Top 5 Overlooked Movies of the 2000s | Archive

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Speaker 1: Film Spotting is presented by Regal Unlimited, the all you can watch movie subscription pass that pays for itself in just two visits. See any standard two D movie anytime with no blackoutdates or restrictions. Sign up now on the Regal app or at the link in our description and use code film spot twenty six to receive fifteen percent off.

00:00:45
Speaker 2: What kind of a show you guys putting on here today?

00:00:48
Speaker 3: You're not interested in art?

00:00:49
Speaker 2: Now?

00:00:50
Speaker 1: No, Look, we're going to do this thing. We're going to have a conversation.

00:00:55
Speaker 2: Hey, film spotters. The devilwares Prada two is in theaters. That means it's putting us in a bit of a time machine, taking us back to the release of The devilwares praduc the two thousands. We thought, let's get in a two thousands frame of mind. Let's revisit a top five of ours, Josh, where we looked at the overlooked movies of the two thousands that aired back in twenty nineteen. So we gave ourselves a good swath almost twenty years of films to consider.

00:01:26
Speaker 1: Yeah, and Devil War's product we didn't We didn't include that. I mean, how could that be overlooked, huge hit enough to gain a sequel. Looking at our picks, yeah, I particularly enjoy that one of mine. I'm proud of myself here for one of mine in particular.

00:01:46
Speaker 2: There's one that everybody sees coming probably yeah.

00:01:50
Speaker 1: And then and there's yeah, there's one. There's one like smart one here, you know, I say, I would say that I've got one smart, respectable one, and the others are just kind of a lot of fun. Yeah, how you How are you feeling about yours?

00:02:03
Speaker 2: I don't know. I clicked on the link today to look at the list because I when Sam suggested this for the archive drop, I had no idea. I had no clue what we could have included, what I would have put on this list, And every title in its own ways surprised me.

00:02:19
Speaker 1: But looking at it, I guess, can I say something. There's one here that you don't know what movie it is.

00:02:26
Speaker 2: That's incorrect, that's incorrect. I know all of these films. I can tell you who directed all of these films. Oh wow, one of them. One of them is from a marathon that we did. That's the one I remember, well, yes, see, I got it. It's from a marathon that we did. Obviously a very good movie one of them. The number five I think pretty well known and a movie that I've gone to bat for quite a bit on this show over the years. The number two, I think it's the number two is the one that may surprise people a little bit, just in terms of being a movie that I don't think a lot of people are aware of. And it's a documentary from the filmmaker behind I'll just give you a little bit of a spoiler here. It's the filmmaker behind Hoop Dreams, Steve James, and I believe, if I'm remembering correctly, his collaborator, one of his collaborators on that film, Hoop Dreams, Peter Gilbert, was the producer, co director, and cinematographer. So all right, you can look forward to that pick and more our top five Overlook movies of the two thousands from April twenty nineteen.

00:03:41
Speaker 3: Who is the greatest basketball player in the history of the game?

00:03:46
Speaker 4: I mean, do you mean ever?

00:03:47
Speaker 1: Come on?

00:03:47
Speaker 5: This is easy?

00:03:50
Speaker 2: Michael Jordan?

00:03:51
Speaker 1: And why was he the greatest?

00:03:52
Speaker 3: Because he paced himself, because he always had something left at the finish?

00:03:56
Speaker 2: Magic Johnson called it winning time.

00:03:58
Speaker 1: See those guys over there.

00:04:03
Speaker 4: Yeah, those guys think they're kicking ass, but believe me, it is early.

00:04:07
Speaker 1: We are a long way from winning time, so pay attention.

00:04:10
Speaker 2: Okay, Campbell, Scott and Jesse Eisenberg. There in Dylan Kids Roger Dodger from two thousand and two, a movie that myself in Film Spotting producer former co host Sam van Holgren champion a lot on the show, including way back on episode eight. At that point, Josh I called Roger Dodger the number one overlook movie I guess of all time. That was two thousand and four. Me. Yeah, very bold. A movie that came out in two thousand and two I called the most overlooked movie of all time. But both of us, Sam and myself do adore that film, and longtime listeners are probably aware of that. I don't need to talk about Roger Dodger anymore. Definitely not eligible for this week's Top five Overlooked Films of the two thousands. So this is becoming sort of a tradition, tying in with Film Spotting madness. Last year, when we did the best Films of the nineteen nineties, we discovered that Miller's Crossing one of the films in the tournament was in need of a rewatch, certainly by me, and we gave it the Sacred cow treatment. Ended our overlooked films of the nineties this year, decided to devote the first part of the show to the assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford, a movie that probably has gone under the radar a little bit more than Miller's Crossing over the past couple decades, and we thought, why not go ahead and shine a light on a few more films from the two thousands that definitely did not come up in the film spotting Madness talk on the show over the past six or seven weeks, didn't make the tournament and also really weren't even considered by the selection committee, despite my appreciation for them, not movies that maybe have a wide enough fan base to justify their inclusion. Josh, how did you go about this time establishing what constituted an overlooked movie?

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Speaker 1: Well, this was really difficult because I had ten years of top ten lists to access of my own to reference as a foundation for this, because those were the main years I was working as a daily newspaper film critic. And here's where the trouble comes in if you have somewhat contrarian tastes, and your top ten lists will have a few titles that are a little bit odd. I had twenty two films pulled from those top ten lists that I really could have put on this list. Now narrowing that down, I got a little bit of help because on episode three ninety six we revisited.

