I feel like I've done this list before, but I can't find it and since D9 was such a flop, I thought I would suggest some alternatives (this list is in order).

10. Hot Fuzz
9. Rambo: First Blood Part II
8. Aliens
7. Enter the Dragon
6. Predator
5. The Matrix
4. Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark 
3. The Bourne Identity
2. Terminator 2
1. Die Hard

Last night, I finally saw District 9. I had been waiting to see it since the beginning of the summer, but I just never got the time to go to the theater. So I put it at the top of my Netflix queue about a month ago, and I received it in the mail yesterday--the first day of its DVD release.

I had been excited because the movie had gotten such high reviews from just about every source I read (Yahoo! movies- A-/B+, Rotten Tomatoes- 90%, Metacritic- 81/100), and the trailer and premise were interesting.

Now, after watching the movie, I am baffled by how bad it was. If you plan to see it and you care about possible spoilers, stop reading. But I would just say you should skip it and spend your time doing something more worthwhile.

Basically, the script is poor, the directing is bad, and the fake documentary style doesn't work. The worst defect of the movie, though, is that it bills itself as having been inspired by the conditions and events in South Africa's District Six, while portraying the aliens almost universally as unintelligent, animalistic, expendable, flat, and undeserving of the viewers' sympathy.

I'm not going to spend a lot of time writing about this (even though I strongly feel that the overwhelming praise for the film deserves a well-developed response), so here are just a few of my suggestions to the filmmakers for when they start on the inevitable sequel:

• if alien technology/guns are entwined with alien biology to the point that you need alien DNA to operate them, then please use creative artistic design to come up with props that appeal to our imagination and are new and different rather than digging up old Robocop memorabilia and asking us to accept that an alien trigger can't be pulled by a human finger.
• When the evil corporation's ruthless CEOs are weighing whether to murder and harvest body parts from the main character, perhaps they could do it somewhere other than next to the operating table where the main character is strapped, and where they will soon attempt to cut out his heart without sedation/anesthesia. Also, it would be nice to see some debate beyond a flippant "let's do it."
• When basing the experience of an alien species on the real experience of a tragically oppressed group of actual humans, don't portray 99% of the aliens negatively, and don't make the agent of the oppressive government the hero.
• Shootouts and roid-rage bad guy meatheads have been done before (and better), so give us a better enemy to fight.
• Action and sci-fi are ok; action and sci-fi + believable emotional responses, moral/ethical complexity, and well-developed relationships between characters = better.

Brian challenged his readers to post a "best movies of the decade list," so here's mine. Obviously, this is not a top ten (there are 15 + 1 movies here) and this does not represent anything about how well-made (or not well-made) these films are because I don't know anything about that. This is simply a list of movies that come to mind when I ask myself "what movies from the 00s would I recommend to a friend with similar taste?" I'm also listing these not in the order of best to worst, but in the order I would tell someone to watch them if they had not seen any of them. And BTW, Christian Bale must win Best Actor, because he's the lead in 3 of these.

15 Movies of the 00s:

Bourne Identity
Zoolander
The Departed
Fellowship of the Rings
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
The Ring
Hot Fuzz
Terminator: Salvation
3:10 to Yuma
Beautiful Mind
The Village
About a Boy
Stardust
The Prestige
Hotel Rwanda

Bonus: The Top Movie I Wish I Had Seen in the 00s:

District 9

While Brooklynne was away, I loaded up the Netflix queue with "guy" movies. I'm feeling pretty tired and uninspired, so here's a list of movies and a grade just to keep my momentum.

Shaolin Soccer: B+
Be Kind Rewind: D-
Hot Fuzz: A
Alien: B+
Aliens: B+
Shaun of the Dead: B
Donnie Darko: C-
1408: D+
Out Cold: B+
Waterworld: B-
THX 1138: C
Man on Wire: B-

Hot Fuzz was an unexpected surprise, and if you love kung fu movies, Shaolin Soccer is a fun take on that genre. Donnie Darko came highly recommended, but I was not impressed. If you know me well, then you know that party movies are a guilty pleasure of mine, so don't give me grief about Out Cold.

When I have more time, I'll do a full review of Benjamin Button and Up, both of which deserve more than a simple letter grade.

PG-13, 1h 58m

Critics: C-

Miles: C+

Brooklynne: C

Brooklynne and I watched G.I. Joe last night. Brooklynne saw it while she was in Utah, so it was nothing new to her, but I was seeing it for the first time. All in all, it was a fine summer flick, which was entertaining, especially if you checked your expectations at the door, but it was only a mediocre adaptation from the cartoons that I grew up with and the potential for a really good action movie was mostly wasted.

I guess most of you would say, "what did you expect from a movie whose main purpose is to boost toy sales?" but I'm going to share my two main gripes anyway. First, the action and special effects were really cartoonish. That's not my issue. That would have been fine, and the movie could have been great by hailing back to its cartoon roots. But the cartoony action made the movie seem like a kid movie, which clashed with the ramped up violence compared to the animated series. In the original series, people didn't die (or very rarely at least). Things blew up and the bad guys ran away in a rain of bullets, but people's heads did not explode, people weren't run through with knives and stuff, and there wasn't an explicit disregard for human life. My suggestion to filmmakers is to go one way or the other. A realistic, violent, shoot 'em up would have been great for an adult audience, and a cartoonish, mild action movie for younger kids would have been fun. But a mix of the two seems both uncomfortably violent for the young kids it seems designed to appeal to, and annoyingly lame excuse for a more mature action movie.

Secondly (and perhaps predictably), the writers murdered the characters of the original. While Sienna Miller plays a great Baroness, her relationship with Duke is an affront to boys who grew up loving the series. Everyone knows that the Baroness is Destro's woman. Destro, on the other hand, comes off as weak character and incapable of being a convincing partner for the Baroness, which ruins any potential future for those characters in the inevitable sequels.

Duke's character was alright, as well as Ripcord, although the banter between Ripcord and Scarlet was lacking something. The pacing was good--you never felt like the story was bogged down in details. And the Zartan character did lend the audience something to be curious about in the next installment.

So there you have it... enjoyable movie, but far far from great, and not a movie that will satisfy your old G.I. Joe nostalgia. Did anyone else see it?  Thoughts?