1. Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
Bring it on. But please, bring something more than the usual “boo hoo, Hayden is whiny and I don’t like CGI and Darth Vader shouldn’t say ‘noooo!’ and Padme shouldn’t die” crap. Yes, Anakin is a petulant brat put in a huge position of power by a malicious senior mentor with an agenda of perpetual conquest…gee, doesn’t that sum up most of the way the actual last decade was? And you don’t even have to make it a Bush/Cheney analogy…how about Medvedev/Putin, Ahmadenijad/Mullahs, Bin Laden/Omar, or even, stretching it a bit, Blair/Bush? It was the decade of the do-gooder hero as self-righteous bully, and the decade of peace ending, chaos reigning…but the promise of A New Hope at the end.
Aside from that, REVENGE OF THE SITH has almost everything: buddy comedy, political intrigue, tragic romance, even arguably a musical number if you count that zero-gravity opera thing Palpatine attends. It also proved that you could make a huge blockbuster in which children are murdered, and every hero ends up dead, exiled, or crippled. The digital technology finally caught up to George Lucas’ vision of it, and beautifully, fully rendered worlds were created – I thought about choosing AVATAR for this list, but there would be no AVATAR without SITH. General Grievous is a prime example of a character that can only be done with CG, yet he looks absolutely real.
On a more primal level, I simply find this movie compulsively watchable. If it’s on TV, or playing in a store, I am captivated all over again. Suck it, haters – it is the movie of the decade.
2. Oldboy
Simultaneously the most fucked-up and beautiful revenge movie of the last ten years. A compellingly original twist on the premise (bad guy’s easy to find and kill…but don’t you want to know why? Then dammit, you can’t kill him yet – and that in itself will be your undoing), shot with colorful set design and all sorts of stylistic quirks, notably the single-take hammer –fight scene…and a genuinely shocking ending on many levels. Also stoked my appetite for live sushi, and a five-year quest for active octopus tentacles.
3. Amelie
Using the palette of a sci-fi/fantasy director to explore the romance genre was a masterstroke, and a sign of the way the decade in cinema would open up the visual palette to where anything you can imagine is possible, and imagination is conceivable in every kind of story. Jean-Pierre Jeunet may never again be as good as this, and Audrey Tautou became an international star as a result.
4. United 93
A totally straight adaptation of a fresh wound that defined our psyche for most of the oughts, this was an adaptation of brilliant nonpartisanship so brutal that we all needed a drink afterwards…and so painstakingly accurate that it will undoubtedly be shown in history classes to future generations.
5. Tomorrow Night
Arguably the only one of my choices that didn’t push the visual envelope, shot as it was on black-and-white 16mm…and yet the story was so much more creative than anything else like it. A nerdy, uptight photo-store owner likes to rub his bare ass in ice cream, and falls in love with a retired woman after her husband is torn apart by wild dogs. Together, they adopt a gangsta-rap teenager, at which point our “hero” tries to find a way out of the marriage. Appearing briefly in one L.A. theater in 2000, this movie featured such then-little-known actors as Wanda Sykes, Steve Carell, Robert Smigel, and JB Smoove. The director? Oh, just some unknown comedian…named Louis C.K.
6. Waltz With Bashir
When people ask me about my biases as a critic, I often will admit that foreign-language documentaries are my least favorite kind of movie. And yet, anything can happen – turn it into a cartoon and I will watch. This is not on my list just to prove that I can like all kinds of stuff, but rather because it is a radically different merging of cinematic styles in a way that surprises, enlightens, then makes you shut the fuck up so quietly you can hear tears fall at the end.
7. 300
Not necessarily one of my favorites, but I think if you were to pick movies that sum up the recent era, this has to be on the list. Love it or hate it, or (as I do) feel it has flaws yet is easily rewatchable, 300 put Zack Snyder on the map, and, like AMELIE, proved that visual imagination and subjective reality can apply to any genre in this day and age.
8. The Dark Knight
How hard is it to properly cinematically capture the iconic characters of Batman and the Joker? Hard enough that it hasn’t been done in live-action until this. Stupid attempts to “Hollywood-ize” such iconic characters should be put in their place by Chris Nolan’s masterpiece.
9. Irreversible
Cinema doesn’t get much darker than this. Many will praise MEMENTO for its backward-structure, as I do, but I find that it has little rewatchable value. IRREVERSIBLE is like a car wreck where you might want to look away but you can’t.. It’s a movie that speaks to me personally, about how people who try to remain rational above all can lose their shit in the most frightening way when cornered, and about the many times we wish we could hit the reset button, or time travel back. Also speaks to my overriding thesis about visualizing anything in any genre…the CGI penis raping Monica Bellucci is a seamless example of FX work.
