Best of the what?
Well, one of my favorite films of the decade was David Fincher's Zodiac.
The wearying parade of best-of-the-year lists is compounded, this year, by the best-of-the-decade lists. I exclaimed aloud when I got an email from an editor a couple of months ago asking for us to put together the best-films-of-the-decade list. Is it really the end of the decade?
My movie-watching skills at the beginning of this decade were not up to snuff, to put it mildly. (I’m pretty sure I thought A Beautiful Mind was an art film when I first saw it.) I think I’ve come a long way since then.
This is especially interesting to me because I’m using film as the basis for the research writing class I’m teaching next semester, and I know that many of my students are from a background similar to mine and also haven’t had much experience with truly good film. I’m having them read Jeff’s book and explore The Auteurs, but there’s only so much I can do in a class that’s not actually a film class. So how to teach them what makes a movie good?
A.O. Scott is thinking about this too, as he does in his article “Screen Memories,” published yesterday. This passage is intriguing:
Most critics, when they assemble their personal canons, will implicitly follow the director-centric impulses of the auteur theory, even if they retain some skepticism about the theory itself. That is, we will gravitate toward favored filmmakers, with plenty of room for argument about choices within a given body of work — why “Letters From Iwo Jima” and not “Changeling”? — as well as about the stature of particular artists. Are the Coens profligate geniuses or clever, cold-hearted pranksters? (“Both” may be the only acceptable answer.) Is Soderbergh a protean visionary or a formalist hack? (See above.) Such arguments, infinitely extendable and happily interminable, are what sustain film criticism in its various incarnations, professional and amateur, printed, blogged and tweeted.
This kind of argumentation has the double appeal of being both stimulating and fundamentally conservative. It allows us to think about cinema — a restless, constantly changing art form — as something fundamentally stable and coherent, in the way that other arts are imagined to be. And the emphasis on great directors and their masterpieces is also useful as an organizing principle for festival programs, film-studies syllabuses and museum retrospectives. It is, in other words, the institutional form of film criticism.
I don’t know if we at Filmwell are planning to compile a best-of-the-decade list, but I’m curious to know what our readers think. What are your best films of the decade? What criteria do you use? And is there a film that you once thought was brilliant that now wouldn’t make your list at all?
It’s always difficult creating these types of lists as they invariably change according to mood and what I can actually remember that I’ve seen at any given time. A decade is a long time to consider for films. However, I do know know that The Lives of Others, written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck would have to be very near, if not at, the top.
Doubtless more discerning film viewers than I will pipe up on this topic. My criteria for “best of” seem to be: (1) Did the film stay with me after I left the theater, preferably in a good way, but the real question is, did I keep thinking over it? and (2) Did I want to see it again, and if I did see it again, was it just as good, if not better? By those standards, a few films from the past decade that I’ll venture to list: The New World (2005), The Brothers Bloom (2009), The Incredibles (2004), Millions (2005), Serenity (2005), Lars and the Real Girl (2007), Sweet Land (2005), About a Boy (2002), Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
“Wearying parade of best of the year lists”? My dear, dear Alissa. Do you also dread the soul-numbing progression of Advent candles, turkey dinners, house-parties with loved ones, Christmas gifts, appreciative reflections on the year past?
Now Alissa, I am sure I have always thought of this time of year as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant, list-making time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, united in their appreciation of all the year’s cinematic joys, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!
I am looking forward to seeing our collective lists as well. Here is a wager: a Dardenne’s film on each of our lists.
The Son. Top three, for me. Along with Dogville and Pan’s Labyrinth. After that it, many glorious candidates, but not sure what ranks highest.
My film tastes and preferences have changed significantly over the past few years, thanks in part to some of the thoughtful people here and through discussions elsewhere, as well as a smattering of personal studying and reading on film art. I can’t help thinking, too, that for those who value change and growth over stasis, a personal evolution is inevitable regarding views on what is beautiful, contemplative, or simply pleasurable.
My criteria for favorite films are similar to those of Beth. Here goes, in no particular order:
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Spirited Away
Ponyo
Kings and Queen
Brokeback Mountain
Man on the Train
Intimate Strangers
Heartbeat Detector
When the Levees Broke
Hawaii, Oslo
Master and Commander
28 Days Later
No Country for Old Men
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
The Rage in Placid Lake
Unbreakable
Volver
Talk to Her
Like Alyssa, my taste in movies changed violently over the decade (if I even really had a taste pre-2002). My list would almost certainly include the following (in no particular order):
1. Millennium Actress (2001)
2. Junebug (2005)
3. Children of Men (2006)
4. Little Children (2006)
5. Nobody Knows (2004)
6. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
7. There Will Be Blood (2007)
8. Hero (2002)
9. Ratatouille (2007)
10. The Squid and the Whale (2005)
11. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
12. LOTR Trilogy (2001, 2002, 2003)