My Desert Island DVDs

Fandango Groovers Movie Blog put out the call - send me your weak, your tired, your Desert Island DVDs. Eight of them to be exact. I am heeding that call. Additionally, he's asked me to include this link, so I done did that, too. Here's the setup, followed by my picks:

"The idea is a variation on the radio program Desert Island Discs: For those who don’t know the show has been running on the BBC for nearly 70 years. Guests are invited to imagine themselves cast away on a desert island with only eight pieces of music to listen to. Being a movie blog obviously we are having a twist on the idea. Simply pick the eight DVDs that if you were stranded on a desert island (don’t ask how you would play them) you could happily watch over and over again. For some people this will be their favourite movies for others it will be subtly different."

Ok. I'm on a desert island. I can take eight DVDs. For starters, I'm going with known quantities; sure, it might be noble to take a "classic" that I've never seen along for the journey - a chance to broaden my horizons, learn something, all that jazz. No way. It I hate it, or even vaguely dislike it, I'll be regretting said decision for my own personal eternity. So I've seen everything here, and in most cases, more than a few times. More than anything, these choices will make me eternally happy, and that's more important than anything else.

So I'm taking one of my all-time favorites; a film that, depending on the date and time, fills one of the top three spots in my list. The other two are Pulp Fiction and Fight Club, but a) I've seen them enough times that I can recall them at will, and b) they aren't tremendously deep. Well, Fight Club might be, but I've read the book as well, so I've gleaned as much of the meaning as I'm probably going to. Instead, I'm taking Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I know, original choice. It'll likely be on at least half of the participants' lists. I care not. I've purposefully limited my viewing of it in the six years since its release so as not to tire of it and retain some of the joy that's renewed upon each viewing. As a bonus, it's lengthy (sure to be a recurring theme for this list; given the choice of an 85-minute movie I love and a 140-minute one, I'm taking the latter).

Being on this island with not much to do besides swim, run around, build shelters, and whatnot, I'm sure I'll be in good shape bodily in no time. But what of the mind? This next section is intended just for that. I'll take along 2001: A Space Odyssey for its beauty, its length, its brain-altering content, its "How'd they do that?" special effects - the whole shebang. Additionally, I'm bringing two true mind-benders; Chris Nolan's breakout hit Memento, whose DVD houses not only a great movie but enough material on the menus to keep me busy for some time (double bonus: I can watch the movie in chronological order, which will make it seem as though I'm watching a different flick), and Shane Carruth's 2004 time travel thriller Primer, which I've seen just once, but already know I need to see about 100 more times before I fully comprehend it (and even that might not do the trick).

Of course, I will need to laugh while stranded, sans friends or family, on this island. I'll be stuck in a place with no entertainment to speak of, no one to talk to, basically nothing of interest to do (aside from movie watching, of course). In other words, my existence will be rote and monotonous for the most part. How meta of me, then, to choose Groundhog Day. I'm sure I'll take intense pleasure at watching someone else live the same 24 hours over and over again, though I suppose in this case, the end will now be a tad depressing, since Phil Conners will escape his prison and I won't be so lucky. Still, all I have to do is re-start it and he's back in jail with me. Who else could go for some flapjacks?

I'm cheating a little with my next pick, though not as bad as I had originally planned on. I'm taking a TV show. I was going to say that I would take the entire first season of Arrested Development with me (only chosen over the latter seasons due to more episodes), but that was going too far, since the package is comprised of three discs. No fair. Instead, I'll make myself a custom DVD, jamming on as many 22-minute episodes as I can onto a single DVD. If I'm going to be miserable at all on this island, at the very least I know I'll be better off than the Bluths, and no piece of comedy has made me consistently laugh more.

Two left, and they're both wild cards of sorts.

The first is Paul Thomas Anderson's masterpiece Boogie Nights. Why? Why the hell not? It's got it all - drama, comedy, soft-core porn, one of the best casts ever assembled, enough cheeseball (and otherwise) hits from the 70s and 80s to fill at least three CDs, Burt Reynolds - I mean, what more could you want from a movie?