10. The Room
If you take director/producer/writer/star Tommy Wiseau at his word, he meant this movie to have the precise effect that it did, becoming the biggest midnight movie phenomenon since ROCKY HORROR. But if you believe that, you probably also believe his claim that he’s an American. No, the brilliance of THE ROOM is that every time Wiseau has the opportunity to make a directorial choice, he does exactly the opposite of what a good director would do. The odds against getting absolutely everything wrong so perfectly, and still delivering the best laugh-out-loud comedy of the decade (intentional or otherwise) are astronomical, and whether it’s a fluke or a perverse talent, I would be a complete hypocrite if I did not put a movie I love this much on my list.
Honorable mentions: Spirited Away, May, Hero, Donnie Darko (The Director’s Cut), Saw 3, Paprika, The Tracey Fragments, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Antichrist, Avatar, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
your list is fine except for revenge of the sith, which i hated. the lightsaber battles were weak, there was a lot of talk about the dark side but the force barely showed up, and there were far too many monents like yoda giving up halfway through his fight with palpatine, because he had to lose and go into exile to set up empire strikes back.
ultimately, revenge of the sith was a clumsy bridge between the prequels and the original trilogy, but all it really did for me was hammer how much those two trilogies do not work together. as shown in the prequel trilogy, there’s no way palpatine would have won that fight, and indeed, it doesn’t even play off like yoda losing, he just gives up halfway through and slips out the back door. anakin and obi-wan fighting should have been a much better fight, but instead we get obi-wan using the high-ground to win, when he he beat darth maul from anakin’s position two movies ago.
everything in revenge of the sith happens because that’s how it was at the start of a new hope. it doesn’t play off as a natural conclusion to the storyline of the prequels, it just kind of reshuffles things to match star wars and calls it a day.
and it really hammers home how ill-conceived the entire prequel trilogy was. they had a rough framework built for the first death star at the time of luke’s birth, but it took eighteen years to finish it? obi-wan and yoda easily overpowered their clone assassins and managed to survive and escape and go into hiding, but none of the hundreds or thousands of other jedi even had a chance? palpatine said he had been attacked by jedi and was going to a: kill them all and b: take power forever, and the majority of the population just kind of sat there and said ’sure, why not’? how exactly was the rebel alliance merely a band of geurilla fighters, and not an open rebellion resulting in civil war against the new ‘imperial’ government? and how did it take them eighteen years to gain any kind of potency?
also, darth vader dropping to his knees and screaming in anguish was the dumbest fucking thing i’ve ever seen.
that all said, i adore joss whedon’s writing and think serenity is one of the best movies of the decade, so i’m perfectly happy to disagree on this one. i also very much enjoy the clone wars, which suffers from many of the same problems (the underwhelming force powers, being restricted in storytelling because they can’t contradict revenge of the sith, etc). and i think we can all agree that circa revenge of the sith the star wars toyline saw a dramatic jump in their standard figure quality that’s continued to this day even on background cantina aliens. i shouldn’t even be able to buy a fully-posable malikili, but it totally can, and it’s very likely because revenge of the sith made a ton of money.
I stopped buying Star Wars after moving to OC and giving up most of the small stuff. But who knew there was demand for a new Malakili?
I’m not sure all your problems with Sith hold water. Why, for instance, was there no way Palpatine should have been able to beat Yoda? He had just totally schooled six Jedi who came to arrest him at once…that he had a hard time finishing off Mace may simply have been for show, to lure Anakin into the fight. Plus he was powerful enough to cloud Yoda’s mind into never sensing him all this time.
Why no open rebellion? Because nobody had the equal of a “Grand Army of the Republic,” especially after Anakin assassinated the entire Trade Federation leadership. A few Chinese-accented alien accountants were holding the entire republic hostage over tax routes two movies prior. And besides, remember how quickly our country fell in line behind Bush after 9-11? Or, better example, the German people behind Hitler after the Reichstag fire? By the time they were disillusioned, it was too late. Many have theorized that Chamberlain didn’t declare war in Hitler because he knew the western armies needed to regroup, and re-strengthen. No stretch to me to say that Yoda knew this too.
Eighteen years to build the death star is a stretch. No doubt the EU will fill in with some story about how construction was ruined at some point and they had to start again. No biggie to me. I mean, why not also nuke the Ewoks from orbit in Jedi? Some logic holes remain throughout.
