My Favorite Films of the Decade

Since taste is so subjective -- and because I'm fully aware of the fact that there are plenty of movies out there from the last decade that I haven't seen -- I'm loathe to call this a "Best Of" list. Rather, let's just say that these are my personal favorites, the ones that compelled me to go back for a repeat viewing.

So here goes.

1. Let the Right One In and The Signal (both 2008)

Directed by Tomas Alfredson (Right One) and David Bruckner, Dan Bush, and Jacob Gentry (Signal)





2008 reignited my passion for horror movies after a slow, nearly decade-long falling out with the genre, and it was these two films -- wildly different but each brilliant in its own way -- that did it.

I saw The Signal first, and I walked away convinced I wouldn't see a better horror film for at least another decade. Conceived by a collective of independent Atlanta filmmakers working with prosumer equipment, the movie is told in three elegantly interlocking parts, each written and directed by a different person but all forming a cohesive -- if utterly demented -- whole. The story is deceptively simple: a strange electronic signal delivered through TVS, radios and cell phones turns all of the denizens of a fictional American city into homicidal maniacs. I don't want to say anything more about it for fear of spoiling the experience. Just trust me when I say this is the most original and thought-provoking American horror film in years. And it was all done for a budget of about $200,000.

So when I saw Let the Right One In some months later, I was stunned to discover that it was even better. Austere, chilly and deliberate where Signal is heated and frenetic, Right One manages to do what Twilight, True Blood, Thirst, Underworld, and all the other "vampire chic" movies and TV shows in recent years have so far failed to do ... make vampires scary again. The swimming pool scene toward the end is worth the rental price alone.

2. The Business of Fancydancing (2002) and Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001)

Directed by Sherman Alexie (Fancydancing) and Zacharias Kunuk (Atanarjuat)



NOT SAFE FOR WORK!!!


I don't really like the term "indigenous film" because it smacks to me of white liberal condescension, but I think it's worth noting that two of the best independent films from the early part of the decade came from Native American (or Canadian) filmmakers using the then new medium of digital video.

Fancydancing was written and directed by novelist/poet/screenwriter Sherman Alexie, and it follows Seymour Polotkin (Evan Adams), a gay Native American poet living in Seattle, as he returns home to the reservation he grew up on to attend a childhood friend's funeral. The film comes off as one part documentary, one part traditional narrative, and one part visual poem. It will creep under your skin without you even knowing it, and the quiet but crushing ending can reduce even the most macho dude to tears (trust me, I've seen it happen).

Atanarjuat is a very different film. Written and acted entirely in Inuktitut, it is the cinematic realization of a centuries old Inuit myth about the title character. Director Zacharias Kunuk provides almost no narrative context for non-Inuit audiences, choosing instead to toss us head-first into the story, and he uses the DV format to lend the film a sense of both immediacy and reality. The result is a movie that feels in some ways like a Maysles brothers documentary. Yet Kunuk still manages to create a stunning visual landscape, wringing images out of his video camera that a studio cinematographer would envy. It's a long movie, and slow going, but well worth it.

3. Michael Clayton (2007)

Written and directed by Tony Gilroy



The directorial debut from screenwriter Tony Gilroy (Dolores Claiborne, The Devil's Advocate, the Bourne trilogy, among others), Michael Clayton was sort of lost in the shuffle during a powerhouse year that offered up such lauded (and I would argue overrated) films as No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood. Critics had nice things to say about it, but audiences didn't really notice and all the available Oscar buzz got sucked up by the Country/Blood showdown.

Granted, a legal thriller about a cynical lawyer (George Clooney) confronting the depths of corporate greed is familiar terrain oft-traversed by the likes of John Grisham and Scott Turrow. But that's selling this movie short. Michael Clayton is oh-so-much better than its legal-thriller genre origins would suggest. Click on that clip I posted above, close your eyes and listen to Tom Wilkinson's opening monologue, and try to tell me that this isn't the work of an A-list screenwriter operating at the absolute top of his game. Michael Clayton is the type of straightforward movie that Hollywood does best, when it can get its shit together.

