1-Natural Born Killers
2-Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
3-Iron Man
4-Tropic Thunder
5-A Scanner Darkly
6-Chaplin
7-Wonder Boys
8-Zodiac
9-US Marshalls
10-A Guide to Recognising Your Saints

@HAZMAT_PWNS_ALL: IIRC, Downey’s done 32 movies that have been released to date. He’s actually a better actor to play the “Six Degrees” game with than Kevin Bacon; heck, half of today’s stars can be traced back to RDJ in 2 movies or less.

My own list:

10) One Night Stand — a movie utterly unwatchable when Downey isn’t onscreen. In an excellent supporting role and sidestory to the main plot thread (Wesley Snipes cheating on Ming-Na with Nastassja Kinski), Downey plays a gay choreographer with end-stage AIDS determined to fight his disease to the end. The quiet earnestness of his plea to best friend Max (Wesley Snipes) to come visit him in the hospital between 5:30 and 5:45 AM because he fears dying before the sun comes up is utterly heartbreaking.

9) Less Than Zero — Bad 80’s hair, bad 80’s fashion, decent 80’s music, and one knock-em-dead performance from 22-year-old RDJ. RDJ has called this role “The Ghost of Christmas Future”, and he’s probably right: Julian Wells, the cokefiend whose only motivation in life is obtaining more drugs, willing to do practically anything to obtain them. This performance started Downey on a wild upward career path and made Hollywood producers and directors turn a blind eye to his increasing drug problems for over 8 years; it was that electrifying.

8 ) Soapdish — A cute “chick flick” movie that doesn’t deserve the bad reviews it got. Downey is in peak comic form here as producer David Seton Barnes, who is trying to accommodate the wishes of his girlfriend to be the show’s focal star, keep the show’s Susan Lucci-esque diva happy, deal with the press about soap-opera-like events unfolding within the real lives of his cast, and get the show’s ratings up to please the network bosses. His comic timing here is impeccable, and his expressions wouldn’t be out of place in a classic screwball comedy. If you haven’t seen it, add it to your RDJ collection.

7) Natural Born Killers — RDJ gives a great supporting performance in one of the most controversial movies of its time. As Australian tabloid TV reporter Wayne Gale, RDJ cracks open his impressions box and pulls out a darn good Aussie accent that never slips or breaks, and does a fantastic job building up the layers of Gale’s obsession with Mickey and Mallory and his hope that their increasing fame will carry him to higher heights in his own.

6) Kiss Kiss Bang Bang — An overlooked comedy that never devolves into camp. An older-but-wiser RDJ, at the beginning of a four-year grinding workload (16 movies from 2005 to 2008), plays thief Harry Lockhart, who stumbles upon a movie audition line while running from police; Lockhart impresses the producers, and he is cast as a private eye and brought to Hollywood, where a gay private eye is brought in to help Lockhart prepare for his role. Everything Downey does in this film — his innate sense of timing in delivering lines, his facial expressions, his gestures, and his ability to say unspoken but implied dialogue through just a glance at the camera — is pitch-perfect. It is a crime that this film was completely ignored by the major awards.

5) Chaplin — For most people, THE defining RDJ role. RDJ said in an interview that he’d only ever had to audition for two parts: Charlie Chaplin in Chaplin, and Tony Stark in Iron Man. Looking at the finished film, it’s a wonder he had to audition at all — he’s practically a carbon copy of the man, in both looks and physical mannerisms. (RDJ was once shown a pair of Chaplin’s shoes and asked if he could try one on, and was shocked to discover he and Chaplin had the same size feet.) The movie itself has its problems — like most people, I want the 4-hr. director’s cut NOW — but there’s nothing wrong with the portrayal of the title character. Chaplin got RDJ his first (and so far, only) Oscar nod, but he lost to Al Pacino (I distinctly remember shouting at the TV in a tirade unrepeatable in mixed company). If you ever want to know why Hollywood producers kept giving RDJ work even through the Hell years of 1996-2001, rent Chaplin; you’ll never ask the question again.

4) A Scanner Darkly — A criminally overlooked film that is perhaps the best treatment ever of a Philip Dick novel. RDJ plays James Barris, drug-addled technology expert who gradually emerges as a sociopathic monster attempting to set up a conspiracy involving housemate Bob Arctor (an undercover cop) and Donna Hawthorne (his drug dealer girlfriend). Even though the film is “animated”, it is done so by taking footage shot with the real actors, digitizing it, and running it through Rotoshop for interpolated rotoscoping; thus, the expressions on the actors’ faces, their movements, even the most subtle gestures are captured with surprising clarity. If you haven’t seen the film yet, rent it or buy it. I find I can’t resist it when it comes on HBO.