00:06:25
Speaker 2: I've got a funny story about that.

00:06:26
Speaker 1: In a second okay, good, we revisited top five overlooked films again of all time. And I can't laugh too much at what you put on yours the first time you did it, because I had three titles from the two thousands on that list. So these are the ones I disqualified for this list because I named them there, Monkey Bone, the live action Henry Sullick film, The weather Man, Nicholas Cage comic drama, and then Spike Lee's Bamboozled. So that took three away. I still had a whole bunch to choose from. I whittled them down to the five I'll get to.

00:06:58
Speaker 2: Okay, so this is all true, This is how this actually played out, and how big of an idiot I am. I'm approaching this top five list, and I had an idea that I slacked to Sam because I needed a sounding board, you know often with these top five lists, and Sam's wired the same way. We like to have organizing principles sometimes to guide us as we form these lists. And I suggested to him, what if these are the top five overlook movies from the two thousands I would most want people to see, almost as if I was programming my own Ebertfest. I thought that's how I could approach it. But then I even said to Sam, but it's so hard to define what constitutes overlooked anyway that without coming up with that definition, I don't know that that actually helps me. So I kind of just put it aside and I went to more conventional criteria. I thought about movies that, just like last time with the nineteen nineties, these are movies that weren't part of film spotting madness. They really didn't appear on any of the lists I found online of best films of the decade, any of those retrospective lists, whether it was fifty or one hundred films, they weren't really included. And I will add that I ignored a lot of great films that probably qualify as overlooked based on box office that I think I've mentioned enough on the show over the years, and also in cinophile circles. I think they're regarded highly enough that they don't really make sense.

00:08:18
Speaker 1: Or maybe grown in stature among cinophiles.

00:08:20
Speaker 2: Two overtime, Do I really need a Champion, Master and Commander or The New World from Terrence Malick, or in the Bedroom or even Michael Winterbottoms twenty four hour Party people. I decided no, I'm going to give them a little bit of love here, but otherwise they just didn't really fit for me. So I'm then forming my list. I have my five movies chosen. I'm looking through my Google docs just for some notes on films, and I come across a top five list that's called overlooked Films. And yes, Josh. On episode three ninety six, this goes back to May fourth, twenty twelve, twenty episodes into your tenure here on Film Spotting, we did an overlooked films list, basically revisiting the one that happened on episode eight of this show. Would you believe that all five of my choices were from the two thousands?

00:09:07
Speaker 1: Oh my goodness, Now I don't feel so bad.

00:09:09
Speaker 2: Even the memorial list title I went with, that never Let Me Go memorial list is from the two thousands.

00:09:15
Speaker 1: Oh no, I.

00:09:16
Speaker 2: Had no idea I did that. But all five movies I picked at that time were from the two thousands. And even more than that, that whole idea, I had that brilliant idea of programming my own film festival.

00:09:28
Speaker 1: You used it there.

00:09:29
Speaker 2: I already used it back on episode three ninety six. I even talked about Wow Who I would have a tend on behalf of the film at my film festival to give us insights on it.

00:09:39
Speaker 1: No new ideas here, we know we'll shut this thing down.

00:09:42
Speaker 2: No new ideas whatsoever.

00:09:44
Speaker 1: Please tell me you brought it five year titles.

00:09:46
Speaker 2: And you should have been somehow involved. You should have read my mind on this. So no, thank goodness that I had five different titles, Okay, that were not those five, Otherwise I would relieved of last minute shifting.

00:09:59
Speaker 1: I'm very relieved.

00:10:00
Speaker 2: So let's jump right in then, Josh, your number five overlook film of the two thousands.

00:10:04
Speaker 1: So when we talk overlooked, I think we have to talk comedies. They're just not taken seriously or thought of as they just don't have the prestige and get forgotten as we talk about the great films and look back. So I'm going to start with the comedy. Two thousand and six is Natcho Libre.

00:10:24
Speaker 2: Okay?

00:10:24
Speaker 1: This is from the Napoleon Dynamite team of Jared and Jerusha Huss. Mike White here is assisting on the screenplay, and yes, it stars Jack Black. This will sell you. Adam as a Mexican friar at an orphanage who dreams of becoming a luchador. This is a masked theatrical wrestler in the world of Lucha Libre. Black teams up with a street criminal played by Hector Jimenez to go undercover as a tag team wrestle to make money for the orphanage, despite you know it being banned by his religious superiors. All right, there's a ton of funny stuff here, trust me, Adam about piety, a ton about religious hypocrisy. There are some wonderfully outrageous costumes, and I think this is one of Jack Black's best straight comic performances. He gets a few chances to sing, of course, so you gotta love that his eyebrows have to be at their wiggliest. I think because they're inexplicably competing with this curly mop top he chooses to have for the part.

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Speaker 5: Okay, or fans listen to it.

00:11:24
Speaker 4: Listen to Ignacio.

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Speaker 5: I know it is fun to wrestle, and I spiled direct to the face or a bunch to the face, but you cannot do it because it is in the Bible not to wrestle your neighbor.

00:11:39
Speaker 2: So you've never wrestled me?

00:11:42
Speaker 1: No, come on, don't be crazy now. Is it problematic that Jack Black is playing a Mexican character?

00:11:49
Speaker 2: Probably questions no one would have asked you and if you hadn't brought it up?