4. Shaun of the Dead (2004)

Directed by Edgar Wright



This is the movie that singlehandedly destroyed my beloved zombie subgenre and forever dashed my aspirations of making a truly scary, super-serious zombie movie like the ones I grew up on. After receiving the Edgar Wright/Simon Pegg treatment, I just don't think zombies can ever be taken seriously again.

But that's okay, because this movie is so friggin' awesome I can't be mad at it. Smart, silly, and -- yes -- even scary at times, Shaun of the Dead injected a much-needed shot of comedic tough love into an admittedly (begrudgingly, on my part) tired formula. The film transcended parody and proudly entered the pantheon of great horror comedies, unceremoniously batting Return of the Living Dead aside like a rag doll and knocking An American Werewolf in London off its long-occupied throne. And we all must now bow before it.

5. Memento (2000)

Written and directed by Christopher Nolan



The backwards-unfolding structure of this movie could have been a hopelessly irritating gimmick, but writer/director Christopher Nolan used it to craft a brilliant exploration of the very nature of memory and identity. And he managed to make a pretty awesome neo-noir thriller as well. Memento is now considered an undisputed classic, and it's as stunning to me these days as it was when I first saw it almost ten years ago in the theater. If you haven't seen it in awhile, go back and give it another watch. I promise you'll see things you missed the first time around.

Plus, it has Joey Pants. You can never have enough Joey Pants in your life.

6. Little Children (2006) and House of Sand and Fog (2003)

Directed by Todd Field (Children) and Vadim Perelman (House)





I grouped these two films together because of the presence of the generally amazing Jennifer Connelly, but it says something when you stop and realize that hers isn't the strongest performance in either film.

Little Children, directed by Todd Field (In The Bedroom) and adapted from a novel by Tom Perrotta (Election), was criminally unappreciated upon its release. A seemingly familiar tale of suburban infidelity, it's both funny and tragic, deleriously sexy, and is wonderfully acted from start to finish. It reintroduced us all to Jackie Earle Haley, whose turn as pedophile Ronnie James McGorvey is so alternately creepy and heartbreaking that it will leave you breathless, near tears and desperately wanting a shower. And Kate Winslet's pretty good, too.

House of Sand and Fog is probably the better film (although I'm partial to Children). Connelly and Ben Kingsley soar as two broken people battling each other and their personal demons in a tug-of-war over a repossessed house. There's nothing funny about this one, and the conclusion left me shaking in my seat. This is a movie that cuts to the bone.

7. Zodiac (2007)

Directed by David Fincher



David Fincher fans expecting another violent bruiser like Se7en or Fight Club were largely disappointed by the slow-paced, talky, and necessarily open-ended Zodiac. What they failed to realize was that this is a mature film for grownups, and it's less a serial killer movie than an old-fashioned, 1970s-style newspaper movie. Granted, I was predisposed to like it because of my already established fascination with the Zodiac Killer (which came from reading the book by Robert Graysmith, who's portrayed in the movie by Jake Gyllenhaal), but I still fly in the face of movie-geek wisdom by maintaining that it's Fincher's best. And, besides, it comes with my favorite movie soundtrack since Natural Born Killers.

8. Brokeback Mountain (2005)

Directed by Ang Lee



I almost didn't post this trailer, since it -- along with the theme song and the "I wish I knew how to quit you" line -- have been reduced to an unfortunate parodic shorthand in the years since. But watching it just now reminded me how much I love this movie, which for my money is one of the most starkly effective works of cinema I've seen. Masterfully directed by Ang Lee (robbed at the Oscars by that hack Paul Haggis) and adapted from an Annie Proulx short story by veteran writer Larry McMurtry (along with writing partner Diana Ossana and frequent Lee collaborator James Schamus), this is the movie that reminded all of us that Heath Ledger could act. He may now be forever remembered as the Joker, but this is the performance that stole my heart (and I'll thank you to stop your snickering).

