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.)
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 mo
vement 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."
posted by LAGuy @ 12:28 AM
5 Comments:
Not enough Oscar winners.
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.
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"
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.
Put it up on the blog, VermontGuy.
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