Oltmans Movie Lists

Worst movie of the year, hands down 42.   Reno 911!Miami I don’t know why I watched the whole thing.   It was maddeningly unfunny, worse than anything I’ve seen over the last couple years.   The trailer for this was way funnier than the actual movie.   It makes me angry just thinking about it.   Movies I didn’t enjoy 41. Blades of Glory – I love Will Ferrell, but this was not funny at all.   I’m convinced the guy from Napoleon Dynamite was perfect for that one role, and will never be funny again. 40. Apocalypto – Pointless, violent action movie.   About as unrealistic as an action movie can get.   How many times can you get shot with an arrow and still outrun a jaguar?   Movies I enjoyed at least part of, but weren’t all that great or memorable 40.5 Totsi – I forgot about this one because I rented it in the store.   It won an academy award for best foreign film a couple of years ago, but I just thought it was ...

Movies I Loved Lest you think that my film tastes just run towards documentaries, historical miniseries, and foreign films, my top film of the year is… 1. The Dark Knight, aka the highest grossing, biggest, most-hyped movie of the year.   There wasn’t a cooler movie made this year.   Even though it was long, I wanted it to keep going.   I can’t think of a superhero movie I’ve ever liked more than this one.   There was so much hype leading up to the movie about how great Heath Ledger was, but I kind of figured it was just people making a big deal about him since he had died.   Wrong.   Ledger was what made this movie great for me.   His Joker goes down as one of the best bad guys in any movie ever (Darth Vader is still #1, of course) 2. Mongol – About five years ago my brother had the idea that he wanted to write a screenplay for a movie about Genghis Khan.   I thought it was a great idea – Khan is a fascinating figure, and you’d have to...

My All-Time Comedy Top 10 10. Anchorman – There has to be at least one Will Ferrell movie on my list, and this is probably my favorite, although Old School and Step Brothers were also hilarious.   One sign of a great comedy is how many great quotes the movie has, and this has more good ones than any movie in the last decade. 9. Planes, Trains, and Automobiles – Steve Martin and the late, great John Candy ruled the 80’s with some terrific comedies like Roxanne and Uncle Buck, and I think this was the best (or at least the funniest) movie either of them made. 8. Rushmore – I kind of feel like I’m cheating by including this on my top 10 high school movies and top 10 comedies, but it is one of my all-time favorite movies so I’m putting it on both lists.   Bill Murray is funny even when he’s sad. 7. Groundhog Day – Bill Murray is my undisputed comedy king, appearing in 4 of my 10 favorites.   Love him, love the story.   Lots of movies since, including...

For those of you I haven’t sent this to before, this is my fifth annual ranking of every movie I watched in the past year.   For me, the calendar year starts at the beginning of the summer and runs through the end of the school year.   The list isn’t necessarily ranked by how good a movie is, but rather how much I enjoyed watching the movie.   As a case in point, one of the movies near the bottom of my list this year is considered one of the greatest films of all time, but it nearly put me to sleep.   And at the top is a movie with humor that I wouldn’t let my kids or my parents watch, but had me nearly crying I was laughing so hard.   I put together the list mostly because I’m a bit obsessive about things that involve rankings or lists of some sort, but also because I like hearing other people’s opinions of films.   It’s always interesting to see what other people think about movies.   Last year the movie I caught the most grief about was Twilight. ...