1. Despite the hardness with which each of these three guys exist, they all fall deeply in love with their dogs, of course, because dogs are the very best and allow humans to access parts of themselves that are often otherwise unreachable.

2. I toyed around briefly with making this chapter a thing about tough guys who own birds as a way to talk about LL Cool J in Deep Blue Sea and Mickey Rourke in Iron Man 2, but that would’ve probably only been interesting to me, Chris Ryan, and like six other people.

3. This is the dumbest thing. I love it a lot. As soon as I started writing this chapter, I said to myself, “This is it. This is the one that I’m going to start the book with.”

4. There’s a whole thing to be said about how pit bulls are a misunderstood breed, same as Bob Saginowski is a misunderstood human.

5. I Am Legend looks a lot different if Sam was, say, a weenie dog.

6. How about this for a crossover theory: What if the virus is how John Wick’s wife died? I know the time tables don’t exactly match up, but I also know that we’re talking about zombie-vampires, so, I mean, let’s not get too lost in the nitpicking.

7. During a behind-the-scenes interview, Dennis Lehane, the author and screenwriter of The Drop, explained, “Ten years prior to the film beginning, Bob has made a decision that he’s going to close himself from humanity; he’s gonna close himself off from feeling; that he is never going to engage the world. And the film opens really on the day he engages the world again through this puppy. It’s when he finds the dog that he begins to open something up in him.”

8. My all-time favorite Jaime anecdote is one day I got a phone call at like 8 a.m. on a Tuesday. I didn’t recognize the number so I answered it because this was before I had student loan collectors calling me all the time. Jaime was on the other end of the line. When I realized who it was I said, “Why are you calling me at 8 a.m. on a Tuesday, Jaime?” He very matter-of-factly said, “My friend works at the bus station. They have a Street Fighter II machine there. Do you wanna go to the bus station with me and play Street Fighter II?”

9. There’s a 50 percent chance that Bob is actually really smart and understands that pretending to be a blockhead is the easiest way for him to live his life.

10. It’s the second best haircut that Keanu Reeves has ever had in a movie. His first best was the very short cut he had in Speed. Semi-related: The best non-Keanu haircut that anyone has ever had in a Keanu Reeves movie was the surfer cut that Patrick Swayze had in Point Break. It was, in all manner and in all ways, perfect.

11. My wife and I watched I Am Legend in a movie theater during Christmas break the year that it came out. There’s a scene in it where Will Smith does pull-ups with his shirt off. When it happened, I leaned over to her and whispered, “Hey. If you ever get the chance to cheat on me with Will Smith, please do it.”

12. When Nadia, who has just watched Bob shoot Eric in the throat and head, says, “You just fucking shot him,” Bob says back, “Yes, I did. Absolutely. He was gonna hurt our dog.”

1. Tarantino wrote and directed both of the Kill Bill movies.

2. Third on the list of things he likes is “Writing the N word in scripts” would be my guess.

3. This is why she decided she no longer wanted to be in the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad.

4. Christoph Waltz does a very similar thing as the villainous Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds.

5. She eventually poisons him.

6. My first-ever experience with any sort of extended universe was seeing the Pussy Wagon truck in a Missy Elliott video after Kill Bill: Volume 1 had come out.

7. There’s something uniquely hilarious to me about being in a life-threatening sword fight with an ultra assassin and taking the time to pause the fight for a second to call her a “silly Caucasian girl.”

8. I know this seems like a good thing, and it probably is, but there’s also a part in the scene where Beatrix realizes that she’s missed out on the first four years of her daughter’s life and somehow becomes even angrier than she was when she thought the little girl was dead.

9. A neat thing is the camera switches to black-and-white during a long stretch of the fight. That’s because there was so much blood in that scene that the MPAA threatened to give the movie an NC-17 rating if Tarantino didn’t rein things in a bit. Turning everything black-and-white was just a sneaky way to do that.

10. I’m not sure if O-Ren’s main bodyguard, a sadistic seventeen-year-old named Gogo Yubari, is a member of the Crazy 88 or not. If she is, you can slide her into the number-two spot in this top four. She gets a table leg with three large nails in it slammed into her foot, which is then pulled out and slammed into the side of her head.

11. My wife and I have been arguing for fifteen years about whether or not it hurts to get your head cut off. She thinks that it does. I think that it does not. I think that it happens so fast that your brain doesn’t have time to register anything other than it maybe saying, “Oh fuck. My head isn’t on my body anymore.”

12. I actually know exactly why it bothered me. It’s because I’m an idiot.

13. I would like it stated for the record that none of these things justify him trying to kill her. Thank you.

14. When they get around to making Kill Bill: Volume 3, it will be twenty years in the future from when Kill Bill: Volume 2 ended and it’s going to be Nikki, Vernita’s daughter, hunting down Beatrix for killing her mother. And Elle’s going to be the one who trains her to be a killer.

1. He had Central Intelligence (kind of funny), Moana (excellent), The Fate of the Furious (very good), Baywatch (a lot of people hated it but I liked it), Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (good), Rampage (bad), and Skyscraper (pretty bad). And that definitely seems like a lot, but only until you remember that he was in five (!!!!!!!) movies in 2013 alone. His films grossed nearly $1.5 billion globally that year.

2. It was spliced from a scene in a TV show on HBO called Ballers.

3. He was in thirty-seven between 2001 and 2018.

4. I have to believe that this was the exact pitch for this movie when the writers were shopping it around Hollywood.

5. RoboCop is stuffed fat with silly scenes and even sillier moments. My favorite tiny one that happens: While showing off another potential robotic law enforcement machine (the giant, cumbersome, terrifying ED-209) to a boardroom full of suits, the motherboard malfunctions. The ED-209, which was only supposed to scare everyone, ends up shooting a guy in the chest 100,000 times with high-caliber bullets. It turns his chest into spaghetti. There are pieces of him everywhere. He is as dead as anyone has ever been dead, or will ever be dead. That much is clear. And still, after this very obvious massacre, there are a few seconds of silence, and then someone in the background shouts, “Somebody wanna call a goddamn paramedic?!” My best guess is that paramedic was then going to call a janitor, because janitors always have buckets, and that’s what they were going to have to carry that guy out of the room in.

6. Holy Fucking Shit, as it were.

7. We came dangerously close to this in 2011 when Vin Diesel and The Rock fought in Fast Five.

8. Pain & Gain was incredible.

9. It was because of this scene that I spent a not insignificant stretch of my young life thinking that women were attracted to men who could do the splits. And while that very well may actually be a true thing, one thing I can say for certain is that women are not attracted to me telling them I can do the splits.

10. To make you cry.

11. Home Alone is Culkin’s most everlasting movie performance. It’s not his best, though. His best is as Henry in The Good Son.

12. I guess that’s not so much “funny” as it is “sad.”

13. They actually allude to how Jack is going to die in exactly this way when Jack and Rose first meet. Rose is about to jump off the back of the boat and kill herself because she’s so upset with how her life is turning out. Jack sees her and intervenes. After a couple moments of chitchat, he tells her that if she jumps he’s going to have to jump in after her. She says that he’ll be killed if he does so. He tells her he’s a good swimmer. She says that the fall alone will kill him. And he says, “It would hurt. I’m not saying it wouldn’t. To tell you the truth I’m a lot more concerned about that water being so cold.”

14. This is a very sweet thing to do, but I imagine it’d also be wildly traumatizing.

1. The people who push the cage up against the paddock are called the “Pushing Team,” which is hilarious to me.

2. He’s called the “Gatekeeper,” which is also hilarious to me. I keep picturing some recruiter trying to sell him on the job, being very mysterious and mystical about the situation. And then when he asks what the Gatekeeper is actually responsible for, the recruiter is like, “Huh? Oh, basically you just open a gate.”

3. This should not have been a surprise, given that IT’S A FUCKING RAPTOR.

4. I have a lot of questions about this scene, the most relevant of which being: You mean to tell me you’ve unlocked the science behind re-creating creatures that have been dead for tens of millions of years but you can’t figure out how to make a cage that doesn’t require a person climbing on top of it to open a gate?

5. This paragraph is the most amount of times in my life I have used the word “paddock.”

6. February 11, 2019.

7. At the moment, a sixth movie—Jurassic World III—is supposed to be released in 2021.

8. Watching Jurassic World in a theater in 2015 is one of my five favorite ever movie theater experiences. The part at the end where Blue, the star raptor of the movie that you think has been killed, comes running back on screen to join in the big final dinosaur fight is perfect.

9. I’m doing a lot of work here to talk myself into this idea.

1. “As far back as I can remember I always wanted to be a gangster.”

2. A fun aside: Henry Hill talks about wanting to be a gangster as he’s dealing with a dead body in a car. Jules Winnfield, who works for crime boss Marsellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction, refers to himself (and his partner) as gangsters while he’s on the phone with Wallace talking to him about what to do with a dead body they have in their car.

