could use a decade of help

I've just realized that the first decade of the 21st century is ending in a few months. Wow. I've got some work to do. For the past five years at the end of every year I make sure to post online a list of my favorite movies and songs from the year. Now that we're hitting the decade mark I'm probably going to do a decade list.

For this reason, please comment, email, text or Twitter me your favorite (or least favorite) movies from the past ten years. I don't want to forget anything.

In case you're interested, here are some of my lists from the past:

MOVIES: 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008

MUSIC: 2004, 2005 (scroll down), 2006, 2007, 2008

Jon Demand 10: Shaving the Beard

I've been sitting on this one for a long while. Those who know me know I've been beardless for months. Took forever to edit this thing:

putting off the novel part 2...

Okay, try this. There's this fun movie site called flickchart.com. You should go there and log in.

Here's how it works. Flickchart shows you the posters from two movies, then you just pick the movie you prefer of the two. It puts the movie you just ranked into an ordered list and then offers you two more movies and so on. Your list continues to get updated, sorting your favorite movies to the top and your least favorite to the bottom.

I heard about this site months ago, but it's only recently been out of beta and open to the public. I logged in two days ago and as of this typing I've gone through the process 1,867 times.

It's the new solitaire I'm telling you. Plus, if you're list-obsessive like I am it's a great method.

The funnest is when it's aggravating. Here are some examples of some of the more "Sophie's Choice" type decisions I've had to make.

This little battle managed to put Ferris Bueller's Day Off in my number one spot for a while -- even though 28 Days Later has a special place in my heart as the primary inspiration for this year's Halloween movie (also I have several friends who irrationally believe it to be the worst movie ever made, but that's another story).



Drug-induced Anglophilia or the Frenchifying of Star Wars? Love them both, but from totally different angles.


Coming of age lessons on life, joy and art OR fast cars and fast women? How can there be a WRONG choice here?


Can't vote against Heath! It would tarnish his death and his awesome marching band-backed serenade to Julia Stiles! Then again it's against one of the most beautiful movies ever and the only non-annoying occurrence of Jim Carey ever.


Poetic fighty or new-age scary?


Worst villain: Lumbergh or Joker?


Jewish power or mutant power?


... and this one. It may be easy for you, but it's hard for me, okay!


Those last two were very different, but what if I'm forced to choose between the two best Pixar films? WHAT IF?


Don't make me choose geek sides! Again!


Where do my loyalties lie Coen brother-wise?


This one made me want to invent a time machine so that I could travel to the future to see what decision I made.


Sometimes it's really difficult because you get two popular movies with critics and everyone you know, BUT YOU STILL DESPISE BOTH MOVIES!


Who would have thought that the choice between the third and fourth in a series of six would actually be so very very easy?


Also who would have thought that I would re-live that battle years ago when I was with a group of people who were considering watching the following two movies and everyone besides me said they didn't care which one we watched and I said I wanted to watch The Matrix because I loved it and absolutely despised Gladiator and then I got a phone call and by the time I got off the phone everybody informed me that we were indeed watching Gladiator. Pfft.


Anyway, here's how my top 20 has strangely panned out so far:

20. Serenity
19. The Empire Strikes Back
18. Slumdog Millionaire
17. Die Hard
16. It's a Wonderful Life
15. X-Men
14. Star Trek
13. The Incredibles
12. Grease
11. Ghostbusters
10. X2: X-Men United
9. The Ring
8. 28 Days Later
7. Match Point
6. The Fifth Element
5. Annie Hall
4. Ferris Bueller's Day Off
3. No Country for Old Men
2. Raiders of the Lost Ark
1. Kill Bill Vol. 1

Now, I adore all of these movies, but if you asked me to write down my favorite 20 movies, I'd probably come up with a completely different list. Notice that Flash Gordon is nowhere to be seen and most people close to me know it to actually be my favorite movie. Well, I haven't been asked about Flash Gordon yet. PLUS, who knows what kind of mood I'll be in when I do get asked? Also notice that Empire Strikes Back is lagging behind Star Trek despite the fact that Empire won that particular battle. I'm pretty sure what happened there is Star Trek came up again in a battle with X-Men, which was already ahead of Empire. Unfair probably. The same thing probably happened with The Ring and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and also maybe The Incredibles and Wall-E. Then again, I may have been in a mood.

