This was actually my final project for my Literature class but it’s entertaining enough to warrant general readership.  It’s probably better if you’ve actually read The Inferno, though.  I’ll probably write the rest of the cantos sometime in the future.

CANTO I

When I had journeyed half of our life’s way, that is to say when I was 36 years, 1 month, and 18 days old, I found myself on a crowded freeway confined behind the wheel of a passenger vehicle.  This scenario was quite unremarkable considering a large portion of my waking hours were spent in this fashion, all the more reason for my state of despair at the time.  Up ahead, a serious accident involving multiple fatalities hindered my progress toward home.  The hot sun was beginning to set when a loudspeaker announced that the entire incidental congregation of commuters would now be turned around to go the opposite direction.  We were to follow the flashing blue and red lights to the next offramp.  Well, technically, the last offramp.  Naturally, the whole ordeal took ages and by the time I had made it back to the street the sun was already sinking beneath the horizon.  If only those people hadn’t wiped out and gotten killed, I could be home watching TV right now.  Since I had already missed the Simpsons reruns, the night was basically ruined for me.  And with work in the morning, I was just moving toward oblivion, toward sleep that would only steal more time.  My mood darkened in step with the sky.

CANTO II

Since my night was already shot, I decided to stop and get gas, despite having more than half a tank already.  Maybe I would buy a Snickers bar or something.  The next gas station I saw was a Shell station with the “S” missing.  How appropriate, I thought.  I pulled up next to the pump and got out of the car to go into the station.  There were no other cars around at the time.  The clerk was a middle-aged man with a thin brown beard, shaved head, and prominent brow.  He gave a prolonged stare and smile as I walked in.  A glance that might otherwise have been friendly was made unsettling merely but its persistence.  I grabbed a Snapple from the cooler and a candy bar from the rack and put them on the counter.  He made no motion to ring up the items but continued to smirk at me.  Now I was starting to get very uncomfortable, but all I could utter was, “Ummmm” before he interrupted me.

“Dante, your life, your job, your house, your routine, they have separated you from the things that truly matter.  You have begun to feel, increasingly, that there is more to it all than the dull work-a-day world you have sentenced yourself to.”

“How do you know my name?”

“You may know me as Les Stroud from TV’s Survivorman where I survive in the wilderness for seven days with no crew or outside assistance.  Not like Bear Grylls from Man Versus Wild with his entire support team.  I carry the damn cameras around myself!  Ah, but I digress.  I was sent here by the woman in heaven who watches over you, you know her.  Betty, your ex-girlfriend.  I will guide you in this journey. ”

“Hold on.  Journey?  Where?  I have to work in the morning I can’t journey anywhere!  And Betty’s not even dead, she can’t be in heaven.”

“Yeah, about that.  She was actually one of the fatalities in that accident.  Ironic, right?  In a way, she guided you here, as I will now guide you through the nine circles of Hell.  So, let’s get going.”  He took out a bathroom key attached to a large piece of plastic from under the counter.  Why are bathroom keys always attached to something bulky, anyway?  To dissuade people from stealing them?  Why would anyone want a key to a bathroom, there’s nothing but plumbing fixtures in it!

“Hell?  That’s just silly!  Even if Hell did exist, it wouldn’t be a physical place that we could just go to!  Besides, I have a life with responsibilities, I can’t just leave!  I have work at 9 am tomorrow and I need to sleep!”

“You sure do complain a lot.  The reason we’re going through Hell is because it is part one of a three part series that ends with your holy union with the deity of your choice.  We don’t discriminate here.”

“That’s very progressive, but again, I can’t!”

“Yeah, yeah, your job.  Listen, buddy, you can get a job anytime but how many opportunities do you have to go to Hell?  Wait, that’s not what I mean.  What I’m saying is this will be an enlightening spiritual experience that will shape you as a human being.  You would give up that chance just to sit around in traffic and answer telephones all day?”

Survivorman was right.  Up until now, I had felt a profound emptiness in life.  Work, traffic, money, rent, everything that my world consisted of had alienated me from the essence of being.  It was time to rectify that.