3. Is Gangs of New York a gangster film? (Maybe, but probably not.) Is New Jack City a gangster film? (Absolutely.) Is Training Day a gangster movie? (No.) Is Snatch a gangster movie? (Barely, but yes.) Is Belly a gangster movie? (Yes.) Is Blood In, Blood Out a gangster movie? (It has gangs and also it has what amounts to the movie version of the Mexican mafia in it, but no.) More, more, more.

4. There’s a book I like called The Ultimate Book of Gangster Movies by George Anastasia and Glen Macnow. In it, they walk front to back through what they argue are the hundred best gangster movies of all time. They tackle the topic of figuring out what is or isn’t a gangster movie in the foreword, eventually settling on a similar verdict, saying they chose to go with “U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s inarguable characterization of pornography: ‘I know it when I see it.’”

5. We did a similar thing in Basketball (and Other Things), except we were picking basketball players from movies and TV shows. It’s always one of my favorite things to do. It makes me feel like Kevin Costner in Draft Day when he was trying to figure out who to draft for his Cleveland Browns. I always respected that he chose Vontae Mack with the first pick. It took guts to do that, what with several seemingly bigger and better players available. I didn’t make a Vontae Mack–style pick anywhere in the Basketball (and Other Things) draft, but I’m going to do it somewhere in here.

6. Should Manny have seen this coming? He should have, right?

7. I know the character that Frank Lucas shoots in the head right here isn’t really named Stringer Bell (his name is Tango), but it’s just that Idris Elba is always going to be Stringer Bell.

8. John Turturro has, for many years, been one of my favorite actors. He has this odd ability to tune in perfectly to whatever frequency it is that a role needs.

9. “Now you know how to do this, right? You gotta remember to put one in his brain. The first shot puts him down, then you put one in his brain. Then he’s dead. Then we go home.”

10. Tom ends up killing Bernie later in the movie because Bernie tries to blackmail Tom with his own pretend death. Tom should’ve shot Bernie in the woods the first time. It’d have saved everyone a lot of trouble.

11. SYMBOLISM!

1. My favorite scene is when he ends up back in Philadelphia at the end of the movie. He’s sitting across from his gangster brother, who had to suffer through the blowback of Tom/Joey leaving. Tom says that he’s there to make peace. His brother says no, that he has to die, and then a guy standing behind Tom tries to strangle Tom with a piece of thin rope or wire like an idiot instead of shooting him in the back of the head like a non-idiot. Tom, of course, fights his way out of the room, killing two of his brother’s men on the way out, one of which he stomps in the throat.

2. My second favorite scene is when Tom finally admits that he’s Joey. He holds on to that lie for long enough that you really start to feel like maybe it’s all just a big case of mistaken identity. Hearing him say he really is Joey is very satisfying.

3. This sounds like a terrible date, but also it sounds like kind of an excellent date.

4. Manny and Gina would’ve made for a great couple, I suspect.

5. The guy who played Bullet Tooth Tony in Snatch (Vinnie Jones) plays a similar character in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. There’s even a scene where he bashes a guy’s head in with a car door. (Guy Ritchie directed both movies.)

6. Pacino is, at best, the third best part of Carlito’s Way, losing out to Leguizamo as Benny Blanco and Sean Penn as the slimy and loathsome lawyer David Kleinfeld. It’s Pacino’s accent that does it. He’s never quite able to pin down exactly what he’s supposed to sound like.

7. Do you think that if Carlito had killed Benny he’d have made it out of the movie alive? There’s no chance, right? Carlito was forever fated to a catastrophic end, is what it feels like to me, and what Carlito alluded to when he got pulled into that drug deal with his cousin.

8. It’s so fucking good.

9. This same person one time recapped The Lion King by saying, “It’s about a lion who makes friends with a pig and a ferret.”

10. Smokin’ Aces is only juuuuuuuuuuust barely a gangster movie, but it’s a gangster movie nonetheless.

11. Fortunately, she does not get shot. Her father does, though.

12. The out and out greatest performance of his career was in Boogie Nights, obviously. But he doesn’t have to carry The Departed like he did in Boogie Nights. He gets to show up for a few minutes, put up a few thirty-five-footers off the dribble, and then disappear. It’s like talking about the difference between someone’s best overall season and their best single-game performance.

13. His second best: “I’m the guy who does his job. You must be the other guy.” His third best: “If you had an idea of what we do, we would not be good at what we do, now would we? We would be cunts. Are you calling us cunts?”

1. See? It feels weird calling him “Tango” and not “Stringer.”

2. Ace lends Mitch $5,000, which is enough for Rico to calm down. This has always bothered me. Mitch wasn’t short on the money. After their initial bet, Mitch had $10,000 in his possession (his original $5,000, plus the $5,000 he’d just won from Rico). When they bet the second time, Rico tells him to “double up,” setting two wads of money on the table. Assuming each wad is $5,000, that means the total of the new bet is $10,000, which Mitch was in possession of.

3. Of course, their relationships all turn to muck later in the movie.

4. Hated.

5. Hated.

6. There are few things as unsettling as watching a child contemplate where he wants to be shot.

7. Except Elvira. She was the only one smart enough to see that hanging around Tony was going to get her killed. I always wondered if she’d tried her hand at any more relationships after she left Tony. Like, was there a point in her life afterward where she was out on a date with some guy and he asked her about her previous relationship and she had to explain to him that her husband was a drug dealer who was murdered? And so then as a way to break the tension her date asked her about her relationship before that and she was like, “He was a drug dealer who was murdered.”

8. To get hyper-specific about the situation: I am writing this right now in my office in downtown San Antonio. My father drives a bus two blocks away from the building I’m in. If I look out the window at exactly the right time each day, I can see him.

9. Told you.

1. James Cameron directed both Avatar and Titanic.

2. Avengers: Infinity War is the other.

3. I know that Avengers: Age of Ultron was also an Avengers movie but it never felt like it grabbed a hold of everyone the way that the other three did.

4. Two other modern examples of monoculture: the last three seasons of Game of Thrones and rooting against the Warriors from 2017 to 2019.

5. I realize that this is silly given that I wrote their names in the acknowledgments, but it just feels different.

6. It took a good 10 minutes before he landed on this name. He spent more time coming up with his fake name here than his mother and I did coming up with his real name when he was born.

7. Truth be told, this is actually a pretty good way to summarize Avengers: Endgame.

8. Every Friday, we do a thing at our house called Friday Family Movie Night. I imagine many families do it. Everyone turns off their personal electronics and we order Chinese food and then put a movie on and sit there and watch it together. Sometimes it’s bad, like the time when one of the twins asked to watch Paranormal Activity, but mostly it’s very good. Anyway, we had a stretch where we watched the three Spider-Man movies that Tobey Maguire made. That’s who I was talking about here. And for the record, I liked Tobey as Spider-Man. It’s just that I liked Tom Holland more. He’s my second favorite ever Spider-Man, behind only Shameik Moore as Miles Morales in Into the Spider-Verse.

9. When the twins were young—probably around six or seven—Larami and I put them in taekwondo. And they really liked it a lot in the beginning, but then they started sparring, at which point they hated it. One of the boys (the one who’s going by the name “Two” in this chapter) was sparring with a kid, but he was a little too nervous to hit the kid so the teacher gave them both these foam swords and said to use those instead. The point was to introduce them to the idea of hitting each other, which, as I type this, I’m seeing how dumb that is. But so the teacher gave each of the kids a foam sword, and then signaled the start of their sparring match. The kid whopped Two across the chest with the sword and Two lost his fucking mind. He dropped the sword, balled his little fists up, did a scream like The Hulk did in the first Avengers movie when he saw all the aliens, and then charged at the kid. He tackled him down and just started pounding on him. It has since been a running joke that Two, if you get him mad enough, will turn into a tinier, more tan version of the Hulk.

10. The Baby loves the Jurassic World franchise. Chris Pratt, who plays Peter Quill in the MCU, also plays Owen Grady, star of the Jurassic movies.

11. This doesn’t really have anything to do with anything, but the all-time greatest quick little Easter egg in a Marvel movie is when Red Skull, the Nazi villain from Captain America: The First Avenger, makes an offhand remark about how Hitler is overseeing a mining expedition in the desert, which is a sneaky high-five to Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark.

12. Iron Man was the first movie of the MCU’s twenty-two movies that made up its initial run. There was actually some uncertainty in place when Marvel started the MCU. People in charge thought that The Incredible Hulk was going to be the universe’s marquee figure in the beginning, but Robert Downey Jr. was so undeniably good as Iron Man that he became the central figure.

13. A fun thing: Tony Stark meets Nick Fury at the very end of Iron Man. Fury says to him, “Mr. Stark, you’ve become part of a bigger universe.” It’s a neat thing to look back on and realize that Marvel’s very ambitious plans to make their own cinematic universe were in play from the start. It’s also a neat thing to look back and realize that Nick Fury was actually talking to the audience as well.

14. Eight Legged Freaks. It was on Netflix. We tried watching it one day. A bird gets killed in the first few minutes. The King Spider started crying. We had to turn it off.