Here are some bad-showing surprises so far that I will fix through heavy amounts of voting:

73. Trainspotting
81. The Dark Knight
82. Amadeus
89. Star Wars (while Return of the Jedi is at 40!)
117. Top Gun
130. Shaun of the Dead
139. The Matrix
155. Office Space
282. North by Northwest
290. Scream
299. Signs


Here are some that I'm surprised are doing so well:

59. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (although the first Terminator is sitting nicely at 39)
62. Hitch
69. Die Hard With a Vengeance
72. There's Something About Mary
77. Jurassic Park

Anyway, go to flickchart.com. We can be friends, compare lists, laugh, cry, argue and finally hug.

Oh! Another awesome thing about it is that they randomly have different movie posters for each movie. Some of them are very unique and/or foreign and/or retro.

putting off the novel part 1...

I was just struggling what to type before this video, but if you watch it, it's pretty darn self-explanatory.



Thanks to Joe for recording and uploading it.

na.. no... wri... mo...

My good friend Emily recently pointed me toward an interesting site: http://www.nanowrimo.org/. I would link to her blog or something at this time, but she's very internet Amish -- not even a Facebook account.

Anyway, the point is, November is National Novel Writing Month (or at least the site says it is) and Emily is totally writing a novel. That surprised me. See, we were talking over the Tim Tam slamming eating contest that Emily beats me at every year. She's better at eating melty Australian cookies, but I thought for sure I'd beat her at writing a novel. Very good for her.

So I told her I'm writing a novel too. It's not necessarily true, but if I tell her and then tell enough other people maybe it will happen. Probably not by the end of National Novel Writing Month, but in the definite specific future. I've actually been meaning to for years and I have several different ideas in my head.

Here's the important truth: I dislike the way things exist here on Planet Earth. The way culture and society and stuff has evolved over the past 20 years tasks me quite a bit. Feelings and attitudes are rotten and simply wrong. Yes, there's lots of good, perhaps too much to count or measure, but I simply think the world needs much more.

Now here's the most conceited thing I'll probably ever say: the world inside my head is far more wonderful than the world outside of my head. I'm constantly (annoyingly) doing silly filmy or internety things sorta for fun and sorta for pride. I think though, that the biggest reason I do all these silly things is because I'm trying desperately to translate the good stuff in my head into some kind of reality. I know many people must feel the same way. I want to think I'm creative, but even if I'm not, it doesn't stop the compulsion to create. It's absolutely something I HAVE to do.

Of course compulsion and ability are two very very very different things. As far as I know, the only thing I'm naturally good at is sarcasm. I'll write that book though -- even if I have to painstakingly chisel every word.

day of the dead -- the worst day of the year

November 1st is always pretty depressing for me. That's when there's the most amount of time before more Halloween. May as well post some swell pictures of this past holiday season (even though it's now November 2nd).

This might be interesting. We did a few storyboards for the Zombie movie. So here are some of the concepts and how they turned out. For some of these I actually took some preliminary pictures before I did the storyboards.












Here are some production photos that a few of us took while we were filming:

(I think this was my first day of being a zombie. Many more to follow)

Here are images from normal Halloween parties. Starting with the ones the weekend before Halloween:

Lucia and I didn't have our proper costumes ready so we both had to fall back on old ones. Joe and Camille knocked it out of the park with their Labyrinth theme.

This is the view from the mansion party the week before Halloween. This is looking west from a few blocks north of the capitol.

Here's a gang of us at Dee's a week before Halloween.

So the day before Halloween I went and helped out at the Nielsen Family Haunted Forest. My job was to hide in the trees and scare people who came down the path. Pretty standard haunted forest stuff. My main strategy was to jump out and take a picture with my camera while screaming. In my old age my creepiness knows no bounds. Hopefully these young girls don't mind me posting their screams.

Here is some of the gang gathered for the premier of The Last Zombie Movie EVER!

And finally, here's me posing in my costume, which I finished at about 6:30 on Halloween afternoon. In case you're wondering, I'm Jack Torrance from The Shining. I adjusted the t-shirt words to something I could personally wear and not worry about it being a Halloween costume.

the last zombie movie EVER!

Well, here it is. It's done and that makes us all a little bit sad in a way. Maybe we'll tinker with it a little. Before we showed it I apologized for it not being funny, but everyone laughed anyway. So, good fun to be had no matter what?



Are you questioning your own duality now?

Check it -- here's the direct YouTube link for more HD access.