Top 5 Overlooked Movies of the 2000s | Archive

18:27Adam Kempenaar:But what's truly impressive is Matchstick Men's ability to capture the emotions that drive the machinery, getting beyond simple greed to find the other needs that draw marks to con men and make fools of both. And I think that's obviously eloquently said there by Keith, but does get at what makes Matchstick Men such a good film. Yes, there's a certain precision to the cons and how they play out. There's some great humor in not only the performance of Cage, but in Rockwell. But there is a real heart to this movie as well underneath that kind of sheen of cynicism. And I think that's what separates Matchstick Man makes it for me one of the truly memorable films of the 2000s, one I don't think gets enough love.

19:05Josh Larsen:In 2003, I gave Matchstick Man three out of four stars. OK, well, that's better. So I was a fan as well. And yeah, it was an interesting. The 2000s were interesting for Cage because this was after stuff like The Rock and Con Air, right? I believe it was. So he's already had a foot kind of in that loony bin territory action stuff. But he was doing stuff like this. He was doing something like The Weatherman, which I mentioned, which is a fantastic Cage performance. So, yeah, I liked him quite a bit in Matchstick Men. And, of course, Rockwell is good as well.

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22:03Josh Larsen:It's time to get Brex AF. Learn more at brex.com slash AF. All right. At number four, I have Baby Boy. After a couple of larger scale projects like Rosewood and then his Shaft remake, John Singleton returned to the streets of South Central Los Angeles. That's, of course, the site of his breakout film, Boys in the Hood, for 2001's Baby Boy. This is just a really thoughtful, still stylish. It has a lot of singleton visual touches to it. But it is ultimately a deeply thoughtful take on a selfish 20-year-old single father of two who learns to embrace his responsibilities. The lead role is played by Tyrese Gibson.

22:43Josh Larsen:And at that time, he was only known as a model, a singer and a TV actor. I think he was an MTV VJ as well at the time. He makes a strong featured debut here, full of feeling this performance is. He brings a reluctant vulnerability to it that's not on the surface, but you always sense it and really does hold this whole thing together. Also good, which I had forgotten until I was looking back at it for this list, a young Taraji P. Henson as his girlfriend. So, yeah, some raw scenes, really raw scenes between the two of them. So this made my top 10 list of 2001. on Roger Ebert, also a fan at that time, and he noted in his review how this movie walks a very delicate line.

23:25Josh Larsen:So I wanted to quote him here. Baby Boy is a bold criticism of young black men who carelessly father babies, live off their mothers, and don't even think of looking for work. It is also a criticism of the society that pushes them into that niche. There has never been a movie with this angle on the African-American experience. The movie's message to men, like its hero, is yes, racism has contributed to your situation, but you have to give it so much help with your own attitude. Now, Baby Boy is probably, I would say it's hardly the first film that comes up when people think of John Singleton, especially since he followed this up with Too Fast, Too Furious, also with Gibson.

24:01Josh Larsen:But it's absolutely worth a look if you never made it that far down in Singleton's filmography.

24:06Adam Kempenaar:Yeah, I'm a big fan of Baby Boy. I reviewed it back in 2001 in really my first full year writing any kind of reviews than as a grad student at Iowa. And I would quote from that review right now if I hadn't just glanced at it and wasn't totally embarrassed by it. Okay. So happens to the best of us. I won't be doing that, but I do recall I really enjoyed that film. I think it's one of Singleton's better films. He's made some movies I'm not a fan of at all. I would agree. And this is definitely up there with Boys in the Hood as one of his best. My number four is a film that comes from one of our film spotting marathons.

24:39Adam Kempenaar:And I didn't want to rely on these marathons too much when forming this list because those are by definition devoted to our blind spots. Of course, they're going to be fruitful ground for an overlooked list. But I'm guessing that there are a fair number of listeners in 2017 who chose to overlook the first movie in our new Argentine cinema marathon, Extraordinary Stories. Oh, yeah, there's a movie from 2008. As far as I can tell, didn't even get a theatrical release in the US. There are no box office numbers for it that I could find. Not only that, when it came up as part of our marathon, we had never even heard of it, right?

