The Onion A.V. Club picks its top 50 films of the decade

[Watson]

http://www.avclub.com/articles/the-best-films-of-the-00s,35931/

AV club goes a little off the beaten path when it comes to film choices. Some of these I like, some of them I can't believe are on the list. Moulin Rouge? Really?

The top 10

10. Children of Men

The scenario of Children Of Men—a near-future in which humanity has lost its ability to bear children—is extreme. The details, however, are not. Alfonso Cuaron’s adaptation of a P.D. James novel takes the turn of the millennium’s most alarming political and social trends and follows them along a downward arc. Religious radicals battle fascists as the opposition either retreats to marijuana-filled isolation, or echoes the extremism of their opposition. It’s a desperate, dying place, but the appearance of a thin sliver of hope drives the film’s actions, and brings out the best and worst of everyone along the way. Cuaron’s gift for bravura filmmaking leads to some justly hailed setpieces, but it’s the unsettling plausibility of his world that makes the film work, as well as its insistence—sometimes hard to pick up under all the bullets and bloodshed—that the worst of times don’t have to bring out the worst of people. And that if we’re going to last as a species, they simply can’t.

9. The New World (2005)

Terrence Malick has long been captivated by how man strives to tame, shape, and live in the natural world, which makes The New World practically the filmmaker’s thesis statement. Here, Malick offers a deep submersion into “the unspoiled America,” set at a time when the settlers of Jamestown and the land’s native inhabitants advanced incompatible conceptions of civilization. The New World moves through three distinct phases, beginning with John Smith's infatuation with the lifestyle of the Powhatan Confederacy, then moving to the colonists' growing conflict with the natives, and ending with Pocahontas marrying John Rolfe and sailing to the ordered gardens of England. Throughout, Malick treats the humans and their environment with equal interest, showing them all as part of an unstable order. And throughout, Malick integrates every visual and audio element of the film into a meditation on one difficult question: “Shall we not take what we are given?”

8. Capturing The Friedmans (2003)

Moviefone co-founder Andrew Jarecki set out to make a documentary about popular New York children’s party entertainers like sought-after clown David Friedman, but he stumbled upon a bigger, darker, and richer story that formed the basis of his mesmerizing 2003 documentary Capturing The Friedmans. Friedman’s brother Jesse and father Arnold had both been convicted of child molestation. But is Jesse guilty, or merely a victim of the hysteria over child-molestation rings that swept the country in the ’80s and filled anxious parents’ heads with gothic images of Satanic sex cults and trenchcoat-wearing predators lurking around every corner? Though he creates a sympathetic portrait of an upper-middle-class Jewish family in a state of crisis, and the collateral damage that invariably accompanies child-molestation accusations, Jarecki leaves the question of Jesse’s guilt or innocence tantalizingly open. The use of home movies shot by the Friedmans as Arnold and then Jess awaited trial gives the film an almost unbearable intimacy. What began as a film about an unusually successful professional jester morphs into an American tragedy.

7. Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003)

Detractors have long accused Quentin Tarantino of being all style, no substance, a master craftsman with a pop-culture encyclopedia instead of a soul. 2003’s Kill Bill Vol. 1,Tarantino’s first film since 1997’s refreshingly mature Jackie Brown,would seem to validate that conception, but when you have style this audacious, inventive, and just plain fun, substance seems downright irrelevant. Tarantino’s giddy, overstuffed tribute to the movies that rattled his soul as a kid casts Uma Thurman as a professional assassin who goes bucking for revenge after her creepily paternal boss has her shot and left for dead on her wedding day. Much badass mother****ery ensues as Thurman goes after her former partners in crime, leaving a trail of destruction in her wake. Tarantino’s kung-fu adventuresoars as pure cinema, a sustained adrenaline rush that skips giddily from one unforgettable setpiece to another while quietly laying the groundwork for its quieter, more substantive, and dialogue-heavy second volume.

6. Spirited Away (2001)

All of Hayao Miyazaki’s animated films are finely crafted artifacts, steeped in old-school craft and a sense of joyous wonder. But Spirited Away may well be his magnum opus, first among comparable masterpieces. The fable of a lost, fearful little girl finding her courage after she and her parents are trapped in the spirit world, it has the usual Miyazaki hallmarks, including a fascination with flight, a deep respect for people of sincere good heart, and scary villains who aren’t really villains when seen up close. But even for a Miyazaki film, it’s uncommonly beautiful, and uncommonly moving. It’s the rarest of things: an animated movie safe for kids but equally suitable for adults, with no pandering to either group.

