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Spike Lee has no problem with being incendiary and indulgent and infuriating. He is also achingly tender at unexpected moments and completely willing to let the sanity of his plots bubble over. Thanks to all these qualities, he crafted one of the only American films to date to consider the effect of 9/11 on our national psyche and one of the only films ever to ask and answer the question "What does it mean for someone to be going off to prison?" Potent, electrifying and heartbreaking in equal doses, with Edward Norton allowing the audience to see his character’s spirit slowly collapsing before our eyes as he takes measure of all that he is losing and accepts the knowledge there won’t be much to come back to after he has served his time. A scorched earth sendoff seems the only possible closing note, before an achingly tender final sequence that considers the possibility of rebirth and renewal for all of us as individuals and as a country.


All the Real Girls (2003)

David Gordon Green now apparently makes oddball stoner films starring James Franco and Danny McBride, but still with the same sort of visual and emotional poetry he brought to his first four features, including this tale of thwarted young romance and emotionally volatile man-boys. This properly introduced a creature known as the Zooey Deschanel and gave Paul Schneider a format for his singular blend of charm and sorrow.


Inland Empire (2007)

Who would have thought, after decades of getting caught up in peering inside the severed ear of small town life and looking for the maggots, that David Lynch would find true creative expression examining the Hollywood Dream factory and the life of the actress in this and the thematically similar Mulholland Dr? Laura Dern gives a career redefining performance(s) as she traverses multiple layers and levels of reality and media and sanity and possibly time and space. Inland Empire is disturbing and tumultuous and epic but also oddly uplifting, containing the best use ever of "The Loco-Motion" and finishing up with an all-female singing/dancing rhythm and blues call-and-response that stands as the ultimate rebuke to everyone who loves to walk out once the credits start rolling.

Wet Hot American Summer (2001)

WHAS is a comedy so completely constructed using nothing but irony that it should have pissed me off royally. Instead, this ode to '80s summer camp movies is just piss-your-pants funny, so attuned to that sub-sub-genre it stands as a love letter to filmmaking in general. David Wain gets great performances from Janeane Garofalo, David Hyde Pierce, Paul Rudd, Christopher Meloni, et. al. and proves the more localized and focused (as opposed to generic) a plot is, the more entertaining it can be.

Final Destination 2 (2003)

FD2 is part of the long line of movies where the world comes tumbling down in slapstick calamity. It’s like an Irwin Allen disaster epic writ small and shifted towards the comedy side of the comedy/horror meter. Every joke is a sharply pointed stick with death as the punch line. David R. Ellis may never be able to recreate his pacing, timing and great use of CGI ONLY WHEN NEEDED (The Final Destination proved this), but he shouldn't be discounted either. The freeway vehicle pileup is the set piece of the decade.

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