ten favorite movies, 2000-2009

A to Z:

Michael Bay's BAD BOYS II (2003)

Kinji Fukasaku's BATTLE ROYALE (2000)

Fernando Meirelles' CITY OF GOD (2002)

Michel Gondry's ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (2004)

Brad Bird's THE INCREDIBLES (2004)

Tony Kaye's LAKE OF FIRE (2006)

Peter Jackson's THE LORD OF THE RINGS: 
TEH WHOLE SHEBANG (2001-2003)

Edgar Wright's SHAUN OF THE DEAD (2004)

James Gunn's SLITHER (2006)

Paul Thomas Anderson's THERE WILL BE BLOOD (2007)

apologies, I was going to draft little mini-writeups of all of these but I've already written about several of them here (linked in such cases, as they were in the previous posts, at the film's title) and the rest I haven't seen recently enough to do anything but run my mouth. 

stray defenses: 

• Bad Boys II is the Last Great Action Flick, and the only Great film M. Bay will ever make
• Shaun is funnier but Slither is sharper, and criminally overlooked
• Lake Of Fire may be, in its own way, the best nonfiction film I've ever seen
• and Incredibles is the best Pixar film, because it just is

and stray stats, because i think they're interesting:

• I suppose I agree with my list that Guillermo Del Toro (with three films) was the filmmaker of the decade. Peter Jackson teeeeeechnically has three films in my top ten, but they're counted as one, and then The Lovely Bones was just awful.
• 2002 was quantitatively the best movie year of the aughts, with nine -- Adaptation, City Of God, Punch-Drunk Love, Spellbound, Blade II, Blody Sunday, Dirty Pretty Things, Talk To Her and The Two Towers -- out of 53. (I split LotR and Kill Bill up into parts for fairness on this one.)
• Qualitatively is harder to say. I'd tie crowd-pleaser city 2004 (Kill Bill, Spider-man 2, Eternal Sunshine, The Incredibles, Mean Girls, Shaun Of The Dead and...well, Primer) with 2007, which of its six gave me two of my favorite cinema experiences (Grindhouse and King Of Kong) and then saw There Will Be Blood and No Country For Old Men battle it out in a wonderfully heavy awards season.
• Worst movie year turns out to be 2009 -- big ol' goose egg, there -- but I suppose it's hard to add fresher stuff to lists like this, and I'd wager at least Where The Wild Things Are and Crank: High Voltage would shimmy their way in if I ever came back to this.

thanks for reading! see you in ten years!


#11-#50, alphabetically:
Part One: Adaptation through Dirty Pretty Things
Part Two: The Fog Of War through The Man Who Wasn't There
Part Three: Mean Girls through Spider-man 2
Part Four: Spirited Away through Zodiac

favorite films 2000-2009 (part four)

Spirited Away through Zodiac, after the jump.

favorite films 2000-2009 (part three)

Mean Girls through Spider-Man 2, after the jump.

favorite films 2000-2009 (part two)

Fog Of War through The Man Who Wasn't There, after the jump.

my favorite films of the decade (part one)

i made this list for elsewhere and it'd be silly not to validate my time ever-so-slightly by reposting it here. the first four posts will be my eleventh through fiftieth favorite films (ten in each post) alphabetically, the last will be my top ten, also alphabetically. if you have a sure single favorite film of the decade, that sucks for you, you did not see enough movies.