15. The Indominus Rex is the main villain dinosaur in Jurassic World.

16. I was mad right here, but the more I think about it, the more sense it makes. He just watched a movie where literally billions of people on earth come back to life. That probably clouds up the permanence of death in a six-year-old’s mind. Unless you’re killed by a spider, in which case you are dead forever, apparently.

17. One of my very favorite things is when two different parts of pop culture get folded over onto each other. (You could’ve maybe guessed this by looking at the cover of this book.) It happened every so often when I was a kid—I remember being absolutely beside myself when I found out that the Ninja Turtles and Vanilla Ice existed in the same universe; I had the same feeling when Uncle Phil showed up on an episode of Family Matters—and happens all the time now. The MCU will, in all likelihood, end up being the finest example of that kind of stream crossing that any of us ever get. It has changed storytelling for the rest of time.

18. The boy can’t remember to brush his teeth at night, but he knows about 600 dinosaur facts.

19. Kids fucking love flips so much.

1. You can always tell how much someone hates by how big of an object it is that they’re willing to figure out how to pick up and throw at you.

2. Others on that list include Any Given Sunday, Friday Night Lights, Invincible, Rudy, The Replacements, Little Giants, The Longest Yard, Brian’s Song, The Waterboy, Necessary Roughness, The Program, and Varsity Blues.

3. This wasn’t a true thing either. In real life, the school was integrated five years before the 1971 football season.

4. Every time I watch a movie like one of these where it’s the white people against the black people, I always say to myself, “Where the fuck were the Mexicans during all of this?”

5. It is a true testament to Suplee’s talent as an actor that he was able to play both of these characters convincingly.

6. This was the first real role for Gosling. He’s mostly a background character. Watching Remember the Titans now after he’s become one of the biggest stars in the world is a real treat.

7. A few days after we’d turned this book in to be sent off to the printer, Kip Pardue was fined by the actors’ union because he’d been accused of on-set sexual harassment. When I saw the news clip, I searched for other actors I’ve mentioned in this book to see if anyone else had also been accused of anything similar. Several of them had been, including Kevin Spacey, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Ben Affleck, and Morgan Freeman. I’d known about Spacey beforehand (which is why he is only mentioned in the chapter where I was listing Oscar winners). I had not known about Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Affleck, and Freeman (which is why they are mentioned slightly more). I hope there are not others that I’ve missed here. Apologies to everyone, if so.

8. It was also a perfect TV scene. They played it expertly, giving you these tiny bits of hope along the way; just enough so that you’d be all the way wrecked when he finally died.

9. A small thing about the Scrubs inclusion here is that his character, Turk, had a hard time remembering if his wife was Dominican or Puerto Rican.

10. Two roles that someone could use to argue the other way: When he was Wedgie Rudlin in The Boondocks, and when he starred in Homie Spumoni, a movie that somehow managed to be offensive to several different races and ethnicities all at once.

11. It seems like accusations of racism would be a secondary concern in that situation, though.

12. I remember everyone making a big, big deal about his performance in La La Land because he was singing with Emma Stone, and I definitely understand the fuss because watching Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone sing to each other is something that checks off a lot of the boxes on the list of things that I am interested in. But the most exciting part about him being in a movie where he was singing was that it reminded someone to start circulating a video of the time he performed Jodeci’s “Cry For You” as part of a group on the Mickey Mouse Club when he was a preteen.

1. This would never happen.

2. Neither would this.

3. We all swore this was the nerdiest thing and then each tried to do it in private on our own.

4. The Spring Fling is a big dance that happens at the school every year.

5. This movie came out my senior year of high school. I absolutely loved it. There’s a part in it where Freddie Prinze Jr. plays hacky sack, which is probably the only time a cool person has ever played hacky sack.

6. As far as Untried Movie Crimes in movies considered to be classics are concerned, Biff attempting to rape Lorraine outside of a high school dance is up there with the guy from Revenge of the Nerds pretending to be a girl’s boyfriend and performing oral sex on her.

7. Also a cartoon. I assume that would prove more troublesome here.

8. As part of the research for this chapter I spent something like eight straight days watching high school movies back to back to back. I’d almost forgotten how wonderful the poem scene at the end of 10 Things I Hate About You is. I don’t know that it’s the finest sixty-second stretch of Julia Stiles’s career, but I also don’t know that it isn’t.

9. As a rule of thumb here, we can probably eliminate any injured athlete from every movie about high school sports.

10. The scene where he cleans out his locker and he’s being very confident and Boobie-ish and then he gets to the car outside and gets in and has a breakdown is so fucking crushing. I’ve seen Friday Night Lights probably fifteen different times, and each time I (a) skip right past the scene, and (b) try with all my might and my heart and my love to will Mike into the end zone on that last play.

11. They sneak a joke early into this movie about masturbating an animal. That doesn’t have anything to do with anything, but I thought I should tell you about it.

12. The vampires from 2008’s Twilight have a better shot, would be my guess.

13. Maaaaaaaaaaaybe Parker Posey.

14. I would all-caps LOVE to see Regina in Mr. Escalante’s class—or, better still, working on a group project with Angel as her partner.

15. EMILIO SHOULD STILL BE ALIVE. I WILL NEVER FORGIVE THAT PRINCIPAL.

16. We need a stretch of, like, forty-five movies about high schools with non-white people in them where the students have money and aren’t stuck in the middle of some gang dilemma where they have to choose between ratting out another gang member or learning math or whatever.

17. That being said, he’s still not within forty miles of Regina George.

1. The single best part is when the kid teaches him how to do a fist bump.

2. I ended up writing an article about sad animated movie characters for a place called Grantland, which is where I was working at the time. I’ll always remember that assignment because when I was explaining the idea to one of my then six-year-old sons, he said, “Daddy, don’t be mad, but that sounds dumb.”

3. Woody is first.

4. Or anything like Frozen.

5. There’s a good chance I’ve gotten the plot of this particular episode of House wrong.

6. And also a great, great movie.

7. As a way to prove how deep into his coma he is, an FBI agent puts a cigarette out on his arm, which to me seems like a very extreme way to prove that point.

8. There’s so much other stuff that happens in the movie that I didn’t even get to, and won’t be able to get to, including but not limited to: Castor shooting an undercover FBI agent and then tossing her out of the plane and then shrugging in celebration like Jordan in the ’92 Finals; a shootout set to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”; a floating prison where all the inmates wear magnetic boots and occasionally receive shock treatment; and Castor dressing up as a priest and fondling a young girl during a choir performance. (He wears the priest outfit as a disguise, but then he dances in it and then joins a choir mid-performance, which, I mean, why put on a disguise if you’re not going to try to blend in? It’d be like if you were going hunting and so you put on camouflage pants and shirt but then walked around the woods shouting, “Hey, you fucking deer! Where you at?!”)

9. His four best movies: 1989’s The Killer, 1992’s Hard Boiled, 1997’s Face/Off, and 1986’s A Better Tomorrow.

10. Also, he has a friend who has a tail. That’s not a joke.

11. This is a point that Bill Simmons brought up one night when we recorded a live podcast about Face/Off in October 2017, and I’ve thought about it every day since, and will continue to think about it every day until I’m buried in the ground.

12. This is seriously a real thing that happened.

13. You start with 401 because it’s the minimum number you can have that’s still “more than 400,” and then you add one more for Coral.

14. It was not “like that,” I suppose.

15. My greatest hope is that there’s a clown fish version of this same book for sale in underwater bookstores everywhere and they have this same chapter in it except it ends with, “Sean Archer, while at times cloying, is superb as a character and as a complex creation. But he’s still a fucking human.”

1. I would like to officially call into question the legitimacy of the mission statement of the International Scuba Diving Hall of Fame, and I would like to do so because Carter Blake, the hero shark wrangler from Deep Blue Sea, is not in the International Scuba Diving Hall of Fame. And, I mean, if Carter Blake isn’t worthy, then who is?

2. It honors the pioneers of the sport of killing people in action movies, if you will.

3. I’m going to break this rule one time during the induction ceremony.

4. “Let off some steam, Bennett.”

5. The first time this happened in a movie was in 1974’s The Street Fighter, a karate exploitation movie starring Sonny Chiba.

6. Also, DMX stars in this movie with him, and let me tell you: If the people who made Cradle 2 The Grave were trying to satisfy all of the things twenty-two-year-old me wanted in a movie, they fucking nailed it.

7. The other three—Hero, Fearless, and The Warlords—were not action movies.

8. Harry hadn’t intended on killing a bunch of people when he went into the hate group’s church, FYI. He was just there investigating some stuff. But the movie’s main bad guy, Richmond Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson), had arranged it so that when he turned a knob on a machine everyone’s cell phone would start emitting a high pitched sound that turned everyone into raging lunatics.

9. In 2012, members of the band said they were discontinuing their use of the Confederate flag. They changed their minds after protests from their fans.

10. I am not entirely sure that Kill Bill is an action movie. If you decide that it’s not, then go ahead and slide the nightclub scene in John Wick up to second and move the lobby shootout from The Matrix up into third. Keanu is great in a killing spree.