25:14Adam Kempenaar:You hadn't heard of it. I had never heard of it or heard of the director, Mariano Ginas. And up until recently, when Mubi had it as an offering on their platform, it was pretty much impossible to see. This isn't a movie that you could just get on VOD or streaming anywhere. Now, as far as I can tell you, you can see it on Amazon Prime. You can rent it if you are on Prime and you just need to set aside four hours. Yeah. But if you do that, it's well worth it. Absolutely. It was your, I'm not sure if you mentioned this, it was your best picture. It was my favorite film from that marathon. And it's a movie that takes three different characters who just have letters for names.

25:53Adam Kempenaar:We know them as H and X and Z and they're stories that don't really seem to be interconnected at all. And frankly, Josh, it's been so long since I've seen the film. I'm not sure that the movie does ever really unite them in a way that maybe you would expect with a movie like this. I wouldn't say it all comes together. No, no, it doesn't come together with that kind of neat resolution. It's one of those films that as you watch these characters and their lives and these actions unfold in front of us, you just never know what to expect. The extraordinary of the title is completely appropriate because at first it seems like all these characters are leading completely unremarkable lives.

26:29Adam Kempenaar:One of them is a board civil engineer. One is an architect and surveyor. Another one is basically just a bureaucrat, but they do get caught up in these truly remarkable situations. And I love the way that we become sort of active in the creation of these narratives unfolding because of the way we see. here's that word from Jesse James again perspective the way we see different events unfold sometimes multiple times sometimes the camera is just moving closer gives us as viewers more of an opportunity to scrutinize and it's not a case where it's really about showing things from different points of view it's not as if the filmmaker is trying to make a variation on Rashomon where it's this character's perspective and this truth but we are always aware that there is a storyteller pulling the strings who can give us one perspective and then change it for us.

27:21Adam Kempenaar:And some of the techniques that are used here, too, are so great. The flashbacks that we get, there's dream sequences, there's a direct address to the camera by a dead guy, there's split screens. And yet it is so novelistic. It's one of those movies. I know you're going to think I'm copping out here, but I think probably even you, Josh, didn't watch this in one four hour sitting, did you? If I recall, I had a dinner break.

27:43Josh Larsen:OK. Yeah. For some reason, it came right back to me.

27:46Adam Kempenaar:Yeah, it would be a lot. But it does seem to me whether it's one break or two breaks or more, it's the kind of movie that you can sort of check back in on just like a book. Yeah, right. That's a not realistic. You can come back to it and just pick up at any point and you're going to get caught up in these characters and their events. I looked at Letterboxd, not the end all be all of logging movies necessarily or telling us how widely seen a movie is, but a good indicator. And only 805 people have clicked on Extraordinary Stories as a movie that they have seen. To put that in perspective, In the Mood for Love had 62 ,000 and Spirited Away had 228 ,000.

28:26Adam Kempenaar:So only 805 people on Letterboxd have seen Extraordinary Stories. It was my favorite movie of that entire marathon. And it's well worth the time.

28:36Josh Larsen:Yeah, your highlight of that marathon, I think I gave that award to a different film, but did give two different awards to Extraordinary Stories. So definitely worth checking out. All right. At number three, this one for me is a really deep cut, almost totally forgotten, but it really affected me at the time. And it deserves to be remembered. It's 2003's My Life Without Me, starring Sarah Polly as a young woman. She's a wife and a mother of two who's diagnosed with terminal cancer. She doesn't tell her family and instead spends her last few months trying to set things up for them for life after she's gone.

29:10Josh Larsen:And this includes identifying a wife for her husband, who's played by Scott Speedman. And now at the same time, she also starts taking these chances on things that she feels like she missed out on in her fairly mundane life. All of that probably sounds like melodrama. But knowing Polly as an actress, you can probably imagine the subtle sincerity she brings to the part. And you also have some strong work here from Mark Ruffalo, who plays a man she meets, and he comes to represent what she does feel like she may have missed out on. The director is Isabelle Couchette, and she also did the screenplay.

29:47Josh Larsen:She's adapting Nancy Kincaid's novel here. She just has this delicate, almost magical, realist touch that keeps things from feeling too soap opera-y. And there's an especially nice flourish at one point, a grocery store dance number where Polly's character is just doing her everyday shopping and everyone around her begins to dance as she just thinks about this space she's suddenly come to inhabit with her health. I think you can also really see My Life Without Me's influence on the films that Polly would go on to make as a director, especially something like Away From Her, which has this, you know, there's a confirmation of mortality going on there.