00:11:52
Speaker 1: And if so so as much of Masacar Theater, Black saccent definitely veers into Italian by way of Vigo Mortensen in green Book Territory. That's part of the pleasure of Nacho Libre. I think, ultimately too, I can defend that choice because affection, not mockery, is at the heart of this movie. I think that's also a hallmark of the Hesses films, and here, especially for the movies loser characters. It gives Nacho Black's character the sort of reverence that other films give to Matine Idols. It just looks at him this way, no matter how ridiculous he is being, and Black plays him as if he deserves this sort of vantage point, this sort of treatment. By the end of the film, despite all the silliness, we believe it too. Nacho Libre, Adam, have you seen it?

00:12:40
Speaker 2: Have I seen it? I glanced at the Film Spotting archive. First I have to ask, what is it with you in comedies where characters speak a lot of Spanish?

00:12:48
Speaker 1: Is that just a thought, baby Padre?

00:12:50
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly.

00:12:51
Speaker 1: It doesn't become a trend until there are three at them.

00:12:54
Speaker 2: Okay, I'm sure I can find one. But looking at the archive of our ratings back on episode oneh eight of Film Spotting, at that point were experts so main review Nacho Libre, Sam and I two stars each.

00:13:10
Speaker 1: Out of two out of five. Did you were working with the two star rating system at that point, right?

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Speaker 2: Not fans of Nacho Libre. We were probably too hard on it. We were probably too hard on it. I'll give you that.

00:13:22
Speaker 1: I can just see the two of you sitting in the theater, arms folded. Totally serious. Critics do not like this sort of.

00:13:27
Speaker 2: Ste hundred percent all right, My number five overlooked film of the two thousands is the movie that is probably the most unoverlooked of all five of my choices, meaning it's the one that's probably most widely seen. Most people listening have probably at least heard of the movie, whether or not they have made the time for it. It made sixty five million dollars at the box office, not a huge haul, but you do have to consider that it was made for sixty two so this was a gigantic disappointment. That's sixty five million worldwide. In the US it only made like thirty six or thirty seven in its favor. It also is mostly appreciated by critics. It has an eighty two percent on Rotten Tomatoes. But if you look at any list of the best films by this filmmaker, and the filmmaker is Ridley Scott made twenty plus movies, Matchstickmen is usually in the bottom half. This two thousand and three con Man film starring Nicholas Cage and the assassination of Jesse James Rockwell so good in this film. This is a movie that has been an honorable mention a few times over the years, has been in consideration for various lists a few times, including Top five con Movies. It made only one top five list though over the years, and I'm not going to say which one that is because that might give away some of the fun actually of Matchstick Men. But this is Nicholas Cage two to three years before he hits that straight to DVD point of his career that he still seems to be ensconsdin. He plays Roy, who is a con artist in La Sam Rockwell is his partner, Frank, and he has a lot of issues, including Tourette syndrome and OCD, and he has a really bad panic attack and that's when his partner suggests he sees a psychiatrist, and through that whole process of going through therapy, he eventually discovers that he has a daughter, a fourteen year old daughter who's played by Alison Lowan. So while he is also trying to pull off these cons, including one big con, he's also trying to kind of make amends for some of his past bad choices and try to be as best as he can be a good father to this daughter. He now discovers, Jeez, your worse than mom, Angela, Listen, I'm glad I met you.

00:15:46
Speaker 3: I'm glad we met, I really am. But I've got a business and I've got a partner, and I've got things a certain way, and that's it. So you know, I think it'd be better for you most of all, if tomorrow morning I took you back home.

00:16:01
Speaker 5: What did I do wrong?

00:16:03
Speaker 3: Didn't do anything wrong.

00:16:04
Speaker 2: I did not plan for there to be I swear any kind of theme running through most of my choices here, but it is a theme that goes back to our discussion of Jesse James. This whole idea of storytelling and narratives, and as a con artist, Roy is someone who makes his living off of narratives, telling pe people what they want to hear or what he thinks they need to hear, and he's trying to go about changing his narrative. The movie also largely succeeds based on us as viewers, seeing and hearing what best fits the story that we think is unfolding in front of us. Our friend Keith Fipps from the Next Picture Show writing then for The av Club, said that Scott lets the machinery, the film's grand scale con click into place with a craftsman's expertise, but what's truly impressive is Match Stick Men's ability to capture the emotions that drive the machinery, getting beyond simple greed to find the other needs that draw marks to con men and make fools of both. I think that's obviously eloquently said thereby Keith, but does get at what makes matchtick Men such a good film. Yes, there's a certain precision to the cons and how they play out. There's some great humor in not only the performance of Cage but in Rockwell, but there is a real heart to this movie as well, underneath that kind of sheen of cynicism, and I think that's what separates Match stick Men, makes it for me one of the truly memorable films of the two thousands. One I don't think gets enough love.

