Top 50 Movies of the Decade

A lot of these lists have been going around. It was suggested to me that I do my own, and I was like, yeah, totally I should! So, I did it, agonized over the order, wrote maybe a little bit too much on the top ten, and, voila, here it is for your reading pleasure! I urge any and all disagreements to be posted as virulent disapprovals of my ability to be a human being, either here or on the old facebook.

Enjoy.

Top 50 Movies, 2000-2009
50. Shaun of the Dead
49. Sunshine
48. High Tension
47. Munich
46. The Host
45. Kill Bill Volumes 1 & 2
44. The Bourne Trilogy
43. Heaven
42. The Constant Gardener
41. Pirates of the Caribbean
40. Almost Famous
39. Ponyo
38. Avatar
37. No Country For Old Men
36. The Hurt Locker
35. Ocean’s 11
34. March of the Penguins
33. Enchanted
32. Into the Wild
31. Snatch
30. The Dark Knight
29. Amelie
28. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
27. Where the Wild Things Are
26. Inglourious Basterds
25. Up
24. American Gangster
23. Spirited Away
22. Across the Universe
21. Vengeance Trilogy (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance/Lady Vengeance/Old Boy)
20. I Heart Huckabees
19. Quills
18. The New World
17. The Departed
16. Y Tu Mama Tambien
15. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
14. City of God
13. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
12. Ratatouille
11. 2046
10. 28 Days Later – With barely any budget, some digital cameras, a cast of unknowns, and a whole lotta blood, Danny Boyle managed to single-handedly reinvent the zombie genre and the apocalypse picture. From Zach Snyder’s “Dawn of the Dead” remake to Will Smith in “I Am Legend”, it was a decade of running cerebrumphagists, the-end-is-extremely-fucking-nigh fantasias, and empty metropolises. And yet, unlike many of his more hedonistic peers, who were looking for brains, bodies, severe dismemberings, and a cheap thrill, Danny Boyle, with the help of writer Alex Garland, found a very poignant story of survival, love, and hope in his end-times desolation. Look no further than the vapor trail scene for proof of the film’s brilliance; it remains one of the decade’s most beautiful cinematic moments.


9. Lord of the Rings Trilogy – There’s not a lot to say about this one that hasn’t already been said. It was a behemoth of a trilogy, a staggeringly huge cinematic milestone that set a daunting high-water mark for 21st century epics. In finding the quiet heart of the story, and focusing on it amidst the carnage, Peter Jackson created myriad new avenues of grand-scale film making, and blew our minds in ways the didn’t know they could be blown. Few, if any, films wowed me the way Fellowship of the Rings did. A true “show ‘em something they ain’t never seen” moment of wonder and charm (hats off especially to Rudy’s performance as Sam Gamgee).


8. Traffic – Lens filters, subtitled swaths, and a disjointed narrative that had a lot of people scratching their heads like “Huh the fuck?”. Sound like a classic? It is. Steven Soderbergh and Stephen Gaghan weave an entrancing web of ambiguous morality peppered with fallible, flailing characters (brilliantly acted by the ensemble cast) that gives us far more questions than answers. This refusal to take sides makes the film that much more striking. Through its disparate plots the filmmakers show us some of the many ways that drugs infiltrate and affect our society, and the hypocritical ways in which we deal with these issues. Unfortunately, this film also inspired many lesser professionals to attempt similarly disjointed, big-idea pictures, most of which ended up like old oatmeal – tepid, mushy, and pointless. Yet despite this, it remains one of the most powerful, intelligent, and original films of the 21st century thus far.


7. Pan’s Labyrinth – All of Guillermo Del Toro’s sensibilities – his penchant for horror, his glee for creatures and myth, his ability to see the world as children do, his understated sense of tragedy – cohered beautifully is this Spanish civil war fable. A young girl has lost her father. Her mother has remarried a remorseless lieutenant. The family is relocated to a mountain town where the fascists are fighting the rebels. In a creaking old farmhouse, the girl is visited by creatures and ordained tasks of incredible significance. In the war, the parallel fantasias, and the familial tensions, Del Toro finds heartbreaking moments of human frailty and strength in a film that is ultimately about belief and the capacity people have to do the right thing, when the time comes.


6. Wall-E – A robot love story? Um…ok. I suppose it’s better than traveling the exhausted avenues of Martians and talking animals (though honestly I’m sure I could ever have enough of talking animals cause, well, animals are really cute, even if the films suck). Dutiful Pixar peon that I am, I found my way to the theater, and an experience of complete joy. A wordless, endlessly inventive first act following a robot in his daily routines on a vacant and trash-strewn earth (his only friend, appropriately, a roach) gives way to a touching, very honest love story (between robots!), which follows an adventurous, let’s-save-the-human-race conclusion evoking the best of the original Star Wars triumvirate. Though there are those who point supposed flaws and an unnecessarily grandiose ending, I find nothing to dislike in this film, which lives up to cinema’s great promise: something that anyone can love.


5. Brokeback Mountain – Master director Ang Lee came up trumps twice in the oughts by giving us both Brokeback and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Though the later is the more rapturous and original film, few movies match Brokeback’s overwhelming depth of emotion, thanks in large part to phenomenal, tender, incredibly vulnerable performances on the part of star-crossed lovers Ennis Del Mar (Heath Leger) and Jack Fuckin’ Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal). The nearly infinite scope of the film, from the mountains and valleys of Wyoming to the more treacherous territory of human relationships, societal taboos, and missed chances, elevates what might have been overly-sentimental pap or button-pushing propaganda to the plateau of the timeless love story. The scene in which Leger goes through Gyllenhaal’s shirts is heartbreaking.