30:27Josh Larsen:And also Polly's documentary, Stories We Tell, where she interrogated family secrets of her own. Not as many laughs here as in Nacho Libre, but still a really strong film, a very moving one. It's worth a look if you are going to be tracking down some forgotten gems from the 2000s.

30:43Adam Kempenaar:Yeah, it's one that's overlooked by me. I have not seen my life without me. Great pick. I'm going to stick with the Canadian theme anyway. And actually, you mentioned Sarah Pauly and Stories We Tell. This is another playful take on the personal memoir. Before I give you the title, though, I have to read this email from a Film Spotting listener. This is a title that I knew was going to make this list instantly because at the start of Film Spotting Madness, we got an email chiding us for overlooking this movie and many others as you're going to hear the subject line was film sputtering madness this is going to be a theme on this show more anger richard pout perfect p-o-u-t-t let's go with pout let's go with pout he's pouting in canada he says i enjoy listening to your show and like to indulge in inappropriate umbrage as much as the next guy regarding your madness selections i just received an email from the vancouver International Film Festival Theater announcing a retrospective of a filmmaker whose absence from your bracket is so dumbfounding that I kind of can't take any of its results seriously.

31:44Adam Kempenaar:You had Yi Yi from Taiwan and In the Mood for Love from Hong Kong, but nothing from Jia Janka, who only spent the entire decade masterfully filming the story of China's eruption into the 21st century. I know a touch of sin falls outside of your timeline, but you still had platform, unknown pleasures, the world, still life, and 24th city available for selection. Platform and still life at least ought to have been no brainers. I'll watch a movie about people living in a city as it is being systematically demolished to accommodate the reservoir slowly rising behind the Three Gorges Dam rather than the curated violence of comic book earth, Tarantino earth or Middle Earth every time.

32:22Adam Kempenaar:Wow. So a lot of films there that film spotting listeners have probably also overlooked at least a few of them. But all that said, it's not one of those movies that I'm going with here. It's the one that's in Richard's PS. He says, you also ignored the scrupulous documentary of Guy Madden's brain that is my Winnipeg, despite your fondness for films about imaginary realities. Yes, we didn't include it in film spotting madness. My Winnipeg, his memoir, his docu Fantasia, as it's known from 2008, a movie that I viewed at the Toronto Film Festival in 2007, the same festival. I saw the assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford.

33:02Adam Kempenaar:I saw my Winnipeg in a much more alert state. Pretty good tiff that year, I might add. My three favorite films ahead of my Winnipeg at that fest were No Country for Old Men, Atonement, and Juno. My Winnipeg is this wonderful blending of fact and fiction and, yes, fantasy. And it's still historical in nature. It's giving us some truth about the city of Winnipeg. You come away knowing much more about that city and its history than you may have ever thought you needed. Of course, you're also learning true things, actual things from Guy Madden's life. He chose to view Winnipeg, the city he grew up in, through the prism of his own childhood experience.

33:43Adam Kempenaar:And I was listening back to some of the conversation that I had, along with Maddie, actually. He had just joined the show in 2007. We talked to Guy Madden in one of the little malls, just a coffee shop right there at the Toronto Film Festival outside the theaters. And he mentioned that this movie came about actually because it was the assignment of the producer. He threw out this idea, and it certainly wasn't Madden's original concept because he doesn't typically make documentaries. He has a real reverence for documentarians, and it just wasn't a mode that he saw himself working in. But it was always part of the assignment to make it personal.

34:18Adam Kempenaar:And that's what hooked him. Now, Maddie saw the screening at that fest where Guy Madden did the narration that you hear in the movie. He performed it live there at the festival. I unfortunately missed that. But as I said, I had a chance to talk with Madden and it was fun revisiting that conversation. I asked him what came first because the imagery is so vivid in this film and so outlandish and fantastic. And then you've got this wonderful voiceover narration that goes with it. I was curious which came first. Did he have the narration? He had the story and then he found these images to match it?

34:52Adam Kempenaar:Or did he have the images in his head and match the words with it? He talked about that in the interview and also about whether or not going back and dramatizing moments from his own childhood, but with actors playing him and his family, whether that was just on his part, a fun conceit for a film or whether it was actual catharsis or provided any catharsis. And here's what he said.