00:17:25
Speaker 1: In two thousand and three, I gave matchtick Men three out of four stock Okay, so I as a fan as well, And yeah, it was an interesting The two thousands were interesting for Cage because this was after stuff like the Rock and con Air, right, I believe it was. So he's he's already had a foot kind of in that looney bit territory action stuff, but he was doing stuff like this. He was doing something like The Weatherman, which I mentioned, which is a fantastic cage performance. So yeah, I liked him quite a bit in matchtick Men, and of course Rockwell is good as well. All right. At number four, I have Baby Boy. After a couple of larger scale projects like Rosewood and then his Shaft remake, John Singleton returned to the streets of south central Los Angeles. That's, of course, the sight of his breakout film Boys in the Hood. For two thousand and one's Baby Boy. This is just a really thoughtful, still stylish. It has a lot of Singleton visual touches to it, but it is ultimately a deeply thoughtful take on a selfish twenty year old single father of two who learns to embrace his responsibilities. The lead role is played by Tyrese Gibson, and at that time he was only known as a model, a singer, and a TV actor. I think he was an MTV VJ as well at the time. He makes a strong, featured debut here, full of feeling. This performance is he brings a reluctant vulnerability to it that's not on the surface, but you always sense it, and really does hold this whole thing together also good, which I had forgotten until I was looking back at it for this list. A young Taraji p Henson as his girlfriend. Really so yeah, some raw scenes, really raw scenes between the two of them. So this made my top ten list of two thousand and one. Roger Ebert also a fan at that time, and he noted his review how this movie walks a very delicate line, so I wanted to quote him here. Baby Boy is a bold criticism of young black men who carelessly father babies, live off their mind, and don't even think of looking for work. It is also a criticism of the society that pushes them into that niche. There has never been a movie with his angle on the African American experience. The movie's message to Matn like it's hero, is yes, racism has contributed to your situation, but you have to give it so much help with your own attitude. Now. Baby Boy is probably I would say it's hardly the first film that comes up when people think of John Singleton, especially since he followed this up with Too Fast, Too Furious, also with Gibson, But it's absolutely worth a look. If you never made it that far down in Singleton's filmography.

00:19:55
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm a big fan of Baby Boy. I reviewed it back in two thousand and one, in really my first full year writing any kind of reviews then as a grad student at IOWA, and I would quote from that review right now if I hadn't just glanced at it and wasn't totally embarrassed by it.

00:20:10
Speaker 1: Okay, so happens to the best, We'll be doing that.

00:20:13
Speaker 2: But I do recall I really enjoyed that film. I think it's one of Singleton's better films. He's made some movies I'm not a fan of at all, I would agree, and this is definitely up there with Boys in the Hood as one of his best. My number four is a film that comes from one of our film spotting marathons, and I didn't want to rely on these marathons too much when forming this list because those are by definition devoted to our blind spots. Of course, they're going to be fruitful ground for an overlooked list, but I'm guessing that there are a fair number of listeners in twenty seventeen who chose to overlook the first movie in our new Argentine cinema marathon, Extraordinary Stories. There's a movie from two thousand and eight, as far as I can tell, didn't even get a theatrical release in the US. There are no box office numbers for it that I could find. Not only that when it came up as part of our marathon, we had never even heard of it, right, You hadn't heard of it. True, I had never heard of it or heard of the director, Mariano Ginnas, And up until recently when Moby had it as an offering on their platform, it was pretty much impossible to see. This isn't a movie that you could just get on vod or streaming anywhere. Now, as far as I can tell, you can see it on Amazon Prime. You can rent it if you are on Prime, and you just need to set aside four hours. Yeah, but if you do that, it's well worth it.

00:21:30
Speaker 1: Absolutely. It was your I'm not sure if you mentioned this. It was your best picture.

00:21:33
Speaker 2: It was my favorite film from that marathon. And it's a movie that takes three different characters who just have letters for names. We know them as H and X and Z, and they're stories that don't really seem to be interconnected at all. And frankly, Josh has been so long since I've seen the film I'm not sure that the movie does ever really unite them in a way that maybe you would expect with a movie like this.

00:21:58
Speaker 1: I wouldn't say it all comes together.

00:22:00
Speaker 2: No, no, it doesn't come together with that kind of neat resolution. It's one of those films that, as you watch these characters and their lives and these actions unfold in front of us, you just never know what to expect. The extraordinary of the title is completely appropriate because at first it seems like all these characters are leading completely unremarkable lives. One of them is a bore civil engineer, one is an architect and surveyor, another one is basically just a bureaucrat. But they do get caught up in these truly remarkable situations. And I love the way that we become sort of active in the creation of these narratives unfolding because of the way we see here's that word from Jesse James again, perspective. The way we see different events unfold, sometimes multiple times, sometimes the camera is just moving closer gives us as viewers more of an opportunity to scrutinize. And it's not a case where it's really about showing things from different points of view. It's not as if the filmmaker is trying to make a variation on Roschaman, where it's this character's perspective and this truth. But we are always aware that there is a storyteller pulling the strings who can give us one perspective and then change it for us. And some of the techniques that are used here, too, are so great, the flashbacks that we get. There's dream sequences, there's a direct address to the camera by a dead guy, there's split screens, and yet it is so novelistic. It's one of those movies. I know you're gonna think I'm copping out here, but I think probably even you, Josh, didn't watch this in one four hour sitting. Did you?

00:23:30
Speaker 1: If I recall I had a dinner break, Okay, yeah, for some reason, they came right back to me. Yeah, what it would be a lot.

00:23:36
Speaker 2: But they seem to me. Whether it's one break or two breaks or more, it's the kind of movie that you can sort of check back in on, just like a book that you put down right that's a nice You can come back to it and just pick up at any point, and you're gonna get caught up in these characters and their events. I looked at letterboxed not the end all be all of logging movies necessarily or telling us how widely seen a movie is, but a good indicator. And only eight hundred and five people have clicked on Extraordinary Stories as a movie that they have seen. To put that in perspective. In the Mood for Love had sixty two thousand and Spirited Away had two hundred and twenty eight thousand, So only eight hundred and five people on letterbox have seen Extraordinary Stories. It was my favorite movie of that entire marathon, and it's well worth the time.

