My Movie Decade
By Brett Beach
December 31, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
I am a fan of best of lists that don’t feel the need to conform to countdown formats or a number divisible by five. I thought about striving to make sure that every year was represented but, as I found at the end, my picks already encompassed all the years. Those who peruse my column Chapter Two on a regular basis know I can often err on the side of extreme verbosity. In this case - with the exception of my co-picks for Best Film of the decade - I have opted to stay (relatively) brief. I also have chosen to present my other picks in random order.
I imagine you have heard of most of these, but if you haven’t seen them, give them a chance, especially if you have been holding out. I know how scary it can be to finally watch “that film” you have been hearing about for years. What if you hate it? It’s a risk. Thankfully, none of these films has a “view-by” date. And they will be here today, tomorrow, next week, and beyond.
The Best: A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) and 25th Hour (2002)
A sci-fi take on Pinocchio about a robot who only wants to be real (and wants Mommy all to himself) & a gritty and hallucinatory portrait of a small-time drug dealer’s final day of freedom before a seven-year prison sentence. What do these two have in common? Aside from being masterful expressions of their creator’s talent, with something to tell us about the world(s) we live in (and may yet live in?), to quote Jonathan Rosenbaum in his capsule review of 25th Hour, "[they] risk absurdity to achieve the sublime." I cannot think of anything more worthy for art to do or a more eloquent way of saying it.
Steven Spielberg channels Stanley Kubrick (or is it the other way around?) and creates a scary, sad, fucked-up fairy tale with the bleakest happy ending ever. This film confused some, disappointed many and pissed off a lot more. It is the only film from my adult lifetime thus far that I am eager to follow over the decades to come and chart the ebb and flow of its reception. I remember the devastating silence in the theater at a point when it seemed like the film might simply end on a note of wistfully heartbreaking irony. Then the movie proceeds for another 30 minutes and a wrap-up so bathetic and twisted, describing it only makes one sound insane. It has to be experienced. Masterpieces aren’t always about “perfection.” They can also be about messiness and chaos and disparate parts that don’t necessarily come together. A.I. is all of that. Consider also that Spielberg directed this, Minority Report, Catch Me if You Can, War of the Worlds, and Munich in near succession (sorry, The Terminal). That's a helluva streak for bravura filmmaking.
Spike Lee has no problem with being incendiary and indulgent and infuriating. He is also achingly tender at unexpected moments and completely willing to let the sanity of his plots bubble over. Thanks to all these qualities, he crafted one of the only American films to date to consider the effect of 9/11 on our national psyche and one of the only films ever to ask and answer the question "What does it mean for someone to be going off to prison?" Potent, electrifying and heartbreaking in equal doses, with Edward Norton allowing the audience to see his character’s spirit slowly collapsing before our eyes as he takes measure of all that he is losing and accepts the knowledge there won’t be much to come back to after he has served his time. A scorched earth sendoff seems the only possible closing note, before an achingly tender final sequence that considers the possibility of rebirth and renewal for all of us as individuals and as a country.
All the Real Girls (2003)
David Gordon Green now apparently makes oddball stoner films starring James Franco and Danny McBride, but still with the same sort of visual and emotional poetry he brought to his first four features, including this tale of thwarted young romance and emotionally volatile man-boys. This properly introduced a creature known as the Zooey Deschanel and gave Paul Schneider a format for his singular blend of charm and sorrow.
Inland Empire (2007)
Who would have thought, after decades of getting caught up in peering inside the severed ear of small town life and looking for the maggots, that David Lynch would find true creative expression examining the Hollywood Dream factory and the life of the actress in this and the thematically similar Mulholland Dr? Laura Dern gives a career redefining performance(s) as she traverses multiple layers and levels of reality and media and sanity and possibly time and space. Inland Empire is disturbing and tumultuous and epic but also oddly uplifting, containing the best use ever of "The Loco-Motion" and finishing up with an all-female singing/dancing rhythm and blues call-and-response that stands as the ultimate rebuke to everyone who loves to walk out once the credits start rolling.