Finally, a movie that I can guarantee will make no one else's list. No, it's not The Room, though that's a tempting option. Instead, it's the critically loathed and commercially ignored Southland Tales. Why on earth am I taking it, you might be asking? That's a very good question, and I'm not even totally sure that I know the answer. I know it intrigues me. I know that it, too, combines elements of action, comedy, and drama - even some sci-fi, too. I know that, of all the things it can be - poorly acted, byzanitinely written, overwrought with not ready for prime-time players - the one thing it never is is boring.

And the last thing I want to be on this desert island is bored.

And then...

The Really Drawn-out Blog Cabins Decennial Spectacular: #1

Decennial, in case you're not hip to the term, means: 1. relating to or lasting for ten years, or 2. occurring every ten years. It's really a word that we should hear more often. Anyway, this will be my series where I count down my favorites from the last decade, and since I don't plan on it taking 10 years to finish, we're going to go with the second definition.

Previous day's posts:
12/21: Intro/#10: Idiocracy
12/22: #9: Children of Men
12/23: #8: Pan's Labyrinth
12/24: #7: Wall*E
12/26: #6: Memento
12/27: #5: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
12/28: #4: The Royal Tenenbaums
12/29: #3: Amelie
12/30: #2: There Will Be Blood

Number 1 on the RD-oBCDS is...

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
With a bullet. I mean, not even close. Astute readers might recall that in my Top 50 films that I posted a little over a year ago, there were only two from this decade in the first chunk of ten, and this was the higher of the two (I didn't assign numbers, and interestingly enough, my Decennial #2 is nowhere to be found on the entire list; either I was still digesting it or made an oversight). Additionally, Eternal Sunshine was one of the movies I listed as one of my favorites in the LAMB's first-ever post. You read and perfectly retained the info given in both those posts, right?

Almost since the day I saw it, Michel Gondry's near-perfect film vaulted itself into my vaunted Top 3 (an impossible to separate trio that includes Pulp Fiction and Fight Club, with Fletch coming in a sentimental fourth). Inventive, funny, heartbreaking, creepy, sexy - pick an adjective, they all apply in spades.

Take a look at the complete Decennial Top 10 I've posted and you'll notice a very similar theme that runs through many of them: they are the works of tireless creatives that weren't satisfied with merely telling a story that existed in the reality we inhabit. Rather, they constructed whole new worlds in their films and filled them with intricate, intimate details that left the viewer's eyes (or at least this viewer) wide-eyed and struggling to catch up to all that had been laid out in front of them. A depressing America some 500 years into the future filled with morons (at best). An equally depressing (for altogether different reasons) planet just 20 years from now that needs but a single tweak (infertility) to wreak havoc on a global scale. The imagination of a pre-teen girl inhabited by monsters and fairies. A depressing America some 500 years into the future filled with morons (at best)...and robots. The blackboard of a mind of Leonard Shelby. Middle Earth! The Salinger-esque universe that occupies the head of Wes Anderson, complete with jumpsuit-attired millionaires and the fathers that abandoned them. A Paris so clean and picturesque it left real Parisians livid with Jean-Pierre Jeunet. And perhaps the lone exception, an all-too real version of the world of the early 1900s dominated by tycoons and baptist preachers.

Finally, there is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a movie that takes its audience and characters so far into the rabbit hole that we all forget that there was even a hole there to begin with. Faceless characters, worlds disappearing before our eyes - it's as if screenwriter Charlie Kauffman and Gondry dropped us into a human-sized ant farm and then shook it up until all the tunnels and patterns became jumbled and unrecognizable. So we waded through it all, and what did we find? That the world they had made was perhaps better than the one we were in to begin with.


What's your Top 10 for the decade? Finally, the Blog Cabins End of Year Spectacular for the best and worst of 2009 should hit the streets towards the end of January.

And then...