This was a wild year for me. I had started a band and got married. I was getting toward the end of college in a pretty weird way. My cousin was dying. I transitioned from working at Blockbuster to working for my parents at the truck shop my dad owned. I was starting to worry about what my life was going to be after I graduated. My cousin started calling me ‘Quarter Century Man.’ This is the current mid-point of my life.

It is an interesting thing because I thought I knew what I wanted but there was something unsettling inside me that I couldn’t put my finger on. It felt like I was on the right track but something still felt wrong. It is easy to look back on this time and realize how profoundly unhappy I was but the truth is a bit more complicated. I was doing a lot of things I loved.

I was skating a lot, although it was winding down a bit because bailing came with a much higher cost than it had before since injuries took longer to heal. I was working on art a lot because my brother-in-law was also an artist and we motivated each other a lot. I was writing a lot, still trying to finish my first novel. I was working on the Pyschical Explorers with my writing partner Katie, and, another guy who will remain nameless. It was a satirical website about the paranormal that eventually blossomed into Katie and I writing books on the paranormal and investigating haunted places after the other guy broke up with us to see other websites. We decided, hey lets really do this. So we did,  but that was several years from this point.

The band was pretty good and we played out and had some mild label interest. I really loved doing that. The end of that venture is part of the very painful fallout that is to come in the next year but at this point, I loved it a lot. I think I was more invested than other members of the bad as evidenced by how it all ended but that is a story for later. I really loved the band a lot.

So, I was doing a lot of what I wanted to do and that is not nothing. I took a trip with friends to Las Vegas this year and joke my former roommate Oliver made led to an internet alter-ego of mine that lasted for a few years (the Baron VonStokenwhiff) and further solidified my friendship with my best friend Jeff as we went around Vegas playing silly games on elevators and pretending we were a belligerently drunk British rock band. I am sure we were a major nuisance to everyone around us but oh well. What happens in Vegas and all that. I also failed to climb the entire 80ft on an indoor rock climbing wall at Gameworks and didn’t realize until I got home that I was deeply sick. This led me to realize that in Vegas you just always feel like you have the flu.

Of course, 9/11 happened this year as well which did not do much for any kind of national sense of safety. I remember when it happened, I was sleeping because I had a later class and my then-wife woke me up to go and look at the TV. At first, I wondered why she was waking me up to watch a bad movie because I couldn’t comprehend what I was seeing. We were going through the ‘what do you mean a plane flew into the world trade center’ discussion when the second plane hit. It was terrifying and sobering and everything was chaos for quite a while. My cousin Kelly was living in New York at the time and it took a fairly long time to make sure she was safe. It was terrifying and obviously set a grim tone for the rest of the year and the foreseeable future. It was the 25^th anniversary of 9/11 yesterday and it is fairly weird that I should get to this entry on this particular weekend. We are still dealing with the legacy of 9/11 today and that is kind of scary in and of itself.

Movies were in a weird place too. Looking over the list there are a lot I loved but there are it generally feels like a lighter year than some others of that time. It might just be some of that search for identity I talked about last week that plagued this entire decade. I saw fewer movies than usual this year as there was a lot of other things going on so my connections and recollections are much less bound to movies than usual. It is also weird to realize that most of the movies in my top five are ensemble movies. Strange, that.  

Runners up roughly in release order: the Mexican, 61*, the Mummy Returns, A Knight’s Tale, Shrek, Moulin Rouge!, Evolution, the Fast and the Furious, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Made, Jurassic Park III, America’s Sweethearts, Rush Hour 2, American Pie 2, Osmosis Jones, the Others, Zoolander, Training Day, From Hell, Not Another Teen Movie, Royal Tenenbaums, and Black Hawk Down.

If you have not read the introduction to this exercise, I recommend you do so for context regarding what this all is. In short, be nice, these are my favorites based on how I encountered them in my life and what they mean for mean to me. This is not a list of objective best movies in their respective years and if a movie that you love or is considered great does not appear, it does not mean that I think it is shit or that I don’t love it. These are just my favorites for particular personal reasons. Feel free to let everyone know your favorite five for 2001 and why as well. It is also worth mentioning that there will be spoilers here for what are now 25-year-old movies. Let’s dig in!

1.Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of the Ring-Peter Jackson

The beginning of Peter Jackson’s epic and amazing adaptation of the Lord of the Rings trilogy began here to much anticipation and skepticism prior to release.