Wet Hot American Summer (2001)
WHAS is a comedy so completely constructed using nothing but irony that it should have pissed me off royally. Instead, this ode to '80s summer camp movies is just piss-your-pants funny, so attuned to that sub-sub-genre it stands as a love letter to filmmaking in general. David Wain gets great performances from Janeane Garofalo, David Hyde Pierce, Paul Rudd, Christopher Meloni, et. al. and proves the more localized and focused (as opposed to generic) a plot is, the more entertaining it can be.
Final Destination 2 (2003)
FD2 is part of the long line of movies where the world comes tumbling down in slapstick calamity. It’s like an Irwin Allen disaster epic writ small and shifted towards the comedy side of the comedy/horror meter. Every joke is a sharply pointed stick with death as the punch line. David R. Ellis may never be able to recreate his pacing, timing and great use of CGI ONLY WHEN NEEDED (The Final Destination proved this), but he shouldn't be discounted either. The freeway vehicle pileup is the set piece of the decade.
Import/Export (2009)
In this fiction film, Ulrich Seidl looks at the state of our global world by following two 20-somethings in Eastern Europe as they attempt to find gainful employment, and perhaps from that a sense of self-worth. I was chastised to observe the tracking of my emotions from condescending superiority over this pair to a sense of respect and awe. With no one to guide them, they hold on to their moral compasses and tentatively reach out into the unknown, (naively?) believing they may find a place in this world. Or perhaps they simply can’t allow themselves to think of what will happen if they fail.
The New World (2005)
Terrence Malick suggests what it might have been like when Pocahontas encountered the English settlers and "civilization" of these wild lands began. No history book exercise, this strips away 400 years of assumptions and romanticizing of the era’s hardships, and feels like a filmed document from the 1600s. In the final half-hour as Pocahontas (a sublime Q’orianka Kilcher) trades one life and continent for another, we see the true price of civilization, and feel the inevitable march of time.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)
Australian filmmaker Andrew Dominik looks back to another enduring myth about America and finds a relevant parallel to today's "we're all celebrities" mentality. Robert Ford gets everything that he wants and still isn't quite sure what all that is. The film's true theme emerges in the final 40 minutes as (SPOILER!) a post-assassination Ford is left to make his way among the tabloid elements of the time, and becomes just another punch line in our violent self-made history. Casey Affleck finds a way to make us want to follow a creepy, double-crossing, obsessed outsider, and almost care about what lies at the end of his path.
24 Hour Party People (2002)
If I was a British lad but 30 years ago…I would have gotten my ass kicked but good. Luckily, a film like this takes me back via the safety of celluloid, to the roar of the blossoming Manchester music scene. Director Michael Winterbottom has worked in just about every genre over the last 15 years and Party People shows the humanism that makes his oeuvre such a joy to pore over. Self-referential, debauched, and with Steve Coogan playing the man who presided over Factory Records (in a performance of comic deftness), it feels like a soundtrack to life changes.
Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005)
Performance artist Miranda July goes mainstream (or rather shanghais the mainstream and makes great use of it) for tales of tentative love, sexual awakening among the young and old, caring for the elderly and "passing the poop back and forth forever." This material would be [intentionally] inflammatory in most other's hands but July finds the purity, innocence and strange beauty in her characters' lives, and by extension, our own.
La Commune (2002)
La Commune, from director Peter Watkins, is at heart a "mockumentary" but it's not borrowing from the Christopher Guest playbook. Using a cast of nonprofessionals and shooting in one location (a large warehouse) for under three weeks, Watkins recreates a time and a place (Paris, 1871) just after the people have revolted against the government and are attempting to hold on to what little power they have snatched. He does this using only the bare minimum of props and costuming. Watkins' conceit is to imagine the presence of the media back then via state-run news updates and guerrilla camera crews conducting man-on-the-street interviews. Mixed in with this are thoughts from the actors, in their costumes, and what they are learning about their own country's history from participating in the film. If I make it sound pretentious, I have failed. It is alive and vibrant and engrossing and remains so even as it acknowledges its own artifice. I watched this on my laptop over three evenings in Vegas (because that's how I roll in Sin City)
Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003)
Los Angeles Plays Itself is a documentary that consists entirely of several hundred film clips and voiceover narrations, structured and presented like the most in-depth film lecture you’ve ever attended. Directed and scripted by Thom Andersen, a Professor of Film Studies in Los Angeles, it is a look at how his hometown has (or has not as the case may be) been portrayed in film and television over the decades. A consideration on how much of our perception of places comes from media and a tribute to the lost histories of an often over-simplified city.