35:17Josh Larsen:You know, it's only recently that I discovered that filmmaking is really therapeutic in many ways that I never suspected. I've not once have I worked through any problems and gotten to the root of them or anything, but it's just that filmmaking takes so long. It's at least a year to get a feature out if you're even a fast mover. And you have to watch your own movie so many times, and you have to reread what you've written. In other words, you end up getting bored of what you were once obsessed with. And it's actually just kind of a form of aversion therapy. It's just that you just, instead of being at peace with your childhood traumas because you, like I say, worked them through, you've just grown tired of your childhood traumas, and they don't traumatize you anymore.

36:05Besides, you've turned them into something else, something you're now proud of.

36:10Adam Kempenaar:and it was a really fun conversation with Madden a lot of great insights and you can find that conversation in our show notes for this episode if you are curious over at filmspotting.net this movie did get a criterion collection release in January 2015 so it may have a little bit of a higher profile than some of the movies that we're talking about but at the same time you look at Letterboxd only 5300 people mark it as viewed I don't think it's that widely seen certainly could be seen by a wider audience.

36:38Josh Larsen:Well, and in my case, that's probably the first title that would come to mind if you said Guy Madden, but I haven't even seen it. So this is an overlooked one by me as well. Strangely, the only Madden film I've seen is Dracula Pages from A Virgin's Diary. So I've got some work to do when it comes to Madden. Okay, at the number two spot, this one people are probably going to be vaguely familiar with. They remember it came out, but may not have actually seen it because it didn't really do very well, even though it came from a big director and had big stars. It's What Lies Beneath from the year 2000.

37:11Josh Larsen:Robert Zemeckis is the director here, and this is his thriller about a married couple, played by Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer, whose house appears to be haunted after their daughter leaves for college, and that causes some friction between them.

37:24Adam Kempenaar:She's dead.

37:25Josh Larsen:Who's dead?

37:26Adam Kempenaar:You know damn well who's dead. Oh, this is his fear.

37:29Josh Larsen:Listen to me. He killed her, and I'm not crazy. Jodi and I had a seance in the bathroom, I'm Jodi and I and nothing happened. But when I went back there, she was there. She was. This starts as a rear window riff. So Michelle Pfeiffer suspects her neighbor of murdering his wife. And then it goes on later to employ some bathtub imagery, similarly to the way Hitchcock used a shower in Psycho. Zemeckis is such a master craftsman that I just love seeing him play with this sort of suspense, especially in those tub sequences. Then it goes on to do the Hitchcock thing of undermining a beloved movie star once Ford's husband comes under suspicion.

38:09Josh Larsen:So think about what he did with James Stewart and Vertigo. That's what he's doing with Ford here. This was widely dismissed as a Hitchcock ripoff. That's what most people saw it as. I took a little bit more generous of a vantage point and appreciated it as an homage. And what's the difference, you might say? For me, I saw him using the conventions to do something new, and that's bring in this element of the supernatural. Now, others hated this because it was decidedly un-Hitchcockian. So they were damning Zemeckis for both aping Hitchcock and then making this left turn that wasn't like him. But for me, I liked how it made things distinct from the master while also allowing the movie to draw upon him.

38:50Josh Larsen:And ultimately, really, in what lies beneath, what's most Hitchcockian about it is that it's all about guilt. And for me, that's what made the movie stick. There are definitely thrills and suspense and gotcha moments and all that stuff. But this one stuck with me, too, because it is a rumination on guilt at the end of the day.

39:07Adam Kempenaar:Yeah, it's another one I need to see. I've only ever watched scenes from What Lies Beneath over the years just coming on TV. And it always seems to be at that exact moment where we get that switch with the husband character and some of those bathtub sequences that you are mentioning. So I guess I kind of know where the movie's going, even if I don't know how it gets there. My number two is my third film in a row, randomly, from the year 2008. And it's another documentary, the one that's a lot more grounded in reality than my Winnipeg. And it's At the Death House Door, directed by Steve James, co-directed with Peter Gilbert, who also produced Hoop Dreams with James, was a DP on that film, actually.

39:48Adam Kempenaar:And he also produced another James film that I considered for this list, 2002 Stevie. This is the letterbox description of At the Death House Door. And it will become clear in a moment why I'm reading this summary. An investigation of the wrongful death of Carlos DeLuna, who was executed in Texas on December 7th, 1989, after prosecutors ignored evidence, inculpating a man who bragged to friends about committing the crimes of which DeLuna was convicted. My immediate response to that was, that's funny. that's not at all what I remember at the death house door really being about. I remember that the Carlos DeLuna case comes up, but that's not the primary narrative of this film.