Les Stroud opened the bathroom door from the outside of the building and ushered me inside.  It was dim, smelly, and plastered with graffiti.  About what you would expect from a gas station bathroom with the exception of a shovel propped against the wall by the toilet.  I couldn’t fathom what purpose that might have served.  Les went over to the sink and unscrewed the mirror with a screwdriver he apparently had in his pocket.  Pulling it aside revealed a hole in the wall large enough for a person to crawl through.  Immediately I knew what I was going to have to do.  If it had been anyone other than Survivorman leading me on, this whole scenario would have been very shady, but this man once ate a scorpion and drank distilled dew from plastic wrap because he was stuck in the desert with no food!  Truly he is the one meant to guide me on this journey.

“So you’re telling me the entrance to Hell is in a gas station bathroom?”

“Of course, where else?”  He took out a small stepladder from under the sink and placed it so as to grant access to the hole.  “Read the inscription first.”

“’FOR A GOOD TIME CALL JENNY’?”

“No, the one above that.”

CANTO III

“’ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE’ That seems awfully familiar.”

“Yes, well, it is a famous literary reference.  Get in,” he said motioning to the wall.

“Shouldn’t we make preparations first?  Going to Hell seems like it might be dangerous.”

“Nothing in Hell can hurt you, although what you see there may be frightening and disturbing.  In truth, I have been there once before.  I had to survive there for seven days with no crew or assistance.  I do fear returning there, but only because of the great pity I feel for the residents.”

“Alright,” I said, mustering my courage, “I’m ready.”  I climbed up on the sink and into the hole.  As I crawled on, the darkness and narrowness of the passage suddenly became very apparent.  I was on the verge of panicking when the passage suddenly dropped off onto a metal grate.  At first I thought it was just the area behind the cooler in the convenience store and Les Stroud had just played a prank on me.  Then I saw that I was in a vast complex of metal and concrete with poor lighting.  Les Stroud fell out of the hole behind me, then stood up and dusted himself off.

“Well, here we are.  Hell.”

“It looks like it could use some renovation,” I said, seeing its dilapidated infrastructure.

“Unfortunately, none of the souls here are condemned to an eternity of repairing things.  It does contribute a sort of unsettling atmosphere though, doesn’t it?”  He walked ahead leading the way to a dirt arena where chalk lines had been drawn into the sand as if in preparation for a race.  Down in the bleachers hundreds of souls sat looking bored and listless.

“Are these souls condemned to an eternity of boredom?” I asked.

“These are the souls of those who live without disgrace and without praise.  They used to get chased by swarms of Africanized honeybees while the other people in Limbo placed bets on the weekends.  The bees all died though since there are no flowers in hell to extract pollen from.  Now the souls just sit there, without disgrace or praise.  A much more fitting punishment if you ask me.”

“Can’t they leave?  Why do they stay here?”

“Actually, I’ve never been all that clear on why people here do things repetitively.  It’s not as though someone is forcing them to do it.  Maybe because the souls here do not require sleep, food, or water to survive there is no reason to pursue different tasks.  Without the struggle for survival, apathy sets in.  Remember that as you watch my show, Wednesdays at 8:00 pm on the Discovery Channel.  Next week, I survive the Serengeti Plains!”

The Survivorman led me to the center of Limbo where there was a circular chasm so vast that I could not see the opposite shore through the haze nor the bottom of the shaft which disappeared into darkness.  I gripped the guardrails as I surveyed the scope of the place.  Giant machinery climbed from the floor and across the walls.  Engines, pipes, pistons, gears, all whose function was unclear to me.

“I can’t believe all this was under the gas station,” I said.

“Technically it isn’t.  That hole was actually a portal to Hell which exists on a different plane of reality than the material world.”  Just as I began to wonder how he knew so much about Hell, the earth began to tremble and I began to feel extremely dizzy.  Keep in mind I was still standing over a giant abyss and I have pretty severe acrophobia as it is.  The last thing I wanted was to feel unsteady on my own feet.  Overcome by vertigo, I quickly fainted.

CANTO IV

“Quite a tumble you took there, champ.  You’re lucky that court-ordered guardrail was put up in 1982.”

“You look frightened, Survivorman.”

“Not frightened,” he replied, “I’m just anticipating the horror we will soon witness when we leave the first circle.  Hell is organized by circles by the way; I may have forgotten to mention that.  This is Limbo, the first circle, and the circles progress downward becoming narrower.  Anyway, I feel very sorry for some of the souls here, hence my apprehension.  Definitely not afraid, no way!  You know what I’m afraid of?  Bull moose during mating season.  The most dangerous animal on the planet!”