Fellowship of the Ring adapted the first novel and details the forming of the Fellowship and the beginning of their journey to destroy the One Ring all the way to the their dissolution at the end of the first novel. It all begins with Gandalf the Grey (Ian McKellan) arriving in the Shire for Bilbo Baggins’s (Ian Holm) birthday celebration. Here we meet Bilbo’s nephew Frodo (Elijah Wood) and Frodo’s friends Samwise Gamgee(Sean Astin), Merry Brandybuck (Dominic Monaghan) and Pippin Took (Billy Boyd). When Bilbo makes himself invisible to escape the party, Gandalf becomes suspicious of the ring he used to do it (this being the ring Bilbo found in the Hobbit, a book Jackson would later adapt into three movies to disastrous effect). This leads Gandalf to go off to research the ring in order to determine if this is the evil One Ring of Sauron that has a corrupting influence on its wearer and wants to return to its evil master.

When Gandalf returns, he tells Frodo that the ring must be taken to Rivendell, the home of the elves and charges Frodo with the task. Gandalf leaves to meet with fellow wizard Saruman the White (Christopher Lee) and tells Frodo he will meet him at the Inn of the Prancing Pony. Frodo sets out, with Sam, Merry and Pippin following along. The way is not safe and they are pursued by the Nazgul or Ring Wraiths, a cadre of fallen knights twisted by Sauron’s magic set to retrieve the ring for their master.

The company arrive at the Inn and are joined by Strider (Viggo Mortensen), a ranger hiding a secret past and working for Gandalf. He helps them escape to Rivendell while the Nazgul are hot on their heels. Things get serious when Frodo is stabbed by one of the Nazgul with a Morgul blade that poisons him. Only the elves can save him and they race to the elves with the Nazgul very close behind. They manage to escape when Arwen (Liv Tyler) uses her elf magic to save them.

Frodo wakes up in the elven city and joins the council to discuss what needs to happen with the ring. It is revealed that Strider is Aragorn, heir of Isildur, a king who had failed to destroy the ring in the first War of the Ring, thus making him the rightful heir to Gondor and Arnor. Aragorn is also in love with Arwen, daughter of Elrond Half-Elven (Hugo Weaving) but their love is forbidden unless he takes up the throne which he is not willing to do. It is also revealed that the ring must be taken to be thrown in the fires of Mount Doom where it was forged in order to destroy it. There is a great deal of disagreement of how this could be done and whether or not it should be done. Boromir of Gondor (Sean Bean) feels it is a weapon to be wielded. Legolas of the elves (Orlando Bloom) calls this out for madness. The Dwarf Gimli (John Rhys-Davies) does not want the ring to be taken by the elves. It devolves into a shouting match until Frodo volunteers to take the ring although he concedes that he does not know the way.

The Fellowship is formed of Aragorn, Boromir, Gimli, Legoas, Gandalf, and the hobbits to help Frodo get there. As they make their progress, they find themselves stymied at every turn not just by the machinations of Sauron but also by Saruman who has been corrupted to the side of darkness and has created an army of orks to find the ring and bring the world to heel.

The now fracturing fellowship continue on, pursued by Gollum (Andy Serkis) the creature Frodo had gotten the ring from in the Hobbit and meet with Galadriel (Cate Blanchett) who helps them along the way. The fellowship eventually fractures and the hobbits go along by themselves and the rest of the Fellowship go off to help in other ways.

That was a longer plot summary than I usually do and even still it has omitted a fair amount of what happens in this very long film. The theatrical release was two hours and 58 minutes with the extended edition clocking in 30 minutes longer. I bring all that up and provide the longer summary just to illustrate a point about how much is packed in this movie and how largely faithful Peter Jackson was before mentioning how pissed a lot of people were before the movie came out because of all the changes he was making.

These were still pretty early days for the internet and a lot of nerds used it to bitch about the Lord of the Rings movies before they came out. Well, in fairness, they used it to bitch about movies in general which will be addressed in an entry later on this list, but I remember reading endless pages ranting about stuff that Jackson was doing wrong.

I read the first book before the movie came out so I had opinions (I have been stuck on the last 10 pages of the Two Towers for the past 25 or so years). People were annoyed that Jackson was getting rid of the songs and that there was no mention whatsoever about Tom Bombadil. There was also a lot of dissatisfaction that Arwen would be played by Liv Tyler and that it looked like she did more in the movie than pine after Aragorn. For me going in, I was encouraged by all of that and thought these ‘fans’ were being ridiculous. I had arguments about this with the guitar player of my band both before and after the movie came out.

