I think most people write ‘top tens’ as a monument. It feels more like a purge to me. One final moment of reflection before turning toward the future. My 2000s were so peppered with the blossoming of my general film history knowledge that separating out the movies I saw last decade that came out last decade was a challenge in itself. Here goes…
Runners up, in alphabetical order: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Grindhouse, Howl’s Moving Castle, Kill Bill, Ponyo, Ratatouille, Slumdog Millionaire, 24 Hour Party People, Star Trek
10. Hedwig and the Angry Inch
A movie about love, lust, spirituality, betrayal, friendship, art, commerce, life, and the cosmos. It all boils down to a botched sex change and a band. As an actor, John Cameron Mitchell imagines Hedwig as a wonderfully flawed and complicated hero. Hedwig is capable of great cruelty to friends in need if it suits her mood. Yet the character is never alienating. We understand why so many love Hedwig. We love Hedwig. As a director and storyteller, Mitchell weaves a trans-aesthetic into the production itself, never relying on the orientation of the characters to provide the movie’s ‘queerness.’ The music is great, too!
Magic Moment: The “Origin of Love” sequence. A compelling queer theory of the self set to a great tune and beautiful, hypnotic, out-of-narrative animation. The Origin of Love song-story manages to encapsulate the themes and direction of the movie as a whole without being a reduction of the movie. Now that I think of it, in some ways, this sequence reminds me very much of the ballet centerpiece of Powell/Pressburger’s Red Shoes. There are intuitive congruencies between the short piece within the movie and the movie itself, but they inform each other without defining each other.
9. King of Kong
The only documentary on my list, King of Kong tells the story of two men obsessed with becoming the best Donkey Kong arcade game player in the world. These guys are such nerds they make me feel normal. And then suddenly you realize that you have become completely invested in these people and their struggles. You will laugh your ass off. You will cheer out loud. This movie is like the Rocky of arcade games. If you haven’t seen this, please do yourself a favor. If nothing else, call me. I will watch it with you.
Magic Moment: When Steve Weibe shows up at the Funspot Arcade and sits down for his first competition Donkey Kong game in front of the Twin Galaxies crew. This is still relatively early in the movie, but the filmmakers have done such a fantastic job carving out these discrete personalities, that at their first meeting, we have no trouble as viewers juggling at least 7 or 8 specific people in action that takes place simultaneously over two states. And it’s tense as shit.
8. Speed Racer
Some people think that unseen forces of justice and righteousness guide the universe. If this is really the case, then I expect that a decade from now, Speed Racer will be fondly remembered as one of the best movies of the 2000s by movie critics, tastemakers, the Pope, etc. This movie will play to sold-out audiences in revival theaters. An archival print of Speed Racer will be placed in the Library of Congress. The President will announce Speed Racer Day as a national holiday. But I have a sneaking suspicion that the universe is governed by chaos, and therefore I expect that soon enough, Speed Racer will be all but forgotten by everyone but me and the loved ones I force to watch this movie over and over and over and over again. Speed Racer is really something different. The laws of ordinary filmmaking do not apply here. If you can tune yourself to its internal logic, your brain will melt in the most pleasant way imaginable. Q: Is this movie like drugs or candy? A: It is like both.
Magic Moment: Christina Ricci: “Was that a ninja?”
7. Sympathy for Lady Vengeance
How can a movie with this much pain and wickedness turn out to be, of all things, hopeful? This is a movie about evil people and the things that evil people do. Somehow, this is also a movie about bonds that develop around those caught up in the web. Almost in spite of herself, Guem-Ja, the “Lady Vengeance” of the title, finds a family growing around her. After three movies of staring in the abyss, the final statement of Chan-Wook Park’s rightfully famous and infamous Vengeance Trilogy (along with Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Oldboy) is one of hope and healing. This is not false sentimentality. Park holds the mirror up to the worst humanity has to offer, and still has the guts to say that this life is worth living. If it isn’t, goddamn it, we have to make it worth living. This movie shakes me to my core.
Magic Moment: The emotional outburst at the end of the movie, when Guem-Ja smashes her face in the tofu cake. Unfortunately, most people I show this movie to laugh at that moment, and I must admit it’s a bit culturally obscure. However, they establish the metaphorical purpose of the tofu cake very clearly earlier in the movie, so I guess I don’t really get people’s confusion here. This moment is the tension release for the entire trilogy. This is the release that even ultimate vengeance did not afford Guem-Ja. She is literally trying to beat herself into purity. I don’t get what’s so funny about that. This is intense, honest stuff.
6. The Lord of the Rings
This would be higher on this list if it weren’t for an unfortunate side effect of Peter Jackson’s genius. The scope of Jackson’s vision for Lord of the Rings was just too great, and unfortunately moments of the trilogy suffer for it. With so much on his plate, how could Jackson possibly have control of every instant of footage shot? It wasn’t possible. I’ll nitpick for a moment and acknowledge that there are many subpar scenes over the course of this epic. Specifically, most everything involving John Rhys Davies’ Gimli the Dwarf in The Two Towers and Return of the King is pretty embarrassing. I’m sure you can think of more if you’re being honest with yourself.
Okay, now that I have that out of my system, what a fucking movie! This really lives up to the hype. I’ve heard many people discuss this as our generation’s Star Wars. To me it feels much more like our generation’s Wizard of Oz. This is a surprisingly idiosyncratic vision for such a blockbuster, and I hope we acknowledge that as Lord of the Rings ages. These movies and the empire Peter Jackson built will be remembered as a wonder of ensemble casting, cinematography, editing, scoring, practical effects, model design, digital effects, teamwork, coordination, and gumption.