40:27Adam Kempenaar:And sure enough, if you look at the first comment on Letterboxd, it's two stars from a user that says, but what they actually mean is there is nothing being investigated and is almost two hours of an effing vicar talking to the camera. That was the very agitated response to at the death house door and that plot summary. The plot summary is just off. As I said, it does explore that case and his execution and a Chicago Tribune investigation into that case. That's in fact how this project first was pitched to Steve James. They said, we want to look at the death penalty and use this case as the key story for the film.

41:07Adam Kempenaar:And this was all what Steve James told me at a 2016 event, looking back on 20 years of his career. and we touched on this film. He said that he was interested, but he was apprehensive for a variety of reasons. And then they mention a man named Carol Pickett. They said he was the chaplain for 15 years at this prison unit in Huntsville, Texas, and he had presided over 95 executions, including Carlos DeLuna's, and that's for James where the light went off. And this is where that element of storytelling comes into play. Pickett made an audio recording with each one of those 95 men. just before they were ushered off to their execution.

41:47Adam Kempenaar:James said, that's the film. That's the story I want to tell. I can bring in these other elements, but I want to focus on Pickett. And this is something I think James has shown throughout his work, an effort to give voice to the voiceless, to the marginalized, to the overlooked in society. And there is a political element to this film, but it's really more about the existential toll that it takes on this man, who is a fascinating character, as you would imagine. There isn't really a clear sort of call to action, I would say, by the end of the film, but it is a philosophical and very personal and very emotional journey.

42:23Adam Kempenaar:And as far as overlooked on Letterboxd, this movie, 88 views. Really? 88 views throughout the death house door. And I would say not only see it, but it's up there with James's best documentaries. Yeah.

42:36Josh Larsen:And so it came, what, over 10 years after Hoop Dreams, James is best known that probably has a lot more letterbox views, but also one, even though I've followed other films in his career, I haven't seen another James film that is definitely going to be in consideration for my list when we do this next year. The 2010s will be The Interrupters, which touches on some of those same themes that you're talking about. So, yeah, I need to see At the Death House Door.

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43:25Adam Kempenaar:Apple Vacations, where your story starts.

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44:48Josh Larsen:Shop now on Hero.co. Use code IHEART for 10 % off. That's Hero.co. Per serving, not a low-calorie food. Some products contain allulose. See nutrition info on Hero.co for sodium and sugar content. If your best finance people are doing expense reports, chasing receipts, or spending time on month-end close, it's time to get Brex AF, a gentic finance that eliminates that work before it starts. Learn more at brex.com slash AF. All right, I think we're up to our number one, right? And I'm going to go with the promotion. I've talked before about my 2000s artistic crush on Steve Conrad. That name is also going to be an overlooked one, one that most movie fans aren't going to recognize right away.

45:34Josh Larsen:But he wrote Nicolas Cage's The Weatherman, which was, as I said, on my top five overlooked films list we did earlier. And then here he wrote and directed the promotion. This is his only feature directorial effort. Came out in 2008. Comedy drama. I think I'd describe it. It's maybe more comedy than drama, but it stars John C. Reilly and Sean William Scott as assistant managers at a grocery store who end up vying for this new manager position that's opening in a store they're building nearby. There's a similar vibe here to television's The Office, which I didn't pick up on then, but we happen to be binging The Office right now at home as a family.

46:12Josh Larsen:And both are interested in some similar things. They both burrow into the mundane of the everyday and then comically highlight, you know, the pettiness that can be found there and also the humanity that's surprisingly on display in these quotidian places. And as a matter of fact, Jenna Fisher plays Sean William Scott's wife. Scott is really good here. I mean, I was a fan of him as Stifler in the American Pie films, but this is a much more nuanced sort of comedy that he absolutely nails. And, you know, I can't get enough of John C. Reilly when he's in comedy drama mode. This also is subtler than he is in my beloved Cedar Rapids.

46:49Josh Larsen:I think this is a subtler film overall. And he gets this solo shuffle alone at night in the grocery store that made another top five list of mine. We did top five dance sequences in non-musicals. Remember that one? That was episode 412. I don't know why I have two. Here's my grand unified theory for my list, Adam. Yeah. Dance numbers in grocery stores. Okay. That's what I use to form this list. Now, like The Office, which I think begins by laughing at the people that we see in The Office. Here we begin by laughing at these two guys. And then it turns into something where we do begin to sympathize with them.