When the film released, a goodly portion of these detractors were silenced, although the Arwen thing still stuck in a lot of misogynist craws. The movie was enormously successful, was nominated for Best Picture and solidified pretty much everyone involved as major talents. It was really something for something so high fantasy to be taken seriously as typically fantasy films were firmly left in the b-movie bin with low budgets and poor execution (see the Dungeons and Dragons movie from 2000 to see what I mean). But here we have a triumphant and epic movie that was just the start of a trilogy.

The craft and attention to detail in this movie was impeccable and the making of it has been better documented than historical evidence for the Bible. The WETA workshop, coming off of work on the Frighteners, managed to meld CGI and practical effects seamlessly for one of the most visually impressive films ever made. That it holds up to this day is further evidence of the amazing work they did here.

The performances were all amazing and went even further solidifying this as an important and legitimate film, not one that should be discounted by subject matter. Everyone was taking this seriously and the performances reflected that. There were no tongues in cheeks or nods to the inherent silliness of high fantasy drama. And it worked so well.

All of these things contributed to this being the best movie of the year but I think it is Jackson understanding what would work in a movie that really makes this the masterpiece it is. JRR Tolkien, the author of the novels, wrote the bulk of the Lord of the Rings during WWII after having fought in WWI. While he disliked allegory and denied that WWII influenced the events in the story, including assertions that the One Ring symbolized the atomic bomb. Tolkien held that had that been the case, they would have used it to destroy Sauron. But allegory or not, the trauma of WWI and the constant threats during WWII certainly influenced what he wrote about in the novels.

To this end, the novels luxuriate in things like food, clothing, and songs while some of the more action oriented elements are more or less hand waved away. This is nowhere more apparent than when Gandalf faces the Balrog in the novel. The Balrog and the conflict gets a paragraph. I am not saying any of this as an attack on the novels. My own preferences aside, I understand what is up and the character and world building, and indeed language building is amazing. But there is a lot there that would not translate as well to movie form (See the Hobbit movies for evidence of this).

What Jackson did as far as curation is what makes all this work as well as it does. While any change does take away somewhat from Tolkien’s original vision, I argue that Jackson’s treatment of the material brings out its feel and intention onto the movie screen with a success that would have been impossible for a one to one translation. In expanding some sequences and retracting or omitting others, Jackson is able to bring the most faithful version of the tone and intention possible. It is like on a comics page, if you show action as it looks in reality, it feels lifeless and boring whereas when you exaggerate movement for legibility it looks dynamic, exciting, and more realistic. Jackson made the Fellowship of the Rings more legible for the screen.

When I read the book, I hated Boromir. HATED Boromir. When standing in line (which is a thing we had to do back then to get good seats at the theater) to see the movie, I said to Jeff, who had seen it earlier in the day as well, that I couldn’t wait to see Boromir die in the movie. Jeff looked at me like I had kicked a puppy. He said ‘I can’t believe you would say that.’ I was resolute in my disdain. Then I saw the movie and I was sobbing when Boromir died. The humanity that Sean Bean gave the character and the care Jackson put in crafting him took him from my most hated character in the book to someone I cried over when he died. That is the magic that Jackson and the cast brought to this movie.

I saw Fellowship five times in the theater during its initial run. That is a lot of hours to spend in Middle Earth and I have spent even more still with the extended edition. I LOVE the Lord of the Rings and it is mostly because of the movies. I should clarify that I loved the Hobbit when I read it. It is a book I am enormously fond of and I find it ironic that I love the movies of the trilogy I care less for in book form and hate the movies made of the book I have enormous affection for. It is a weird world to be sure.

2.Ocean’s Eleven-Steven Soderberg

A remake of the Rat-pack starring original, Ocean’s Eleven is a slick, funny, and enormously cool heist movie that I will never be tired of rewatching.

When his girlfriend Tess(Julia Roberts) leaves him for casino owner Terry Benedict( Andy Garcia), professional thief Danny Ocean (George Clooney) decides to recruit a crew to do the impossible: rob three Las Vegas casinos at the same time. In order to do this, he recruits 11 thieves with different skill sets: Rusty Ryan (Brad Pitt), Frank Catton (Bernie Mac), Rueben Tishkoff (Elliott Gould), Livingston Dell (Eddie Jemison), Virgil and Turk Malloy (Casey Affleck and Scott Caan respectively), Yen (Shaobo Qin), Saul Bloom (Carl Reiner), Basher Carr (Don Cheadle), Linus Caldwell (Matt Damon), and Jerry Mathers as the Beaver. Okay, sorry about the Beaver part, I couldn’t help myself and am just kidding.