“Okay, just asking.”  We moved on to a small city of Romanesque architecture with paved roads instead of just metal grating and old concrete.  It appeared to be a pedestrian-based city as I saw no automobiles.  Can you get an automobile into Hell?  Could they make their own?  Either way, the people here seemed to be at least euthymic in their disposition, wearing no expressions of suffering.

“This is the City of Worthy Pagans.  Really, that’s the name.  The people here lived good lives but they worshipped the wrong god so none of their good deeds really mattered.  Still, eternal torture didn’t sound quite fair so they were sent here as sort of a consolation prize.”

We climbed the stairs into a large state building that Les Stroud informed me was city hall.  There we met the city counsel, which consisted of Mother Theresa, Siddhartha, Jesus Christ, and Obi Wan Kenobi.  Because Mother Theresa doubted Christian theology later in her life, she was automatically denied entrance into heaven despite her great humanitarian efforts.  Siddhartha was here because he was a Buddhist of course.  At first I was baffled as to Christ’s placement here but then he explained that because he was technically Jewish he too was denied entrance into heaven.  He tried reasoning and pleading with Saint Peter at the pearly gates, explaining that it was God’s command that he be in heaven, but Peter insisted that because his paperwork listed Jesus as a Jew that it was out of his hands and that Jesus would have to speak to his manager.  To date, God has not returned any of Jesus’ prayers.  Equally baffling was the presence of Obi Wan Kenobi, a jedi master from George Lucas’ Star Wars films.

“But Obi Wan is a fictional character,” I said to him.  He mumbled something about Aenias being in the original Inferno.  We bade our hosts farewell and set off for the second circle.

CANTO V

A large freight elevator obviously designed to transport hundreds of people at once took us to the second circle where the souls of the lustful were condemned.  The main area of the circle was behind a tall fence crowned with razor wire.  The gate was guarded by former U.S. president Bill Clinton who had inexplicably grown a stereotypical devil tail and horns.  Clinton explained that it was he who determined the placement of souls in the circles of Hell, as if he were now the president of Hell.  He really did say that too, partly in jest.  I inquired why he of all people would be the guardian of the circle of the lustful.  He only had a single affair and surely there were so many more that were much more lustful.

“Everything in Hell can be summed up in one word: publicity.  The amount of attention your sin receives is directly proportional to the likelihood of some writer incorporating you into their ironic vision of Hell.”  I didn’t think to ask why he was here when he was supposedly still alive until he had already let us though.  We passed into the main chamber of the second circle which was an enormous wind tunnel where sinners where blown all around by strategically placed giant fans, colliding with the walls and with each other.  I couldn’t see the irony.  Les Stroud just shrugged and we circled the perimeter of the chamber looking for familiar faces.  I couldn’t discern anyone in particular; there were so very many of them and they were moving around too fast.  Disappointed, Les Stroud and I moved on.  I fainted for no reason.

CANTO VI

“You’re lucky I’m used to carrying fifty pounds of camera equipment with me wherever I go,” Les Stroud’s voice explained as I came to, “Otherwise I couldn’t have picked you up and carried you all the way down here to the third circle, where the gluttonous souls are condemned.”

“You could have let me wake up where I was and we could have walked here.”

“I could have but I carried you.  Is this fainting going to be an issue?”

“Actually, those were the only two times I will faint in the entire journey.”

In this circle, there was a heavy downpour of hail, snow, and dirty rain.  Not all at the same time of course, it varied with the local temperature.  There was also a sophisticated drainage system to prevent the circle from flooding.  In the main chamber, millions and millions of poor souls were bent over wet soil filling baskets with scrawny, frost-bitten vegetables.  At the far end, a giant three-headed dog lay on a quilt on a raised platform.  We ran over there as fast as we could to avoid getting terribly wet and sought an audience with the guardian of the third circle.  He introduced himself as Cerberus and told the story of how he used to slash the denizens of this hell with its claws.  Apparently, now that so many human societies had entered an age of post-scarcity, this circle was overpopulated with people who in life felt no need to restrain their appetites.  Eventually it was no longer prudent or even possible to give each patron equal slashing time, so Cerberus decided to radically overhaul the third circle and had vegetable seeds planted.  Now instead of being slashed, the gluttonous harvest food to be exported to other planes of existence where scarcity is still an issue.

