What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 2007

The Year: 2007
What the Nominees Were: Juno, Michael Clayton, No Country for Old Men, Atonement, There Will Be Blood
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Nope, that’s a great list.

What Did Win: No Country for Old Men
How It’s Aged: It’s brilliant, one of the best movies of the 21st century. Certainly one of the most chilling villains ever presented. And yet…

What Should’ve Won: There Will Be Blood
How Hard Was the Decision: Extremely hard. How could I take away such a deserving Oscar win? But There Will Be Blood is even better. If I could move either of these by a year either way, they would both easily win.

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Writer: Anderson, very loosely based on the novel “Oil!” by Upton Sinclair
Stars: Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano

The Story: In 1898 silver prospector Daniel Plainview discovers oil instead and shifts focus. When his shady practices kill one of his men, he adopts the man’s toddler son, H.W. Later H.W. is deafened in another accident, and his relationship with his father becomes more and more strained. Meanwhile, Daniel gets into an longstanding struggle with a preacher named Eli Sunday, resulting in a death-by-bowing-pin.

Any Nominations or Wins: It won Actor and Cinematography, but lost Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Art Direction, Editing and Sound Editing.
Why It Didn’t Win: The Academy had unwisely passed over Fargo and now the Coens were overdue, so this movie just couldn’t compete with No Country for Old Men.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. Anyone whose read “The Jungle” won’t be surprised to hear that, in Sinclair’s novel, the anti-drilling heroes turn to socialism, but Anderson eliminates all that here (as well as all reference to the real-life Teapot Dome scandal). Instead, Anderson crafts a story similar in feel to that of a different muckraking novelist, Frank Norris, whose “McTeague” became the legendary silent movie Greed. Ultimately, Anderson was right to make the story his own. No one in the movie has the moral standing to heroically denounce Daniel, but the viewer sees enough to do that ourselves.
2. Usually, when I walk out of movie talking about its intrusive score, it’s because I didn’t like it (I’m looking at you, Hans Zimmer). This is one of the rare movies where the score is very noticeable and I actually loved it. Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood makes the whole movie weirder and more discordant than it would have been, which is all to the good. (Anderson gives Greenwood a great showcase by having no dialogue in the first 15 minutes, which have a similar feel to a previous winner of mine, 2001: A Space Odyssey.)
   
3. Noted Hollywood asshole Quentin Tarantino recently picked a fight with this movie for no reason, claiming that it was ruined by a bad performance from Dano. I have no idea what he’s talking about. Dano is brilliant. Yes, it’s hard to compete when you have every scene opposite a never-better Day-Lewis, but Dano’s counterforce keeps those scenes crackling with life.
   
4. Wikipedia takes Daniel at his word when he says that he only adopted H.W. to make himself more appealing when he showed up to buy people’s land, but I don’t believe it. Daniel spends the whole movie looking for family, and it’s only when H.W. rejects him for the last time that Daniel lashes out with that claim. Yes, Daniel is an utterly evil psychopath, but that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t desire love and belonging as much as the next man, though he’s incapable of receiving it.
5. My favorite line from the movie is when Eli asks Daniel for money at the end and then adds “plus the five that is owed to me, with interest.” In the war of humiliations that has escalated between the men, Daniel had previously been “forced” to make a five thousand dollar donation to Eli’s church, but of course, it turns out he never paid it, because we all know that the secret of getting rich in America is to never pay your debts. And you scarcely even need to bury to succession of dead bodies you leave behind. No Country for Old Men may be an equally good movie to this one, and it’s got a great villain, but I find Daniel even more compelling, and I think he speaks to our real life national pain better, so I’ll give it to this one.
   

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 2006

The Year: 2006
What the Nominees Were: Babel, The Departed, Letters from Iwo Jima, Little Miss Sunshine, The Queen
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s Half Nelson was pretty brilliant. Over in Germany, The Lives of Others was great.

What Should’ve Won and Did Win: The Departed
How Hard Was the Decision: Very hard, because The Departed is not an all-time classic. I slightly prefer Half Nelson and Letters from Iwo Jima, but not strongly enough that I felt like I could take away Scorsese’s win. In the end, possession is nine tenths of the law.

