Lupe's Top 20 of 2001

20. Mulholland Drive (drama)
The girl actually acts in one scene, and... wait, what?  How many movies is this?  Why is anybody doing anything?  What day is it?  Does it have to be human flesh, why can't it be animal flesh?  I don't have time to explain it to you now.

19. Waking Life (animated)
Is this a movie or a lecture?  It's like a literal dream documentary (with a monkey).  Or at least, someone forgot to add a story.

18. Zoolander (comedy)
A triumph of being both exceedingly silly and kind of homo.  Kudos, Ben Stiller.

17. Crazy/Beautiful (romantic drama)
That title describes every girl I know.  Or at least the beautiful ones.  Okay, I'm kidding.  I don't know any girls.

16. Vanilla Sky (drama)
Something about a Holodeck malfunction, but Picard and Worf were seriously underrepresented.  Instead, it was all about how much Tom Cruise loves his own face.

15. A.I. - Artificial Intelligence (sci-fi)
Spielberg's doing his best, but this is still like weepy Kubrick.  Moral of the story: the robots will miss us when we're gone.  Someone tell Agent Smith.

14. Enemy at the Gates (war)
A modern day Euro-pansy should be dumped into the eastern front next time he whines about life being unfair.  If he lives long enough, he might find a rifle amongst the dead.  Maybe it will have bullets.  If he's really lucky, Rachel Weisz's hands won't be too cold.  Wait, she's got a Kraut name, get her!

13. Gosford Park (period drama)
Why does it take eighty minutes for the plot to start?  What is this, The Rules of the Game?  Clue got there in like ten minutes.  Spoiler alert:  Snape kills Dumbledore.  Wait, Alan Rickman's not in this...

12. Monsters, Inc. (animated, all ages)
If you could really harness a child's fear as an energy source, I'd get rich just by walking down the street.  They really take a shine to my hunch, my scowl, and my greasy trenchcoat.

11. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (comedy)
Astonishingly, Will Ferrell is out-funnied by Jason Mewes, Judd Nelson, Shannon Elizabeth, Carrie Fisher, Sean William Scott, Tracy Morgan, Diedrich Bader, James Van Der Beek, Shannen Doherty, and Gus Van Sant.  And a monkey.

10. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (fantasy adventure)
Innocent children inducted into devil worshipping cult, and so on.  We all know this is a threat to society, right?  A philosopher's stone by any other name...

9. Training Day (crime)
After all that, the chest thumping, the dirty dealing, Denzel's inflated sense of his own badassery, and in the end the Russians were scarier after all.  Do svidanya, King Kong.

8. The Devil's Backbone (foreign, horror)
Spanish geezer go boom.  Take note, Saw series.  Scary can be done without resorting to cheap shock tactics.  Sometimes all you need is a dead kid to get things done, so to speak.

7. Ocean's Eleven (comedy)
I guess ripping off one of those gas station casinos near the California state line isn't good enough for this crew.  Then again, their personalities are larger than life, so I guess their target should be, too.

6. Black Hawk Down (war)
Cultural sensitivity aside, Mogadishu looks like an armpit.  A few burning helicopters actually brighten up the place.  Our boys really suffer for our art.  At least it wasn't the eastern front.

5. Amelie (foreign, romantic comedy)
Accordions.  Ennui.  L'amour.  Yup, this is French.  Seriously, Tim Burton would be whimsical like this if he didn't secretly yearn to be a suicide girl.

4. Ghost World (comedy)
Sometimes a person's life can be so bleak it's funny.  That's definitely true of the characters in this movie.  People tell me I'm like that, but I don't think they're laughing with me.

3. Donnie Darko (sci-fi...?)
It's got Patrick Swayze (God rest his soul) playing Pete Townsend.  Use this opportunity to make your own joke about putting baby in a corner.  He may have been a little too committed to sparkle motion.

2. The Royal Tenenbaums (drama)
Hey Black Hawk Down, choke on this ensemble cast!  Gene Hackman's dead on about the whole Greg and Marcia Brady thing.  Still frowned upon.

1. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (fantasy)
Once, I found a website that would give you a hobbit name.  Mine was something like Poofo Fattleby.  Anyway, Gandalf's schnoz may be subtext for the supposed WW2 allegory, but I really don't see it.  I saw this, though, like six times in the theater.