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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
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/
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
9. The New World (2005)The scenario of Children Of Mena near-future in which humanity has lost its ability to bear childrenis extreme. The details, however, are not. Alfonso Cuarons adaptation of a P.D. James novel takes the turn of the millenniums 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. Its a desperate, dying place, but the appearance of a thin sliver of hope drives the films actions, and brings out the best and worst of everyone along the way. Cuarons gift for bravura filmmaking leads to some justly hailed setpieces, but its the unsettling plausibility of his world that makes the film work, as well as its insistencesometimes hard to pick up under all the bullets and bloodshedthat the worst of times dont have to bring out the worst of people. And that if were going to last as a species, they simply cant.
8. Capturing The Friedmans (2003)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 filmmakers thesis statement. Here, Malick offers a deep submersion into the unspoiled America, set at a time when the settlers of Jamestown and the lands 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?
7. Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003)Moviefone co-founder Andrew Jarecki set out to make a documentary about popular New York childrens 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. Friedmans 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 Jesses 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.
6. Spirited Away (2001)Detractors have long accused Quentin Tarantino of being all style, no substance, a master craftsman with a pop-culture encyclopedia instead of a soul. 2003s Kill Bill Vol. 1,Tarantinos first film since 1997s 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. Tarantinos 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. Tarantinos 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.
5. Memento (2000)All of Hayao Miyazakis 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 arent really villains when seen up close. But even for a Miyazaki film, its uncommonly beautiful, and uncommonly moving. Its the rarest of things: an animated movie safe for kids but equally suitable for adults, with no pandering to either group.
4. No Country For Old Men (2007)Heres 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 judgmentand 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, Im chasing this guy? [One gunshot later ] No, hes chasing me.
3. There Will Be Blood (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 McCarthys 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.
2. 25th Hour (2002)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, Andersons bruisingly intense 2007 Upton Sinclair adaptation There Will Be Blood looks and feels nothing like any of his previous films. Its 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, Andersons gut-punch of a film will retain extraordinary contemporary resonance.
1. Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (2004)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 everyones lives in that specific time and place and should not be papered over. That sense of profound loss dovetails beautifully with David Benioffs 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 hes ledcompounded by the realization that the world will keep turning without himwith the vibrancy and resilience of the wounded city he at one point professes to hate, but loves with bone-deep transparency.
Some very interesting choices. I can't agree with them all. So, what do you guys think?A film is many things, among them a defiance of mortality and a hedge against the fading of memory. All filmsfrom the best to the worstsay something about the way we thought and acted and felt at a particular time and in a particular place. But theyre 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, theyre 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 cant remake the past, but we constantly try to make it a place in which were 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. Its 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 Gondrys direction. Portraying the fading and flaring of love in gargantuan bookstores and on railway lines, Gondry captures a moment thats 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 Sunshines lovers, whose circular path brings them back together for an ending thats 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. Its the rare film that shows us who we are now and who were likely, for better or worse, forever to be.
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/
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! iTunes only has it available to buy, not to rent.
