Shaggy Dog Movies of the '00s

Amongst other things, December is the magic time of the year when lists of the "Best/Most Important/Least Degrading/Most Thoughtful/Most Transgressive/Most Crowd-Pleasing Films of the Year" are compiled by critics and other buffs; once in a blue moon, you also find lists championing the "Best/Greatest/Most Entertaining/Artfulliest Films of the Decade." While there's certainly an argument to be made in favor of these self-important necessary evils, one of the many problems with these lists is that they exclude so many good, sometimes troubled films just because they don't end up where they start out.

These are the cinematic equivalent of "shaggy dog" jokes—stories that build and build only to leave the viewer with a preposterous anticlimax of an ending. Sometimes they drag the viewer along and build up the expectation that some central burning question will be solved when, in fact, it won't. Sometimes their creators bite off more than they can chew, delivering a film that's prematurely deemed an ignoble failure because it's too wrapped up in its own obtuse punchline to let us in on the joke. Whatever the reason, the fact that they don't add up in the end is what makes them so fascinating, confounding, irritating, bewitching and cruelly funny. A few of them involve God, outer space and/or other generic conventions, because nothing makes for a more enticing road to nowhere than a heady story about alien or celestial mother ships. Behold, my Top 10 Favorite Shaggy Dog Movies of the Decade That Was the Aughts. There are a good deal of SPOILERS along the way; you've been warned.

10. Izo (2004)

By that year, Takashi Miike (Audition, Zebraman) had already established himself as an international cult darling and a prolific provocateur. Nevertheless, what sets Izo apart from Miike's other noodle-scratchers is its heartfelt (though clearly unbalanced) critique of the interminable cycle of universal violence and the indomitable psychic forces that make sure history repeats itself. Yes, really, Miike said all that. Izo's titular hero tries to confront and kill the person or persons responsible for the world's problems and winds up confronting God. Miike begins with a crucifixion and ends with a legion of magnified sperm, leaving the viewer to wonder what the hell came in between the two.

9. Crank (2006)

As the film that put the endearingly spazzy co-writer/director team of Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor on the map, Crank came as a shock to unprepared viewers expecting a generic action film with a tweaked set-up. Like a sleazy parody of D.O.A., Crank follows Chev Chelios (Jason Statham in what has retrospectively become his über-performance) as he tracks down the killers that gave him "The Beijing Cocktail," a synthetic drug requiring him to keep his heart rate up, lest he double over and die. The film is infused with its protagonist's convulsive energy, emulating and exaggerating the obnoxious, hyper-kinetic rhythm of its L.A. setting with hilariously crude results. Its spit-take-worthy non-resolution sets up this year's avant-retarde sequel in such a way that you have to marvel at Neveldine and Taylor's ballsy and proudly juvenile sense of humor.

8. The American Astronaut (2001)

Writer/director Cory McAbee's indie sci-fi musical western whatsit garnered a sizeable cult audience with good reason. The soundtrack, attributed to The Billy Nayer Show (a band led by singer/songwriter McAbee), is strange in the best way possible, and the film is wonderfully imaginative in its depiction of an intergalactic bounty hunter Samuel Curtis' (McAbee again) quest to deliver a real live boy to a planet of sterile women. At the same time, there's no real resolution of the film's biggest theme, namely how the alienation of space leads to sexual frustration and borderline psychotic obsession. Villainous Professor Hess is on Samuel's trail, has a crush on him, and uses a ray gun to turn everybody in his way to dust—while our hero begins to bond with "The Boy Who Actually Saw a Woman's Breast," a 16-year-old child raised as a deity on a planet of men that have never seen a woman before. In the end, "The Boy" gets delivered, his handler gets away and the bad guy just sort of disappears. If there is a moral to this story, it's that a lack of consummation can drive you crazy.

7. Frailty (2001)

What's misleading about actor Bill Paxton's brooding directorial debut is how it solves its main theological quandary. The crux of the film is whether Paxton, playing a mild-mannered father who believes he must kill demons disguised as normal people with a holy log-splitting axe, is in fact God's liberator... or just a crazy guy with an axe. His two sons, one of whom he is asked to sacrifice a la Abraham, are the only ones that get to know that answer. We see that one is in direct communication with God, continuing his father's work without ever revealing if his father ever had a holy mandate in the first place. It's like answering, "Why did the chicken cross the road?" with "Because her chicks followed after her!" That doesn't compute, but by that point, Paxton has already led us by the nose down such a grim road that even if this were just a story about an abusive father, it’d be a memorable one.

