NPO #28: The List (2024 Edition)

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. The Ticketmaster

a.k.a. The Trooper?

New Year, new banner, Ticketholders!

I didn't have one for NPO/New Piece Offerings yet, so I Googled "Piece Of Mind," and the Iron Maiden album cover was the most popular result. I am not familiar with their work; I'm just giving credit. There was also an Iron Maiden font available online (the same place I got the Dragon Ball font for my Dragon Blog Z/Super banners), so into PhotoShop it all went, and whoever Bob is, he is now your uncle.

Before we continue, please remember (and remind your friends, family, and your new Uncle Bob) to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest mental fragments of news on my content.

As I have often said in the past, I began this whole review "business" back in 2004 when Yahoo! Groups was still a thing, MySpace hadn't become one yet, and I was just a cringey, wrestling catchphrase-spewing idealization of what a "cool" version of myself would have sounded like at twenty.

That was twenty years ago! And to celebrate the twenty-year anniversary of my "career" (I also began an actual career in Customer and Food Service that year, but I feel like I'm better at--and more proud of--my accomplishments in the non-money-making one with sarcastic quotes around it), I thought I would spend 2024 revisiting a List FROM April 30, 2004 (I don't have any form of archiving for this post because it wasn't a review or part of the SWAT Ticket/SW@ Ticket/Just the Ticket series), but context places its publication sometime after that of SWAT Ticket #3.5: Spider-Man Then & Now (which I compiled in my Homecoming mini-series on this platform). To spare you the immature, ego-cringe prose of the original, I will summarize:

This was back when Spider-Man 2 hadn't released yet and rumored "spoilers" were flying about villains such as the Lizard appearing in the film (shoutout to my high school and college friend, John Hudson, for that bit of advanced inaccuracy, and for getting me the MTV Spider-Man DVD as an early birthday gift that year). In the original post, I also thanked John for the gift and said I "can't wait for season 2" (which, of course, I eventually learned to stop waiting for because MTV and their CGI Spider-Man series turned out to have as much longevity as Blockbuster Video and Birds Of Prey).

I vaguely remember this being a response post to John's own Top Five list (which included Dickie Roberts and Big Daddy), where the Master (a.k.a. the Ticketmaster) proceeded to "show ya how it's done" by rattling off not just a Top Ten list, but three!

SWAT's 10 greatest horror movies of all time:

1. The Ring
2. Identity
3. Gothika
4. Thinner
5. Joy Ride
6. Jeepers Creepers
7. Final Destination
8. The Faculty
9. The Descent
10. Penny Dreadful

SWAT's 10 greatest action movies of all time:

1. Avatar
2. Wanted
3. Shoot Em Up
4. Last Man Standing
5. The Terminator Trilogy
6. The Alien Trilogy (and Alien vs Predator)
7. Spider-Man Trilogy
8. I, Robot
9. Independence Day
10. Armageddon

SWAT's 10 greatest WhaTheFuck movies of all time:
1. Avatar
2. Magnolia
3. Memento
4. The Usual Suspects
5. American Beauty
6. One Night At McCool's
7. The Big Empty
8. The Cooler
9. Vanilla Sky
10. Pulp Fiction

Looking back at these lists now, I can only assume that some of them were in no particular order, and that most of the films on here would not crack the top ten with twenty years of cinema intervening. So, I've decided that, with the exception of the movies I have already reviewed (and any sequels, because I don't want to burn myself out with multiple-franchise degeneration), I would re-evaluate the entries in these three lists as Just the Ticket content, and end the year with one, big ranking post of them all.

So because doing a review every two weeks isn't going to be feasible until a quarter of the year has passed us by, I narrowed it down to one a month by averaging the IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes scores of the twenty-five movies that were left. Some of the movies I really wanted to talk about didn't have great scores, so it isn't going to be a "best of the best" situation here. However, this is what I ended up with:

• January: Pulp Fiction (90.5%)
• February: One Night At McCool's (47.5%)
• March: Identity (68%)
• April: Alien (89%)
• May: Shoot 'Em Up (66.5%)
• June: Joy Ride (70%)
• July: Independence Day (69% - Nice! and Duh!)
• August: Last Man Standing (52.5%)
• September: The Faculty (61.5%)
• October: Penny Dreadful (41.5%)
• November: The Usual Suspects (86.5%)
• December: The Terminator (90.5%)

The films that were not chosen for this year's List Lookback (because alliteration and I just came up with it) may receive coverage in future years.

Until then, please remember (and remind your friends, family, and your new Uncle Bob) to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest mental fragments of news on my content.

Tomorrow, the GFT Retrospective makes a return with a "new" Tale From Wonderland, and time continues to get fuzzy as we travel backward to a TBT Anniversary where Iron Man plays Sherlock Holmes, followed by even more chronological confusion and Pulp Fiction that's Just the Ticket.

Ticketmaster,

Showin' ya how it's done....

Happy Anniversary!

Out.