11. The way you know this is true is that Ripley has a team of Space Marines with her to battle the xenomorphs. (The best space marine is Private Hudson, a character played by Bill Paxton. He says things like, “Hey, Ripley. Don’t worry. Me and my squad of ultimate badasses will protect you.” He gets killed, of course.)

12. The exosuit is basically a twelve-foot-tall robot shell that Ripley gets inside of and controls with her body.

13. Or, robot-to-alien combat, I guess?

1. That’s what we’re told anyway. We find out at the end of the movie that she’s actually alive.

2. We basically got this with The Foreigner.

3. Commodus, the petulant emperor played pitch perfectly by Joaquin Phoenix, asks for Maximus’s loyalty. Maximus, a man of honor and nobility, declines. Commodus orders his men to murder Maximus, as well as Maximus’s wife and son. Maximus survives. His wife and son do not.

4. There’s a blind guitarist in this movie. There’s also a blind guitarist in Road House (Jeff Healey). There’s also a blind guitarist in Fargo (Jose Feliciano). I don’t know a lot about a lot, but I do know that if your movie has a blind guitarist in it, I’m going to watch it and I’m going to love it.

5. Iko Uwais, the guy who plays Rama in The Raid and The Raid 2, is the greatest pure movie fighter we have ever had. He’s fast, strong, gifted, and violent. He’s so good at fighting in movies that I always feel like I have to whisper when I’m talking about him. That’s why you and I are having this conversation in the footnotes rather than in the actual chapter text. It’s the quietest I can be in print.

6. Per MovieBodyCounts.com.

7. Others include (but are not limited to) 1971’s Shaft, 1972’s Super Fly, 1973’s The Mack, 1974’s Foxy Brown (which also starred Pam Grier), and 1975’s Dolemite.

8. The bad guy, a high-ranking government member from another country, shoots Murtaugh’s partner in the back a few times. When he runs out of bullets he holds up a legal document so that Murtaugh can see it and says, “Diplomatic immunity,” which is basically his way of saying to Murtaugh, “Yes, I am a criminal and you have witnessed me being a criminal, but fuck you. I get to go back to my home country.” Murtaugh cranks his neck a bit, shoots a bullet into the bad guy’s forehead, then says, “It’s just been revoked.”

9. Beverly Hills Cop II in 1987; Lethal Weapon 2 in 1989; Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in 1989; Die Hard 2 in 1990; Terminator 2: Judgement Day in 1991; Batman Returns in 1992.

1. She’s Puerto Rican. And this is going to come as quite a jolt for some of you, but: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans are not the same thing.

2. We closed our eyes during Gigli.

3. When she starred in Maid in Manhattan, a movie about a maid who works in a ritzy hotel where rich people are either rude to her or ignore that she is alive, it was like, “Oh, wait, I know this one.”

4. “Jimmy and I could never be made because we had Irish blood. It didn’t even matter that my mother was Sicilian. To become a member of a crew you’ve got to be 100 percent Italian so they can trace all your relatives back to the old country.”—Henry Hill, Goodfellas

5. You can also include literally any scene from La Bamba that has Bob in it.

6. Basically every Letty scene, really.

7. The opposite version of this is sometimes when I take meetings in Los Angeles to talk about TV stuff or movie stuff, the people on the opposite end of the table look at me like I walked into the room wearing a sombrero.

8. I recognize that this is a bad thing, but I still always laugh whenever I think about it. I’m laughing to myself literally right now again as I write this all out. Apologies to Cicis.

9. The only other one that I really and truly remember when it came out was Congo, a movie about special gorillas that start hunting humans in a jungle. Also, there’s a gorilla in it who knows sign language and wears a special glove that speaks out loud the words that she’s signing. Also, there’s a part in it where hippos eat some people in a river. I don’t know what the point of Congo was, but I know after I saw it I said to myself, “Well, I guess I’ll just never go to the Congo then.”

1. You’re the greatest and most powerful mega-animal that’s ever been and you end up getting captured by Nacho Libre? Tough break.

2. A dick move, truly.

3. The most accidentally funny part of the movie is when King Kong breaks free, snatches up the actress, looks at her, roars a few times, then fucking chucks her sixty feet into the audience like a kid tossing a baseball in the backyard because he realizes it’s not the real Ann.

1. He was fired for stealing boxes from his work. It’s unclear whether or not he actually did it. I would guess no, but that’s just a guess.

2. Prior to Friday, there were a string of movies set in Los Angeles that presented parts of the city as, in effect, war zones. There was 1988’s Colors. There was 1991’s Boyz n the Hood. There was 1993’s Menace II Society. Friday sought to filter everything through a warmer lens. Even the part where there’s a drive-by is funny, which I think is the first time a drive-by has ever been funny.

3. A bonus: The only time in the movie we see Deebo show any sort of emotion that isn’t menace is after the shooting when Dana asks him if he’s seen Craig and Smokey. He hears the questions, thinks on it briefly, then, in a surprisingly earnest voice says, “Earlier.” It’s weird to hear him use that voice. It’s like watching a great white shark hold a door open for a seal.

4. This scene is colossal. John Witherspoon, a fantastic comedic character, activates a serious side that he seldom showed in his movies. He’s so smart, and so powerful, and so fatherly. It’s like it’s a scene from a whole different movie.

5. Some might say he was THE member of the group.

6. Ice Cube’s son, O’Shea Jackson Jr., played Ice Cube in the movie. And I know that that sounds like the beginnings of a very bad situation, but O’Shea Jackson Jr. was incredible in the role.

7. This, I imagine, is exactly the place the guy who interrupted the party was hoping that she would not be.

8. Some might say THE iconic line from Friday.

9. Another nice little high-five is we get a quick glimpse of Ice Cube’s character working on the script for Friday in Straight Outta Compton.

10. Separate of the Friday conversation: The “Bye, Felisha” line being able to sneak up on you the way that it does is a testament to how good of a movie Straight Outta Compton is. F. Gary Gray so completely immerses you into the N.W.A. world that you forget about basically everything else that isn’t directly connected to it. And the hotel room scene where the “Bye, Felisha” line happens, which is shot in a way that, for most of it, is done as one take as you follow along through the chaos of the party, is remarkable.

11. Olive Garden is just about as fancy as it gets when you’re a high school student in San Antonio. If you were a junior in high school and one of your friends said he was going to take his girlfriend out on a date to Olive Garden, you said something back to him like, “Whoa. Are you gonna propose to her?”

12. Get it? Pride. Because of lions.

13. If you and I were in the Friday universe and I was telling this story, I have to imagine Smokey would say something here like, “You got to be a stupid motherfucker to get cheated on at the zoo.”

14. If this sentence is no longer true by the time you read this book, then something terrible has happened.

15. This was not something I actively thought about, but it was something I felt, same as how you don’t ever really think about the ozone layer but you always feel its presence.

1. Critic Emily Yoshida had a great bit of insight into what made Booksmart, a small-budget indie, feel so immediately weighty. Writing for Vulture, she pointed out that high school movies have, since their inception, had a cast of common character archetypes, like The Jock and The Nerd and The Princess, etc. In the 2010s, we began seeing a new archetype, a character Yoshida described as “the socially conscious busybody, the walking #thread, Tracy Flicks with Netflix accounts, pre-THC Abbi and Ilanas, neither loser nor winner but Type A all the way.” What Booksmart did is it offered up the two best, most complete, most fully fleshed-out versions of that character, meaning Booksmart served as “an official coronation of the type.”

2. Pointing out Superbad here is not a coincidence. Philosophically, it’s very similar to Booksmart, in that it’s presented as a movie about two kind-of-awkward high school kids trying to make their way to a party, but really it’s a movie about friendship, and how powerful a thing it can be when you’re eighteen years old.

3. A movie that makes it up to this level but not past it is 2007’s Blades of Glory, which starred Will Ferrell and John Heder as feuding ice skaters who get forced to team up together.

4. The outtake of this is unbelievable. McCarthy gets Rudd and Mann both to crack early on, but rather than stop to let them collect themselves, she just keeps going after them, harder and harder, until someone off-screen yells for them to cut.

5. A movie that makes it up to this level but not past it is 2000’s Best in Show, which was a mockumentary about a group of people who compete with their dogs in a dog show.

6. You could go with the nightclub hallucination scene as well.

7. Regarding surprise dance battles in movies that aren’t about dancing, this one is somewhere up near the top, along with the dance battle in White Chicks, the dance battle in House Party, and the dance battle in American Pie: The Wedding.

8. A movie that makes it up to this level but not past it is 1998’s There’s Something About Mary.

9. In most cases, they’ll add it in, but mostly as a way to bridge together two separates part of a movie, like what they did with 21 Jump Street when Jenko and Schmidt grow apart from each other while they’re undercover.

10. I would like to mention here that so many great parts of Booksmart have gone unmentioned, not the least of which is the pizza guy robbery scene, which might be the line-for-line funniest two minutes of the whole movie. There’s also the bathroom stall scene, and the scene where Molly makes Amy’s parents uncomfortable, and the yacht party scene, and the murder mystery scene, and the rideshare scene, and the Alanis Morissette scene…

11. When the cops are escorting Amy to the backseat of their squad car, she says, “Shotgun… just kidding.” That’s the first time I’d ever seen that in a movie. I laughed a lot.

