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

michel gondry's BE KIND REWIND (2008)

i've been struggling with this one all weekend, being repeatedly asked about it and not quite being able to recommend it. Be Kind Rewind is a thoroughly pleasant movie, and hard not to smile at, but it'd be dishonest to call it good; Eternal Sunshine (and to a lesser extent the affecting but minor Science of Sleep) suggested Gondry as a storyteller talented beyond the confines of his quirk, but Be Kind Rewind determinedly contradicts, clumsily throwing sentimental whimsy at a cute premise and calling it a movie. the "sweded" movies starring Mos Def and Jack Black (a good duo, even if Black's schtick is finally wearing thin) are a lot of fun, and the film would have perhaps been better off accepting itself as a simple frame for their VHS shenanigans, but its gentle, well-intentioned questioning of art's (and history's) relationship to its audience takes over halfway through and bogs down what should have been a light entertainment with ideas, however innoucuous and sweet, beyond its modest capabilities.