9. Grizzly Man (2005) and The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009)

Both directed by Werner Herzog





Werner Herzog has proven to be one of the most fascinating documenters of human folly and psychosis that cinema has to offer (this probably comes from all that time he spent hanging out with Klaus Kinski back in the 70s). In his documentary Grizzly Man, he focuses on a real-life crazy person: Timothy Treadwell, a failed actor who got it into his head to go to Alaska and hang out with a bunch of hungry grizzly bears all summer without any means to defend himself. He did this for years, proclaiming over and over again that he would die for his beloved bears. And then one of his beloved bears decided to eat him, along with (sadly) his girlfriend, who Treadwell drug along with him on his delusional adventure almost against her will. Herzog mixes Treadwell's footage with interviews and his own acerbic commentary, and he presents a vision of this story that is both funny and tragic, occasionally sympathetic and at times downright cruel. In true Herzogian fashion, we can't help but think the celebrated German filmmaker is reveling a bit in the tawdry details of the story. And who can blame him?

If you doubt that, then look no further than his latest...er...opus, The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Ostensibly a remake of Abel Ferrera's...um...classic indie from the early 90s, Bad Lieutenant is nothing BUT tawdry details. I'm not sure I can really defend this choice as one of the best films of the decade, but I will say that I had more fun with it than almost anything else I've seen in the last ten years and it's so gloriously, stupendously demented that I couldn't not mention it here. Nicolas Cage is far from my favorite actor, but what he does in this movie is simply mind-blowing. It really has to be seen to be believed.

10. A History of Violence (2005)

Directed by David Cronenberg



I really tried not to overfill this list with dude-oriented movies about sex and violence, but what can I say? I like what I like. That said, as movies about sex and violence go, David Cronenberg's adaptation of the graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke is curiously flat in the depiction of both. That's because Cronenberg has spent a career working his way through weirdo, existential horror movies on an endless quest to explore the frayed edges reality and examine the ways humans find to create their own reality. Violence isn't really about violence at all, but rather about how a man can -- through sheer force of will -- become someone else entirely. Cronenberg and Violence star Viggo Mortensen explored similar thematic territory with their somewhat less effective followup, Eastern Promises. That was a good enough movie, but I think Cronenberg really said all he needed to say on the subject with this one.

11. Infernal Affairs (2002) and The Departed (2006)

Directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak (Affairs) and Martin Scorsese (Departed)





I can't get away from this list without mentioning Andrew Lau and Alan Mak's Hong Kong crime thriller Infernal Affairs and its American, Scorsese-helmed remake The Departed.

It's unfashionable to say one prefers The Departed to Infernal Affairs, and it's true that Departed is sprawling and messy next to the cold elegance of Lau and Mak's original. It's also true that Departed is seriously marred by a "what-the-fuck?" performance by an eternally phoning-it-in Jack Nicholson. But, after living in Boston for a couple years and having subsequently become obsessed with the real-life tale of Boston gangster Whitey Bulger, around which Scorsese and screenwriter William Monahan refashioned their story, I have to say I prefer The Departed. The film captures the language, feel, and texture of Boston in a way that no other film I've seen has before it (take THAT, Mystic River), and -- Nicholson aside -- the performances are nearly pitch perfect across the board. Even Vera Farmiga shines in a role that by rights should never have been written.

Is it crazy to think of The Departed as the final part of a trilogy, preceeded by Goodfellas (1990) and Casino (1995)? I think not.

12. In Bruges (2008)

Written and directed by Martin McDonagh

NOT SAFE FOR WORK!!!


I'm not going to say a whole lot about this one. If you watched the clip above you get the idea. In truth, Martin McDonagh is a brilliant playwrite -- nasty, profane, and funny, sure, but with a surprising capacity for spiritual depth and a truly genius touch with character -- and In Bruges is a startlingly solid first step into feature filmmaking (his Oscar-winning short, Six Shooter, is even better). Watch out for him in the future.

13. This Is England (2006)

Written and directed by Shane Meadows



I've mentioned this movie and talked about Meadows before, so I'll try not to dwell. Meadows is one of the most exciting filmmakers working in England today, and his semi-autobiographical film about the rise of the at-first benign skinhead movement and its corruption by the racist National Front is as eye-opening as it is entertaining. Thomas Turgoose is a firecracker as the young lead, Shaun, and Stephen Graham is absolutely chilling as Combo, Shaun's vicious mentor in the ways of English nationalism. This Is England is like a rich, raw wound needing to be bled.

