Thursday, December 31, 2009

Top Of The Decade To You

Still need to catch up on a few titles before I review the year in film. So now, seeing as it's the end of the aughts, I figured I'd list my top ten for the decade. (Most of these I've seen only once. It's true that some films don't hold up, but nothing can replace the first viewing anyway.)

Drum roll, please...


Bubbling Under The Top Ten

American Splendor
The Barbarian Invasions
Dancer In The Dark
Elephant
Ghost World
In The Loop
Let The Right One In
Little Otik
Man On Wire
The Nines
Shaun Of The Dead
Spellbound 
The Squid And The Whale
Superbad
Trailer Park Boys: The Movie
Wedding Crashers
Y Tu Mama Tambien


Top Ten

About A Boy (2002)

Cidade de Deus (2002)

4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days (2007)

The Incredibles (2004)

Inglourious Basterds (2009)

The King Of Kong: A Fistful Of Quarters (2007)

The Lives Of Others (2006)

Pan's Labyrinth (2006)

Spirited Away (2001)

And the film of the decade

Mulholland Drive (2001)


Bonus section

Director of the decade: A tie--Lars Von Trier and Gus Van Sant

Most promising new director: Jason Reitman

Performance of the decade: Naomi Watts in Mullholland Drive


Extra Bonus

Perhaps my favorite entry from my film years in review:

ALL APOLOGIES: Near the end of The Day After Tomorrow (the day after, I guess), the Vice President, clearly based on Dick Cheney, goes on TV and apologizes for not listening to climatologist Dennis Quaid's warnings. (The well-meaning but stupid President died in a blizzard). Slate Magazine had a contest to write how the real Dick Cheney would have apologized. I didn't enter, but I think the speech would have gone like this:

"In the 1960s, there were many significant spokespeople for the environmental movement who claimed the game was already lost and by the mid-70s, we'd have mass starvation in the United States. After being proved comically mistaken, they kept predicting apocalypse in very short order, and yet, though disproved time after time, never gave up making terrible predictions, and never apologized for being so frighteningly wrong. By 2004, after more than four decades of being absurdly off, and with the average human on earth better fed, clothed and housed than ever before, you can understand my skepticism when a lone expert predicted outrageous scenarios of disaster, one following upon another, in a matter of weeks. I was not willing at the time to jeopardize the world economy to avoid what sounded like the plot of one of those empty, big-budget Hollywood summer movies, full of spectacle at the expense of character. It now turns out after forty years of experts being wrong and not apologizing, one of the experts finally got it right--for not recognizing this, I apologize."

5 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Not enough Oscar winners.

3:02 AM, December 31, 2009  
Blogger QueensGuy said...

Oh, I disagree, anon. There were plenty of Oscar winners this past decade.

LAGuy, you've got a typo in one of your top ten titles.

4:39 AM, December 31, 2009  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

You left out of the Cheney speech "and this was clearly the fault of the Clinto Administration until such time as became the fault of the Obama Adminstration"

6:21 AM, December 31, 2009  
Blogger VermontGuy said...

I haven't compiled a list but if I did, it would certainly include The Dark Knight. Easily the best movie ever made about a comic-book character (faint praise, I know) but also a movie of surprising depth and complexity and one that sticks with you long after the film ends.

I liked Inglorious Basterds but if I were to include a Quentin Tarantino flick it would be Kill Bill Vol. 1. The South Korean horror movie The Host would get a lot of consideration and finally, I would have to include one of - or perhaps a special grouping of all 3 - The Lord of the Rings movies. If I had to pick one, it would be Fellowship. I can still recall seeing it for the first time and being completely blown away by Peter Jackson's vision of Middle-Earth.

6:51 AM, January 01, 2010  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Put it up on the blog, VermontGuy.

11:51 AM, January 01, 2010  

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