Top 50 Films of the Decade: # 1 - 10

10.) Undertow (2004)

Directed by David Gordon Green

It’s no surprise Terrence Malick produced David Gordon Green's mythological road picture, about two brothers on the run from a greed-obsessed uncle (who may be their father, too), Undertow. His influences are just as evident here as the influence of Night of the Hunter, and it’s refreshing to see another filmmaker, who like Malick, doesn’t just film something beautiful for beauty’s sake. There is a purpose to cinematographer Tim Orr’s shots, and even though they are beautifully framed and conceived, they aren’t showy, blow-away shots that exist only to draw attention to how good the filmmakers are. These are shots that are designed to evoke mood – visually-poetic conceits that conjure up the danger and horrors found in the original Brothers Grimm stories – shots that always tell us something about the narrative, and help move the story along. Undertow is a refreshing thriller that embraces the ethereal qualities found in myths or fables, giving the viewer great locations (the opening six minuets of the film, the junkyard where Chris (Jaime Bell) and his brothers seek refuge) that are feasts for the eyes, and scenes of surprising warmth (the scene where Chris finds out that two waifish girls have tried to steal his coins, and instead of lunging at them in anger, he looks upon them with empathy as if to say: “we come from the same place”.) that showcase Green’s narrative skills in addition to his extremely creative and poetic eye. Undertow is David Gordon Green’s masterpiece.

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Top 50 Films of the Decade: # 11 - 20

20.) Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005)

Directed by Miranda July

Miranda July's whimsical fairy tale about fractured romance and oddity being sexy is probably the most memorable Sundance darling to be released this decade.  It's just quirky enough to be interesting without being grating, and it's just dark enough to delve into some humorous situations that are only funny because they're handled without vulgarity.  The film's opening, a father (the great John Hawkes...why doesn't he get more film roles?) trying to get the attention of his kids by lighting his hand on fire as some kind of parlor trick (only he uses gasoline, not alcohol), is one of the weirdest and most jarring openings to any film this past decade.  There's also a great moment when a character played by writer/director July walks down a street with Hawkes.  The two converse and as they continue their walk July pretends that they are married, and that the street is their timeline of events as a married couple.  As they stop to consider this half way through their walk she quips that their life is half over.  It doesn't do any kind of justice to explain the scene, but if you've seen it then you know why it works.  It's moments like that stand out and make this oddball film so memorable. 

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Top 50 Films of the Decade: #21 - 30

30.) Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (2000)

Directed by Jim Jarmusch

As he did with his oddball western Dead Man, Jim Jarmusch mashes up another genre and produces an esoteric look at the gangster film as seen through the eyes of a hitman who lives by the ancient code of the samurai. It's a bizarre film (especially the moments of dialogue between our protagonist and a French ice-cream salesman) that I think is meant to be seen as more a cartoon than something super serious (characters are frequently seen throughout watching cartoons); Jarmusch even has one of the gangsters die in such a cartoonish way that he seems to call a spade a spade and just cop to it as the same thing happens in a cartoon a character is watching prior to the gangster's death.  This is Forrest Whitaker's best performance, and it's one of Jarmusch's masterpieces as he satirizes the gangster genre while simultaneously paying homage to it.  That's what makes Ghost Dog work so well is the serious matter in which Jarmusch treats his main character...this isn't some kind of eccentricity, this is a way of like for our hitman, and Jarmusch never condescends; rather, his film is a contemplative genre picture (again, much like Dead Man) as a lot of the film is sans dialogue as The Rza's fantastic soundtrack guides us through the action.

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Top 50 Films of the Decade: #31 - 40

40.) Eastern Promises (2007)

Directed by David Cronenberg

David Cronenberg re-teams with Viggo Mortensen to create one of the darkest, most bleak, and yes, interesting movies about the criminal underworld (I will refrain from the term organized crime, because these Russian mobsters don't seem all that organized). Family members kill important people without consulting their father (the head of the family) and alliances are made behind peoples back. Booze is not stolen, but purchased cheap, but possibly it could have been purchased even cheaper, and when they get the booze they don't sell it for profit they drink it. These quirks and undercutting of the traditional mobster film make this one of the better films on the subject to come along since Miller's Crossing. The film has the appropriate cold aesthetic to it, and when we become privy to a key plot point that turns the entire film on its ear, we stop to think about what might happen to these characters after the film cuts to black. The film doesn't contain the family oriented scenes of the Corleone family of The Godfather, it doesn't contain the appealing mobsters from a film like Goodfellas; however, the film is spot on in recognizing that for these mobsters – who inhabit a world extremely different than the Italian mobsters we're used to seeing in film – their bodies belong to someone else (there's a great scene where Mortensen's character must strip before the heads of the Russian mob and prove, based on his tattoos, that he is fully committed), and that's what makes the film so fascinating: Yes it has all of the typical themes of a Cronenberg film (the decaying of body/soul, the mixture of extreme violence and sex, and the idea that the choices made by these characters have dire circumstances), but it feels fresh for its genre, it's appropriately ambiguous, and it's certainly proof of one of the best director/actor collaborations of the last decade. Oh, and that knife fight in the shower room is something to behold.

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Top 50 Films of the Decade: #41 - 50

Before I get started with this I just wanted to point you all towards a great review by Tony Dayoub of Cinema Viewfinder. He reviews Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar, one of my favorite cult westerns, over at our western blog Decisions at Sundown. Check it out. Onto the countdown...