*****

There are a lot more movies I'd like to talk about, but this post is already ridiculously long so I'll just give a quick shoutout, in no particular order, to:
The Last King of Scotland
American Psycho
Dancer in the Dark
Ginger Snaps
High Fidelity
Requiem for a Dream
Traffic
Ghost World
Waking Life
Adaptation
City of God
Spider
Amores Perros
Battle Royale
21 Grams
Cabin Fever
Dogville
Elephant
Kill Bill Vol. 1 and 2
Love Actually
The Station Agent
Willard
Swimming Pool
Wonderland
Session 9
Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
The Royal Tenenbaums
Sideways
Monster
The 40-Year-Old Virgin
Brick
Caché
The Constant Gardener
Dog Soldiers
Inside Deep Throat
Jarhead
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Land of the Dead
Match Point
The Proposition
Six Shooter
War of the Worlds
Wolf Creek
The Assassination of Richard Nixon
Before Sunset
Collateral
Dawn of the Dead
Downfall
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Hotel Rwanda
The Lost
United 93
Clerks II
The Prestige
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
Volver
Stranger Than Fiction
Blood Diamond
Children of Men
Pan's Labyrinth
Dead Man's Shoes
An Inconvenient Truth
The Science of Sleep
The Lookout
Death Proof
Sunshine
Death Sentence
Eastern Promises
No Country For Old Men
Beowulf
The Mist
Juno
There Will Be Blood
Cloverfield
The Ruins
WALL-E
The Dark Knight
Burn After Reading
Milk
The Wrestler
Donkey Punch
Coraline
Gomorrah
State of Play
District 9
Inglourious Basterds
Zombieland
Brothers
Avatar (sorry, Gene)
No End In Sight
Waltz With Bashir
Narc
Hard Candy

Brothers (2009)

Tobey Maguire and Jake Gyllenhaal at the Los Alamos ice rink

WARNING: SOME SPOILERS AHEAD

In the interest of full disclosure, I should preface this review by saying that I'm actually in this movie. More specifically, the back of my head makes its major motion picture debut for a grand total of about eight seconds during the big funeral scene toward the beginning.

So I was maybe a little predisposed to like it. Not only am I in it (sort of), the majority of the movie was shot right in my home town. For those of you who grew up somewhere like New York or LA, that's not probably not a big deal. But for us Hilltoppers, it's kind of cool. Even movies about Los Alamos (like Roland Joffe's 1989 film Fat Man and Little Boy) aren't usually shot there.

Brothers, directed by Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot, In The Name Of The Father) and a remake of Susanne Biers 2005 Danish film Brødre, tells the story of Sam and Tommy Cahill. Sam (Tobey Maguire) is the good brother, a star athlete married to his high-school sweetheart Grace (Natalie Portman) and father to two adorable little girls (Bailee Madison and Taylor Grace Geare). He's also a decorated Marine on his way back to Afghanistan. Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal) is the bad brother, recently paroled after doing a three-year prison stint for armed robbery. Grace isn't Tommy's biggest fan. Neither, it seems, is Sam and Tommy's stern alcoholic father (Sam Shephard).

When Sam's helicopter goes down in Afghanistan and he's presumed dead, Tommy tries in his clumsy way to fill the void left by his absence. He does this at first by getting drunk and calling Grace at three in the morning to come pay his bar tab. Oops. After this inauspicious start, he slowly and inevitably steps up to the plate. After enlisting three friends to remodel Grace's kitchen and spending time with his nieces, Grace -- almost reluctantly -- begins to thaw. Brother and sister-in-law grow ever closer. Eventually, Grace and Tommy spend an evening together smoking pot and reminiscing about Sam. One thing leads to another and, in a weak moment, their emotions (unsurprisingly) get the better of them.

Before long Tommy -- a crude but well-meaning facsimile of his lost brother -- has, without quite meaning to, supplanted Sam's memory in his grieving family's hearts.

And then Sam comes home.

There has been a lot of bitching and moaning about how the trailer gives too much away, and before seeing the movie I would have agreed. After seeing it, we'd all be forgiven for thinking we know exactly what this movie's about: bad brother sleeps with dead good brother's wife, good brother (not dead after all) comes home and, after finding out bad brother and wife got their freak on, flips out and goes on a shooting spree.