1. The Oscar for Best Picture has not gone to a rom-com in over forty years. (Annie Hall, 1977)

2. “You know what ol’ Jack Burton always says at a time like this?” has popped in my head at least once a day for the past thirty years.

3. SHE GETS IN A LITERAL FISTFIGHT WITH A HOUSECAT.

4. Additionally, Tommy Lee Jones, who played the main U.S. marshal chasing after Harrison in The Fugitive, was not only nominated for Best Supporting Actor, he actually won it. (Tommy Lee Jones has played so many characters who were trying to catch someone. In addition to The Fugitive, he also did it in Men in Black, U.S. Marshals, The Hunted, No Country for Old Men, and Jason Bourne. I bet he’s so fucking good at hide-and-seek in real life.)

5. The shot that he does as the camera swoops around to show the edge of the building as the guard holds Andy up at the edge of the roof is really something special.

6. Comversation?

7. It’s important to me that you know that I was so excited to make this joke.

8. ONLY THREE LEFT.

9. This is a jokey answer, but Blade, which set the template for what a substantial comic book movie could be if it took itself more seriously, really does have an important legacy.

1. This is a mistake. I love Gladiator.

2. Apologies to Adrien, who I have always liked. Did you watch him in Predators? He was wonderful in it.

3. I still remember watching the trailer for Insomnia the first time in a movie theater. I had, to that point in my life, only known Robin Williams as a sweetheart and good guy actor. When they showed him in the trailer right as they’re revealing he’s a killer, I very loudly said to my girlfriend-who-became-my-wife, “HOLY FUCKING SHIT!”

4. So much so, actually, that I asked Arturo to draw a picture of Robin Williams as Patch Adams treating Robin Williams as Jack, his character from Jack who aged four times faster than everyone else. It’s the art on the next page.

5. To be clear, I am very high on Renée Zellweger. She has been in several of my favorite movies.

6. Jennifer Aniston is quietly an elite-level performer in rom-coms. A sampling: She’s the One, Picture Perfect, The Object of My Affection, The Switch, The Break-Up, Just Go with It, All I Need Is Pizza, Second Chance, The Getaway, and Three-Day Weekend. (Those last four are made up.) (Sorry.)

7. This is the second Oscar Liv Tyler has picked up, and it literally was not until this very moment that I realized how much I’ve enjoyed Liv Tyler’s career. (Empire Records, That Thing You Do, Armageddon, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Strangers.)

8. Her four best movies: 1991’s Point Break, 2008’s The Hurt Locker, 2012’s Zero Dark Thirty, and 2002’s K-19: The Widowmaker.

9. I don’t know why it wouldn’t be allowed, given that I am kind of just making all of this up as I go.

1. It was a disaster, I am sad to report.

2. This is a thing that is somewhat troubling for me, what with it being my job to explain exactly these sorts of things and situations. I think maybe the best way to describe it is to say that I felt like I’d experienced something that reached me in an existential way. I’ve never been religious, but I have always been fascinated with outer space, and I’m referring to both the vastness of space and also the way that any conversation of outer space always seems to wordlessly confirm how tiny and unimportant everything is.

3. I wish that I’d have written this book exactly one year earlier because right here would’ve made for such a perfect ending to this chapter. I could’ve written a final sentence at the end of this The Big Sick section like, “That’s how all of this started, so that’s how all of this has to end.” It would’ve been so great.

4. I’m fucking serious.

1. I guess if you were going to a funeral for a sea creature then this might be fine, but I don’t know that sea creature funerals happen nearly often enough to take that kind of risk.

2. They were a Technology Dependent Crew, as it were.

3. A good one would be Cleon from 1995’s Dead Presidents. He was not only fiery, but also he made the classic mistake of flashing money around shortly after the heist.

4. A good one would be Jimmy Logan from 2017’s Logan Lucky, a delightful movie where Channing Tatum and Adam Driver play brothers who appear to be dumb but actually end up being very smart.

5. Like the crew in 2018’s Widows, a truly great heist movie that was, as film critic Adam Nayman explained, “genre pleasures framed by deeper social and political themes.”

6. Like the crew in 1995’s indelible Heat.

7. Like 1975’s iconic Dog Day Afternoon, or 2012’s underappreciated The Place Beyond the Pines.

8. Here’s one of the lines delivered Mark Wahlberg, the leader of the group: “That’s Left Ear. Demolitions and explosions. When he was ten he put one too many M80s in a toilet bowl. Lost the hearing in his right ear. He’s been blowing stuff up ever since.”

9. This one is cool in that way that an older uncle who thinks he’s still young tries to be cool.

10. This one is cool in a Dad Joke kind of way.

11. This one probably isn’t cool at all, but I appreciate how hard he worked at the imagery.

12. A better Clooney pick would be Jack Foley, his character from Out of Sight. He checks off all the same boxes that Danny Ocean does, except he’s also a killer.

13. AND LET ME SAY AGAIN: I love the Ocean’s movies. And I love the characters in the Ocean’s movies. And I understand that barring them all from selection here ends up with losing a lot of good people and hurting a lot of feelings. But when you’re robbing banks, you don’t have time to worry about feelings, because worrying about feelings is how you end up dead.

14. They pretend to shoot someone in Inside Man, but only so the cops will take them more seriously. We find out later that it was all a setup.

15. Same reason that Joker from The Dark Knight is getting cut.

16. I don’t like that his name is Driver. I mean, I get what they’re going for with it—that whole Mysterious Man angle—but mostly it just makes me think he has a very dorky name in real life that he knows doesn’t fit his persona, or his neon cool aesthetic. It’s probably something like “Melvin Dorkman.”

17. Curiously enough, he’s the enforcer in this movie but it’s his quiet brother, Toby, who has the movie’s most turbulent moment. (When he beats up the guy at the gas station who pulls a gun on Tanner.)

1. It operated from 1943 to 1954. It was started by several professional baseball executives as a response to World War II drawing hundreds of MLB players away from their teams and into conflict.

2. The other two are The Sandlot and Major League. No matter what order you arrange those three into, you will be both correct and wrong.

3. A technical note: The trade happens right before the playoffs start. No professional sports league allows trades to happen that late in the season. I think about that every time I watch this movie. Also: We never find out what player(s) Rockford picked up in exchange for Kit. I feel like the AAGPBL’s trade guidelines were far too sketchy.

4. There’s literally a line where, well after her career is over, she says, “It was never that important to me. It was just something that I did. That’s all.”

5. There’s this movie called Mr. Destiny that came out in 1990 that deals with almost this exact thing. A guy strikes out in a big at bat in high school and then goes on to live what he feels like is a regular, boring, bad life. A magic bartender (lol) goes back in time and makes it so that he actually hit a game-winning home run in the at bat, and his whole life changes; he’s rich, and successful, and so on and such and such.

6. Also: Who would really be upset about a starting pitcher making it through only eight and two-thirds innings? If anything, Kit was being a tad bit selfish and unreasonable here.

7. Another thing to point out is that the score was 2–1 when Kit went up to bat. She drove in the tying run (which Dottie anticipated) before making a break for home to try and win the game (which Dottie was somewhat surprised by). You can make the argument that Dottie being somewhat surprised by Kit going for home is a good piece of evidence that she didn’t drop the ball on purpose, but I’d counter with Dottie was happy that Kit went for it all because it provided Dottie with the most perfect and natural way to gift the victory to Kit.

8. She says that she and her husband got “as far as Yellowstone Park” when she cut out on the team before deciding to come back. If that’s the case, and if they were leaving from anywhere near Illinois (the general area most of the games took place), things still don’t really match up. That’s a round trip of about thirty-eight hours. She gets back in time for game seven. Even if Racine and Rockford played doubleheaders in three straight games (which definitely they didn’t do), she should’ve still made it back before games five and six.

1. When I asked him why he did this, I was expecting him to shrug his shoulders and run away, given that that’s how he had answered basically every question I asked him from the time he was three up until the time he was five. He didn’t do that, though. In fact, he was quite adamant in his answer. I held up a strawberry and said, “Hey. Why’d you do this?” And he looked at the strawberry and then he looked at me. Then his face got real mad. Then he said, “I don’t like pointy fruit.” He was so confident about it that in my head I was like, “Yeah, man. Fuck pointy fruit. Get the bananas. We got work to do!”

2. If I were 20 percent more clever, I’d have come up with an impromptu joke here for him about pointy people.

3. I suspect using the word “culture-y” would not go over so great with Hannibal. It’d be like when the one guy in the symphony kept fucking up so Hannibal killed him and then fed him to some people at a dinner party.

4. Ernesto also tried to kill a child twice in his movie.

5. Simon Phoenix definitely overreacted here. He needed the prison warden’s eyeball to open up the doors to the cryo-prison because it was locked with a retina scanner. But rather than just forcing the much weaker, much softer warden to put his head up to the scanner so it could scan his eyeball, Simon cut out his whole eye and held it up there himself.