Before Sunset (2004)
Richard Linklater, Kim Krazen, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy bring us once more into the orbit of Jesse and Celine and in only 75 minutes distill the essence of a night of young love and a decade in its aftermath of wondering what-if. I was doubtful if I wanted to "tarnish" my love for Before Sunrise with finding out "what happened next" but now I hope sometime this decade will bring a third installment, when we will all be a little older and a little wiser (heh, heh).
Marie Antoinette (2006)
I admire all three of Sofia Coppola's features this decade but I think Marie Antoinette trumps both Lost in Translation and The Virgin Suicides. Coppola sees this woman child as clearly as the family of teen girls in Eugenides' tale and the young bride in LIT. Her grandest achievement is to make history come dazzlingly and dizzyingly alive with new wave music on the soundtrack and Lance Acord's exquisite cinematography. A stellar ensemble cast delights but Dunst shines. Between this and Wimbledon the same year, I thought she was ready to break through into the next stage of her career. We'll see…
Silent Light (2009)
Set in a Mennonite community in Mexico and focusing on a love triangle, Silent Light is about faith, redemption, spirituality, sin, miracles and the glory of an eight-minute push-in shot with no cuts. For those like me who treat cinema as a church, Silent Light is a film worth assuming an attitude of prayer for. Director Carlos Reygadas’ previous film, Battle in Heaven, featured the most hardcore sex I have ever seen outside of a XXX feature. Silent Light, with its pastoral ruminations and search for a deeper understanding, feels like it heralds from the cinema of Malick .
The Man Who Wasn't There (2001)
This decade, the Coens have made great films, good films and, it pains me to say, not good films (I did not care for The Ladykillers and I still think O Brother, Where Art Thou feels like a third or fourth draft for writers who are so attuned to finding the perfect pitch to every sentence and idea). TMWWT may just be a genre exercise like most of their films are, but that fact never gets in the way of the characters in their film, who don't know about genres. Billy Bob Thornton looks like the handsomest cadaver ever, smokes like cigarettes are going out of fashion and watches as his little world crumbles under the weight of cold war era topics like UFOs, dry cleaning and loveless adultery. He and his wife (an exquisite Frances McDormand) may not "have performed the love act in many years" but watching him shave her legs in the bathtub is so romantic it gives me chills. Roger Deakins' B&W cinematography could make me give up color forever.
Death Proof (2007)
QT has changed WWII forever, but my jury is still out on whether Inglorious Basterds is a great film and will hold up. I think Kill Bill Vol. 2 is his best this decade but I feel compelled to show the love for Death Proof. In its 88 min theatrical version it was solid but the 113 minute version on DVD confirms that the Grindhouse project was doomed to fail because Tarantino couldn't make a true scuzzy B-movie if his life depended on it. He loves his characters and he loves to hear them talk and someday, they may just forget that all the talk is merely holding off someone getting shot in the face, and just keep right on yapping. Death Proof is 85% talk, 13% action and 2% gore. Rose McGowan is sympathetic; Mary Elizabeth Williams is heavenly (and sings! and I prefer not to think that she will be raped and killed off-screen, despite Tarantino's opinions on the matter); and Kurt Russell is blisteringly evilarious, esp. when he's getting his ass handed to him at the end.
Femme Fatale (2002)
Brian DePalma only made four movies this decade. Thank God this one was so unbelievably friggin frakkin awesome. A mishmash of all his favorite fetishes (dream sequences, twinnings, supernatural phenomena, hot nude women), plot devices (heists, murder, redemption, hot nude women making out) and cinematic references (with Double Indemnity playing in French on the TV during the opening tracking shot), this is a gloriously lurid melodrama of improbability leading to an ending that actually had me shout out a joyous "No Fucking Way!" Sadly, this was to a near empty theater as everyone else in the country was watching 8 Mile that weekend. Rebecca Romijn is the first and second word on blonde seductresses and Antonio Banderas uses his looks to ironic effect to play the biggest sap ever.