The story here is told a little bit out of sequence and shows some things to keep how they actually pull of the heist a secret until the big reveal. It is a creative way of doing it that has set a particular standard for heist movies afterward. The recruitment scenes are probably most responsible for the trope parodied on Rick and Morty as ‘you son of a bitch, I’m in’ and while it was not the first to do any of that, it has become the short hand for it ever since.

The chemistry with the cast mixed with top notch writing make this movie an absolute joy to watch. That it keeps you on your toes with a twisty plot make it even more fun and rewards repeat viewings. The good will and affection for the absolute murderer’s row of performers led to three sequels. One of them is great. One is pretty good and one is watchable. None of them really get back to the heights of this one, though, and it remains a bit of lightning in a bottle.

I saw this in the theater and while my particular experience wasn’t a particularly memorable trip to the movies, it was a movie that memorably made me very happy. I watched this movie a lot at home, once it came out on DVD. It became a comfort film for me to throw on when I was feeling depressed, stressed, or lonely. I remember a particular time, shortly after my first divorce, in which I was alone in my bedroom trying to rebuild what was left of my things, when I put it on and it immediately made me feel more comfortable. There was a lot of solace taken in movies during that time and this was one of the go tos. It is bittersweet as I don’t really watch it much anymore, associated as it is in that time of my life, but I still love it and I always will.

3.Memento-Christopher Nolan

Christopher Nolan’s first full length theatrical release, Memento is wholly unique amongst the director’s work while also being a preview of what was to come in his career.

Memento is a complicated story of an insurance adjuster named Leonard (Guy Pearce) who suffers from anterograde amnesia, which means he cannot form new memories, and uses notes and tattoos in order to track down his wife’s murderer. Along the way he is helped and/or hindered by Teddy (Joe Pantaliano) and Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss) who seem to be at cross purposes as they interact with Leonard. He has to try to make heads or tails of what’s going on based on his tattoos, notes, and photographs but never remembers how any of that stuff got there. The story is twisty on its own even before you add the real Nolanesque element: it is told backwards.

Memento really started Nolan off with a bang. The backwards narrative was really mind-blowing and rewarded not only close attention during the movie but also repeat viewings once the mystery is solved. It made 25 million worldwide off of a 9 million budget which isn’t a massive, meteoric success but it was enough to let people know that Nolan was a writer/director to watch.

Guy Pearce continued being excellent and Joey Pants and Carrie-Anne Moss were reunited from the Matrix. The narrative is driving and propulsive, even backwards, and the film is put together with the confidence of a more experienced director. It also announces that Nolan is really into non-linear storytelling, something he continues to return to today for better and for worse.

I loved Memento when I saw it at the Loft here in Tucson. Anterograde amnesia fascinated me and I had studied it in a Memory class I had in college. The amnesia unit was somewhat personal to me as I had a friend who had retrograde amnesia who actually showed up to take that class as well but as familiar as I was with retrograde amnesia, in which something causes memory loss of the past, anterograde was entirely foreign. It is hard to imagine which is worse, really, losing your entire past or losing your entire future but the loss of short term memory is absolutely devastating as the only present that exists only lasts for roughly 15 minutes at a time.

It is kind of fanciful to imagine someone like Leonard would be able to be out and about to solve a murder but the conceit works here dramatically. It is also a way to comment on how vulnerable a person in this position would be and how easy it could be for bad people to exploit them.

I showed this to my mom as I get my love of murder mysteries from her and sat with an expectant smile on my face as she watched. She got up right to the point where everything was about to make sense and she turned it off because she didn’t know what was going on and didn’t want to given it the three minutes needed to get there. This was very frustrating and disappointing to me but I suppose it is just an example of ‘your mileage may vary.’ Oh well, I have watched it enough over the years for the both of us. It has made me somewhat gunshy about showing it to people with any kind of expectation whatsoever.  

4.Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back-Kevin Smith

The culmination of all of his movies up to this point, and originally meant to close the book on the View Askewniverse entirely, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is like the Avengers of Kevin Smith’s characters.

After Randall (Jeff Anderson) has Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Kevin Smith) arrested, the pair go to Brodie (Jason Lee), who is canonically Randall’s cousin, to tell him their tale of woe, Brodie mentions the Bluntman and Chronic movie in an effort to cheer them up. Jay and Bob have no idea what he is talking about and he suggests that they should go talk to Holden (Ben Affleck) and Banky (also Jason Lee) to get their payment for likeness rights.

