There were many great films in the last 10 years (2000-2009), and so I will take a final look back.
My list is unapologetically subjective. Some of the choices are obvious; others are perhaps entirely questionable. But they are all films that I am passionate about, and wish to celebrate on the blog.
The list is flexible and of course comes with caveats, beyond just the whims of my own personal tastes. The list is biased towards the first half of the decade--I suspect because I seemed to have had more time on my hands to see films. I used to see more films back then than I do now (and, yes, this is also an admission that I do not claim to have seen every possible eligible film in that time).
As I get older, as I spend more time as an academic, writing about films, the theatre-going side of my cinephilia has waned (that, plus the secret confession--in the last three years, I've been more captivated by new TV shows than by new movies).
The list invariably reflects my writing and scholarly interests, and vice versa. My cinephilia dictates that I write about the films I love, and that I love the films which compel me to write.
Okay, so here's my top 12 American films for the present decade (2000-2009), with a brief rationale:
1. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 2004: a blissfully perfect match of form and content, of narrative and disruption; a love story that moves at once in opposite directions, on several levels.
2. Punch-Drunk Love, 2002: Pure cinematic affect; a cinephiliac blend of sounds, colors, frames, movement . . . and, oh yes, one of the decade's most interesting characters, bolstered by one of the decade's finest performances--Sandler's persona achieves its perfection by nothing more than being itself.
3. Mulholland Drive, 2001: a film so good that, nine years later, I still cannot put it into words. Reducing its wonders to psychoanalysis only begins to scratch the surface.
4. American Splendor, 2003: the best narrative autobiography of the decade, and the last great, old-fashioned postmodern film where the simulacrum still meant something.
5. Ghost World, 2001: a magical little film about how commodity, racial transgressions, and history weigh on America's (literal and metaphorical) youth.
6. Lost in Translation, 2003: I see its condescension more clearly five years later, but its story and its atmosphere remain heart-breakingly simple and effective.
7. Casino Royale, 2006: Yes, regular readers should have seen this one coming, but it is my personal favorite film of the last five years. Besides, there should be at least one franchise film on the list. It would be intellectually dishonest, not to mention how terribly un-cinephiliac of me, to overlook the film just because its "only" a Bond film.
8. No Country for Old Men, 2007: The one Best Picture this decade that the Academy got right (though they didn't do too badly with The Departed a year earlier). A true genre thriller in the best sense of the word, in an age when that genre seems over-exploited and dead, and yet such a label also misses the many layers and narrative contradictions of the film.
9. The Royal Tennenbaums, 2001: a purely sentimental favorite; a moving story, seamlessly blending tragedy and comedy, and featuring career performances.
10. Memento, 2000: I suspect the novelty of Nolan's groundbreaking noir might not hold up well over the years--I haven't re-watched it since 2003--but it remains a substantial technical and narratological achievement.
11. Be Kind Rewind, 2008: yes, Be Kind Rewind. It may seem surprising, but there was no other film this year I saw that was so intriguing, provocative, and moving that I had to write about it--I can offer a film no greater compliment than that. If you think this film is a "comedy," you completely missed what does. One day (soon), I will develop more thoroughly my ideas on the film's relationship with issues of ritual/affect, urban studies, whiteness, and of course cinephilia in the age of digital reproduction.
12. There Will Be Blood, 2007: Like 2007's other masterpiece, No Country for Old Men, this film is deceptively simple. And, more so that 2006's The Departed, its a rhetorical sucker-punch that proves more rewarding on repeated viewings--the logical end of its stark thematic development.
Here are eight more, in no particular order, to round off my top 20 list (I will have undoubtedly forgotten one or two, but I've spent the last week formulating my list, so it should be pretty representative): Inglorious Basterds (2009), Adaptation (2002); History of Violence (2005); Brokeback Mountain (2005); The Man Who Wasn't There (2001); Munich (2005); Sideways (2004); Capote (2005).
0 comments:
Post a Comment