3) Iron Man — The superhero movie for grownups that transformed RDJ from “great actor, former druggie” to “superstar” in the average moviegoer’s minds. RDJ is picture-perfect (literally, he looks like he stepped off the comic book’s pages) as genius munitions inventor and ardent war hawk Tony Stark, who has a change of heart — almost literally — when one of his own rocket-powered grenade explodes beside him during a roadside shootout in Afghanistan where he is taken hostage. To escape from his cave prison, Stark agrees to build the bad guys a missile but instead builds himself a better generator to power the electromagnet that keeps his heart beating and a suit of power armor to allow him to pass through the wall of guards and their Stark Industries weapons. RDJ plays Tony Stark’s transformation — from bored playboy at the beginning of the film to re-energized inventor obsessed with perfecting his power armor to outraged businessman infuriated that his own second-in-command has been selling Stark technology to terrorist groups around the world to fledgling superhero beginning to realize that there is a world beyond his own circle that needs someone to take up their cause — with style and panache, and even manages to use that great sense of comic timing he possesses when needed. I adore this movie, and the only reason it doesn’t make my number one is that two more performances somehow manage to top it.

2) Tropic Thunder — A brilliant farcical movie-within-a-movie that takes on the movie industry and the many targets within it. RDJ plays 5-time Oscar winner Kirk Lazarus, an Australian method actor who takes his need to bury himself in his characters so seriously that he has a skin pigmentation procedure performed to transform himself into a dark-skinned black man in order to play the character of Sgt. Lincoln Osiris, the black platoon sergeant in the movie Tropic Thunder. To force his cast of overpaid and overpampered actors to actually have to work, director Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan) drops them all off in the jungles of Vietnam with only a map and a list of scenes to be shot; hidden cameras all around will capture their acting to finally create the “greatest war movie ever”. But when Cockburn is killed by a mine and the actors discover they have been going the wrong way through the jungle because of star Tugg Speedman’s (Ben Stiller) poor mapreading skills, Lazarus never drops character, buried so deep into the character that he cannot let go of it, even when all the characters reach the reality that they are no longer making a movie. RDJ, who told CBS’s Harry Smith that the inspiration for Kirk Lazarus came from “sadly, my sorry-ass self,” carries the last half of the movie on his shoulders, and his comic timing and ad-lib ability make what could have been an insulting slap at African-Americans a very funny indictment on insufferable method actors who insist on staying in character on the set at all times. This performance is definitely Oscar-worthy, and if it weren’t for the fact that the Best Supporting Actor Oscar already has Heath Ledger’s name engraved on it, RDJ would be a hard candidate to beat.

1) Wonder Boys — Take 3 past Oscar nominees (Michael Douglas, Frances McDormand, Robert Downey Jr.). Add 2 young up-and-comers (a pre-Spider-Man Tobey Maguire, a pre-Tom Cruise Katie Holmes). Stir in one quirky director (Curtis Hansen) and one writer best known for taking on Harry Potter (Steve Kloves, who wrote the screenplay based on Michael Chabon’s novel). Whistle a merry tune during prep (”Things Have Changed”, performed by Bob Dylan). Bake until well done and serve while hot (February 2000), then reheat and serve again at Thanksgiving (November 2000) to remind the critics how good it was. Watch a very deserving film get no acting Oscar nods, no directing Oscar nods, and only three nominations total (Best Editing, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Song), with only one win (”Things Have Changed”). Grumble loudly at the fact that a fantastically nuanced performance by RDJ (as gay literary agent Terry Crabtree, struggling to hold his career together because his star client Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas) hasn’t released a new novel in seven years) gets ignored completely by the Academy. Get a huge laugh out of the fact that (according to RDJ) eight years later, a scene in Wonder Boys where Crabtree has a one-night stand with the maybe-sexual James Leer (Tobey Maguire) gets a hugely funny payoff in one of the mock trailers for Tropic Thunder (Satan’s Alley, where the Irish monk played by Kirk Lazarus is seduced during prayers by another monk played by Tobey Maguire). Most of all, sit back and enjoy a group of really great actors delivering terrific performances in a sweetly funny comedy about writers and writing, giving up and moving on vs. standing your ground and trying to make that ground better, growing up vs. growing old, and love and its many beautiful, wonderful forms. In 2000, RDJ had not yet hit rock bottom in his drug addiction issues, but the film serves as a reminder of what a tremendous actor he was and still is.

I do agree that Zodiac was a piece of shit that literally put me to sleep as I watching it. People just like to pretend it was awsome because of the director. Finch