The Best Movies of the Decade

I've been thinking long and hard about it, and rewriting a list. Perhaps that is too much thought, but a person, a writer, can only be true to what he thinks. This is the best I got - these are the movies that most excited, moved, surprised me the last ten years. I no longer care about being representational or talking about movies I thought were "significant." Some of these movies are on others' lists, some are not, but the sensation was the same - watching each of these movies, something struck me that I loved, something I hadn't seen before or couldn't remember when I'd seen. There are maybe 100 others this decade that were outstanding, but these ten (or, I guess technically, 14) are the ones I remember the overwhelming experience of the whole thing.

The Top Ten Movies of the 2000s:

1. Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (2004)

Let me describe what watching Eternal Sunshine did for me in 2004. I stood up in the theater, near the end, as Jim Carrey nearly allowed Kate Winslett to walk away forever. I yelled "What are you doing?! Go after her!" I never felt a love story like this that looked at the inevitability of the failure of human interactions over time, but fell on their side anyway. It reminded me of the end of Annie Hall and of nothing, I had never seen anything like it. It could only be made in our time, and yet, it is timeless.

2. I'm Not There (2007)

The height of esoteric moviemaking, yet for those initiated, it's completely unequaled. Do you learn about Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes' fake-named, expressionistic, occasionally dream-speak creation of what Dylan's denunciation of identity is? No, I suppose - I knew enough going in and filled in the story with the "truth" I knew. But yes, in that I learned about identity, the quest for who we are and how we see ourselves. Some scenes are beautiful, some are puzzling, some are unmistakably sad and lonely. In some, "Dylan" (or, whoever he's being called at the moment) rejects all we thought we knew of him. Yet do we not feel the same pull sometimes? To see meaning in our moments and yet feel the need to change into someone else entirely? To me, leaving I'm Not There as though I was in a different world, I felt as though I no longer understood who we were, and that I was closer to understanding.

3. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (2001-2003)

You sit in The Return of the King and you think "I cannot remember seeing a story like this." That is if you can stop watching, if you're no longer drawn to the screen. For that, I cannot just single out Return of the King. The friendship of Fellowship of the Rings and battle of The Two Towers are essential too. I never read a word of JRR Tolkein, but the movies speak to me of what is important about him. This is what happens when every weapon in a filmmaker's arsenal is employed correctly.

4. What Time Is It There? (2001) and Yi Yi (2000)

I love movies about watching others, and I combine these two because they're a brand of Taiwanese movies that simply observe. In Tsai Ming-Laing's What Time Is It There? they observe the sensation of loss, of disconnection, of feeling without understanding of the movements and ease of everyone else, of wondering what others' experiences could possibly mean, because ours, well, we're not sure about those. Edward Yang's Yi Yi is, perhaps, more "story" oriented, but it too is about observing how others interact, and make sense of the world. More humanist and less speculative, Yi Yi is about the way we can love everyone, even if they do not love each other, or if they act in ways we cannot condone.

5. Amelie (2001)

I looked at my friend Melinda while watching Amelie in Boulder at a theater that no longer exists. I have not spoken to her now in several years. It was at the end of the first sequence, which introduces us to characters by going through their purses, telling us the things they like to do, pointing the camera to the sky and telling us the shapes they see in the clouds. I couldn't remember smiling like that, perhaps ever, and maybe I still don't. She felt the same, and the feeling, the beautiful, floating feeling came with you out of the theater. Jean-Pierre Jeunet's movie is a love song to movies, and to happiness itself.

6. Mulholland Drive (2001)

I was willing to give up on Mulholland Drive, too, but then I read a piece about an interpretation of the movie, and then another. Pieces started to gain clarity to me. My father told me of his interpretation, so I would watch it again. I would marvel at the pieces I could no longer fit into what was now my own interpretation of the movie. There are scenes I love that I perhaps think I know what they "mean," but it's the spell I love. A man at a diner who speaks of a dream, then the dream exists. The old couple in the cab whose disturbing smile never ceases. Naomi Watts talking in lonely honesty while no one listens at a later dinner. David Lynch truly made his masterpiece with Mulholland Drive, and truthfully, it's the movie we'll all remember him for.

7. Kill Bill, vol. 1 and 2 (2003-2004)

I think my favorie scene in all of the Kill Bill movies is the opening scene in Kill Bill 2, the black and white western moment when Bill, playing a flute, speaks to his bride with a wide smile. He knows what he's there for, and to an extent, so does she. As her fiance comes outside, she whispers for him to call her another name, and he does. Or is my favorite scene the brilliant unbroken shot in Kill Bill 1 that Tarantino repeated in Inglourious Basterds when the camera goes up the stairs, down, into the kitchen, around, to the bathroom, and back up? Or is it when Beatrix's hand, bruised from Pai Mei's tutelage, eats her rice, and learns to form itself again? Or is it when Lucy Liu kicks off her shoes into the snow before her battle with Bea? I never want to have to decide, I only want to see them all again.

8. All The Real Girls (2002)

Some scenes in David Gordon Green's All The Real Girls last only a few seconds, yet you know the hours of which they encompass. A woman tells her friends at a party about a guy she's started dating. Those two stand outside of a door and speak, obliquely, about the night they just had. A man fights with his mother, who is in clown makeup, about his breakup and his sadness. All The Real Girls is, like Eternal Sunshine, about love, but it's also about who we are, and what we give to others in our life, how they change us. It creates its own context by being precise to the moments that may have had beginnings and endings, but shows that the moments that occurred in the middle - the smiling, the honesty - were what mattered.

9. 25th Hour (2002)

I have seen 25th Hour three times, and each time I remember, at the movie's end, just how powerful it is. Monty (Ed Norton) is driving to prison by his father (Brian Cox), who speaks to him of a long, glorious alternate world in which he doesn't drive Monty to prison, but instead helps him escape, somewhere far away. He speaks of the life he has, of reuniting with his love Naturelle (Rosario Dawson). It is so achingly beautiful that we think, this must be what happens. Yet we know, with the deliberateness of the previous day that we've seen that nothing that beautiful could possibly happen. 25th Hour also speaks of New York after September 11th, and many, writing about it at the end of the decade, focus on this. That is part of it, but it is the part that emphasizes Monty, not necessarily Monty that emphasizes New York. 25th Hour is one of Spike Lee's greatest movies because of the humanity of his gaze.

10. Donnie Darko (2001)

Almost a synechdoche for all things cloyingly "indie" and hipster in the decade, Donnie Darko, pre-director's cut, has some of the most riveting, funny, enrapturing loopy storytelling you can remember. The director's cut, perhaps, shows Richard Kelly's true stoner philosopher spirit, but Darko hides that just enough to keep the metaphysical tantalizing and emphasize a story of truth and sacrifice underneath. A true post-Tarantino modern classic, Donnie Darko doesn't need to make sense to work, it simply needs to leave you rapt and puzzled at once.

And if I had to pick ten more, they might be...
Junebug, Brokeback Mountain, Michael Clayton, Pan's Labyrinth, The Bourne Supremacy, Talk to Her, The 40 Year Old Virgin, Requiem for a Dream, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, The New World