00:24:25
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're highlight of that marathon. I think I gave that aword to a different film, but did give two different awards to Extraordinary Stories. So definitely worth checking out, all right. At number three, This one for me is a really deep cut, almost totally forgotten, but it really affected me at the time and it deserves to be remembered. It's two thousand and threes My Life Without Me, starring Sarah Polly as a young woman. She's a wife and a mother of two who's diagnosed with terminal cancer. She doesn't tell her family and instead spends her last few months trying to set things up for them for life after she's gone, and this includes identifying a wife for her husband, who's played by Scott Speedman, and now at the same time, she's also starts taking these chances on things that she feels like she missed out on in her fairly mundane life. All of that probably sounds like melodrama, but knowing Polly as an actress, you can probably imagine in the subtle sincerity she brings to the part. And you also have some strong work here from Mark Ruffalo, who plays a man she meets and he comes to represent what she does feel like she may have missed out on. The director is Isabelle Couchette, and she also did the screenplay. She's adapting Nancy Kincaide's novel. Here. She just has this delicate, almost magical realist touch that keeps things from feeling too soap opery, and there's an especially nice flourish at one point a grocery store dance number where Polly's character is just doing her every day shopping and everyone around her begins to dance as she just thinks about this space she's suddenly come to inhabit with her health. I think you can also really see My Life Without Me's influence on the films that Polly would go on to make as a director, especially something like Away from Her which has this you know, there's a confirmation of mortality going on there. And also Polly's documentary Stories We Tell, where she interrogated family secrets of her own. Not as many laughs here as a nacho libre, but still a really strong film, a very moving one. It's worth a look if you are going to be tracking down some forgotten jumps from the two thousands.

00:26:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's one that's overlooked by me. I have not seen My Life Without Me. Great pick. I'm gonna stick with the Canadian theme anyway. And actually you mentioned Sarah Pauley and Stories We Tell. This is another playful take on the personal memoir. Before I give you the title, though, I have to read this email from a film Spotting listener. This is a title that I knew was going to make this list instantly, because at the start of Film Spotting Madness, we got an email chiding us for overlooking this movie and many others. As you're going to hear, the subject line was film sputtering madness. This is gonna be a theme on this show. More anger Richard Pout, Pooh, perfect out. Let's go with Pout. He's pouting in Canada. He says. I enjoy listening to your show and like to indulge in inappropriate umbrage as much as the next guy guarding your madness selections. I just received an email from the Vancouver International Film Festival Theater announcing a retrospective of a filmmaker whose absence from your bracket is so dumbfounding that I kind of can't take any of its results. Seriously. You had Ye Ye from Taiwan and in the Mood for Love from Hong Kong, but nothing from Jia Zhanka, who only spent the entire decade masterfully filming the story of China's eruption into the twenty first century. I know a touch of sin falls outside of your timeline, but you still had Platform unknown Pleasures the World, still Life, and twenty four City available for selection. Platform and still Life at least ought to have been no brainers. I'll watch a movie about people living in a city as it is being systematically demolished to accommodate the reservoir slowly rising behind the Three Gorges Dam, rather than the curated violence of comic book Earth, Tarantino Earth, or Middle Earth every time. Wow, So a lot of films there that film spotting listeners have probably also overlooked, at least a few of them. But all that said, it's not one of those movies that I'm going with here. It's the one that's in Richard's ps. He says, you also ignored the scrupulous documentary of Guy Madden's brain that is My Winnipeg, despite your fondness for films about imaginary realities. Yes, we didn't include it in Film Spotting Madness. My Winnipeg his memoir, his docu Fantasia as It's known from two thousand and eight, a movie that I viewed at the Toronto Film Festival in two thousand and seven, the same festival I saw the assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford. I saw My Winnipeg in a much more alert state. Pretty good tiff that year. I might add my three favorite films ahead of My Winnipeg at that fest. We're no country for old men, Atonement and Juno. My Winnipeg is this wonderful blending of fact in fiction and yes, fantasy, and it's still historical in nature. It's giving us some truth about the city of Winnipeg. You come away knowing much more about that city and its history than you may have ever thought you needed. Of course, you're also true things, actual things from Guy Madden's life. He chose to view Winnipeg, the city he grew up in, through the prism of his own childhood experience. And I was listening back to some of the conversation that I had along with Maddie. Actually he had just joined the show in two thousand and seven. We talked to Guy Madden in one of the little malls, just a coffee shop right there at the Toronto Film Festival outside the theaters, and he mentioned that this movie came about actually because it was the assignment of the producer. He threw out this idea, And it certainly wasn't Madden's original concept because he doesn't typically make documentaries. He has a real reverence for documentarians, and it just wasn't a mode that he saw himself working in. But it was always part of the assignment to make it personal, and that's what hooked him. Now Maddie saw the screening at that fest where Guy Madden did the narration that you hear in the movie. He performed it live there at the festival. I unfortunately missed that, but, as I said, had a chance to talk with Madden, and it was fun revisiting that conversation. I asked him what came first? Because the imagery is so vivid in this film and so outlandish and fantastic, and then you've got this wonderful voiceover narration that goes with it. I was curious which came first. Did he have the narration, he had the story and then he found these images to match it, or did he have the images in his head and matched the words with it. He talked about that in the interview, and also about whether or not going back and dramatizing moments from his own childhood but with actors playing him and his family, whether that was just on his part, a fun conceit for a film, or whether it was actual catharsis or it provided any Catharsis. And here's what he said.