Director: Martin Scorsese
Writer: William Monahan, based on the movie Infernal Affairs, screenplay by Alan Mak and Felix Chong
Stars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, Ray Winstone, Vera Farmiga, Alec Baldwin

The Story: Conflicted cop Billy Costigan goes deep undercover infiltrating the operation of Boston mob boss Frank Costello, but Costello has his own infiltrator in the police, a go-getter named Colin Sullivan. Which rat will sniff out the other first, and will anyone be left alive?

Any Other Nominations or Wins: It won Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay and Editing. It lost Supporting Actor for Wahlberg.
How It Won: I remember that it was a little shocking at the time, because reviews were not ecstatic, but Scorsese had never won and it was time to make up for past slights. Scorsese is one of the most beloved figures in Hollywood, and this movie was just good enough to get him across the finish line.

Why It Won:

1. This is not Scorsese’s best movie (I’ve already given one to Goodfellas, and Taxi Driver and Raging Bull are certainly better than this one, but got passed over in stronger years) but it is the most fun. It’s simply a thrilling cops-n-robbers shoot-em-up. It seems like everybody had a blast making it.
2. DiCaprio seems to have taken to heart the criticism of his terrible performance as an Irish-American in Scorsese’s earlier picture Gangs of New York and portrays the nationality much more authentically here. He talks on the DVD about the research he had to do. Damon and Wahlberg, on the other hand, are actually Southie guys and get to let that all hang out for once. Wahlberg got his only Oscar nomination and earns it, but Damon should have gotten one, too. Wahlberg says it was easy to channel the role from his childhood memories, with the only difference was that he was playing the kind of guy who used to arrest kids like him.
   
3. Costigan is ordered to put his info into an envelope, but the envelope has the word Citizen misspelled so he crosses it off and writes it correctly. Well, as it turns out, this envelope changes hands many times, and it’s very important that we notice it each time we see it, and characters who spot it briefly have to recognize it instantly. Crossing out that word was a brilliant way to do that.
   
4. Costello is closely based on real life criminal Whitey Bulger, who ran crime in Boston for 20 years while secretly informing for the FBI. Amazingly, Bulger was at large when they made this (#2 on the FBI’s Most Wanted list) which makes this a rather courageous story to tell. (Bulger was eventually caught, convicted and murdered in prison in 2018.)
5. There’s a lot of cultural appropriation going on here. Screenwriters Mak and Chong wrote a movie about their native Hong Kong, then Monohan kept just the bones of that and built a new story about his native Boston Irish, and Scorsese chose to direct it because it reminded him of growing up around the Italian-American mafia in Little Italy. For this movie to come together, everybody had to trust that what they knew was universal enough to fit into someone else’s framework.
6. There are X’s in every scene where somebody gets killed, which is a direct reference to the original version of Scarface, which did the same thing. Scorsese talks about in the extras how he couldn’t deal with the mob in the streets growing up because his asthma left him too weak to fight back, so he hid in the movie houses. The two places were equally important in giving Scorsese the abilities he would someday need.
   
7. Before this movie, screenwriters were terrified of cell phones. It seemed like these magical devices would make storytelling suddenly impossible, because they could solve most problems the writers could dream up. But this movie came up with all sorts of ways that cell phones, and the primitive state of texting, could create more dramatic possibilities, not fewer. (Of course, at the time, when phones still had keypads, you could text with your phone in your pocket, something you can’t do with modern phones.)
   

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 2005

The Year: 2005

What the Nominees Were: Brokeback Mountain, Capote, Crash, Good Night and Good Luck, Munich
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: The Squid and the Whale was a great coming of age tale. Over in France, The Child was a heartbreaker.

What Did Win: Crash
How It’s Aged: Terribly. A bunch of smugly-satisfied and all-too-tidy parables about race that only a wealthy white person could dream up. And writer-director Paul Haggis turned out to be a bad guy.

What Should’ve Won: Brokeback Mountain
How Hard Was the Decision: Not exactly hard! This is the most frequently cited Oscar injustice.

Director: Ang Lee
Writers: Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, based on the short story by Annie Proulx
Stars: Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Anne Hathaway, Michelle Williams

The Story: Two cowboys (shepherds actually) fall for each other on a long summer alone up on the titular mountain. Afterwards, they both return to their homes to marry women and have kids, but they reunite many times for “fishing trips” over the next twenty years, until one of them dies from what may have been a gay-bashing.

