A Work in Progress: Top 20 Films, 2000-2009, Part I

I was at the bar around 1:15am Friday morning, after the conclusion of the second heat of the Band Experiments, when I struck up a conversation with a complete stranger about the best films of the decade.  As the first ten years of the 21st century draw to a close it is time to begin preliminary discussions about such vital and important matters.

Any talk at this stage must remain preliminary and the conclusions reached tentative at best.  It will not be until around this time next year that most of good films of 2009 will have had any distribution in this country.

My work-in-progress effort to select and order the decade’s finest movies involves a short list of 20.  These in turn draw on a series of ‘Top 10′ lists for each year of the new century which can be accessed at the Auteur House blog-site:

http://auteurhouse.com/blog/2007/11/09/2000-2005/

This week I’ll kick the discussion off with the bottom 10 selections, listed in reverse order of merit, from 20 through 11.  The final column of the year will complete the task with numbers 10 through 1.

20. “The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring”
     (Dr: Peter Jackson, USA, 2001)

    The opening instalment in our boy Pete’s crack at Tolkien instantly reset the bar for fantasy filmmaking.

19. “Requiem for a Dream” (Dr: Darren Aronofsky, USA, 2000)

    A bleak, intense but at times blackly humorous take on drug addiction, both prescription medication and heroin. Aronofsky turns the refrigerator into an instrument of horror and has dear Jennifer Connelly do unmentionable things with her lovely bottom.

18. “Dancer in the Dark (Dr: Lars Von Trier, Denmark, 2000)

   Von Trier’s one of a kind melodrama combines the tone of a silent weepy, the structure of a classical musical and the aesthetics of MTV.  Bjork is heart breaking as the mother with failing eye sight who sacrifices all for her child.

17. “The New World” (Dr: Terence Malick, USA, 2005)

   Perhaps the most underrated film on this list.  Malick’s usual lyrical treatment of the Pocahontas and Captain Smith story has haunting visuals and restrained performances (from Colin Farrell, no less!). The kind of intelligent, humanistic take on history that’s seldom seen in epics.

16. “The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (Dr: Michel Gondry, USA, 2004)

   The combination of Charlie Kaufman’s brilliant script and Gondry’s imaginative, low-tech direction gives this fantasy about the pain of relationship break-ups a solid, emotional core.  Jim Carrey has never been better.

15. “Capturing the Friedmans” (Dr: Andrew Jarecki, USA, 2003)

   A documentary about a middle class Jewish family ripped asunder when their patriarch, a respected school teacher, is accused of sexually abusing his after-hours students.  Part mystery, part character study, its main strength comes from home movies in which the Friedmans themselves catalogue their own disintegration.  The antithesis of “reality television”.

14. “The Aviator” (Dr: Martin Scorsese, USA, 2004)

  It is ironic that Scorsese’s best work in the 2000s was a project in which he had least personal interest.  Regardless, this powerful biopic of Howard Hughes draws on the great auteur’s textbook knowledge of golden age Hollywood, particularly when it comes to the touching romance between its mad subject and Katharine Hepburn.

13. “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” (Dr: Ang Lee, Hong Kong/Taiwan, 2000)

The first and best of the decade’s ‘thinking person’s martial arts movies’. Lee brings all his dramaturgical skill to a genre that too often settles for spectacle for spectacle’s sake, drawing resonant performances from Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh and launching the career of young beauty Zhang Ziyi.

12. “Talk to Her” (Dr: Pedro Almodovar, Spain, 2002) 

As with all of Almodovar’s mature work “Talk to Her” is grounded in an impeccably detailed and structured screenplay.  A tale of lost love, it makes bull fighting as sexy as ballet and is highlighted by a faux silent film within the film in which a tiny man ends his life as Prince Charles once wished he could with Camilla: by walking into his lover’s vagina.

11. “The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King”
   (Dr: Peter Jackson, USA, 2003)

The concluding episode in the trilogy attracted criticism on first release for its extreme length and series of false endings but you cannot really get too much of a good thing, can you?  Equally successful as spectacular fantasy, involving drama and environmental allegory.