00:31:06
Speaker 4: You know, it's only recently I discovered that filmmaking israel therapeutic in many ways that I never suspected. I never I've not once have I worked through any problems and gotten to the root of them or anything. But it's just that making takes so long. It's at least a year to get a feature out if you're even a fast mover, you know, and you have to watch your own movie so many times, and you have to reread what you've written then, and then in other words, you end up getting bored of what you were once obsessed with. And it's actually just kind of a form of a version therapy. It's just that you just instead of being at peace with your childhood traumas because you, like I say, work them through, you know, you've just grown tired of your traumise and they don't traumatize you anymore. Besides, you've turned them into something else, something you're now proud of.

00:31:59
Speaker 2: And it was a really fun conversation with Madden, a lot of great insights, and you can find that conversation in our show notes for this episode if you are curious over at filmspotting dot net. This movie did get a Criterion collection release in January twenty fifteenth, so it may have a little bit of a higher profile than some of the movies that we're talking about. But at the same time, you look at Letterbox, only fifty three hundred people market as viewed. I don't think it's that widely seen. Certainly could be seen by a wider audience.

00:32:27
Speaker 1: Well, and in my case, that's probably the first title that would come to mind if you said Guy Badden. But I haven't even seen it, so this is an overlooked one by me as well. Strangely, the only Madden film I've seen is Dracula Pages from a Virgin's Diary, So I've got some work to do when it comes to Madden. Okay, at the number two spot, this one people are probably going to be vaguely familiar with. They remember it came out, but may not have actually seen it because it didn't really do very well, even though it came from a big director and had big stars. It's what Lies Beneath from the year two thousand. Robert Zemeckis is the director here, and this is his thriller about a married couple played by Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer whose house appears to be haunted after their daughter leaves for college, and that causes some friction between them. She's dead.

00:33:15
Speaker 5: You know, damn well, who's dead.

00:33:19
Speaker 3: Listen to me.

00:33:20
Speaker 2: He killed her and I'm not crazy. Jony and I had a seance in the mathroom. Jony and I had nothing happened, But when I went back there, she was there.

00:33:28
Speaker 5: She was.

00:33:29
Speaker 1: This starts as a rear window riff, so Michelle Pfeiffer suspects her neighbor of murdering his wife, and then it goes on later to employ some bathtub imagery, similarly to the way Hitchcock used a shower in Psycho. Zamechis is such a master craftsman that I just love seeing him play with this sort of suspense, especially in those tub sequences. Then it goes on to do the Hitchcock thing of undermining a beloved movie star once Ford's husband comes under suspicion. So think about you know what he did with James Stewart and Vertigo, That's what he's doing with Ford here. This was wildly dismissed as a Hitchcock ripoff. That's what most people saw it as I took a little bit more generous a vantage point and appreciated it as an homage. And what's the difference, you might say for me, I saw him using the conventions to do something, and that's bring in this element of the supernatural. Now, others hated this because it was decidedly UNHITCHCOCKI in so they were damning zamachas fervon Apien Hitchcock and then making this left turn that wasn't like him. But for me, I liked how it made things distinct from the Master while also allowing the movie to draw upon him and ultimately, really in What Lies Beneath, what's most Hitchcocky in about it is that it's all about guilt, and for me, that's what made the movie stick. There are definitely thrills and suspense and gotcha moments and all that stuff, but this one stuck with me too because it is a rumination on guilt at the end of the day.

00:34:56
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's another one I need to see. I've only ever watched scenes from What Lies Beneath over the years, just coming on TV, and it always seems to be at that exact moment where we get that switch with the husband character and some of those bathtub sequences that you are mentioning, So I guess I kind of know where the movie's going. Yeah, even if I don't know how it gets there. My number two is my third film in a row, randomly from the year two thousand and eight, and it's another documentary, the one that's a lot more grounded in reality than My Winnipeg and it's At the Death House Door, directed by Steve James, co directed with Peter Gilbert, who also produced Houpe Dreams with James, was a DP on that film actually, and he also produced another James film that I considered for this list two thousand and twos Stevie, this is the letterbox description of At the Death House Door, and it will become clear in a moment why I'm reading this summary an investigation of the wrongful death of Carlos do Luna, who was executed in Texas on December seventh, nineteen eighty nine, after prosecutors ignored evidence inculpating a man who bragged to friends about committing the crimes of which Doluna was convicted. My immediate response to that was, that's funny. That's not at all what I remember At the Death House Door really being about. I remember that the Carlos Duluna case comes up, but that's not the primary narrative of this film. And sure enough, if you look at the first comment on letterbox, it's two stars from a user that says, but what they actually mean is there is nothing being investigated, and is almost two hours of an effing vicar talking to the camera. That was the very agitated response to at the Death House Door. And that plot summary. The plot summary is just off. As I said, it does explore that case and his execution and a Chicago Tribune investigation into that case. That's in fact, how this project first was pitched to Steve James. They said, we want to look at the death penalty and use this case as the key story for the film. And this was all what Steve James told me at a twenty sixteen event looking back on twenty years of his career and we touched on this film. He said that he was interested, but he was apprehensive for a variety of reasons. And then they mention a man named Carol Pickett. They said he was the chaplain for fifteen years at this prison unit in Huntsville, Texas, and he had presided over ninety five executions, including Carlos Duluna's. And that's for James where the light went off and this is where that element of storytelling comes into play. Pickett made an audio recording with each one of those ninety five men just before they were ushered off to their execution. James said, that's the film, that's the story I want to tell. I can bring in these other elements, but I want to focus on Picket. And this is something I think James has shown throughout his work, an effort to give voice to the voiceless, to the marginalized, to the overlooked in society. And there is a political element to this film, but it's really more about the existential toll that it takes on this man, who is a fascinating character. As you would imagine, there isn't really a clear sort of call to action, I would say by the end of the film, but it is a philosophical and very personal and very emotional journey. And as far as overlooked on letterbox, this movie eighty eight views, really eighty eight views round the death story, and I would not only see it, but it's up there with James's best documentaries.