Any Nominations or Wins: It won Director, Adapted Screenplay and Score. It lost Picture, Actor for Ledger, Supporting Actor for Gyllenhaal, Supporting Actress for Williams, and Cinematography.
Why It Didn’t Win: Three guesses! There were several interviews with the aging population of Oscar voters in which they said that gay stuff was too inherently gross to them. The Academy was hugely criticized for this decision, so they inducted a boatload of young voters to keep it from happening again.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. This was a story that needed to be told. The time had finally come to tell America’s first great gay romantic epic. McMurtry had written screenplays about cowboys before, and Lee had directed a movie about gay protagonists, but only by putting that together did they produce the best movie either would ever touch. As McMurtry says on the DVD, “It’s been laying there in the west for a long long time, attraction between cowboys.” (And I shouldn’t short Ossana’s contribution. In their interview, they say that McMurtry focused on the women but Ossana focused on the men “Larry seems to think that I have more intuitiveness about the men than he does.”)
   
2. How do you write beautifully? It’s easy: put a lot of big beautiful dialogue into your characters’ mouths. But great writers can tell stories about anybody, even a hero like Ledger’s Ennis Del Mar, who can barely communicate longer than a grunt. As Hathaway says, “When he talks, the words are punching themselves out of his mouth.” In the end, it’s probably Ennis’s silence that allows him to survive, as opposed to Jack, who may have said the wrong thing to the wrong person.
   
3. All the actors make it clear that Ennis was the perfect avatar for Lee himself, who is just as silent off camera as Ennis is on camera. As Ledger says “He doesn’t say too much, but when he does it’s somewhat kind of poetic and profound… Ang is a beautiful beautiful person, complex, quiet, mysterious character”
4. A 30 page short story has been expanded into an epic, covering many years and life changes. The shocking thing is how many faces pop up that would go on to be familiar, including Linda Cardellini, Anna Ferris, Kate Mara, and even David Harbour as Gyllenhaal’s new romantic prospect! Give it up to casting director Avy Kaufman for spotting potential talent.
   
5. As the two men play with fire over the course of 20 years, everyone else in their lives eventually pieces together the truth, one by one. The looks on their faces as they realize are all examples of Lee’s super-subtle directorial brilliance. (Most of them slightly harden their eyes when they figure out they’ve been deceived. Only Jack’s mom softens them.)
   
6. How did cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto make the mountain look so gorgeous? Partially by making the towns intentionally ugly, causing us to long for the romantic idylls when they finally arrive. (Every time the Wyoming-ites appear on screen I couldn’t keep from thinking, “These miserable people have 20x as much representation as me in the Senate. They should be ecstatic.”)

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 2004

The Year: 2004
What the Nominees Were: The Aviator, Finding Neverland, Million Dollar Baby, Ray, Sideways 

Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the most obvious one! For that matter, Mean Girls is a better movie than The Aviator.

What Did Win: Million Dollar Baby
How It’s Aged: It’s a good movie. Gruesome and unpleasant, but an excellent acting showcase for both Clint Eastwood and Hilary Swank.

What Should’ve Won: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
How Hard Was the Decision: Sideways is almost equally great, and it was very hard choosing between the two. But ultimately, I think Endless Sunshine might be my favorite of the 21st century, so I should certainly award it the prize for the best movie of 2004.

Director: Michel Gondry
Writer: Charlie Kaufman, from a story by Kaufman, Gondry and Pierre Bismuth

Stars: Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffalo, Elijah Wood, Tom Wilkinson

The Story: Joel Barish pays a company called Lacuna to erase his memories of a painful relationship with a girl named Clementine, but in the middle of the process he starts to rebel and tries to flee the wave of annihilation making its way through his memories.

Any Nominations or Wins: Just two: It won Original Screenplay and lost Best Actress for Winslet. It’s insane that Carrey didn’t get a nomination. The Academy really hates him.
Why It Didn’t Win: Too weird, I guess? In a year full of weak nominations, the failure to nominate this movie has to be remembered among the Academy’s greatest marks of shame.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. Michel Gondry won the right to direct this after making some brilliant music videos (check out “The Hardest Button to Button”) and he went afterwards on to make some very good movies (I’m a big fan of Be Kind Rewind) but nothing that matched this. The imagination that fueled the music videos is on display when he creates a giant table for grown-Carrey to hide beneath as he relives his small childhood.
   