Adaptation through Dirty Pretty Things, YouTube clipped all to death, after the jump.

michael apted's 7 UP, SEVEN PLUS SEVEN, and 21 UP (1964-1977)

francis ford coppola's THE GODFATHER (1972)

billy wilder's DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944)

steven spielberg's JURASSIC PARK (1993)

christopher nolan's THE DARK KNIGHT (2008)

more than enough has been said about The Dark Knight's across-the-board successes and more specifically Heath Ledger's game-changing performance, but what stood out to me just as much (especially on a second viewing) is how genuinely accomplished the Nolan/Nolan/Goyer script is, and i hope they're not hidden in Ledger's shadow come awards season. costumes aside, The Dark Knight is as much a crime novel as a summer blockbuster, and walks a fine line between density and accessibility; what's more, though, the script is completely saturated with its challenging themes, and for every moment where it spreads its complex good vs evil, order vs chaos ideas on a little thick there are three or four where they've been woven almost imperceptibly into the narrative. my immediate reaction to The Dark Knight was that "the Godfather II of comic book films" is a pretty fair comparison, and the more i think on it the fairer it gets. i'm reaching back to write this all the way from September (a busy late summer put me a bit behind) but this is still the best "movie" AND the best film i've seen in 2008.

martin scorsese's GOODFELLAS (1990)

alfred hitchcock's VERTIGO (1958)

the Tennessee Theatre's "Summer Movie Magic" series is once again in full swing, populating our local treasure's silver screen with everything from perennial snoozers (Gone With The Wind) to more adventurous selections (Thunder Road's fiftieth anniversary) and underseen classics (It Happened One Night), and this weekend in particular brings perhaps the most exciting, must-see entry in this year's varied lineup: Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece-among-masterpieces, Vertigo.

the story of an acrophobic former detective (Jimmy Stewart) tasked with tailing an associate's mysteriously afflicted wife (Kim Novak), Vertigo met a lukewarm reception upon release in 1958, and in a way it's not hard to see why; Hitch's genteel psychosexual melodrama contrasts rather drastically with the crowd-pleasing potboilers he'd been putting out for more than twenty years at that point, and the film is indeed so introverted that it hands out the solution to the central mystery well before it needs to simply because it serves the psychology.

this is not to suggest that Hitchcock sets aside his Master Of Suspense mantle for a single moment; Vertigo still exudes pure mystery (it was, in fact, recently named the genre's greatest film by the AFI) and beguiles with every twist and turn. the difference, though, is that Hitchcock (with screenwriter Samuel A. Taylor, adapting a French novel allegedly written specifically for Hitchcock) here narrows his focus to the mind -- Stewart's darkening obsession, Novak's fractured identity -- and emerges with a more profound mysteriousness than exists elsewhere in his storied body of work.

what may be the key to Vertigo's ever-expanding reputation, though, is that such internalized intrigue leaves Hitchcock free to dabble carefully with the look and feel of the film, and the result is quite simply perfection. Stewart, composer Bernard Hermann and cinematographer Robert Burks all collaborated fruitfully with Hitchcock throughout their careers, but Vertigo remains the deepest, most challenging work any of the four men ever produced. If North By Northwest is Alfred Hitchcock's gift to the audience, and Psycho his gift to the cinema, then Vertigo is nothing less than his gift to art at large, and the opportunity to see it on the big screen should not be passed up.

(from the KNOXVILLE VOICE)

terrence malick's BADLANDS (1973)

this is another one i'm hard-pressed to put my finger on, but during this viewing i did my damnedest to let Malick instruct me. his visuals aren't quite as far removed from the norm here as in the pure naturalism of his later films, but the writing ("what if i shot you? how'd that be?"), and Spacek's narration in particular, are every bit as focused on where he wanted to be; if you're wanting to make a filmic poem, i suppose, it's a good idea to fill it with such heart-rending poetry.

sergio leone's ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1968)

Leone is one of the embarrassing gaps in my film knowledge, but i've seen the light that is Once Upon The Time In The West, and i'm ready to devour the rest. i don't know if i'm unequal to the task of writing on it or just too lazy to embark on what would take pages to describe, but the short version is that West is grand and brilliant in a way that few films are, and lacks not one bit of the confidence inherent in those qualities. it's been a long time since a film shoehorned itself into a shortlist of my all-time favorites, but Once Upon A Time In The West just strolled in like it owned the place.