Nonetheless, I can’t make you like a movie you don’t like.
not to mention that anakin’s turn to the dark side wasn’t satisfyingly explained. i can buy helping palpatine in his fight against mace windu, because he wanted padme to live. but he wanted her to live so badly that he was immediately willing to go out and personaly murder all the jedi in the universe, a bunch of defenseless children, the seperatist high command, and also his best friend, and also, oops, his wife and unborn child? the sand people incident doesn’t even flow into this. his mother had just died in his arms, he was angry and killed the people who killed her. and dooku was a dangerous dark jedi and the commander of the army against whom anakin had been fighting for three years. war is hell, dooku was no loss. neither of those add up to anakin being willing to kill anyone palpatine tells him to.
having doubts about the jedi doesn’t flow into slaughtering them, it flows into standing against them on the opposing side of the war. i can buy anakin switching sides, but being so distracted by padme that he would fall for palpatine’s rhetoric about heroism and saving the republic and ending the war, if he would only kill the entire leadership of both armies? that’s fucking ridiculous. episode one and two set him up as emotionally volatile, not stupid and gullible.
helping kill mace windu, so that palpatine can save padme’s life, is only the fist step down the dark path. it doesn’t feel honest that he goes immediately from that to slaughtering children, and doesn’t even hesitate, or question how padme might feel about that. as long as she’s alive, he’s willing to do anything palpatine tells him? even if she hates him and leaves him? i’ve seen mobster movies with a more plausible arc of corruption than anakin got. if the entirety of his motivation to work for palpatine was to save padme, why didn’t he leave after he found out she was dead?
oh right, because in a new hope he was space hitler.
Episode II, the dialogue by the lake — Anakin already had in him the belief that a benevolent dictatorship would be just fine if he were the dictator. This predates him knowing his mother was dying.
Also, he’s more or less done with Padme on Mustafar when he tries to choke her. If I had the chance to rewrite, yes, I would have made that more substantial than “dying of a broken heart.” Why stay by Palpatine’s side after that? Well, Palpatine did just save his life, for one. There’s a father-son bond there, perhaps a literal one depending on how you take the Darth Plagueis story.
The dark side would take him further down that road automatically…Luke killing Vader was going to send him to the dark side, remember, even though that too would have been totally justifiable.
both bush and hitler are bad analogues to palpatine because palpatine declared himself emperor of EVERYTHING and, according to the movies, it took eighteen years for enough people to stand against him to make a difference.
hitler only controlled those parts of the world germany had taken over; he never took england, america came in and turned the tide against him, russia never succumbed to his power. he was absolute ruler of central and eastern europe and some of northern africa, but never much more than that.
bush had the absolutely loyalty of few; there were protests against the war from the beginning, democrats took back congress in 06, and we got our man in the white house in 08. arguably the bush/cheney regime only held absolute power, in the united states only, for about two years after 9/11 until people started to speak out. but bush never had the entire world under his thumb. the coalition of the willing and all that.
what revenge of the sith presents that i do not buy is that one week there were seperatists using a droid army to fight for independence from a corrupt central government and republicans fighting to prevent all those worlds from seceding. then anakin killed the seperatist leaders and the jedi, and palpatine declared himself absolute emperor of both republic and seperatists. the next week the war was over and everyone happily submitted to imperial control.
the seperatists would have kept fighting. there were entire worlds standing behind the droid army, not just a bunch of chinese bankers, and those people would have still had all their droids to counter the clone army, as they had been doing for three years. their leaders were dead, yes, but they would have promoted new ones quickly enough to at least put up a prolonged losing battle.
what the movie fails to explain is why the war ended when palpatine crowned himself. the republic accepting this change until it was too late to see it for what it was? fine, i can buy that. all of the seperatist planets not having a problem with this, an even more undemocratic form of central government than the one they had originally wanted to secede from? not even for a moment.
as for yoda, palpatine was aggressively defending himself, but he was consistently backing away from yoda, who was more than holding his own, as he had against dooku. then yoda dropped his lightsaber, and just kind of stopped fighting and left. so my first complaint, why didn’t he use the force to get it back? it wasn’t destroyed, it was just down a hole. he can lift x-wings and giant stone pillars and deflect senate pods and absorb force lighting with his hands, but he can’t levitate a tiny lightsaber unless it’s within four feet of him?
the fight seemed to be portraying palpatine and yoda as equals; palpatine had greater obvious strength and could hide himself from the jedi, but yoda had better foresight and much more experience (he was 882 years old at the time, remember), and had been clearly shown to be much stronger than any other jedi. but palpatine didn’t force him into a draw, he just got lucky and yoda ran away. for eighteen years.
i do want to point out that the scene at the opera and the scene with padme and anakin looking out across the city at each other were both amazingly well done. they had the kind of subtlety and substance that much of the rest of the movie lacked.
The war was declared over when General Grievous was killed. Simplistic or not, that seemed accepted by pretty much everyone, just as the OT war was over when Death Star 2 was blown up. Yes, Timothy Zahn says there were plenty of Imperials still left fighting, but that’s not what the movies imply. Like it or not, the precedent in the Lucas movie universe (discounting EU) is that when the enemy leader dies, the other side wins.
The Separatist leaders then fled, and were decapitated. The droid armies are utterly useless without the control ships, and the Neimoidians appear too cowardly to use those without someone like Dooku or Sidious backing them up.