2. Why does the Academy hate Jim Carrey so much? He’s never gotten so much as a nomination despite deserving wins for The Truman Show and this. Is it because he got his start in such anti-intellectual fare as Ace Ventura, or is it a certain quality of guilelessness he can have that the Academy finds either disturbing or disingenuous? Either way, their bias is a mark against them, not him.
   
3. Like Memento this is a puzzle box movie where you let out a big “Ah-ha!” when you figure out the order the scenes are happening in, realizing we begin with a flashforward, not a flashback. Some of Charlie Kaufman’s other scripts were too clever by half, but in this one he found the perfect balance of genuine emotion with mind-bending brilliance.
4. Kaufman and Gondry pack the screen with dazzling imagination as the memories are deleted (starting with the spines of books), but there are also great visuals that have nothing to do with the deletions. As Taylor Swift would later realize, snow at the beach is always an arresting image.
   
5. This may be the only chance I get to praise the always great Kirsten Dunst, who is both funny and heartbreaking here as an assistant with a crush on the head scientist, and who gets to deliver the title line, though she accidentally credits it to Pope Alexander, rather than Alexander Pope.
   
   
   

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 2003

The Year: 2003
What the Nominees Were: The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, Lost in Translation, Master and Commander, Mystic River, Seabiscuit
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: American Splendor should definitely have gotten a nomination. Elf and the first Pirates of the Caribbean are both shockingly good movies and I wouldn’t mind if either had gotten a nod.

What Should’ve Won and Did Win: The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
How Hard Was the Decision: A very hard choice between that and American Splendor, which is certainly my favorite of the two, but ultimately I came to the same conclusion the Academy did: The totality of the Lord of the Rings films deserved some acknowledgement, and the most convenient time to do that was with the final film in the series.

Director: Peter Jackson
Writers: Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Jackson, based on the novel by J. R. R. Tolkien
Stars: Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Liv Tyler, Viggo Mortensen, Sean Astin

The Story: Questing Hobbits Frodo and Sam finally throw the ring into Mount Doom, while their human friend Aragorn (assisted by Legolas the Elf, Gimli the Troll and Gandalf the Wizard) takes over the titular job.

Any Other Nominations or Wins: It got no acting nominations, but it did win all 11 it was nominated for: Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Art Direction, Costume Design, Editing, Makeup, Score, Song, Sound Mixing and Visual Effects!
How It Won: The previous two films in the trilogy had been nominated, but neither even attempted to have a satisfying ending, which would have made it downright bizarre if either one had won. But this one had six endings, so they couldn’t complain about that this time, and now it seemed like the series was overdue. As an 8-hour epic, it was pretty damn impressive.

Why It Won:

1. Of course, nobody watches the 8-hour version anymore, because the series was expanded to 11 hours on DVD and this is one case where the expanded cut is clearly superior, filling in holes that were baffling in the theater (I hadn’t read the books yet at the time. Shortly afterward, I read them myself, then later read them aloud separately to both kids, so I’m hyperaware of what’s still missing.) This Oscar I’m giving is really for that version.
   
2. Of course, then you’re not done, because, while you have the DVDs out, you have to watch the 10 hours of documentaries, which reveal that this may be the greatest seven year collaboration in filmmaking history, with a crew of long-suffering New Zealanders manually linking over twelve million individual polycarbonate rings using pliers to make all the chainmail, not to mention every other gorgeous element of the world you see onscreen. Dozens of other fantasy films followed this one, but they all lacked Jackson’s mad vision and an antipodean country full of laborers willing to follow him off that cliff.
   
3. Heartbreakingly delivered by Sean Astin, “But I can carry you” is one of cinema’s greatest lines. I’m tearing up as I’m typing this. It’s a crime that Astin wasn’t nominated.
   
4. I’m not sure I would have nominated anyone else in the cast for this one, but they’re all excellent, especially Viggo Mortensen in the title role. He had been plugging away as a minor actor for 15 years (He’s in Witness!), then got the call-up for these epic movies with two weeks’ notice after Stuart Townsend filmed a few scenes and didn’t work out. It’s one of the great Hollywood Cinderella stories. Like Wood and Astin, he’s an American embodying a quintessentially British hero, but he has all the gravitas of a RADA-trained dramatic actor.
   
