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2001: Ghost World

There was a time when Scarlett Johansson was a good actor. Calm down, calm down; I'm being completely serious. Nowadays, Johansson is more well-known for appearing out and about in the world, than for her quirky choices of movies, such as The Man Who Wasn't There, Lost in Translation and Girl with a Pearl Earring. Now, I've never thought she was a great actress (see my comments on Lost in Translation), but she used to have a good eye for projects. The 2001 dramedy Ghost World, based on the graphic novel by Daniel Clowes, is one such movie. Johansson co-stars as Rebecca, the best friend of the main character, Enid. They've been friends for years and, as the movie begins, are graduating high school with the ambition to do pretty much nothing. Eventually, their friendship becomes more fractured, as Rebecca wants to do something with her life, while Enid is content hanging around with and harboring a small crush on Seymour, a middle-aged record collector.

Ghost World is always quirky, but the characters, especially Seymour and Enid, are so well-drawn and fully developed so you never feel like the story is too artsy for its own good. Thora Birch, as Enid, delivers a solid and charming performances; Johansson has a smaller role as the film goes on, but she's always believable, especially when she begins to drift further and further away from her old friend. Steve Buscemi is, as always, great; as Seymour, he's constantly skirting the line between being friendly and being pathetic. Ghost World never got the complete recognition it deserved. The film's director, Terry Zwigoff, got a slightly bigger hit two years later in Bad Santa; still, this movie has the heart that Bad Santa, while very funny, doesn't have. In the end, Enid doesn't get what she wants, but she's so instantly prickly yet lovable that it's hard for you not to root for her.

2002: Insomnia

Before he was capable of making pretty much any movie he wanted to, Christopher Nolan worked his way up to the Hollywood elite by delivering unique, layered, and complex pieces of entertainment. His first U.S. film was the 2000 classic Memento, which just missed my top ten of the decade by a hair. The follow-up was the 2002 crime drama from Warner Bros. called Insomnia. The film had a singular main cast: Al Pacino as a elder and weathered L.A. policeman, Hilary Swank as a bright-eyed cop in a small town in Alaska, and as the murderer being chased by these two cops, Robin Williams. Yes, Robin Williams, recently of Old Dogs and RV. Whatever else he's been in recently, though, Williams is profoundly unsettling as a savvy pulp-fiction author who kills a teenage girl he falls for after she becomes uninterested in his advances. The twist here is that Williams' character sees Pacino inadvertently kill his partner during a foggy chase scene.

What does the cop do? Well, he's got to play by the murderer's rules; if he goes to his fellow cops with the knowledge of where to find this madman, he'll go to jail for a murder he committed, but one that he really didn't mean to commit. Or did he? Though some critics still find the original film, a Norwegian film starring Stellan Skarsgard, a richer and more complex study of human nature, there should be no discounting the Americanized version, which still manages to feel completely alien to most culture in the continental United States. Pacino is not only battling his own demons and Williams, but the time of year he's chosen to go to Nightmute, Alaska; it's the time of year when the summer bring perpetual daylight. Thus, the insomnia of the title. Nolan has obviously become wildly famous due to his Batman movies, and his upcoming Inception is easily one of the most anticipated films of 2010. Still, Insomnia proved that he wasn't just a big fluke of a director.

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