But, now that I've seen the film, I have to say that trailer was actually a pretty clever bait-and-switch on the studio's part. Obviously they want to sell this as either a sexy melodrama, a taut suspense movie, or, preferably, both. But Brothers isn't really about any of that. It's not about infidelity any more than it is a thriller about a psychotic soldier with a gun. What it's about is family, and the way war can bend and twist a family into something tortured and unrecognizable.

Sheridan cuts back and forth between Grace and Tommy's domestic life stateside and Sam's harrowing experience as a Taliban prisoner. The potential second-act "oh shit" movie moment of finding out Sam's fate is neatly sidestepped. When Grace receives the call that he's alive, Sheridan handles the moment with nothing more than a ringing phone and a look on Portman's face.

Sam returns a changed man. Haunted by what he's seen and done and carrying a yolk of guilt around his neck that not even his Vietnam vet father can understand, he projects all his fury and self-loathing outward at Grace and Tommy. Whether or not his wife and his brother actually slept together is beside the point. Sam, desperately looking for a place to put his rage, convinces himself of such. He coils up amidst his increasingly concerned family like a tightly smiling snake ready to strike. Grace, Tommy, and the girls are soon terrified of this unfamiliar and maybe dangerous stranger who has appeared in their midst.

In movies like In The Name Of The Father and In America, Sheridan has proven himself to be one of the most exacting chroniclers of familial nuance that cinema has to offer. So it's no surprise that the most convincing parts of Brothers involve the family. Each of these characters could have been stock, but Sheridan and screenwriter David Benioff's eye for detail saves them, and Sheridan leads his cast to some of the finest and subtly affecting performances of their careers.

Portman has never been one of my favorite actresses. She has always seemed so deliberate and hyper-intellectual to me, and her performances have tended to feel like a bundle of ticks and actorly "choices" rather than fully realized characters. Here, in the thankless role of the grieving wife, she manages -- finally -- to eschew her tendency to overthink. She inhabits Grace thoroughly. Grace's pain is almost entirely internal, and Portman lets it bleed out here and there through looks and gestures. When she does cry, the work she and Sheridan have done to keep Grace firmly grounded makes those bigger moments ring true. Later, when she tries to reach out to Sam, the tangled mess of love, torment, guilt, and confusion seems to seep right out through her pores.

Gyllenhaal manages to keep Tommy from drifting into caricature. Tommy is charming, well-meaning, a little flaky, and more than a little devilish. He's also all twisted up with his own Freudian rage and font of self loathing. It would have been easy to go over the top, to hit the dark notes too hard, but Gyllenhaal wisely keeps it simple. The chemistry between him and Portman is thick, but they keep it throbbing at a low hum rather than letting it cycle up to a high whine. When their resolve finally crumbles and they give in to their temptations, the moment is deceptively small but deeply resonant.

The only real false notes for me in Gyllenhaal's performance are the two or three times the script calls on him to play drunk. A wise actor -- okay, Miguel -- once told me that the biggest mistake an actor can make when playing a drunk is to "act drunk" because actual drunks, by and large, try to act sober. Gyllenhaal, unfortunately, goes for the easy choice and you can just see the "acting" all over the screen. Just compare what he does to what Shephard does after the funeral scene, and you'll see what I'm talking about.

Shephard, for my money, is the best thing in the movie. His character -- the stern military father constantly comparing his two sons -- is the most fraught with potential for cliche and melodrama. And the script, to be honest, doesn't do him any favors in the early bits (I almost groaned aloud during his rote "why can't you be more like your brother" moment). But Shephard is a pro and he manages to pivot away from our expectations, presenting a flawed man struggling with his own pain who loves both of his sons deeply but just doesn't quite know how to say or do the right thing. After Tommy starts proving himself to both Grace and his dad, Shephard's scenes with Gyllenhaal ("How'd you get so handy?" he admiringly asks as Tommy puts molding on the cabinets) are textbook examples of how less is usually more and what's not said can be more powerful than what is. Later, when he recognizes that Sam is struggling and stumblingly tries to reach out to him, you just want to give the big guy a hug.

