wacky movie selection concept that I thought about far too much

"If you were to have a DVD-collection draft with five buddies (and by the way, don't think I haven't done this) in which everyone picks six actors in snake fashion and you get every single movie they made on DVD, Hoffman would be a sneaky late-first-round pick. You'd get "Almost Famous," "Boogie Nights," "The Talented Mr. Ripley," "Scent of a Woman" and about 10 watchable indies, right?

(Because you asked, my top 12 looks like this: Hanks, De Niro, Cruise, Stallone, Pacino, Douglas, Freeman, Damon, Hoffman, Costner, Hackman and Denzel. Late-round sleepers: Clancy Brown and Joe Pantoliano. Admit it, you want to make your own list.)"

I'd had to consider this, since it does fit in with my usual means of comparing movies and actors/actresses in quality assessment. But naturally several of those suggestions were not first rounders. Cruise and Stallone? Seriously? Rocky is pretty much it on Stallone's resume, and Cruise you could get Jamie Foxx instead to pick up Collateral No Brad Pitt or Ed Norton? And of course there's the generational gap where you're missing out on Bogart or Brando, even Connery which gets you pretty much all the decent Bond films. Besides, there's probably a couple women I'd consider on that list. Even with my war film dominated collection. Uma's been the main deal in Tarantino's work for example. Maggie Gyllenhaal? You couldn't sneak Dark Knight or Stranger than Fiction by someone that way?

I figured an easy solution would be to look for people with the most movies over 7.0-7.5 on imdb.com, or the best ratio of such films in terms of more recent stars (Christian Bale or Daniel Craig?). But that turns out to be really hard, in part because lots of people are in tons of crappy movies and only a couple really good ones (John Travolta with Pulp Fiction being about it) or because there are people you'd never think of who were in lots of good movies, but were always "that guy", the guy you don't recognize but is always in good movies, not the star of the show. PSH is one such guy, but he's pretty recognizable now. Plus 7-7.5 rating does filter out a lot of crappy movies doesn't really cut it for assessing some movies that you still wouldn't want that were otherwise watchable for other people. So I'm not sure what the solution to that would be.

Actually, I pretty much know the solution: just buy the movies you wanted to begin with. And not think about that much. What I could think about instead is the underlying argument that the defining movie of the past decade was suggested to be Almost Famous. And that's probably not that bad of an argument. It's not the best film. That's not the argument. Something like Dark Knight has a huge advantage for that case here because nobody saw Memento or Cidade de Deus. While I think Lord of the Rings were an excellent films personally, it doesn't have the same cultural resonance as any of those 3 because it's really a far older story just finally made into a decent movie. Besides, City of God was set in Rio, and Americans don't care about poor slums in other countries, at least not until Slumdog came out last year. There will be Blood was pretty good too, but there's several other historical type films like that (Gladiator, Prestige, Hotel Rwanda, Pianist, Pan's Labyrinth). Those to me seem like good films about another period in time with a important message for now. Not a message about now, but perhaps set in another time.

The argument for this is more like a sum total of the things that happened in one place on film. You could certainly argue that 9/11 did make a good case for Dark Knight there too, because there's a lot about how a population responds to fear and how it can easily create its own monsters in response. But I think culturally a lot of what happened the last decade was we kept looking backward in a sort of nostalgia for things the way they used to be, and we knew somehow weren't ever going to be the same, and that we lived in a world that we thought was pretty big, thought we were a big piece of it, and discovered that we weren't that big anymore (that again, was a 9/11 effect). And that sort of seems like Almost Famous, even though it came out in 2000. There's also the issue of a bunch of people who never really amounted to much else being involved in it. What's Kate Hudson or Cameron Crowe done since? I think we've invented a capacity for people to be excellent or relevant only once this decade and then to persist only if reminding ourselves that they once mattered (Britney Spears? or isn't this pretty much every American Idol winner?). So yeah. I can live with that pick. Of course, I didn't see anything else in this list that shot out at me either. Maybe No Country for Old Men, because that's basically the same theme. But it's less optimistic about our chances than I'd say most people have been. I'd pick it instead. But someone who actually likes people probably wouldn't.