00:38:25
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so it came what over ten years after Hoop Dreams is best known. That probably has a lot more letterbox views but also on even though I've followed other films in his career, I haven't seen another James film that is definitely going to be in consideration for my list when we do this next year. The twenty tens will be The Interrupters, which touches on some of those same themes that you're talking about. So yeah, I need to see at the Death House Door. All right, I think we're up to our number one, right, and I'm going to go with the promotion. I've talked before about my two thousands artistic crush on Steve Conrad. That name is also going to be an overlooked one, one that most movie fans aren't going to recognize right away. But he wrote Nicholas Cage's The Weatherman, which was, as I said, on my top five overlooked films list we did earlier, and then here he wrote and directed the promotion. This is his only feature directorial effort came out in two thousand and eight. Comedy drama. I think I describe it it's maybe more comedy than drama, but it stars John c Riley and Shawn William Scott as assistant managers at a grocery store who end up vying for this new manager position that's opening in a store they're building nearby. There's a similar vibe here to Television's The Office, which I didn't pick up on then, But we happen to be binging the Office right now at home as a family, and both are interested in some similar things. They both burrow into the mundane of the everyday and then comically highlight the pettiness that can be found there and also the humanity that's surprisingly on display in these quotidian places. And as a matter of fact, Jenni Fisher plays Shawn William Scott's wife. Scott is really good here. I mean I was a fan of him as Stiffler in the American Pie films, but this is a much more nuanced sort of comedy that he absolutely nails. And you know, I can't get enough of John c Riley when he's in comedy drama mode. This also is subtler than he is in my book Loved Cedar Rapids. I think this is a subtler film overall. And he gets this solo shuffle alone at night in the grocery store that made another top five list of mine. We did Top five dance sequences in non musicals. Number that one that was episode four twelve. I don't know why I have two. Here's my grand unified theory for my list. Adam, Yeah, dance numbers in grocery stores. Okay, that's what I use to form this list. Now, like The Office, which I think begins by laughing at the people that we see in the office, here we begin by laughing at these two guys, and then it turns into something where we do begin to sympathize with them, and it allows the promotion to become Here's where it's helpful to look back at when the movie came out too. For me, a real part of the value of it which may not register as much today, but back in two thousand and eight, it was really trenchant and timely, just on the brink of recession. You've got these two decent, average joes who are caught in this rat race, and instead of just lampooning that, it kind of makes us understand that they're both clawing after the same piece of moldy cheese and they're gonna lose out at the end, and the comedy comes in recognizing and empathizing with their plight. So I just really love the promotion, and I haven't done the letterbox thing. I'd be curious. Maybe i'll do that and see a minute here what the viewings are for this, because it doesn't get talked about nearly enough.

00:41:43
Speaker 2: No, and it's one I haven't seen. I was gonna say that I haven't seen any of Conrad's stuff, but actually I know. I watched The weather Man. I rented it at some point, Okay, never reviewed it, never really thought about it, seriously liked the film, Like the Cage Performance. It wasn't a film I had as passionate a reaction to as you. But I have never seen the promotion despite all the times you have brought it up here over the years. I definitely do need to see it.

00:42:06
Speaker 1: And just found it on Letterbrocks. Two thousand views, ok so I can be two.

00:42:10
Speaker 2: Thousand and one. Yeah, if I finally see the promotion. And speaking of Sean William Scott, I did think about Role Models, the David Wayne comedy which I had going, yeah, he's so good in that with Paul Rudd, but didn't quite make the list for me. My number one is a movie that I did initially think of and then write off because I thought longtime listeners are very familiar with how much I love this film. But the reality is, when I think about a film from the two thousands, going back to that original premise, that I abandoned a movie that I would love to watch with an audience at a film festival, and that I know not enough people have seen because they probably just like me, initially dismissed it because of the title. It's Lynn Shelton's hump Day. Ah Yes, and this is a film that won astute critic who gave it a positive review on his website, described this way, writer director Lynn Shelton takes a boozy late night query what if a pair of male heterosexual best friends agreed to have sex on film for an amateur porn contest, and turns it into a thoughtful, revealing, and challenging consideration of what it means to be a friend, a husband, a lover, and a straight man. That is one Josh Larsen, writing about hump Day, a movie that came out in two thousand and nine and was my number two movie of that year, I was initially thinking of Shelton as one of these filmmakers who might fit in nicely as one of the key filmmakers of this period. But actually it's a little bit later. If you look at We Go Way back in two thousand and six, which I haven't seen, then My Effortless Brilliance, which is the first film I think that really garnered her some attention, and then hump Day that was two thousand and eight and nine, and then we get Your Sister's Sister in Touchy Feely later on into the twenty later on into the twenty tens, and the movie is this thoughtful consideration of what it means to be all of those things you touched on Josh, A friend, a husband. It's very much a movie about marriage, and it's also very much a movie about art and about artists or people who at some point in their lives find themselves questioning some of their choices and wanting to make some kind of emphatic statement. They want to to put it, in the parlance of some of the films we've talked about here on the show so far, to craft a new narrative for themselves, to break out of the story that they are currently in. And they think that this radical act being captured on film is going to be what does it for them. But them in this case is Mark Duplas and Joshua Leonard, who were best friends back in college and then reconnect here in their mid thirties. Stop trying to let me off the hook, because you know what it sounds like.