   
50.) The Claim (2000)

Directed by Michael Winterbottom

Michael Winterbottom's western is completely indebted to its great cinematography by Alwin H. Kuchler which evokes the greatness of the film's most obvious influence, Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller.  The narrative is similar to the Altman film, too, as Winterbottom metes out the information on a need-to-know basis.  He often drops the viewer in the middle of conversations and keeps a lot of the information between the characters.  It's another Altman trope that Winterbottom employs, but he does so brilliantly.  Winterbottom was one of the most prolific filmmakers of the last decade, and despite The Claim's troubled production and bloated budget (mirroring another film it owes something to, Heaven's Gate) it's Winterbottom's magnum opus.  It's a beautiful and elegiac western that any fan of McCabe & Mrs. Miller should see.

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Top 50 Films of the Decade: Introduction (and the other 50)

In what I hope will be something that I can complete before I go back to school and work here is the first entry in my 'best of the decade' series. I'll unveil a new top ten with each entry. Here are my initial thoughts and 50 other films that make the back-end of a top 100. Remember, these exercises are entirely arbitrary, and I could probably find a good enough reason to reposition a lot of these choices. Feel free to discuss in the comments. Enjoy.


I don't feel like I can put some of my favorite films of the last ten years in here that were released during an entirely different decade. I'm speaking specifically here to Apocalypse Now Redux and Army of Shadows, both of which got theatrical releases the last ten years; also, I can't seem to find a place for Russian Ark or Grindhouse. Two very different films, sure, but they both qualify more as experiences than anything else, and they both have very distinct and different feels to them than all of the other 50 films on this list. Russian Ark with its single take is definitely more than a gimmick, and Grindhouse was one of the most surreal experiences for this fan of grindhouse cinema. Certainly the two films within Grndhouse – Planet Terror and Death Proof – can be separated and reviewed as singular films, but I think doing that is to miss the point of what Tarantino and Rodriguez were going for here, and the only way I can certainly review the film is as the experience in the theater – fake trailers and all – that it was meant to be. So, these four films (I'm sure there are others, but I wanted to single these out) deserve special mention as I unveil my list.


This list was a lot of fun to compile. I hope it sparks some debate. This was a good decade for American film, and you're going to see a lot of it on here, but I also have to admit that I was extremely out of the loop of world cinema for the early part of this decade. If you don't see a film on this list there's a good chance that I haven't seen it…or I just didn't like it. Discuss…

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My 20 Favorite Things of the Decade

Instead of doing a traditional countdown of the best films of the decade (for that you can see the Question of the Day feature that was posted in the last week or so) I thought I would change it up and just list some of the things that made me extremely happy the past 10 years. I think people may be a bit "listed" out right now, and I like doing something more personal than just listing movies I loved…which is an exercise I take pleasure in, but for that just look at my top 10 lists for the past 10 years (check the labels on the left side of the blog). So here are my 20 favorite things (movies, sports moments, music, books, etc.) of the past 10 years…

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My Favorite Books of the Decade

I hate choosing favorites. Especially when it comes to books…which is why I am just going to list these things alphabetically. I hope you'll ask about some of these choices in the comments section; I also hope that you will pick some of these titles up if you haven't read them. There are some great authors here, but before I reveal the list there is one caveat: my tastes unabashedly lean towards the British writers. Sorry Chuck Palahniuk and Don DeLillo fans (although I do love White Noise and Mao II…I just didn't think DeLillo did anything great in the 2000's). There are a few American authors on here – my favorite being Rick Bass, the best naturalistic writer since Thoreau, and his brilliant collection of short stories The Hermit's Story – but you'll mostly find British authors who either write classically (McEwan, Coetzee and Waters) or sardonically (Barker, Amis, and Rushdie). Because my tastes lean towards the British you could say my tastes are a bit aesthete. I don't mind sounding pretentious here. I get a lot of enjoyment out of postmodern takes on classical tropes likes a WWII story (Atonement), the detective novel (The Light of Day), or just a good old fashion love story (The Powerbook).

If I had a gun to my head I guess I could name a favorite amongst these twenty selections…that would have to be Ian McEwan's Saturday…probably the finest novel about September 11^th to be written. It was also interesting to see Martin Amis go to a more classical style of storytelling with House of Meetings after his failed attempts at a September 11^th novel, Yellow Dog. Meetings is like Dostoevsky lite…which is a compliment. It's a tightly packed novel with a lot of wonderful Amisisms in it. Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown is brilliant novel, too. Rushdie floods his story with usual pop culture allusions and at the end succeeds at flipping the end of The Silence of the Lambs and making the male the hunted. It's his most impressive and his most garish novel since Midnight's Children. Finally I want to give a shout-out to Nicola Barker's fascinatingly absurd novel Darkmans. It's audacious (800+ pages) and sardonic (it reminded me of Will Self and Martin Amis), and it's not all together a success; however, it's ambition gets you through the rough patches, and by the end of the novel – a hilariously dark and irreverent flip on Bergman's moment of Death playing chess (for Barker Death is more of a jokester, and instead of chess he flips a coin) – I found myself to have laughed more than I did groan throughout the novel. It's really one of the standout works of the last ten years.

Onto the list…

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