5. Memento (2000)

Here’s how to tell that a movie is innovative and watertight: Seen nearly a decade after release, Memento still feels experimental and daring, and it still holds up as a viewing experience. Director Christopher Nolan, working from a story by his brother Jonathan (later to be his writing partner on The Prestige and The Dark Knight), tells the story backward, starting with a killing that makes no sense out of context, then moving back through time to establish why that initial/final murder happened, and what it means in a tragic larger context. Along the way, he reveals a lot about protagonist Guy Pearce, a man with a baffling memory condition that opens him up to monstrous errors in judgment—and yet the exposition is so deftly handled that it never feels forced, in the usual Hollywood “people telling each other what they already know” way. In spite of its audacious structure, Memento manages to reveal its backstory more organically and smoothly than most linear films do. On top of that, the small cast is fantastic, the mystery is genuinely compelling, and Memento gave us one of the most outrageously funniest film moments of the decade, summed up with the lines “Okay, so what am I doing? Oh, I’m chasing this guy? [One gunshot later…] No, he’s chasing me.”

4. No Country For Old Men (2007)

When Joel and Ethan Coen accepted the Best Director Oscar for No Country For Old Men, Joel thanked “all of you out there for letting us continue to play in our corner of the sandbox,” which was an apt way to describe a career that can progress from the goofy Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers to an award-winning Cormac McCarthy adaptation. With No Country, the ever-inscrutable Coens reached beyond themselves and connected with a wider audience, turning McCarthy’s sparse, allegorical thriller into a finely tuned anxiety-delivery device. They were ably aided by Javier Bardem, playing a grinning jack-in-the-box who springs out every time the Coens turn the crank just enough, and by Josh Brolin, playing a muttering hunter who seems to be having a running conversation in his head. While those two chase each other (and a suitcase full of money) across the southwest, lawman Tommy Lee Jones stands off to the side, as the old man this newer, scarier country has left behind. Rarely do the Coens seem overly interested in any reality but their own, but with No Country For Old Men, they tapped into the waking nightmare of our age of terror, and did so in a way that made impending doom feel viscerally exciting.

3. There Will Be Blood (2007)

For a filmmaker with such a bold, unmistakable vision, P.T. Anderson has written and directed a remarkably eclectic array of films, covering everything from the hard-boiled world of professional gamblers (Hard Eight) to the porn industry of the ‘70s and early ‘80s (Boogie Nights) to the interconnectedness of humanity and the universality of suffering (Magnolia) to the romantic angst of a tortured man-child (Punch-Drunk Love). True to form, Anderson’s bruisingly intense 2007 Upton Sinclair adaptation There Will Be Blood looks and feels nothing like any of his previous films. It’s a brawling, two-fisted indictment of conscienceless capitalism built around Daniel Day-Lewis’ volcanic performance as a ruthless oilman who gains the world and loses what little is left of his soul. Anderson has made a film at once epic and intimate, a character study of a man whose lust for money and power knows no bounds. As long as we remain addicted to oil, Anderson’s gut-punch of a film will retain extraordinary contemporary resonance.

2. 25th Hour (2002)

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, filmmakers were rushing to digitally blot out any evidence that the Twin Towers ever existed on the New York skyline. Not Spike Lee. New York is his town, and he alone was committed to documenting it truthfully and poignantly, as an event that touched everyone’s lives in that specific time and place and should not be papered over. That sense of profound loss dovetails beautifully with David Benioff’s story of a convicted New York drug dealer (Edward Norton) spending his final day of freedom before serving a seven-year sentence. Lee connects his regret over the life he’s led—compounded by the realization that the world will keep turning without him—with the vibrancy and resilience of the wounded city he at one point professes to hate, but loves with bone-deep transparency.

1. Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (2004)