4. Lost in Translation – Though living in Tokyo when I saw the film certainly biased me, no other movie this decade so expertly spoke to and of lost souls; people adrift in a global society and web-enabled culture that allows us access to any and everything, at an esoteric but painful price: authenticity of experience. In her story of platonic love, Sofia Coppola expertly locates the sense of both wonder and loss of her character. Caught in a vastly foreign culture, one which is so often fetishiszd by those from the west who look east for some kind of transcendental revelation, Scarlet Johansson and Bill Murray bore into the quiet desperation of their characters. In a place without external reference points, the search for understanding must begin within. Lost in Translation is a lovely, melancholy film with an expertly coherent tone that captures the nooks and crannies of Tokyo and its lost ex-pats. A masterpiece of subtle emotion.


3. Before Night Falls – In his film adaptation of Reinaldo Arenas’ autobiography, Julian Schnabel does the author (one of the most shamefully forgotten literary genius of the 20th century) the greatest favor he could have; he gives Reinaldo the life he would have had if his sense of wonder, mischief, and humor had been allowed equal time in the spotlight as the terrors he faced under Castro’s fascism (let’s call it what it was). Despite wrongful imprisonments, torture, and the destruction of his manuscripts (one of his nine novels was destroyed three times – he wrote the book a total of four times in his life), Arenas managed, through his belief in literature and art, to hold onto some of his boyish, wide-eyed love of the world and its poetry. The film captures all of the writer’s, and the world’s, poetry, in lush, surprising, and incredibly lovely ways. Javier Bardem’s performance is astonishing. Few movies have ever offered sequences as beautiful as those of Cuba’s landscapes set to a voice over of Arenas poetry. More than any other film I have seen, Before Night Falls shows us the interconnectivity of art, humanity, love, and hope.


2. There Will Be Blood – When the credits rolled my first time through There Will Be Blood, I laughed out loud. I couldn’t help myself. People around me in the theater, friends included, thought I was insane. But my laughter wasn’t wow that was ha-ha funny laughter. It was holy-shit-did-I-really-just-see-a-movie-that-good? laughter. The film floored me in so many ways I wasn’t quite sure how to react. I went back to see it the next weekend, and have seen it many times since. Enough has been said about Daniel Day-Lewis’ performance that I needn’t say more; it’s so huge it seems as though the movie is an event horizon around Day-Lewis’ black hole. The film is all film, an epic conceived and executed visually, with towering landscapes, claustrophobic interiors, and a genius eye for its characters. The way genius auteur (of Boogie Nights, another all-time favorite of mine) Paul Thomas Anderson subtly moves the film from the daunting grandiosity of nature to the imposing confinements of human creation speaks volumes of his massive take on greed and its avaricious consumption of men’s souls (not many women in this picture). There We Will Be Blood is a brutally American film, as fully realized and unquestionably brilliant as the Godfather or Citizen Kane. The burning rig, the rain of oil, Johnny Greenwood’s score, the bowling alley (“My straw comes across the room, and I drink your milkshake. I drink it up!”) the allegory for American’s 20th century (corporations and religious enterprises vying for the hearts and minds of the public), all of it, perfect.


1. Children of Men – As I sat down with a six pack, a quill pen, four mugs of coffee, and a stuffed sea otter to write this list, there was no doubt in my mind that There Will Be Blood would claim the top spot. I thought Children of Men would maybe squeeze its way into the top ten. So then what happened? What happened was that, unlike near every other movie on this list, Children of Men accomplishes something profound; it’s sets new paradigms. It is subversive in so many ways that it can only be one thing: the future of film. Much has been written about the ten-minute plus tracking shot, the attack on the car in the woods, and how unifying and terrifyingly realistic Cuarón’s film is. Moving away from Orwellian fascistic paradigms, Cuarón creates a future dystopia not radically divergent from the world we currently live in, making the film all the more uncomfortable and unsettling. Rather than marauding military police and secret societies waxing conspiratorial, Cuarón simply extrapolates current immigration dilemmas (primarily that of 1rst v. 3rd world) and the fear/paranoia of “the other” as terrorist. And yet despite all of these sly, brilliant moves, the films coup d’etat is this: it upends the deeply ingrained and somewhat bizarre notion that serious art/films with big ideas/etc etc must be nihilistic, tragic, self-serious, and relentlessly dark anad/or violent in order to be powerful, realistic, and persuasively philosophical. In creating a world in which the human race is facing its imminent demise, Cuarón (from a politically unstable and notoriously corrupt country – Mexico – yet another subversion; see Iñárritu, Meirelles, Gavin Hood et al for proof that America most often requires its developing-world filmmakers to point out how violent and desperate situations in those locales are, thereby highlighting how good we have while simultaneously provoking deep-seated feelings of inauthenticity and white/wealthy guilt) asserts that belief in perseverance and a brighter future is far more powerful than petulant resignation. The brilliance of Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, Michael Caine, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Syd go great lengths to making the film as thoroughly believable as it is. A cameo from Gossip Girl’s Chuck makes the deal that much sweeter. Though released in 2006, the film ushers us perfectly from the Bush era to the Obama years, and is unlike anything before it, coalescing trends and influences into something wholly original and progressive. The night is darkest just before dawn.

Top 50 Movies of the Decade