Drag Me to Hell (2009)
Sam Raimi only made two non-Spider Man films this decade and this is the one that wasn't unpleasant and unredeemable (that would be The Gift). Is this better than Spider Man 2? Tough call. Still thinking on that. Is this better than The Evil Dead films? Tough call, but yes it is. Was this the best film of 2009? Raimi came through with a throwback to his early career and blended splatstick, gross-out fluids, and gore, with chills, shadows, thrills and frights, with a low-key but believable love story and made it look so damn easy. Allison Lohman was game, whether trying to impress her boyfriend's parents or getting thrashed upon by a crazy gypsy woman and in that mythical perfect world, her performance would have won nominations. Justin Long's tear-streaked face enters the pantheon of images I hope to carry to my grave.
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)
Shane Black affectionately parodies the movies (e.g. Lethal Weapon; The Last Boy Scout) that made him rich. Robert Downey Jr began his comeback; Michelle Monaghan began her ascent; and Val Kilmer, sigh, Val will just have to settle for the warm inner glow that comes from giving a great comic performance. For all of its lurid thrills, there has been a life-altering consequence from KKBB: I now make it a habit to apologize to the nice folks in the Midwest for saying fuck so much.
Bully (2001)
Larry Clark’s “ripped from the headlines” feature - a darkly comic tale of teens ganging up on one of their own clique - is both repulsively exploitative (Clark will stick his camera right in on a young woman’s naked torso as needed) and unexpectedly moving. In the midst of the physical and emotional violence is a tender almost-romance between two of the teens that plays like Romeo and Juliet reimagined as gutter poetry. The epilogue to it all is a courtroom payoff that may have you laughing through you tears at the absurdity, and the waste.
In Bruges (2008)
Is there anything left to be said about bungling foul-mouthed hit men and the lives they lead? Playwright Martin McDonough proved there was, if they were crafted as unique individuals, with very conflicted feelings about the violence they commit. Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson were the best odd couple of the decade, and Ralph Fiennes matched them as their increasingly short-fused superior. The key surprise was how deeply McDonough treated his themes of penitence, atonement, anguish and strict moral codes, managing to shoehorn them in in-between scattergun satirical shots at pretty much every target in sight. There is also a business allegory in all of this, too: If CEOs who bilked over their employees and destroyed their lives had an ounce of the honor that Fiennes demonstrates at the end, the world would be a better place.
The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
I love this movie and yet I am always forgetting how much I love this movie. I imagine this may pop up in some of my fellow BOP-ers lists, so I only wish to highlight a few things about The Royal Tenenbaums that always make me want to hug myself: 1) Owen Wilson’s use of the word “presuppose”; 2) Danny Glover’s perfectly timed pratfall; 3) Gwyneth Paltrow wielding a hatchet at a back wood chopping block; 4) Luke Wilson giving up his professional ghost and laying prone on a tennis court; 5) Alec Baldwin’s narrational voice. How wonderful life would be if he were to provide a running commentary for each of us.
Wendy and Lucy (2008)
There’s a small amount of hometown pride for this movie, filmed in and around NE Portland and based on a short story by a local writer. But I also feel immense happiness and love for Kelly Reichardt’s short and bittersweet look at a nomadic young woman and her dog, the only friend she has in the world. When the dog goes missing and her car breaks down, Wendy feels her already condensed world closing in on her and must decide what to do next. Reichardt avoids easy sentimentality and unnecessary plot complications and lets emotions take center stage. Michelle Williams finds the perfect note of grace for her performance and carries it from the beginning through to the end.
And finally, though I saw them both only once a few weeks ago, I would throw Toy Story 3 and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World on here as well. I commend the former (via director Lee Unkrich) for staying true to the world of Andy, Buzz, Woody et. al, and seeing that world through to its logical conclusion, and for maintaining its heart and hilarity, even as it saw fit to set my tear ducts to constant flow at about the three-minute mark. I praise the latter for Edgar Wright’s full-throttle willingness to make a film so stylistically packed to the gills it may send its viewers into epileptic shock, and for trusting people to be up for the journey. And also, Scott Pilgrim? He’s kind of an asshole, I was shocked to find, which I think Michael Cera realized as well and played accordingly. Is this a Molotov cocktail to the hipster scene or a revelation of what really goes on in Canada? Either way, it rocked.