“The beauty of it,” he explained, “is that their punishment is now productive, more humane, and above all, more ironic than before.”  Relieved of the duty of physically torturing everyone himself, Cerberus was now able to enjoy occasional downtime.  The diminished stress, he said, has calmed him down significantly and made him less prone to assaulting visitors.  On our way to the fourth circle we encountered deceased comedian Chris Farley.  The expression he wore indicated that he hadn’t laughed in a very long time.  I contemplated how unfair it was that he was stuck here forever just because he over-indulged a bit.  An eternity in freezing rain seemed less than just.

From ChartingTheEconomy.com

TODAY’S NEWS: Healthcare “reform” bill passes, Earth continues to orbit sun AND rotate on it’s axis.  Conservatives panic about “socialist” healthcare despite the government having been entrenched in the industry for centuries and despite a critical misunderstanding of what the word socialism actually means.

TOMORROW’S NEWS: Health insurance providers will continue to be irresponsibly rich, the vast majority of Americans will continue to have poor healthcare, I will continue not seeing any doctors at all.  Also, police will continue to militarize, American ordinance will continue to blow up civilians in far away countries that nobody can point to on a map, the US will continue to be the prison state of the world with 3% of its entire population incarcerated mostly for statutory crimes, the State will continue to be the de facto proprietor of all land not already owned by banks ensuring that near-total reliance on government and capital remain imperative to survival, the credit industry will continue to profit from the never-ending debt of people who can barely afford their minimum payments, land developers will continue to create suburban sprawl, squatters will continue to be forced out of their abandoned warehouses and become homeless people who will in turn continue to be forced to wherever they are not visible, anarchists will continue to be brutalized by cops without badges while protesting peacefully, the best drugs will continue to be illegal and thus expensive and lucrative for the *other* gangs without badges who will in turn continue to be petty and violent, and the rest of us will all continue to work some shitty job for shitty pay under a shitty boss trying to realize an American dream that doesn’t exist, and public schools will continue to manufacture stupid, complacent children to fill these jobs: hard workers, loyal citizens, all-around dull fucks without a shred of creativity.  In other words: everything is going to be okay ;)

"This is an unlawful assembly! Disperse immediately, you fucking peasants!

"Stay in your homes!"

"Bob, get a shot of me fucking this guy up!"

Take THAT, Freedom of Assembly!

This child is now property of the State!

The land of the freeeeeee... and the home of the braaaaaave

God Fuckin’ Bless America!!

By Mizuti; hosted over at Christian Humber Reloaded's current home.

Christian Humber Reloaded is a dreadfully written incoherent mess of a story. The plot is essentially non-existent and does nothing beyond provide a thread connecting the various slaughters of its protagonist, which as Kriegsaffe notes in his lengthy deconstruction of the story, is “the most powerful self-insertion character” that he (or anyone, probably) had ever seen. It clearly is not a masterpiece, but that does not mean that we should not take it seriously. After all, it has antecedents in pre-internet literature. Not great literature, mind you, but literature.

Rolfe playing dress up.

Christian Humber’s unwitting predecessor is a man named Frederick Rolfe, also known as Baron Corvo, A Crab Maid, Frank English and Frederick Austin, among other things. Rolfe, a devout convert to Catholicism, tried and failed several times to enter the priesthood but nonetheless rendered his name “Fr. Rolfe,” an abbreviation that could be interpreted as a shortened version of Frederick, but was more easily misinterpreted as indicating that Rolfe was a Catholic priest (Fr. Is the shortened form of “Father.”) His magnum opus was a book called Hadrian the Seventh. The plot revolves around an eccentric Englishman and failed priest who is elected Pope and proceeds to do all the things Rolfe probably dreamed about doing; things like selling all the art in the Vatican, upsetting the stuffy papal bureaucracy, and issuing papal decrees condemning communists. And all of this is takes place in an alternate reality in which descriptions of pre-pubescent boys that are just a bit too admiring are rife and women do not seem to exist.