47:25Josh Larsen:And it allows the promotion to become. Here's where it's helpful to look back at when the movie came out, too. For me, a real part of the value of it, which may not register as much today, but back in 2008, it was really trenchant and timely just on the brink of a recession. You've got these two decent average Joes who are caught in this rat race. And instead of just lampooning that, it kind of makes us understand that they're both clawing after the same piece of moldy cheese. And they're going to lose out at the end. And the comedy comes in recognizing and empathizing with their plight. So I just really love the promotion.

48:01Josh Larsen:And I haven't done the letterbox thing. I'd be curious. Maybe I'll do that and see a minute here what the viewings are for this because it doesn't get talked about nearly enough.

48:10Adam Kempenaar:No, and it's one I haven't seen. I was going to say that I haven't seen any of Conrad's stuff, but actually I know I watched The Weatherman. I rented it at some point. Never reviewed it. Never really thought about it seriously. Liked the film, liked the Cage performance. It wasn't a film I had as passionate a reaction to as you, but I have never seen the promotion despite all the times you have brought it up here over the years. I definitely do need to see it. and just found it on Letterboxd, 2 ,000 views. So I can be 2001.

48:37Josh Larsen:Yeah, there you go.

48:38Adam Kempenaar:If I finally see the promotion. And speaking of Sean William Scott, I did think about Role Models, the David Wayne comedy, which I adore. Oh, yeah. He's so good in that with Paul Rudd, but didn't quite make the list for me. My number one is a movie that I did initially think of and then write off because I thought longtime listeners are very familiar with how much I love this film. But the reality is, when I think about a film from the 2000s, Going back to that original premise that I abandoned a movie that I would love to watch with an audience at a film festival and that I know not enough people have seen because they probably just like me initially dismissed it because of the title.

49:15Adam Kempenaar:It's Lynn Shelton's hump day. Ah, yes. And this is a film that one astute critic who gave it a positive review on his website described this way. Writer director Lynn Shelton takes a boozy late night query. What if a pair of male heterosexual best friends agreed to have sex on film for an amateur porn contest and turns it into a thoughtful, revealing and challenging consideration of what it means to be a friend, a husband, a lover and a straight man? That is one Josh Larson writing about Hump Day, a movie that came out in 2009 and was my number two movie of that year. I was initially thinking of Shelton as one of these filmmakers who might fit in nicely as one of the key filmmakers of this period.

49:55Adam Kempenaar:But actually, it's a little bit later. If you look at We Go Way Back in 2006, which I haven't seen, then My Effortless Brilliance, which is the first film I think that really garnered her some attention. And then Hump Day, that was 2008 and 2009. And then we get your sister's sister and touchy feely later on into the 20 later on into the 2010s. And the movie is this thoughtful consideration of what it means to be all of those things you touched on Josh a friend a husband. It's very much a movie about marriage and it's also very much a movie about art and about artists or people who at some point in their lives find themselves questioning some of their choices and wanting to make some kind of emphatic statement.

50:34Adam Kempenaar:They want to, to put it in the parlance of some of the films we've talked about here on the show so far, to craft a new narrative for themselves, to break out of the story that they are currently in. And they think that this radical act being captured on film is going to be what does it for them. The them in this case is Mark Duplass and Joshua Leonard, who were best friends back in college and then reconnect here in their mid 30s.

51:00Josh Larsen:Stop trying to let me off the hook because you know what it sounds like? It sounds like you're trying to put this off on me as to why we're not doing it. Because you can't handle it. Straight up. Straight up. Straight up. Straight up. You would have sex with me on film for this project tomorrow night. I could absolutely do this. You could or you would.

51:21Adam Kempenaar:This is a movie that I do think offers a lot to think about, but also is really funny and And does fit into this kind of mumble core concept, at least as far as being, it seems, mostly improvised. Structured, but improvised. Those two have great chemistry together, Duplass and Leonard. And I guess at the end of the day, any movie that can be called Hump Day and be as profound as it is deserves to be seen by more people. Hump Day is my number one overlooked film of the 2000s.

51:50Josh Larsen:I like this. You should quote me in your picks more often.