6. I’m not sure if there will be another spot later in this book for me to say this or not so I’m just going to drop it in right here: James Marsden, who plays the hero David in Straw Dogs, has an all-time great Movie Star Face. He has the kind of face where if you got bonked on the head and forgot everything about everything, you’d still be able to look at him and go, “Oh, duh, that’s a movie star. He’s a movie star.”

7. For this part, I’m only talking about aliens in movies where people are surprised to learn that aliens exist. Mostly all of the aliens in movies where people know aliens exist seem like they’d be fun hangs. The only real exception would be Jabba the Hutt. He seems like the pits.

8. There’s a chance that the one Predator that helps Adrien Brody in Predators might be a good hang, but it’d probably be smart to just go ahead and avoid all the Predators.

9. I want to make sure that this is stated as plainly and authoritatively as possible at least once in this book: Heath Ledger as the Joker is the single greatest acting performance that has ever happened in a superhero movie, and one of the all-time great performances across all genres. There are no holes in it. Everything about it is perfect.

10. A thing that I didn’t realize about Heath Ledger’s Joker until I rewatched The Dark Knight the fourth or fifth time is that his most famous and everlasting monologue in the movie—the part where he talks Harvey Dent into becoming a villain—is a brilliant bit of maneuvering. He spends the entirety of The Dark Knight putting a highly elaborate plan in place to tear Gotham apart forever, and then he somehow in the matter of a few seconds convinces Harvey that he never had a plan at all EVEN THOUGH HE’S LITERALLY IN THE MIDDLE OF EXPLAINING TO HIM EXACTLY WHAT HIS PLAN IS. And so I say for a second time: Heath Ledger as the Joker is the single greatest acting performance that has ever happened in a superhero movie, and one of the all-time great performances across all genres.

1. Daniel Day-Lewis is supernatural here.

2. A testament to the unending genius of George Miller.

3. Remember how exhilarating it was when you realized the narrative device that had been written into place here.

4. Kathryn Bigelow shows everyone how you take Jessica Chastain and turn her into one of the most captivating performers on the planet for 157 minutes.

5. Oscar Isaac, will you marry me?

6. Barry Jenkins announces himself as a master.

7. If Matt Damon plays an astronaut in a movie he’s only either going to be the most likable person or the most hateable person.

8. Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette and Ellar Coltrane… [pretend like I’m doing that thing where a person pulls their glasses down their nose a little bit and then looks over the top of them at you].

9. All-caps AMY ADAMS.

10. Adam McKay was so great here that he somehow made a movie about the housing market feel electric.

11. Definitely my tempo.

12. If Oscar Isaac says no to marrying me, then Javier Bardem will do.

13. I’m going to cry.

14. Okay, now I’m crying.

15. I wrote about this one in chapter 20.

16. Welcome Saoirse Ronan to the pantheon.

17. The best moment of Jeremy Renner’s career.

18. Unquestionable.

19. Eisenberg lost to Colin Firth for his role in A King’s Speech. Kaluuya lost to Gary Oldman for his role in Darkest Hour.

20. The same can be said of Jordan Peele, who wrote and directed Get Out. (Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher, the writer and director of The Social Network, were already recognized as upper level elite.)

21. Remember the way she drops all of the emotion out of her face when she goes from frantically looking for the keys to revealing that she’s actually in on the scam? That was such a suffocating moment. She really makes you believe all the way up until the very last possible instant that she’s on Chris’s side. Watching her face change as she shows Chris she’s been holding the keys the whole time makes you feel like you’ve just been hit in the chest with a baseball bat.

22. So, too, does Rod’s goofiness balance out Chris’s self-seriousness, but it’s a different level.

23. If you want to put Andrew Garfield as Eduardo Saverin up against Bradley Whitford as Dean Armitage, the dad in Get Out, that might be a slightly more even matchup. But Garfield still wins there. The only way this becomes a toss-up is if you plug in Catherine Keener. She plays the mom in Get Out. And she uses every bit of her innate warmness to turn her character into something terrifying.

24. This doesn’t sound like a long time, but two seconds of silence in this script is like forty-five minutes of silence in basically any other script.

25. This part, if you squint, can be used as a metaphor for how Mark might be brilliant at understanding computers, yes, but he’s terrible at understanding humans.

26. Jordan Peele explained in an interview with HipHopDX that in addition to simply being a wonderful song, it also matched up nicely with the general theme and tone of Get Out. “That’s what this movie’s about,” he said, talking about the “Now stay woke” line that he chose to open up the shot into Chris’s apartment. “I wanted to make sure that this movie satisfied the black horror movie audience need for characters to be smart and do things that intelligent, observant people would do.”

27. Like when Sean Parker is talking to Mark about how it’s their time in the nightclub.

28. Like when Mark is narrating his evening’s actions as he blogs his way through heartbreak.

29. Like when they use “In the Hall of the Mountain King” during the Henley Royal Regatta boat race.

30. Like when “Baby, You’re a Rich Man” plays during the movie’s final scene as Mark sits alone at his computer refreshing his Erica Albright’s Facebook page after he sends her a friend request as we get updates on all the key players in the movie.

1. I came up with this chapter at, like, 3 a.m. one night/morning in October 2018. I’d gone to see what was then the newest Halloween movie and really enjoyed it and so I was spending a lot of time thinking about Michael Myers and considering Michael Myers and reading about Michael Myers and reading about the Halloween franchise. He is, without question, the greatest movie monster that’s ever been, and also the most important movie monster that’s ever been. The movie DNA that John Carpenter and Debra Hill stuffed into him and into the movie when they created it can be found in virtually every horror movie that’s come out since 1978. It was truly and unquestionably a shifting point in American cinema. That’s not why I wrote this chapter, though. I wrote it because I was lying there one night thinking about how Michael Myers never talks in his movies and then I started imagining him at a press conference like NBA players do and I couldn’t stop laughing. I rolled over to my wife’s side of the bed and tapped her on the shoulder and then said in a very 3 a.m. voice, “Hey. Hey. Wake up. It’s an emergency.” After she realized she’d been woken up, she said, “What’s going on? Is everything okay? Are the boys okay?” I said back, “What do you think of this: Michael Myers at a press conference.” To which she responded, “… Boy.”

2. This is my favorite moment of the entire franchise. Two people, Lynda and her boyfriend Bob, have just had sex. Bob goes downstairs to get a beer. Michael attacks him, chokes him, the stabs a knife through his chest, pinning him to a wall. Michael decides he’s also going to kill Lynda, but rather than just walking in there and stabbing her, he gets a sheet and puts it over his head like he’s a ghost. And that by itself is already hilarious, but also, as I guess a way to really sell to Lynda that he’s Bob, Michael takes Bob’s glasses off his dead face and puts them on over the ghost sheet. So when he walks into the doorway of the room he’s standing there with a sheet over his head and wearing Bob’s glasses. He’s in a mask, under a sheet, wearing glasses over both. I love it.

3. Halloween II.

1. It was based on a novella by Stephen King called Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption.

2. Here’s a small but interesting thing: After the guards realize that Andy has escaped, they alert Warden Norton. As he’s walking toward Andy’s cell to inspect it for himself, he’s shouting orders at nearby guards. One of the orders he gives is to question Red. He does so because he knows that Andy and Red are good, good, good friends, and so he’s hoping that Red will have some knowledge of the escape. When Norton tells the guards to question him, you can hear in the background one of the guards say, “Open 237.” It’s a quick moment, and if you sneeze you’ll miss it, but it’s not inconsequential (or, rather, it’s not inconsequential as far as small but interesting things are concerned). Turns out, the number 237 is also used in other film adaptations of Stephen King’s works, including Stand by Me (there’s a scene where the boys all pool together the money they have so they can buy some food; they have $2.37 between the four of them) and The Shining (it’s the room number in that scene where the little boy is riding his Big Wheel through the hallways). I’d probably seen The Shawshank Redemption a good twenty times before I caught the 237 reference. Movies are fun.

3. This is assuming that you, the reader, are not reading this book in 2068 or beyond. If you happen to be, though, then that’s cool, probably. I hope things are good in the future. Am I still alive, or did my heart crumple under the weight of a lifetime of tortillas and beans? Is LeBron James still playing basketball? I’ll bet he is.

4. This assumes that Andy was not contributing any money to a 401(k), which, admittedly, does not sound very Andy-ish. It has to be that way here, though, because the money Andy withdrew from the banks was the entirety of his money. There was nothing else stashed away.

5. LOL at “only.”

6. I’m certain that dumping waste into a river is against the law today, but was not against the law fifty years ago. You could basically do whatever you wanted back then. My grandmother one time showed me a picture of her driving my mom around when my mom was eight years old, and not only did neither of them have a seatbelt on, but also they were both smoking a cigarette.

7. It was absolutely not worth it, as it were.

8. Does it affect your decision at all if instead of Shawshank, we put you in that same prison that they put Ray Liotta in Goodfellas?