Despite this minimal plot, the book is several hundred pages long. Rolfe’s prose is incessantly flowery and often groan-inducing. By any regular standard, it is not a very good book. But there is a certain charm to it: a weird guy who wished he was a priest wrote, in earnest, an entire nearly 400 page novel that could just as easily have been titled “The Stuff I Would Do if I Became Pope.” Now that’s dedication. The same dedication, in fact, that a certain Christian Humber showed when he put hand to keyboard and typed out 40 pages of violent destruction with a character that undoubtedly served as a vehicle for some of his own fantasies. It is easy to point out the many, many flaws of Hadrian the Seventh or Christian Humber Reloaded, but that misses the point. These were written by actual human beings. It takes a certain type of person to put so much time and dedication into descriptions of their alter egos walking around in papal robes chain smoking or ruining the Super Bowl and then killing every human being in Miami (including the cops). As a reader, if one remains cognizant of this fact, it makes the reading all the better. Especially if the material is written in a way that abandons even the most basic literary conventions whenever they obstruct the dramatic rendering of the author’s peculiar fantasies.

Somewhat unrelated.

1. Stop reading this.

2. Why are you still reading this? Do something productive.

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25. Bright Star – Jane Campion (2009)

The unlikely romance between John Keats and Fanny Brawne, one whose epistolary manifestations have become infamous, is the subject of “Bright Star,” Campion’s best film in over a decade. Keats’s abridged life is given to us mostly in summer hours spent looking through or standing near windows, pursued by light. “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever,” begins “Endymion,” a perfect explanation for the endurance of both Keats’s and Campion’s art.

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24. Brick – Rian Johnson (2005)

A highly-stylized, hard-boiled noir set in high school shouldn’t work, but its resounding success in Rian Johnson’s “Brick” makes it even more enthralling, and is a testament to the director’s unique and fully realized vision. As Brendan (played with a tight-lipped smolder by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) navigates the seedy underbelly of his hometown to find his ex-girlfriend, he runs up against more than a few unsavory, if larger-than-life characters.

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23. The Hurt Locker – Kathryn Bigelow (2009)

One of the best movies about war ever made, Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker” erupts onscreen, bringing both humor and sense to a situation (the Iraq War) which seems to have neither. Sgt. William James, a bomb squad leader played by the phenomenal Jeremy Renner, could so easily have been a cliché―the new guy who plays by his own rules, jeopardizing his life and others―that when everything goes well (and it does), the audience can breath a sigh of relief. But even when bombs and situations are diffused, the sense of urgency never leaves the screen.

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22. La Niña Santa – Lucrecia Martel (2004)

Lucrecia Martel is the best Argentinian filmmaker working today, and her labors stands alongside those of Lynne Ramsay and Jane Campion (or, in literature, Alice Munro), who specialize in the quiet, often uncomfortable business of chronicling the lives of marginalized, lonely, or lost women. In “La Niña Santa,” a young girl takes it upon herself to save the soul of a middle-aged man. Heat, sexuality, and even faith itself complicate this process.

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21. Punch Drunk Love – Paul Thomas Anderson (2002)

Colors. Lens flares. Harmoniums. “Punch Drunk Love” is, like many of Anderson’s films, long stretches of quietness interrupted by loud, often violent conflicts. It’s also one of the only watchable movies with Adam Sandler. (In a moment of rare onscreen instinct, Sandler decided to play something other than “Adam Sandler.”) Philip Seymour Hoffman as the “mattress man” makes the film alone.

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20.  Kiss Kiss Bang Bang – Shane Black (2005)

Struggling through Michael Hoffman’s 1995 film “Restoration” recently disproved my oft spoken claim that I could “watch Robert Downey Jr. in anything,” but “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” is such a smart comedy that it could have succeeded (in execution; the film did terribly in theaters) without him. But much better for the film, and for us, that Downey Jr. was able to bring his quick charm to Harry Lockhart, a down-on-his-luck thief who soon gets way over his head in a self-aware murder mystery.

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19. Shotgun Stories – Jeff Nichols (2007)

Jeff Nichols’s “Shotgun Stories” is more frightening than most horror films, and it achieves this through tense human drama and in the stoic face of Michael Shannon, behind which lies the trouble of an entire family. Two feuding families, joined by the recently-deceased father that left one to start the other, rush violently towards the film’s climax.

