The (12) Best American Films of the Decade

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).

Bond All-Time Box Office

So, this is what happens on a lazy Sunday. Throughout the Bond blogathon, I was also thinking in the back of my mind about how the Bond films stacked up against each other box office-wise (in US box office, that is), once inflation was taken into account (and yes, my reservations about counting inflation remain--its a much more complicated matter than just comparing tix prices--but its still a useful and harmless academic exercise). It continues my recent fascination with how the dynamics of brand media texts fluctuate over time.

Once I typed in the information from Box Office Mojo into an excel sheet, and figured out the same basic formula using changing tix prices since 1962, it didn't take too long to get the results.



Initial Thoughts?

#1? Thunderball, not Goldfinger--though the latter's huge success probably laid the conditions for the former's even more phenonomenal performance (440 Million!--both Thunderball and Goldfinger each made more than Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace combined, and Craig's box office has been stellar).

Quantum of Solace will probably gain another ten million or so before it leaves theatres, but that would only move it up a slot or two at best, and not into the top ten.

I was not surprised to see that Craig's two recent films really didn't stand out relative to others, even though technically they are, as of this weekend, the two highest-grossing Bond films when looking at the raw data. Technically, Casino Royale has made more money than any others, but counting inflation, it barely cracks the top ten.

I was surprised to see that Brosnan's films ended up ranking so high. I had no idea just how much the tix prices had jumped in just ten years.

I knew Connery's films were far and away the standard-bearers, but never had the data to back it up. However, I was surprised to see that Dr. No didn't make more than it did (yes, it was first, but it also benefited from several re-releases in the 1960s). And I was also surprised to see that Moonraker nearly held its own against those films (along with Die Another Day).

If there's any doubt why Bond filmmakers keep occasionally making really stupid films, one needn't look any further than the fact that Moonraker, Die Another Day and You Only Live Twice represent half of the highest six grossers ever (and I'm tempted to throw Thunderball in that category as well).

I was surprised to see how poorly Moore's Bond films in the beginning (namely, Man with a Golden Gun). Moore's box-office performance actually seemed to gain steam over time, even if (in my opinion) the quality of his films steadily dwindled.

The performance of Bond films in the late 1960s and earlier 1970s was nearly as bad as in the late 1980s, and I am surprised that the franchise didn't fold. I never realized before how The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker (where I felt the franchise started to get a little overblown, silly and lame) actually helped save the franchise. Then again, all the numbers were strong relative to other non-Bond films then, just not other Bond films.

Finally, I was surprised to see Living Daylights so low. I had heard several times that Dalton's first performance was a strong hit, but relatively speaking, it really wasn't.

Only three of the top 10 Bond films (Goldfinger, From Russia with Love, Casino Royale) would be on my list of the Top 10. Meanwhile, four of my personal favorites fill the bottom five (all but A View to a Kill). How did I end up being such a Bond fan with those contradictory tastes?

A Christmas Story of Ritual and Repetition (Ideology?)

How does ideology work in media? The single tightest high-wire act I walk when I teach media is to negotiate the distinction between the fact that films, television shows, etc., are deeply ideological, and the seemingly opposed beliefs that these ideologies often work in contradictory ways and that such ideologies aren't really "transmitted" anyway.

At the risk of contradicting my other work on cinephilia, so little actually happens ideologically at the "inception" of a media text--when it is first made, when it is first experienced. At best, what happens is that the conditions for ideology may begin to shift, the potential that later on new ideological possibilities will begin to develop as much around a text as within the text itself (even while a text's contradictions feed and perpetuate those possibilities).

An unthinking (not mindless, just unthinking) repetition seems to be the key.

Bob Clark's A Christmas Story was a financial disappointment when it was first released to theatres 25 years ago. I know I didn't see it in theatres. It opened prior to Thanksgiving, and had largely passed by the time, ironically, Christmas came a month later in winter 1983.

But that wasn't the end of the Story. The eventual success of A Christmas Story isn't the tale of a film's theatrical life. Its a thoroughly televisual journey. My earliest memories of the film were of an obscure family film that I watched on cable as a child, probably only a couple years after it first appeared in theatres. I enjoyed it, because I got (some of) its humor, and I could empathize with the need for the one special toy.

But I also watched it over and over because it was always on. Then I watched again the following year, and then the next. Then after a few years, I was watching it several times during the same holiday season because it was broadcast several times during the season. The repetition culminated to the point of its greatest intensity--24 hour marathons on TBS.

For a while I had no interest in owning it, because I was only interested in watching it during the holidays, and I knew it would always be on TV anyway--that's when I would see it. The ritual of watching it was completely inseparable for me from the holiday itself, and vice versa.A Christmas Story became a classic not because it is a very good film--the content, the initial experience, is not irrelevant, but secondary. It became a classic because it became a part of a ritual larger than itself.

My own experience was hardly the exception to those among its emergent fandom. I watched it probably a dozen times over the span of 7-8 years before anyone came along and called it a "classic." By then, I accepted the statement as is--"of course, its a classic." Not because I had ever thought about its status before, not because it was socially-agreed upon, but because it had always been there on my television.

There is a certain kind of socially-constructed aura around the film now. Its a holiday classic now, because its always been. Its on TV not because its the holidays, but because its always been on TV. I get excited when I hear it will be on again less because its my favorite holiday movie and more because I always do get excited.

What is its ideology? What explains its appeal? Well, nostalgia, of course. But what about it? The film itself is a nostalgic look at a (illusory) white, middle class, Midwestern 20th Century life. No doubt that nostalgia (representational nostalgia) appeals to many who imagine having lived that childhood. But its also an insightful deconstruction of that nostalgia--Dad's a pervert, Christmas dinner is ruined, Ralphie's quite the potty-mouth, Santa's a creep, kids suffer through endless embarrassment, bullying, humiliation, etc. The film appeals to contradictory audiences which may embrace, and reject, nostalgia for a period that never existed.

But there is also the nostalgia I personally feel for the past--not for the 1940s as simulacrum, but for the 1980s. My childhood. That co-exists with the film's own critique of nostalgia. I never question that, nor what the film is "about." At some point, ideology begins to "naturalize," no matter how illusory it was to begin with. And when it reappears, we are ready for it. Its past success is its own justification, even if the film was rejected theatrically in the beginning. Now, its self-generating. Now it just is.