9. Inasmuch as a man we know has killed at least one man and crippled another can be, anyway.

10. A smaller, less significant question I always think about near the end of The Shawshank Redemption is: What are the chances that Andy really fit into Warden Norton’s suit and shoes that he stole right before he broke out of prison? Andy was six foot five. The warden was six foot one. I suppose there’s a chance that Andy had smaller feet or the warden had oversized feet, but I don’t figure there’s any way that the suit could’ve fit in any believable way.

1. If you get a little creative, you can say he white-saviored ghosts in Field of Dreams, and he white-saviored the Cleveland Browns in Draft Day, and he white-saviored an alien in Man of Steel.

2. It’s based on a real 1987 cross country team.

3. This is a joke, but it’s one of those jokes that’s only, like, 30 percent a joke. There’s a scene in McFarland, USA where Costner pumps the kids up before a race by telling them that the hard lives that they’ve lived (and that their white opponents have not had to live) give them a special kind of strength. And I wanted to roll my eyes at it. I really did. But I couldn’t because I was too busy trying not to cry. I remember going into the movie hoping to only make fun of it, and then getting to that scene and being like, “Well, shit. I forgot that Kevin Costner is a fucking first class actor. I think he just white-saviored me right now too.”

4. An unintentionally funny part of McFarland, USA is that Costner’s character is named Jim White, and so the runners just call him “White” when they talk to him. (“You think you’re tough, White?” “You know what these are, White?” “Somebody picked those, White.”)

5. If, at this very moment, you’re thinking to yourself, “Of course Shea would pick that, what with him being Mexican and all,” then let me confirm to you: Yes. You are correct. That’s the whole reason I picked them (us?) as the winner. That’s just how it goes sometimes.

6. A quick high-five of appreciation for Anna Kendrick, who has never one single time not been great in a movie. Remember her in the Pitch Perfect trilogy? Remember her in Up in the Air? Remember her in 50/50? Remember her in End of Watch? Remember her in Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates? Remember her in The Accountant? Remember her in A Simple Favor?

7. Incidentally, Brad Pitt’s wife in World War Z, a movie about a world war against zombies, had the best luck. She lived and her children lived, too. And I think it’s important that it gets pointed out here that probably the only reason she had good luck is because she ditched Brad Pitt in the movie as soon as she could.

8. Another good one that also has John Cusack in it is when Bruce Springsteen shows up in 2000’s High Fidelity and starts playing the guitar while Cusack is talking to himself.

9. I know there was a thing earlier in the book where I mentioned that mostly it’d be movies that came after 1980 that were discussed, but Audrey Hepburn always existed above the rule of order.

10. Zooey Deschanel is great as Summer. And I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for Joseph Gordon Levitt. Which is why after Summer broke his heart in this movie I held a real and actual grudge against Zooey for it for, like, a solid two years. That’s probably the best compliment you can give an actor or actress.

11. Julia Roberts is the unquestioned alpha of the rom-com genre, but Jennifer Aniston is my surprise pick for the second spot. She never was given the chance to really pin down a top tier rom-com role, but she’s put together enough solid performances that I think a convincing argument can be made that, if nothing else, she at least belongs in the conversation for a second place finish.

12. Not actually a rom-com, but there are parts that are romantic and parts that are funny so, I mean, if I cheated earlier with the Mexicans why wouldn’t I cheat again right now?

1. Creed is filled with wonderful little flourishes and nuances, perhaps none greater than here. When the doctor comes to check Donnie’s eye, he does so by covering up his right eye and then holding up a couple of fingers to see if Donnie can identify them using only his swollen-shut eye. Donnie, of course, cannot. (We get this quick shot of what Donnie sees and it’s basically completely black, what with his both of his eyes, in effect, being closed.) But the cornerman, who is holding a cold towel up against the back of Donnie’s neck, cheats for Donnie. When the doctor holds up four fingers and asks Donnie how many fingers he sees, the cornerman, while holding the towel in place, uses his middle, ring and pinky fingers to wordlessly tap Donnie on the back of the neck four times. Donnie says, “Four.” The doctor holds up two fingers. The cornerman taps Donnie again twice. Donnie says, “Two.” It’s an incredible moment and an unforgettable moment.

2. He looks so fucking confused when Donnie correctly identifies the number of fingers he’s holding up each time.

3. And smoking hot, though that seems less relevant than the other adjectives used in that sentence.

4. A very quick run-down of his situational setting: His mother dies in jail. His father is murdered by his uncle. The uncle abandons him and, in addition to leaving him to survive in the streets of Oakland all alone, he also indirectly banishes him from the rights that his royal blood should’ve afforded him. Also, his girlfriend gets shot and killed (though I should mention that he’s the one who shoots and kills her, so I don’t know if we can add this to his tally of Sad Things About Him in the movie or not).

5. Ryan Coogler directed Creed. He also directed Fruitvale Station. He also directed Black Panther. Ryan Coogler knows exactly how to use Michael B. Jordan in a movie.

6. Thompson plays Bianca. In Creed 2, they’re married. Bianca was nervous about being pregnant because she knew that the degenerative hearing-loss disease she had could be passed down to her baby. As the baby is being tested, Thompson holds her, trying to muster all of the goodwill she can to tilt the results in her baby’s favor. When she sees Donnie panic and start to cry, she realizes that it’s gone the other way. She turns away, looks up at nothing for a second, steadies herself, wipes a couple of tears away, then allows herself to look down at her baby, then touches her head gently. It’s mesmerizing.

7. A testament to the level of love and empathy he has inside of his chest: He shows up one night with dinner for all the kids. He hollers for them all to gather around, then sits down and starts handing out food. As he does so, he realizes there’s a new kid there. He doesn’t even question it. He asks him his name, makes a quick joke, then sees to it that he gets something eat.

8. He was only about fifteen years old when they filmed the season of The Wire that he was in. And he was profound in it. He was so touching, and so compelling. Everything he said felt real, and every moment felt earned. AND HE WAS ONLY ABOUT FIFTEEN YEARS OLD.

1. She won the Oscar for Best Actress that year, of course. She’s one of only three actresses to have won an Oscar for Best Actress in a romantic comedy in the past forty years. It’s her, Cher for 1987’s Moonstruck, and Helen Hunt for 1997’s As Good as It Gets. (Jennifer Lawrence won the Oscar for Best Actress for 2012’s Silver Linings Playbook, but, despite having funny parts and romantic parts, Silver Linings Playbook is not a romantic comedy.)

2. The most succinct explanation of Annie Hall’s place in movie lore came from Roger Ebert, who wrote in Ebert’s Essentials: 25 Movies to Mend a Broken Heart that it “signaled the end of the 1970s golden age of American movies. With Star Wars, the age of the blockbuster was upon us, and movies this quirky and idiosyncratic would find themselves shouldered aside by Hollywood’s greed for mega-hits.”

3. This was actually the first movie I ever saw Diane Keaton in, which is part of the reason I care so much about it. Watching her in it was an awakening of sorts. It was one of those situations where you’re like, “Oh shit. Who is this person? How do I find more of this person’s work?” And so you can imagine my surprise when I found out that I had something like thirty years’ worth of material to work my way through backward. Up to that point in my life, the movies I’d watched and cared about mostly featured fighting and shooting and robberies and gangsterisms and turtles that were ninjas and so forth. Keaton changed all of that.

4. I’m still not quite certain if this means that Nicholson is very good at foreplay or very bad at foreplay.

5. Baby Boom is quietly a very great Diane Keaton movie. She plays a successful New York City businesswoman who becomes the caretaker of a baby from a deceased cousin. The baby, of course, derails her career, and so Keaton’s character ends up in Vermont living on a large piece of property with her new little girl. She starts a gourmet baby food business almost by accident, then turns it into a multimillion-dollar corporation, which she uses to poke in the eye of the company that let her go after the baby showed up. It’s fun, and the part where Keaton realizes she’s not capable of giving the baby up for adoption is a perfect example of the way she can turn any moment into something grand.

6. This happens in 2010’s Morning Glory and it’s so fucking funny.

7. No.

8. This will be crude, and for that I apologize, but right here feels like a good time to tell you that when my wife and I were talking about this while I was working on this chapter, I said something to her close to, “I am familiar with what a thirty-six-year-old penis looks like, because I have seen my own, but I am unfamiliar with what a sixty-three-year-old penis looks like, though I assume it would be largely terrible.” She processed that bit of information, and then said that it was my responsibility to look at one, because it would be unfair of me to mark points off Nicholson’s case in this conversation if I’d done no actual research on the subject. And so I looked for a few on the internet and found them and looked at them and I have to say: It’s not as bad as you’d think. They’re certainly not enjoyable to look at, as most penises are not, but I think that you’d have a hard time guessing a man’s age based solely on his penis. While organ functionality would eventually be an issue for Nicholson before it would be for Keanu, organ attractiveness would not.

9. A third option here would be that actually neither Nicholson nor Keanu deserved Keaton, because nobody has ever deserved her in a movie, because she is Diane Keaton.

1. The most obvious example: In Furious 7, when she fishtails across the edge of a cliff and saves Brian’s life. (I love this one so much because after she does it she gets out her car, sees a totally spent Brian lying on the ground, and, totally unimpressed, just says to him, “You good?”)