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18. All the Real Girls – David Gordon Green (2003)

David Gordon Green, until his associations with the Apatow camp, was a small filmmaker. He was concerned with small lives, small towns, and small moments, all of which bundled together to form significant changes in his characters. Green’s portrait of the American South, with its simple and direct dialogue, will break your heart before you’re sure what to make of it.

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17. Revanche – Götz Spielmann (2008)

After things go wrong in a bank robbery (do they ever go right?), Alex takes refuge in his grandfather’s country cottage, chopping wood and carrying a heavy guilt on his shoulders. What starts out being a film about love and crime soon transforms into a meditation on melancholia, and the abbreviated daylight of Austrian winter wraps its characters and their problems in a single, tragic bond.

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16. O, Brother Where Art Thou? – The Coen Brothers (2000)

George Clooney, John Turturro, and Tim Blake Nelson play escaped convicts in this reimagining of the Odyssey, encountering a number of fantastic elements along their journey home. Trudging through the South with a police at their backs and treasure out on the horizon, these three sing, dance, and laugh their way through one of the Coen brothers’ best films.

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15. The Station Agent – Thomas McCarthy (2003)

Thomas McCarthy’s films are primarily concerned with radically different and lonely people coming together to form an unlikely but surprisingly cohesive familial bond. “The Station Agent” follows Finbar McBride (Peter Dinklage) as he moves to rural New Jersey, reluctantly befriending Joe (Bobby Cannavale) and Olivia (Patricia Clarkson) and discussing trains, the weather, and irreparable loss.

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14. In Bruges – Martin McDonagh (2008)

Martin McDonagh is a name well-known in the realm of theater, but relatively unknown in that of film. His first feature, “In Bruges,” is a dark comedy filled with hilarious non-sequitur and politically incorrect slurs rattled off in thick accents. As two hit-men hide out in Bruges (of all places), one (Colin Farrell) gets increasingly annoyed with his location and increasingly guilty about his last job. Brendon Gleeson (the other hitman) and Ralph Fiennes (their boss) prove invaluable at dispensing McDonagh’s persiflage as well as his strange, somehow serious jocularity.

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13. Vanilla Sky – Cameron Crowe (2001)

Anyone who’s taken an introduction to philosophy class or seen “The Matrix” has been asked to wonder about the importance of reality in regards to happiness, and that if a machine could simulate happiness at a higher rate than we encounter it in our daily lives, would that machine be a good or a bad thing. “Vanilla Sky,” a remake of the “Abre los ojos,” evaluates what happens when that simulated happiness, that dream, becomes a nightmare. Bittersweet, the film came along in Crowe’s career before his love for music prevented him from making a watchable film.

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12. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – Michel Gondry (2004)

Nobody can explore the human mind so forwardly and with as much poignancy as Charlie Kaufman. Michel Gondry’s masterpiece “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” is a confluence of talents, emotions, and stunning visuals, one that evaluates the necessity of memory, pain, and loss. Gondry has proven to be far less rewarding a filmmaker after Kaufman stopped writing his scripts, but this 2004 gem remains a strong case for both of their talents.

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11. The Royal Tenenbaums – Wes Anderson (2001)

Wit and whimsy abound in Wes Anderson’s third film. Detailing the lives of two divorced parents and the three child prodigies they raised (who have become less remarkable upon entering adulthood themselves), “The Royal Tenenbaums” shows Anderson at the height of his cinematic fluency, with wide-angle lenses and shots borrowed from the French New Wave circling around his brilliant ensemble.

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10. The Wind that Shakes the Barley – Ken Loach (2006)

The Irish war for independence was not exactly characterized by glory, and Loach’s harrowing film “The Wind that Shakes the Barley” does not try to change that. It is dark, it is depressing, and even in the small and fleeting moments of sweetness or heart, there is a pressing danger that surrounds each and every one of the film’s characters. Even when an uneven truce is met, more problems arise. It is a tough but entirely rewarding film, one that speaks not only to the cause of history, but to the lives that endured it.

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9. Adaptation – Spike Jonze (2002)

Instead of adapting Susan Orlean’s “The Orchid Thief,” Charlie Kaufman wrote a screenplay about how difficult it was to adapt the screenplay, writing himself into the movie in the process. In the hands of anyone less capable, this could have been a disastrous first-year film school mistake, but in Kaufman’s, aided by the deft direction of Spike Jonze, it is a complete success. Dealing with the difficulty of transposing a work across mediums as well as several-hundred neuroses that blaze through Kaufman’s head in the film, “Adaptation” is life-affirming in the strangest ways possible.