51:52Adam Kempenaar:I don't think I've ever done that before.

51:54Josh Larsen:It worked.

51:54Adam Kempenaar:It felt wrong. No, it worked really well. But yeah. Actually, no, I needed you there. Gave a little heft to your reasoning. Those are our top five overlooked films of the 2000s. I'm guessing we might have a few honorable mentions. I know I do because they were the movies already mentioned by me on episode 396. Yes, obviously. I said it was my Never Let Me Go memorial list. All films from the 2000s somehow. I had Shotgun Stories, the great Jeff Nichols debut, Enemies of the People, a documentary I saw, I believe it's Sundance, Fast Food Nation from Richard Linklater, Black Snake Moan, the Craig Brewer follow up to Hustle and Flow that Sam and I both adored and Son of Rambo, which Sam and I saw at a festival and also love.

52:35Adam Kempenaar:Those were the five that obviously would fit in great on this list if they weren't already mentioned. A couple others I'll throw out that I did seriously think about, Josh. John Cameron Mitchell's first two films, Hedwig and the Angry Inch is getting a Criterion release, but I still don't feel like it maybe gets the due it deserves. So I thought about it. Short Bus is another film that I really do enjoy. Mysterious Skin. I wouldn't say that Greg Araki film starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a film I enjoy because it's a very tough sit, but a very well-made film. And finally, Ramin Barani's Man Push Cart, maybe the number six film on this list for me.

53:14Adam Kempenaar:Yeah. And I remember Juan Ebert particularly really championing. Yeah, he did. In fact, I saw it for the first time in my Ebert class at the University of Chicago's Graham School when I did my Remembering Ebert course, looking at films that he championed. That Barani film was on the syllabus. There you go. All right.

53:31Josh Larsen:So I obviously have a whole host of honorable mentions I could get to. I'm just going to grab a few from that. How many other films is Steve Conrad made? Unfortunately, what I brought up were the highlights. All right. So Dinosaur is this early Disney computer animated effort that's a beautiful artifact and also a moving survival story. Unfaithful is an infidelity drama with Richard Gere and a career high performance from Diane Lane. Borrows very heavily, more heavily now I can recognize after I've seen David Lean's masterful brief encounter. I had just seen that recently and realized how much is at play in Unfaithful.

54:07Josh Larsen:Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, George Clooney's directorial debut, still his best. Autofocus, this is an underrated Paul Schrader film. Yes. Haven't seen it. With Greg Kinnear as sex addict, Hogan's Hero star, Bob Crane. I'll just leave that there. Roll Bounce is Malcolm D. Lee's sweet family drama set around a Southside Chicago roller rink in 1978. Stars Bow Wow. Remember Bow Wow, Adam? Were you listening to him in the 2000s? Sure. And then one more here, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, a stunning first step into our now dominant movie world of digital special effects for better and for worse.

54:44Josh Larsen:But I just love how Sky Captain looks.

54:45Adam Kempenaar:haven't seen that one so a lot of films overlooked by the other host here on film spotting i think that makes it a pretty good list and i will point out although we don't necessarily always list the honorable mentions if we were going through those very quickly you couldn't jot down some of the titles you were curious about we put the titles for every top five list including a lot of the clips that you hear played on the show other links that might be relevant on our website filmspotting.net. You just click on lists at the top of the page and you can look back at every single top five list and all the titles that make our list.

55:20Adam Kempenaar:Para el hombre que ha vivido mucho tiempo sin ellas, la mera proximidad de las mujeres es poco menos que una bendición. Zeta se resigna a esas excentricidades de las chicas y secretamente las disfruta. You thought you'd catch me, Josh, but Argentine Cinema, my best picture of the marathon. I don't know if it was yours. Deep pull. Deep pull. It's a great, great film. Yeah. Those were our top five overlooked movies of the 2000s. Hope that they won't stay overlooked for long for you if you haven't seen them, especially Nacho Libre. Right, Josh? Got to get to Nacho Libre.

55:52Josh Larsen:At this point, since we've done that show, the hordes have just come to support me in their love for Nacho Libre.

55:59Adam Kempenaar:Access to the Film Spotting Archive, just one of the benefits of joining the Film Spotting family, plus bonus shows, weekly newsletter, early access to events, and more. You can learn more at Film Spotting Family dot com. Thanks for listening. This conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye.

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