Magic Moment: Ummm…just one? Okay, you twisted my arm. The “oh shit” denouement at the end of The Two Towers. Our heroes have been busting their assess to kill bad guys for three plus hours, and what happens just when they’re starting to win? Gollum decides that he’s going to feed Sam and Frodo to a giant spider, and if that weren’t bad enough, the camera makes one final, impossible pan up to reveal that, oh yeah, nobody has even addressed the real bad guy yet. They’ve been fighting his understudy this whole time. There is no hope. The end. You have to wait a year for the next installment.
Fun fact: I am apparently the only person on the planet who thinks that the theatrical cuts are better than the extended cuts. I think everyone else is smoking crack.
5. City of God
City of God tells the story of an entire population over the course of three decades. It balances dozens of characters, portrayed over time by multiple actors, all of whose performances are great. It adapts a true story into one of the best crime narratives ever, up there with The Godfather and Goodfellas. It brings us front and center into the lives of the people of the ‘City of God’ slum in Rio with gusto, heart, grace, and style. And it makes it look easy. There will never be another movie like City of God.
Magic Moment: The rise and fall of Knock-Out Ned.
4. Finding Nemo
I don’t know quite what I want to say about Finding Nemo. Is this a placeholder spot on the top ten list for all the fabulous Pixar movies that came out this decade, like Monsters, Inc., The Incredibles, Ratatouille, Wall-E, and Up? Yes, of course. Is it also perfect as a stand alone? Yes. Does the fact that Pixar made a great movie staring Albert Brooks and Ellen DeGeneres prove that we live in an alternate, bizarro universe? Yes. Does my heart grow three times too large every time I see the sequence where Marlin and Dory’s adventures are retold from creature to creature until word reaches Nemo himself? Definitely. I think that’s what I want to say about Finding Nemo. Also, this movie says everything there is to say about family.
Magic Moment: This is Thomas Newman’s best score. When pared with material like Shawshank Redemption and American Beauty, Newman’s scores tend to tip the scales toward sap. When pared with talking fish, however, Newman lends just enough gravity to make you subconsciously question whether you’re watching ‘just’ a kid’s movie. And he’s Randy Newman’s cousin. They almost had a Pixar monopoly going there for a while.
3. The Protector
Tony Jaa’s Kham loves his elephant. His elephant is kidnapped, and taken from Thailand to Sydney, Australia. Kham will kick every ass in Sydney to get his elephant back. That is the plot of this movie. To explain how good this movie is, I will defer to my good friend and bandmate Justin Couch, who says that this movie doesn’t end so much as Tony Jaa just runs out of bad guys to fight.
Magic Moment: The one, long, amazing tracking shot at the restaurant, where Tony Jaa fights his way up, up, up, and up a corkscrew ramp. This shot lasts over 5 minutes and must be seen to be believed. Think about the Bride’s assault on The House of the Blue Leaves in Kill Bill 1, then ratchet it up by 20, and you’re starting to get the idea. According to IMDB, this single shot took a month to pull off.
2. The Dark Knight
Great fiction should function simultaneously as allegory and as a stand-alone. In other words, great fiction lends itself to two readings, one as an allegory to the ‘real’ world outside its fictional universe, and the other as a specific thematic entity relative only to itself. Unlike, say, Animal Farm, I don’t feel that allegory and plot should necessarily align perfectly. They should inform each other and create resonances while remaining discrete enough to create tensions, to get your brain working. Some connections between the fictional world and the ‘real’ world should be intuitive. There should never be A (in fiction) = B (in real life). Take, for instance, The Dark Knight. The Joker is…hmm…sort of a terrorist, and the movie is enriched by both the resonance and the tensions this analogy suggests. Batman uses a homeland security-esque device toward the end of the film, and associating Batman with real life crooked dealers like Bush and Cheney makes your relationship toward the ‘hero’ ever so slightly problematic. A long time from now, when attempting to define the zeitgeist of the 2000s though film, I’d bet money this will be the example.
Magic Moment: When the Joker has finally been caught by Batman and gives his eerie speech about his and Batman’s symbiotic relationship, the camera flips 180 degrees, completely upside down, so while Batman is tense and weighted, it appears as if the Joker might just float or swim away. This obtrusive cinematic technique seems to say that even the laws of physics bend in the face of Joker’s anarchy and nihilism.
1. There Will Be Blood
It truly frightens me to call a movie this sinister infinitely rewatchable. P.T. Anderson tapped into some terrible darkness at the core of humanity, of America, of, gulp, myself. The true terror of Daniel Plainview is that as abominable as he is, there is something that strikes a chord, as if he is the fruition of what fate, circumstance, and good luck have kept us from becoming. This is a cautionary tale meant for anyone who has ever had ambition. There Will Be Blood asks the tough questions, and holds the ugly answers in front of our face. The Christian God and Satan do not exist in the universe of “There Will Be Blood”; the guiding hands of humans are much more frightening. I’m drawn to this movie like a moth to a light. I can’t turn away. If all that weren’t enough, Daniel Day Lewis leads one of the most astoundingly great casts ever, the cinematography is perfect, the mes en scene is perfect, Johnny Greenwood’s soundtrack is perfect. This movie is a miracle. An evil, depraved miracle.
Magic Moment: The fire at the oil rig is one of the great sequences of cinema. Acting, effects, practical design, music, editing, writing, directing, choreography, cinematography. All discretely noteworthy and also working in perfect harmony.