5. Of course, when I read these books to my daughter, she couldn’t help but point out how little the female characters are given to do (Jackson, Boyens and Walsh made halting efforts to beef up their roles in the screenplays), but thankfully this book and movie have one great feminist moment that makes up for a lot of it. Say it with me: “I am no man.”
   

Ah, 2003: Alas, I couldn’t find any interesting ads. Maybe it’s time to retire these as we get to the era of fewer print ads, less nostalgia and everything being less dated.  

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 2002

The Year: 2002
What the Nominees Were: Chicago, Gangs of New York, The Hours, Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, The Pianist
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Spike Jonze’s meta-mindbender Adaptation, Haynes’ mediation on melodrama Far From Heaven, and Spirited Away.

What Did Win: Chicago
How It’s Aged: It’s good. It can never quite decide if it wants to be a full adaptation with period sets and costumes, or just a filmed staging of the musical with modern sets and costumes, but Zellweger and Zeta Jones both give excellent full-tilt performances.

What Should’ve Won: Spirited Away (the American dub) (the Japanese version was released in 2001, but I’m trying to recognize movies on the year they were eligible for the American Oscars, and this movie’s American dub won an Oscar for 2002, so that’s the cut I’m recognizing.)

How Hard Was the Decision: The Pianist was eliminated due to problematicalness, which left Adaptation, Far From Heaven, and Spirited Away. In the end, I decided that the Parasite Rule must prevail and I had to choose the animated classic. (Odd that all three times I’ve used the rule it’s been for Japanese films. I don’t think of myself as a Japanophile, but that’s just the way it’s sorted itself out.)

Director: Hayao Miyazaki
Writer: Hayao Miyazaki
Stars: The late Daveigh Chase, who is wonderful; Jason Marsden; Suzanne Pleshette; David Ogden Stiers

The Story: Chihiro and her parents are en route to a new home when they get lured into an abandoned amusement park with food that turns the parents into pigs. Chihiro must take a job at a bath house for spirits in order to win their freedom.

Any Nominations or Wins: It won Best Animated Feature, which was its only nomination.
Why It Didn’t Win: Miyazaki always had some American filmmaking fans, but it wasn’t until after he (semi-)retired that he was finally recognized as one of the all-time greats. There has still never been an animated Best Picture winner, much less a foreign one, so it’s a stretch to say this could have won, but it’s been universally recognized in the years since as one of the best films ever made, so I’m giving the people of 2002 the ability to spot that.

 
Why It Should Have Won:

1. This is one of many masterpieces made by Miyazaki (I’ve been failing to point out that his other films should have been considered) but this one merges the best elements of his other films: It combines the bountiful visual imagination of Castle in the Sky and satisfyingly complex mythology of Howl’s Moving Castle, with the good-natured gentleness of My Neighbor Totoro. This is the ultimate expression of his life’s work.
   
2. For its dramatic engine, the film revisits a topic from another early Miyazaki film, Kiki’s Delivery Service: the first job. But whereas that one was about (what would come to be called) the gig economy, this one is about starting out in a minimum wage job under one roof, and it perfectly captures the ups and downs of that experience: Sometimes you spot clever solutions that the drudges around you fail to see, sometimes you make rookie mistakes that almost bring everything crashing down.
   
3. Everyone is pursuing their own self-interest except Chihiro, who is trying to rescue her parents, but even she eventually realizes that the only way to get them back is to deprioritize them and instead pay the new debts she has acquired. The theme is one of letting go (from the flowers she is crushing at the beginning, from her old school and life, and from her parents), reclaiming your name from those that would take it from you, and helping out wherever you can, without insisting on overturning the apple cart.
   
4. Most great stories contain elements of real life national pain. This film focuses on the environmental damage of Japan’s economic boom, and the financial suffering of that boom’s bust. The magical land is said to be one of many amusement parks abandoned during the recession. The stink spirit Chihiro saves is filled with pollution, and her friend Haku turns out to be the spirit of a river that was paved over. Restoring balance is always a major theme in Miyazaki’s work. (Compare this to truly terrible American animated films with environmental themes like PIXAR’s Hoppers.)
   