They go to Holden who tells them that he sold his part of the franchise to Banky years ago and they would have to talk to him. He also reveals that the movie is filming in Hollywood and is poised to make a ton of money according to the internet buzz. This leads to an explanation of the toxic fandom going on online via a website called MoviePoopshoot.com in which special attention is paid to the forum attached to it. This is a referent to Ain’t It Cool News and the toxic horeshit from that forum but it was pretty funny to see given that I was a regular contributor at the time to the News Askew forum as I have previously mentioned.

What follows is a road trip movie in which Jay and Bob try to get across the country to stop the movie from being made as they are angry that internet trolls are talking shit about Jay and Silent Bob online. In doing so they become embroiled in a diamond heist plot disguised as an animal rights group. When they release a bunch of animals from a testing faciligy, including an orangutan named Suzanne (who was teased at the end of Mallrats), they find federal wildlife Marshall Willandholly (Will Ferrel) hot on their trail.

This movie is silly as hell and just as fun. It features a metric shit ton of cameos from view askew characters as well as original characters. It crosses over with other movies, including a Scream sequence featuring Wes Craven, and a scene from Good Will Hunting 2: Hunting Season. As a way to close down the universe, this sure does the trick with a kitchen sink approach that scratches a lot of itches. It shows us what happens with Banky after Chasing Amy (he’s dating Hooper X), we see Alyssa from Chasing Amy with her sister Tricia from Mallrats, and we are introduced to Tracy Morgan’s Pumpkin Escobar, a minor but memorable character.

If someone had never seen one of these movies, I can’t imagine how it would play but I really dug it. It was kind of a riff on Kevin Smith’s Chasing Dogma comic which was meant to bridge the gap between Jay and Bob walking out of the diner in Chasing Amy and ending up in Illinois in Dogma but this takes place after Dogma as Alanis reprises her role as god after the credits when she closes the book on the Askewniverse. It is very inside baseball for Kevin Smith fans but it is a real treat to see so many favorite characters all in one movie. It was also good to see Jeff Anderson back as Randall after a rough patch with Smith left him out of Mallrats and Chasing Amy (he was the gun store owner in Dogma).

I saw this movie a bunch of times in the theater and saw the Others in order to see a sneak preview or a poster or something. I don’t remember how that worked but I was good with it because the Others rocked as well. This is another comfort food movie for me and I did not let my ex-wife’s lack of enthusiasm for it get me down at all. I had my own community to talk about it with anyway.

This was a bittersweet movie for me though because I thought it was the end of something I loved. Little did I know that the future would hold a lot more view askew goodness for years to come. If it had been the end, it would have been a fitting one but I am glad it wasn’t. There are people who feel that it is all played out at this point but I am not one of them. You will read about more of this in the future of this exercise.

5.Wet Hot American Summer-David Wain

A parody of summer camp movies from several people involved with sketch comedy show The State, Wet Hot American Summer is a movie I came to very late but that I love with every fiber of my being.

Directed by David Wain and written by Wain and Michael Showalter, Wet Hot American Summer boasts an insane cast that were largely unknown at the time. Paul Rudd, David Hyde Pierce, Bradley Cooper, Elizabeth Banks, Amy Poehler, Michael Ian Black, Joe Lo Triglio, Ken Marino, Christopher Meloni, Molly Shannon, A.D. Miles, Michael Showalter, Janene Garofalo, Zak Orth, and Marisa Ryan are all incredible in this movie and all understand the assignment of the material. Not all of the cast rose to prominence after and not all were obscure in the beginning but they are all wonderful.

The movie is a mishmash of plot points from all manner of summer camp movies and heightens things to their highest levels of ridiculousness with plot points including a talking can of vegetables voiced by H Jon Benjamin, a falling satellite, unrequited love, and even a bit of serial murder for good measure. It is the perfect blend of sharp humor and absurdism, a fact supported by a sequel series, a prequel series, and at 25^th anniversary rerelease.

I missed this in theaters and always wanted to see it but I got sidetracked and never did until I found myself working overnights at a interpreter service and had a conversation with my co-worker Daniel that led to me making the sound of a pot breaking when throwing something. He asked if I had seen Wet Hot because that was a running joke in the movie. I said I hadn’t and he encouraged me to because he thought it would be right up my alley. I checked it out and he was very right. I have subsequently watched it more times than I have had years on earth and it has long been a movie I watch with new friends if they haven’t seen it. I love the series as well but there is nothing quite like the original movie. As I wrap up this list, I realize there are a lot of ‘comfort food’ titles here and Wet Hot American Summer is definitely one of them. If you haven’t seen it, you must as soon as possible.