The lion's share of the capital-A "ACTING" burden falls, of course, on Maguire, who has to go from loving husband and father to dangerous psycho in just under two hours. This is where Brothers both soars and falters. I had an animated discussion with the folks I saw the movie with afterwards, who felt that they just didn't buy his character from the start. He never seems to really connect with either Portman or his children before he ships out, and so the impact of his loss on the family is not quite felt. My friends were never really rooting for him to come back, they said, which lessened the impact of his return.

I could see their point, but -- whether intentional or not -- the stilted nature of his performance felt true to me. Sam is a professional soldier who, it's suggested, has been away before. It seems not only plausible to me but almost necessary that he would struggle, even in the absence of the trauma later inflicted upon him in Afghanistan, to completely plug back into his civilian life. The same would be true for anyone, military or not, who was away from his family for extended periods of time. I would imagine that most of the men and women currently serving overseas right now would identify with his struggle.

However, the question of whether Maguire -- eternally geeky, awkward, and seemingly light as a feather -- is believable as a Marine at all is debatable. I bought it...just. One of my movie-going compatriots suggested it might have worked better if Maguire and Gyllenhaal had swapped roles. I'm not sure I could buy Maguire as a paroled ex-con any more than I buy him as a soldier., but having seen Jarhead (2005), I can agree that Gyllenhaal would have made the more convincing Marine.

Sheridan's touch with the family dynamic is near perfect, but he stumbles badly when he turns his attention toward Afghanistan. It didn't help that I kept noticing how much "Afghanistan" looked like the outskirts of Albuquerque, but even putting that aside I was just never quite able to buy into the reality the film tries to present. Every Afghanistan scene feels like a different movie, complete with mustache (or beard)-twirling Taliban baddies and tired war-movie dialogue ("Give them nothing, Private!" Sam shouts at a fellow prisoner who's being tortured. "Your life depends on it!"). Sheridan and Benioff seem not altogether interested in really capturing the verisimilitude of war, so they try to shorthand those scenes as much as possible. Unfortunately, that means that when Sam is finally pushed into an irredeemable act of violence the moment is simply not earned.

That makes it even more impressive, then, how much power is in the film's punch after Sam arrives home. What Maguire puts forth in the last forty-five minutes or so of the movie is amongst the most haunting screen acting I've ever seen. Four simple scenes stand out to me. In the first, Sam -- utterly unable to connect with his civilian life and desperate to rid himself of the guilt chewing away at his fevered brain -- tries to talk his commanding officer into sending him back to Afghanistan. "I've just been thinking about my men," he says, smiling and trying to hide the flowering madness that lurks behind his eyes. In the second and third, Sam very quietly confronts both Tommy and Grace about their relationship. "I can forgive you," he tells Tommy...and we almost believe him. Again, Sheridan does more here with looks than with dialogue. The third scene features a birthday party set around a dining room table, and it's one of the scariest scenes you're likely to see in a movie this year.

Sam is a ticking timebomb, as the saying goes, and when he finally blows (again, no spoiler here; it's all in the trailer) the look of utter disconnect in his eyes as he rages is both terrifying and utterly heartbreaking.

Upon leaving the theater, I have to admit that overall I was a bit underwhelmed. I described Brothers as two-thirds of a decent movie and one third of a very good movie. But the damn thing put its claws in me and had me tossing and turning all night. I still think, in a stronger year, Brothers would probably have a hard time getting nominated for an Oscar. This year, however, I wouldn't be surprised to see it at least get a nod. When it's good it's very good, and it has moments where it actually approaches great.

I have no idea what the film's commercial prospects are. The conventional wisdom, after notable failures like In The Valley of Elah and The Kingdom, is that films concerned with either of the current wars (Iraq or Afghanistan) are destined to fail at the box office. Nobody wants to get bummed out when they go to the movies, the thinking goes. But in Brothers Sheridan deftly avoids the temptation toward politics (as much as is possible, at least) and keeps his lens focused squarely on the human drama. You could probably call Brothers an anti-war movie if you really wanted, but it's far from a polemic. In light of President Obama's decision to send 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan and the recent tragedy at Fort Drum, I think Brothers is as fitting and sober a tribute to the men and women in the U.S. military and their families as Hollywood is likely to offer.