6. Dante 01 (2008)

Tragically dumped direct-to-video in the US, the first feature directed solo by Marc Caro (City of Lost Children, Delicatessen) is a gorgeous, thoroughly perplexing, pseudo-religious space odyssey. It channels Alejandro Jodorowsky's mystical, genre-mashed-up movies through the filter of Jodorowsky's broader space-opera comic book stories, creating a strange B-movie companion to Solaris. A mental patient is sent to a remote space station to test a new cure for schizophrenia, except he is actually the cure. The mystery patient, nicknamed "St. George the Dragon-slayer," is imbued with cosmic curative powers that allow him to see a person's illnesses and remove them like a practitioner of holistic medicine would a chicken liver. Because Dante 01 mostly follows St. George's interactions with his fellow inmates, the fact that only a handful of the station's inhabitants realize he is the intergalactic messiah means that the psychedelic finale comes out of nowhere. In that sense, it's a spiritually hopeful, utterly perplexing headache of a film. Thanks to Caro's keen sense of style, however, it's a beautiful migraine.

5. Doppelganger (2003)

For all intents and purposes, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Doppelganger was a way for the Japanese auteur to get some extra energy out of his system before returning to his heady, dour and all seemingly water-damaged horror films. Koji Yakusho stars as a man who meets his exact double while working on a robot chair for the handicapped. At first convinced his mirror image is out to kill him, he discovers instead that he actually wants to help finish the chair, but why is anyone's guess. The doppelganger is easily Kurosawa's least complex abstraction, a figure whose tendency to say inappropriate and inexplicable things suggests he's a projection of the main character's repressed ego. He's more aggressive when it comes to winning over the girl of their dreams, and more proactive when the fate of their invention is threatened by a loss of funds. And yet, the shadow's secretive and flamboyant actions ultimately make him a generic threat and the chair—a project that both men agree must be finished—goes out of control and heads off for parts unknown. Never trust your evil twin, least you take your eye off the prize and it drives away with its robot appendages flailing in the air like Johnny 5 on a bender.

4. The Fountain (2006)

Arguably Darren Aronofsky's greatest film, The Fountain remains his most unsung because it's his least straightforward. Using a trifurcated structure, the film follows three ambiguously linked moments in time, centuries apart, leading up to a moment of revelation that forcibly prevents the viewer from achieving a coherent resolution. Granted, it's about the mysterious border between life and death and one man's passion quest to find the Tree of Life, so it works well in that sense. Still, seeing a man impaled on a root of said tree only to have a semen-like substance dribble out of his mouth is... not at all what viewers expected. Nevertheless, the film's vision carries the absurdities and grants it one of the most unsung, fitting, utterly romantic finales on this list.

3. Inland Empire (2006)

It's remarkable that a little less than three decades after Eraserhead, David Lynch is still making people confused as sin and more than a little ireful because of it. Inland Empire split critics straight down the middle, with some loving it as ambling three-hour opus of hallucinatory skits that circuitously revolve around psychic violence and the repression of women. (The film's tagline is "A woman in trouble," after all.) Others dismissed it as self-indulgence for its own sake from a master, not unlike his Wild at Heart. Yet there's something squirming about in Lynch's scattershot imagery that relates primal fears in a new format (this is, notably, the auteur's first dabbling with digital photography—and not high-end equipment). The last scene, a sock-hop from hell, recalls the eerie opening sequence of Mulholland Dr., but that cursory similarity is not meant to make the viewer feel comfortable. Rather, it's to induce the menacing state of déjà vu that the recurring characters in the film grapple with throughout its comically sinister vignettes. Inland Empire fascinates and confounds Lynch-heads because it's so good at sharing its wealth of alienation.

2. The Wicker Man (2006)

Writer, director and playwright Neil LaBute's remake of the cult-beloved 1973 horror film is wickedly perverse. By unevenly re-imagining Anthony Shaffer's original story of a missing girl on an island community of pagan hippies as a caricature of dueling patriarchial/matriarchial ideals, LaBute won himself few fans. But the ones that are in on the jokes and recognize the film as an intentional but lopsided black comedy—in which Nic Cage plays a swinging dick in a world full of schizoid feminists—see it as an audacious failure. The original's much-hyped ending, which effectively invalidates the rest of the film's procedural plot, now actually feels satisfying thanks to Labute's spoof of that film's conservative paranoia. YouTube clips be damned: there's something about the manic energy Cage puts in the film, mixed with LaBute's ill-advised zeal, that makes their Wicker Man a lumpy treat.

1. Southland Tales (2006)

Richard Kelly's sophomore feature was received with such fire and brimstone that it's easy to overlook how much more ambitious and successful it is than Donnie Darko, his excellent debut. A gleefully puerile post-modern parody of the Information Age, Southland Tales is a sprawling film full of allusions, backstories and Kelly's usual brand of questionable spiritual provocations. It's an incomplete text, one that strings viewers along with its promises of forthcoming answers, while showing through its endless tangential questions why no such denouement will ever appear. It's a stew of unglued, context-less historical and pop culture references, from the Pixies to Norman Kefauver—the senator responsible for spearheading the 1954 Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. Too many characters, too many frathouse jokes, and an unhealthy smattering of the warped sense of humor rampant throughout Philip K. Dick's more slippery stories make Southland Tales hard to swallow. But its willingness to go over the top and refusal to explain most of its mysteries also makes it endlessly rewarding.