00:44:38
Speaker 1: It sounds like you're trying to put this off on me as why we're not doing You can't handle.

00:44:43
Speaker 3: Straight up, straight up, straight up, straight up, you would have sex with me on film for this project.

00:44:50
Speaker 1: Would absolutely do this. You could or you would.

00:44:54
Speaker 2: This is a movie that I do think offers a lot to think about, but also is really funny and does fit into this kind of mumble core concept at least as far as being it seems mostly improvised, structured but improvised. Those two have great chemistry together, Duplas and Leonard, and I guess at the end of the day, any movie that can be called hump Day and be as profound as it is deserves to be seen by more people. Hump Day is my number one overlooked film of the two thousands.

00:45:23
Speaker 1: I like this. You should quote me in your picks more often.

00:45:26
Speaker 2: I don't think I've ever done that before. It worked. It's not wrong word it felt wrong, but Yeah, actually no.

00:45:31
Speaker 1: I needed you there a little haft to your reasoning.

00:45:33
Speaker 2: Those are our top five overlooked films of the two thousands. I'm guessing we might have a few honorable mentions. I know I do because they were the movies already mentioned by me on episode three ninety six. Yes, obviously I said it was my never Let Me Go memorial list all films from the two thousand. Somehow I had shotgun stories, the great Jeff Nichols debut Enemies of the People, a documentary I saw, I Believe It's Sundance, Fast Food Nation from Richard Link later Black Snake Moan, the Craig Brewer follow up to Hustle and Flow that Sam and I both adored, and Son of Rambo, which Sam and I saw at a festival and also love. Those were the five that obviously would fit in great on this list if they weren't already mentioned. A couple others I'll throw out that I did seriously think about Josh John Cameron Mitchell's first two films, Head Wigganying is getting a Criterion release, but I still don't feel like it maybe gets the do it deserves. So I thought about it. Short Bus is another film that I really do enjoy. Mysterious Skin. I wouldn't say that. Greg Iroki film starring Joseph Gordon Levitt, is a film I enjoy because it's a very tough sit but a very well made film. And finally, Roman Barani's Man Push Krt. Maybe the number six film on this list for me.

00:46:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I remember one Ebert particularly really championing.

00:46:51
Speaker 2: Yeah, he did. In fact, I saw it for the first time in my Ebert class at the University of Chicago's Gram School. When I did my Remembering Ebert course looking at films that he championed. That Barani film was on the syllabus.

00:47:03
Speaker 1: There you go, all right, So I obviously have a whole host of honorable mentions I could get to. I'm just going to grab a few from that.

00:47:10
Speaker 2: How many other films is Steve Conrad mean?

00:47:12
Speaker 1: Unfortunately, what I brought up were the highlights? All right? So Dinosaur is this early Disney computer animated effort that's a beautiful artifact and also a moving survival story. Unfaithful is an infidelity drama with Richard Gear and a career high performance from Diane Lane. Borrows very heavily more heavily. Now I can recognize after I've seen David Lean's masterful Brief Encounter. I had just seen that recently and realized how much is that playing on I like them Faithful Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, George Clooney's directorial debut, still his best Auto Focus. This is an underrated.

00:47:48
Speaker 2: Paul Schrader film, Yes, haven't seen.

00:47:50
Speaker 1: It, with Greg kinnear as sex addict Hogan's hero star Bob Crane. I'll just leave that there. Role Bounce is Malcolm Deeley's sweet family drama set around to south side Chicago roller rink in nineteen seventy eight stars Bow Wow Remember Bow Wow, Adam where you listen to him in the two thousands? Sure, and then one more here Skycaptain in the World of Tomorrow, a stunning first step into our now dominant movie world of digital special effects, for better and for worse. But I just love how Skycaptain looks.

00:48:19
Speaker 2: Haven't seen that one. So a lot of films overlooked by the other host here on Film Spotting. I think that makes it a pretty good list, and I will point out, although we don't necessarily always list the honorable mentions, if we were going through those very quickly. You couldn't jot down some of the titles you were curious about. We put the titles for every top five list, including a lot of the clips that you hear played on the show other links that might be relevant on our website filmspotting dot net. You just click on lists at the top of the page and you can look back at every single top five list and all the titles that make our lists. You thought you'd catch me, Josh, but Argentine Cinema my best picture of the marathon. I don't know if it deep deep.

00:49:11
Speaker 1: It's a great stordinary STORYLM.

00:49:13
Speaker 2: Yeah. Those were our top five overlook movies of the two thousands. Hope that they won't stay overlooked for long for you if you haven't seen them, especially Nacho Libre, Right, Josh, gotta get to Nacho.

00:49:26
Speaker 1: Since we've done that show, the hordes have just come to support me in their love for Nacho Libre.

00:49:33
Speaker 2: Access to the film Spotting Archive just one of the benefits of joining the Film Spotting Family, plus bonus shows, weekly newsletter, early access to events, and more. You can learn more at film spotting family dot com.

00:49:46
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening.

00:49:47
Speaker 5: This conversation can serve no purpose anymore, but fine.