileged to task. None of the baseball parts of this film are interesting to me, but Boseman is interesting, and framing his character as being willing to lean on others who have more power in this situation to use that power on his behalf is an angle I didn't expect.

🎥 42 (2013)

📊 Ranked #2406/4209 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 43

lost to Mongol: The Rise of Genghis Khan (held at #2141)

beat Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (#3180 → #3181)

beat The Muppets Take Manhattan (#2660 → #2661)

lost to Camp Rock (held at #2400)

beat Men Without Law (#2530 → #2531)

beat One, Two, Three (#2466 → #2467)

beat Finding Vivian Maier (#2431 → #2432)

beat Jesus Christ Superstar (#2415 → #2416)

beat King Kong Escapes (#2407 → #2408)

lost to Revolutionary Road (held at #2403)

lost to Kinky Boots: The Musical (held at #2405)