2. Remember in Fast and Furious 6 when he swings his car out just enough to use a pole to knock a one-inch-tall electronic grenade off his car?

3. Think about any of his best or most memorable moments. They almost always involve him having to either (a) risk crashing into shit, or (b) crashing into shit.

4. There’s another Brian-Dom race that happens at the beginning of Fast and Furious 6, but it turns out not to be a race at all. They were both driving fast to get to Mia because she’s about to give birth.

5. It’s heartwarming to watch him participate in this race. The Dominic Toretto we know now is of such lore and mythology that watching him compete against regular street racers for $2,000 apiece here today feels like watching Barack Obama arm wrestle a bunch of nobodies at a truck stop just for fun.

6. You can start to see right now why Brian was so excited when thought he’d finally beaten Dom in a race in Fast Five.

7. At least we all thought she did. But she’d actually lived. It was just that she was in a car crash so violent that it caused her to lose her memory for several years.

8. This is the only big loss he has in Fast Five. He was really on his shit for that movie.

9. I’m not sure if it counts as a loss or not in this movie when Owen Shaw and his team escape the trap that Dom and his team set for them early on because it’s pretty clear that the only thing Dom is interested in is confirming that Letty is alive.

10. This one might actually be more Han’s fault than Dom’s. But it’s just that Dom is the leader of the group so any time someone dies he’s going to have to share some of that blame.

11. To date, the Fast franchise has grossed over $5 billion, making it the ninth most successful franchise of all time.

12. Another win for Dom.

13. Riley in Fast and Furious 6. This is more of a loss for Hobbs than it is for Dom.

14. This, as we know now, eventually turns into a real relationship.

1. Juice in 1992, The Program in 1993, Major League II in 1994, and Higher Learning in 1995.

2. This brings up a semi-interesting plot hole in the movie. During the opening monologue, Ferris makes mention of how he’s faked being sick nine times already during the spring semester, and that if he tries it again he’s “probably gonna have to barf up a lung.” However, when Ed Rooney, dean of students at the high school Ferris attends, calls Ferris’s mother to tell her that Ferris has been absent nine times, she’s surprised to hear that he’s been absent that many times. (This is when Ferris hacks into the school’s attendance records and changes his number from nine absences to two absences.) But so that’s what I’m wondering about: Who was Ferris faking sick for those nine times if not his parents?

3. Eric Stoltz was among those who auditioned for the role. He also auditioned for Marty McFly in Back to the Future. The eighties would’ve looked so much different if he’d gotten either (or both) of those.

4. The other top ten finishers include Scott Howard in Teen Wolf, Kid in House Party, Malcolm Adekanbi in Dope, Angel Guzman in Stand and Deliver, Johnny Lawrence in The Karate Kid, Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything, Evan in Superbad, Anthony Michael Hall in literally any movie he has ever been in, and the dark-horse pick Murray in Clueless.

5. This one, I will admit, is a stretch.

6. This is a less a connection between Ferris Bueller’s Day Offand The Sandlot and more a connection between Mike Vitar (who played Benny) and Matthew Broderick, but: James Earl Jones has been in movies with both. He was in The Sandlot with Vitar and The Lion King with Broderick.

7. The formula here is: SPEED x TIME = DISTANCE

1. Speaking generally, it was Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson (and, shortly thereafter, Chuck Norris) who defined what action movies looked like and felt like in the seventies and early eighties. And I spent a lot of time trying to think up the simplest possible way to describe that period, and the best word I could come up with was “dusty.” The action movie hero genre felt dusty, and it felt that way for three reasons: (1) Action movies were outgrowths of westerns; (2) Clint Eastwood has, for the entirety of his career, squinted like he was standing face-­forward in a sandstorm; and (3) Chuck Norris always looked less like a movie star and more like that red dirt that gets caked into cowboy boots.

2. Eastwood made Unforgiven in 1992 but it was too solidly a western to qualify as an action movie.

3. This isn’t true. I don’t know how many shots were fired in Die Hard. But it sounds cool. (I actually read a thing on the internet that said there were 365 shots fired in Die Hard. That being said, I also read a thing on the internet that said I died in 2013 from “Fat Feet Syndrome,” a disease described as “when you die because your feet got too fat.” So, I mean, as far as the validity of things available to be read on the internet . . . grain of salt.)

4. There is an argument to be made that Gruber is a throwback to the character style that Bond villains were formed from.

5. He said this to the New York Post before Die Hard had come out.

6. Hans Gruber is such a massive and interesting villain that originally this chapter was supposed to be called, “PICK A HANS, ANY HANS: WHICH HANS WAS MORE SUBTLETY THREATENING?” But once I got into writing itI realized all I wanted to do was talk about Gruber, which is remarkable because Hans Landa is a first-class movie character.

7. A thing that stuck out to me here is: Hans knows when Mr. Takagi’s family immigrated to America and Hans knows what years Takagi was in college and where Takagi went to graduate school but Hans doesn’t know what Takagi looks like?

8. It does.

9. It does.

10. We see a similar level of unconcern when he shoots Ellis, the cokehead slimeball who tries to negotiate his way into favor with Hans. And if you need a more specific kind of context here to place precisely how ruthless Hans Gruber is, consider that one of the facts we end up learning about him is that he was kicked out of a German terrorist organization for being too wild. Think on that. Hans Gruber was so uncontrollable and daunting that a group of professional terrorists voted him out like he was a bad contestant on Survivor.

11. Another good example of his super strength is the way he’s able to hold on to Holly’s arm as he’s falling out of the window after he’s been shot. What’s more, he has no panic in his face at the time. He’s totally confident that he’s going to be able to climb back up. He must have some sort of rock-climbing background, is my guess. Rock climbers are unreasonably strong.

12. I read a thing about how the way that McClane began to suspect that Hans wasn’t the guy he was pretending to be was because Hans did not smoke the cigarette the way Americans do, which is to say between your index and middle fingers, palm-side toward your face. I can’t say for sure if that’s true or not because I don’t smoke and also I don’t know any Europeans who smoke, but it seems like it’s maybe right, same as how in Inglourious Basterds the one guy gives himself away by signaling for three more beers the wrong way.

13. “Now due to the Nakatomi Corporation’s legacy of greed around the globe they’re about to be taught a lesson in the real use of power. You will be witnesses.” It’s the “You will be witnesses” part that really gets me. It reminds me of that part in Red Dragon when the Tooth Fairy makes Philip Seymour Hoffan look at his tattoos and his photo slideshow before he bites a piece of his face off.

1. The first Hollywood movie, anyway. He starred in a television movie called Mazes and Monsters in 1982.

2. Hanks somehow gained the ability to breathe under water when he was with her. Studio executives were greenlighting all kinds of wild shit in the eighties. Some other plots in movies that came out the same year as Splash: cute little furry creatures turn into murdering reptiles if you feed them after midnight (Gremlins); a group of guys open a business catching ghosts for a living (Ghostbusters); a town decides to outlaw dancing because the devil loves a good boogie (Footloose); and a white woman solves classism by learning to breakdance (Breakin’).

3. This, to me, seems like definitely the wrong way to have handled that situation.

4. Have you ever had one of those movies where, for one reason or another, either for understandable reasons or totally unexplainable reasons, you have just decided, “Nope. No. This is a movie I will never watch. Ever. No matter what”? That’s how I feel about Cloud Atlas. That’s why I’m not including it here, even though it is the ultimate Tom Hanks Goes on a Trip movie.

5. I’m also not including Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close because thinking about Tom Hanks dying during the 9/11 attacks is not something I’m so interested in doing.

6. All three of The Da Vinci Code movies are out as well, in part because I ran out of space but mainly because I don’t like the wig Tom Hanks wears in the first.

7. It’s not clear if he’s buying the place or renting the place. I would assume that he was renting, but I would also assume that it’s impossible to wish yourself into a new body, so what do I know?

8. Like, for example, the woman who has sex with the grown-up version of Tom Hanks eventually realizing that she had sex with a twelve-year-old boy.

9. It was his dying dad’s wish.

10. He’s the main person that George Clooney is talking to back home on Earth.

11. A sidebar about Every Time We Say Goodbye: the reason you’ve probably not heard of this movie is because basically nobody has heard of it. The biggest ever box office pull Tom Hanks had was when Toy Story 3 brought in over $415 million. Every Time We Say Goodbye brought in less than $300,000.

12. Almost all of the chapters in this book are set up in silly ways, or in goofy ways, or in (what I hope to be) fun ways. But also—and I’m certain you’ve picked up on this by now—almost all of the chapters contain a certain amount of movie insight (or, at least I hope that they do). And so let me end this chapter with that: on average, trips turn out bad for Tom Hanks in movies. But the audience is typically comforted by knowing that something good or worthwhile will usually come of the trip. The worst one is Saving Private Ryan, as was mentioned, but even that results in a family being spared the death of yet another son, so at least he sacrificed himself to a positive end, rather than getting shredded at Omaha Beach. There’s something significant about the faith that audiences place in Hanks as he goes on these often death-defying adventures. It’s unifying. And beautiful.