A film is many things, among them a defiance of mortality and a hedge against the fading of memory. All films—from the best to the worst—say something about the way we thought and acted and felt at a particular time and in a particular place. But they’re also artful lies, constructed realities that bend the world into a shape guided by the obsessions of those who make them. (Or the commercial interests of the marketplace, or a momentary whim.) In this, they’re much like memories, which act more subjectively and self-servingly than any film. Painful rejections get blurred. Estranged friends fall victim to careless erasures. We can’t remake the past, but we constantly try to make it a place in which we’re more comfortable living.
The Michel Gondry-directed, Charlie Kaufman-scripted (from a story by Kaufman, Gondry, and Pierre Bismuth) Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind takes this process to an absurd, moving extreme by positing a world in which technology facilitates our ability to smooth out our past, eliding over the events that hurt us, and removing the people who did the hurting. It’s a freedom that comes, as the leads played by Kate Winslet and a never-better Jim Carrey discover, at a considerable cost.
Though Kaufman is hardly a purely cerebral writer, his philosophical inquiries find an added emotional weight under Gondry’s direction. Portraying the fading and flaring of love in gargantuan bookstores and on railway lines, Gondry captures a moment that’s quintessentially of the 21st century, and yet timeless. In 2000, the calendar rolled over to a new millennium. With it came a symbolic break with the past, but our old passions and conflicts reasserted themselves seemingly at the stroke of midnight. So it is with Eternal Sunshine’s lovers, whose circular path brings them back together for an ending that’s ambiguous but guardedly hopeful about the possibility of a future not necessarily doomed to reprise the hurt of the past, though it also may well revisit the same mistakes. It’s the rare film that shows us who we are now and who we’re likely, for better or worse, forever to be.

Some very interesting choices. I can't agree with them all. So, what do you guys think?

Oh and if you're interested...

Almost the best films of 00s http://www.avclub.com/articles/almost-the-best-films-of-the-00s-orphans-and-perso,35939/

The best bad movies of 00s http://www.avclub.com/articles/the-best-bad-movies-of-the-00s,35881/

Favourite film scenes http://www.avclub.com/articles/our-favorite-film-scenes-of-the-00s,35888/

Favourite film performances http://www.avclub.com/articles/the-best-film-performances-of-the-00s,35851/

 

[Jordacar]

I've seen half of the top 50, 7 of the top ten and 4 of the top 5.

 

[Watson]

I've seen 7 out of the top 10. I need to see Memento so badly. I hadn't heard of Capturing the Freidman's prior to this, though it is intriguing. I'm kind of "meh" on 25th hour. Anyone else seen it? Thoughts?

 

[Aesop Rocks]

HA! The JOKER isn't on the top 20 film performances but the Cowboy from Brokeback is.

Take THAT TDK fanboys.

 

[Watson]

I agree with that, even as a massive TDK fan. Ledger just got to let loose when he played the Joker, which isn't necessarily as hard as the quiet understated performance he gave in Brokeback. He should have won the Oscar that year.

 

[Aesop Rocks]

TDK Fanboys think Heath Ledgers Joker should win any award winnable.

Best Steering in an SUV? The Joker.
Highest Rated Safety Preformance in a Truck? The Joker
Most Likely to Become President? The Joker.
Class Clown? The Joker.
Employee of The Month? The Joker.

 

[danoyse]

I've seen 7 out of the top 10. I need to see Memento so badly. I hadn't heard of Capturing the Freidman's prior to this, though it is intriguing. I'm kind of "meh" on 25th hour. Anyone else seen it? Thoughts?

I saw part of it on HBO once - it's pretty disturbing. Surprised to see it in the top 10. Memento is excellent.

Glad to see The Prestige get some recognition. Seriously, that has to be one of the most underrated movies of the decade.

 

[Watson]

Gah, I still haven't seen it ! iTunes only has it available to buy, not to rent.

 

[Solidus]

TDK Fanboys think Heath Ledgers Joker should win any award winnable.

Best Steering in an SUV? The Joker.
Highest Rated Safety Preformance in a Truck? The Joker
Most Likely to Become President? The Joker.
Class Clown? The Joker.
Employee of The Month? The Joker.

Though what is pathetic as that, is the haters that just don't want to give credit where many saw credit was due. Not saying you can't not like it but I don't think it makes people less of a film lover, and admirer to actually really really really admire that role. To me it was the best this decade, but is there anything wrong with me thinking that?

I think Ledger did have one of the greatest roles as the Joker. And I think its not wrong that many people thought so.

 

[Dark Victory]

TDK Fanboys think Heath Ledgers Joker should win any award winnable.

Best Steering in an SUV? The Joker.
Highest Rated Safety Preformance in a Truck? The Joker
Most Likely to Become President? The Joker.
Class Clown? The Joker.
Employee of The Month? The Joker.

As much as I love Ledger's performance, this made me laugh my ass off.

 

[SuperFerret]

TDK Fanboys think Heath Ledgers Joker should win any award winnable.

Best Steering in an SUV? The Joker.
Highest Rated Safety Preformance in a Truck? The Joker
Most Likely to Become President? The Joker.
Class Clown? The Joker.
Employee of The Month? The Joker.

