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Shaggy Dog Movies of the '00s
by Simon Abrams
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 a number of problems with these lists is that they exclude so a number of 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.
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