5. I’ve had financial opportunities I did not take because I never wanted to force my kids to move once they’d started school. Every middle-grade story about the wrenching pain kids undergo when they have to do so has affirmed that decision.

Ah, 2002: To this day, nobody knows what to do on these anniversaries...

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 2001

The Year: 2001
What the Nominees Were: A Beautiful Mind, Gosford Park, In the Bedroom, The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring, Moulin Rouge
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: In retrospect, the most acclaimed movie of this year is now David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. The Coen Brothers turned out one of their weirdest but best with The Man Who Wasn’t There. Wes Anderson almost equaled Rushmore with The Royal Tenenbaums. Donnie Darko was a great one-hit wonder. And then of course, there’s Memento…

What Did Win: A Beautiful Mind
How It’s Aged: Anyone who knows anything about mental illness was going to feel very frustrated here, wanting to shout “that’s not how that works!” An honest portrayal of the life of John Nash, who was not a very good person, would have gone down very differently.

What Should’ve Won: Memento
How Hard Was the Decision: This is another hard year because the general consensus is that the Academy was wrong and that the best movie of this year was Mulholland Drive. But I just can’t get behind that choice. The movie started as a TV pilot, and I’ve always felt it would have been a great TV show, but the decision to tack on an ending and try to wrap things up quickly was ultimately a mistake. Don’t get me wrong, the movie is great, and maybe if I didn’t know the history, I wouldn’t notice this at all, but once you know it, it’s tremendously obvious. So I decided to go with Memento. (I should point out that Memento was released in festivals in the year 2000, and won some awards that year, but didn’t have a wide release until 2001 and that was the year it was eligible for Oscars, so I’m counting it as a 2001 release.)

Director: Christopher Nolan
Writer: Christopher Nolan, based on the short story “Memento Mori” by his brother Jonathan Nolan
Stars: Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Pantoliano

The Story: A former insurance investigator named Leonard Shelby, who cannot make new memories, makes the extremely bad decision to hunt down his wife’s killer. A femme fatale named Natalie manipulates him into killing a sketchy cop named Teddy …Or that’s what we eventually figure out, but every scene in the movie is in reverse order, making everything very confusing, and putting us in his shoes.

Any Nominations or Wins: It was nominated for Original Screenplay (despite being adapted) and Best Film Editing, but lost both.
Why It Didn’t Win: An “inspiring” “true story” like A Beautiful Mind beats this gritty mindbender any day of the week.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. This is the ultimate puzzle box of a movie, and you feel very smart as you snap the jigsaw pieces together (and occasionally dumb as you fail to do so.) It’s a very satisfying reveal when we find out that the one really jerking Leonard around is neither Natalie or Teddy, but he himself. Like most of us, Leonard is his own worst enemy.
2. One of the enduring mysteries of Hollywood: why wasn’t Guy Pearce more of a star? He made a big splash with L.A. Confidential, then he had this masterful performance, and then… very little. He was lucky to get a villain role in Iron Man 3. But why wasn’t he playing Iron Man himself? Is it a case where he was picky in his roles, or was he difficult to work with, maybe? I don’t know. (For that matter, Carrie-Anne Moss should’ve gotten more parts too.)
   
3. The bizarre DVD requires you to take a psychological test to get to the menu, and if you answer it in just the right sequence it’ll give you the ultimate easter egg: the movie rearranged in chronological order. Massively edifying to see it that way, and it is possible to cheat using the internet, so check it out!
4. It’s funny to watch today. For a movie from the 21st century, the plot is very reliant on outdated technology (landlines and a polaroid camera). Leonard Shelby may still be out there killing the wrong people, but hopefully he’s doing it more efficiently these days with the help of a smartphone.
   
5. I can’t say for sure whether or not we’ll be seeing Christopher Nolan again, because I’m writing this book in order, but I can say definitively that this is my favorite of his films. I have a limited tolerance for the narrative trickery of some of his later films, but this one hits me just the right way, setting a bar that he still has yet to surpass, in my opinion. This time around, the central conceit is dazzling, and a little dizzying, but never deadening.
6. As Leonard himself point out, this whole situation is karmic justice for him denying an insurance claim of a man with a similar condition.  At the heart of so much of American literature is the evils of our health-care system.  

Ah, 2001: I guess it’s never the wrong time to send the right message, but this was an odd choice, Kenneth Cole…