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8. After the Wedding – Susanna Bier (2006)

Susanna Bier’s films are not exactly happy, and “After the Wedding” is no exception. Melodrama at its very best, the film follows Jacob Pederson (Mads Mikkelsen) as he returns to his native Denmark to secure a grant for his orphanage in India, only to learn that it has several strings attached. A powerful performance by Rolf Lassgård grounds the film, even when he is thrashing about and yelling at the top of his lungs.

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7. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly – Julian Schnabel (2007)

Julian Schnabel practically reinvents cinema in order to tell the story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the former fashion editor who was stricken with “locked-in syndrome,” able to move only one eye. The film grabs the viewer from its first startling moments, locking them in with Bauby for much of the film. Our only escape as viewers is found in his only escape as a man: in memory. The film crashes back through moments of his life, some profound and some deceptively banal, but all undeniably beautiful.

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6. The Barbarian Invasions – Denys Arcand (2003)

The Barbarian Invasions,” which continues 1986’s “The Decline of the American Empire,” may be the best sequel ever made (next to, of course, “The Empire Strikes Back”). Catching up with the ensemble cast that made the first one a success, “The Barbarian Invasions” focuses on the last weeks of Rémy, a college professor who learns he has cancer and gathers his friends at a cabin in French-Canada, essentially, to say goodbye. The film, like its predecessor, is one big, lively conversation, and is as funny and as genuine as it is heartbreaking.

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5. There Will Be Blood – Paul Thomas Anderson (2007)

Is there anyone better at creating larger-than-life, terrifying Americans than Daniel Day-Lewis? Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood,” adapted from Sinclair’s “Oil!,” is reasonable proof against the possibility. With discord both in the clashing strings of the soundtrack and the nervous, sweaty desperation onscreen, Anderson presents a portrait of the furiously emerging country and the egomania that shaped it.

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4. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou – Wes Anderson (2004)

Anderson’s films have always been about reluctant, struggling fathers and the complexes they give their children, as well as all the people they surround themselves with to fight loneliness. Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) is perhaps the most solipsistic protagonist Anderson has put forth, and he’s certainly the most concerned with abstractions like revenge and legacy. Diving through dead-pan and David Bowie, Anderson’s send-up to Jacques Cousteau is essential viewing.

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3. Children of Men – Alfonso Cuarón (2006)

Dystopian fictions are a tricky breed, but Cuarón’s masterpiece is able to make the end of the world feel not only jarringly real, but immediately human. During astoundingly long takes in a world massaged, not inundated, with digital enhancement, Theo (Clive Owen) tries to make sense of what’s going on around him, where, in a world where women have stopped being able to give birth, one suddenly has. Amid fascism and anarchy, the dangers of the world loom and threaten the new young mother, the first beacon of hope in almost two decades.

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2. Synechdoche, NY – Charlie Kaufman (2008)

The scale of “Synechdoche, NY” is almost indescribable; it spans almost half of the life of Caden Cotard, a theater director who feels himself hurdling towards death and, what’s worse, irrelevance. He loses his wife, is estranged from his daughter, and he feels every other meaningful relationship he has slipping through his fingers. The narrative speeds up as the movie progresses, and we lose larger and larger bits of time. Kaufman’s film, his directorial debut, is tough, and certainly depressing; it is among a handful of films that has the power to truly change the way you think about life and how you live it, and is one of the most valuable contributions to cinema, to art that’s ever been made.

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1. The Squid and the Whale – Noah Baumbach (2005)

Many of the best films are aggressively personal; Noah Baumbach’s semi-autobiographical work “The Squid and the Whale” is a perfect example. Caught in the center of his parents’―both writers―bitter divorce, Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) tries to circumvent the pains of adolescence by imitating his father (see: poor role model) and reaching after some kind of literary precocity. He lies, he cheats, and he struggles against the anxiety of influence as his world makes less and less sense. At under 90 minutes, every single scene is essential; Baumbach’s wit has never been sharper than it is in this film, as the former lovers lob insults at each other behind walls of emotionally-detached double-speak and joint custody. With nods to Rohmer and Truffault, “The Squid and the Whale” articulates the difficulty of growing up and growing apart.