This one is true. That truck was doing just fine until Batman came along a flipped it.

 

[Carmine Falcone]

25th Hour is truly one of the very best films of this decade, and many times overlooked. It's nice to see they remembered it and placed it so highly. The acting in that movie is amazing.

 

[Dark Victory]

25th Hour is truly one of the very best films of this decade, and many times overlooked. It's nice to see they remembered it and placed it so highly. The acting in that movie is amazing.

I second this. The stock office/cubicle scene with Barry Pepper is fantastic. You feel just as on the edge as every other broker in the room. And I don't have the mention the bathroom scene. In my opinion and off the top of my head, I'd have to say it's Spike Lee's best.

 

[Doctor Jones]

I would probably put Children of Men in my top 10 of the decade. I just can't see anything wrong with the film at all.

 

[Max J Power]

A few assorted thoughts:

-I'm surprised The Departed wasn't in the top 50 or on any of the "almost" lists. It would be in my top 10 (but these things can always change--I haven't seen every movie on the list).

-I'm glad Kill Bill got that much love, but it's a disservice to the movie to say it lacked substance. I'd say it has a different kind of substance than most movies.

-I wouldn't have put The Man Who Wasn't There that high, but it's an interesting choice.

-Also interesting that Two Towers was their LOTR pick, since it's always Return of the King.

 

[I SEE SPIDEY]

The Two Towers was my favorite LOTR's flick so I agree with them on that one. Can't go wrong with Children of Men either.

 

[Doctor Jones]

I still can't decide which LOTR is my favorite. It always goes back and forth. For a long time it was ROTK. Then I think of the awesomness that is TTT and then go back to TFOTR because that's what started it all for me.

And Ledger's Ennis Del Mar in Brokeback is just as good as his Joker. He's just perfect in it. It's like he knows how the character breathes. As much as I rooted for Hoffman (A Rochester native) I'm starting to think Ledger should of won.

 

[Octoberist]

I think Two Towers was more emotional than Return of the King. That final battle scene in 'Towers' surpasses the last battle in 'King' by far. It was involving I thought.

 

[Octoberist]

I'll put up my top ten very soon (in a different thread of course).

But it's always changing because I'm still catching up on certain movies. it's tough.

 

[Doctor Jones]

I do agree I was more affected by the end battle in TTT. I mean from the moment Aragorn looks out the window and sees the light shining in with Gandalf's "Look to my coming..." line until the very end is what makes me love movies. If you were to ask me, that would be it. To me, it's something like that that have made films last this long.

But the very end of ROTK made me cry.

 

[Laderlappen]

Ledger's performance in Brokeback is his best. Actually I have the exact same top 2 as that list.

 

[Watson]

Personally I thought Fellowship was the best. I enjoyed it more with them all together.

I would have added to this list

-In Bruges
-Downfall
-Amelie
-Shaun of the Dead

Definitely would have lost Moulin Rouge. I'm so glad Spirited Away is on there and so high. That film is a piece of art.

 

[Octoberist]

I just thought that the battle in Return of the King lacked the power and hopelessness of the battle in 'Towers'. You're right, when you see Gandalf's light, it was awesome. It was movie magic.

I also thought that many of the effects in 'Return' looked unfinished. (Like the giant elephants, etc)

 

[Octoberist]

Personally I thought Fellowship was the best. I enjoyed it more with them all together.

I would have added to this list

-In Bruges
-Downfall
-Amelie
-Shaun of the Dead

Definitely would have lost Moulin Rouge. I'm so glad Spirited Away is on there and so high. That film is a piece of art.

Here's mine. It might change soon though...

1 There Will Be Blood
2 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
3 The Dark Knight
4. City of God
5 The Squid and the Whale
6 Y Tu Mama Tabien
7 Almost Famous
8 All the Real Girls
9 Forgetting Sarah Marshall
10 The Royal Tenebaums

and the rest of the 20.

11. 25th Hour
12. Children of Men
13. Tokyo Godfathers
14. Casino Royale
15. Eastern Promises
16. Persepolis
17. Little Children
18. Lost in Translation
19. Memento
20. Hot Fuzz

 

[Doctor Jones]

As much as I loved the Minas Tirith battle you are correct. To me, it's still great but the idea of 500 men and elves against 10,000 Uruk Hai and overcomin it is powerful. That whole sequence I mentioned just brings tears to my eyes. Words can't describe it.

In some shots yes. But for the most part the special effects are amazing. But that won't matter in years to come anyway. What will make these films last is how well made they were.