Andrew's Best of the 2000s

This is a list of my ten favorite films from this decade. I drew it up a while ago during a moment of boredom and then I forgot about it. Having just rediscovered it in the bowels of my laptop, I figured there was no better place to poop it out than onto this blog. If it succeeds in eliciting alternative lists, I might be motivated to do the same for the 1990s, 1980s, 1970s, 1960s, etc... Anyway, here's the list, in chronological order:

1. Battle Royale (2000)
   This was veteran Japanese director Kinji Fukasaku’s last completed film before his death. Given its subject matter – a class of school kids are sent by the authorities to a deserted island and have to kill one another until only one remains – it’s not surprising that the film never found a US distributor with the guts to release it theatrically. It is an intense, suspenseful, satiric, subversive, and truly surprising movie, and it enters into the kind of unsafe territory where all of the characters are totally vulnerable.
   
   
2. Happy Accidents (2000)
   A romantic comedy with Marisa Tomei? Am I crazy? Perhaps… but I thought this film was one of the most original romantic comedies I’ve ever seen. It’s kind of like The Terminator without Arnold and the body count. Marisa Tomei plays a New Yorker who has had a string of bad relationships; Vincent D’Onofrio plays an eccentric who claims to be from the future. Is he yet another loser boyfriend, or is he telling the truth? Happy Accidents has a very compelling, quirky tone, and the science-fiction plot provides a fascinating allegory for exploring the ways in which couples negotiate each other’s differences and defects. Plus, Anthony Michael Hall plays himself in the best celebrity cameo since Tom Jones crooned his way into Mars Attacks.
   
   
3. Together (2000)
   Lukas Moodysson is one of the most interesting figures in European cinema right now, a real provocateur in the ways Lars von Trier would like to be. This film shows a gentler side of Moodysson: a nostalgic ensemble piece about life on a Swedish commune in the 1970s. The film seems almost effortless in the way it weaves storylines together and makes care deeply for the dozen or so richly drawn characters. Also, no film is ever likely to put ABBA tunes to such good use … unless Larry Clark gets his hands on “Does Your Mother Know?”.
   
   
4. The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001)
   One of seven films made by Japanese director Takashi Miike in 2001, this zombie-musical-family-melodrama-black-comedy with claymation interludes plays like The Sound of Music meets The Evil Dead meets Nick Park meets crazy Japanese TV show. It was also Miike’s family film for the holidays! It’s a wild ride and tells the bad-luck story of a family that opens a mountain inn where the guests just keep dying, and it’s unlike anything an American studio would ever make.
   
   
5. Waking Life (2001)
   Richard Linklater’s first foray into rotoscoped animation is still his best. The drifting, aimlessness of the narrative is perfectly suited to its existential probing of life-as-a-dream, and I love how the “academic” tone of the first half slowly transforms into something more ominous and nightmarish in the second half. The animation technique – drawing over live-action video – is also perfected suited to the film’s plot and themes, as it is simultaneously both grounded in and removed from reality. A Scanner Darkly – Linklater’s Kid A – is almost as good and uses this animation style to different, but equally sublime, ends.
   
   
6. 11'09"01 - September 11 (2002)
   Eleven different directors from around the world each were given the same budget and complete creative freedom to make a film about September 11th. All the films had to be 11 minutes, 9 seconds and 1 frame long. Coming so soon after the attacks, the isolationist US was in no mood to hear a diverse set of global voices and this film never got a proper release in the States. It’s a genuine shame, as the visibility then of more works like this might have helped prevent what is happening now. Some segments deal directly with 9/11, others are more allegorical. The ones that have stuck with me the most are Ken Loach’s comparison of 9/11 with another 9/11, the US-sponsored coup in Chile in 1973, and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s structuralist audio collage, featuring a mostly black screen punctuated by flash images of people jumping from the towers that were omitted by most news coverage.
   
   
7. The Five Obstructions (2003)
   In the 1960s, Danish filmmaker Jorgen Leth made a short film called The Perfect Human, a spoof anthropological film in which shots of sixties hipsters doing mundane things are treated like a nature documentary. Lars von Trier was one of Leth’s students, and in this film, as a form of therapy for his mentor, he challenges Leth to remake The Perfect Human five times. The catch is that von Trier will provide a set of “obstructions” each time, to limit/direct how Leth proceeds with each remake. What proceeds is a fascinating chess match: von Trier wants Leth to make something “less perfect and more human,” and deliberately gives him obstructions designed to sabotage the remakes; Leth in turn tries to outwit von Trier by turning the obstructions into strengths. A flawlessly conceived and truly inspirational film.
   
   
8. Before Sunset (2004)
   A second Linklater film for the list. At first glance, clocking in at a mere 82 minutes, this film seems like a slight, unassuming sequel to Before Sunrise. But it’s a film that sticks with you. Not only is it a finely nuanced take on dealing with being a thirtysomething, it also serves to add layer and texture to the original film, placing Celine and Jesse’s first encounter in the context of them being in their early twenties at the time. Shot in near-plotless real time, Before Sunset allows its characters and themes time to slowly emerge and develop, and it is the closest of Linklater’s films to the quietly devastating work of Eric Rohmer.
   
   
9. The White Diamond (2004)
   Around the same time that Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man came out to great acclaim, this other Herzog documentary slinked its way, almost unnoticed, straight to video. I think it's the better of the two, although I can see why the more sensational story of Grizzly Man got more attention. The White Diamond follows airship engineer Dr. Graham Dorrington on a trip to the jungles of Guyana, where he hopes to fly a craft he's designed over the tree tops. He's a classic Herzog protagonist – a driven, manic, obsessive dreamer dealing with past tragedy – and what makes the film work so well is how Herzog contrasts Dorrington with Marc Anthony Yhap, a lovable, mellow, slightly melancholic local from Guyana – the exact opposite of Dorrington.
   
   
10. Children of Men (2006)
    This one didn't grab me when I first saw it. I think the abundant Christian motifs turned me off a little bit, and the film is so extraordinary in its use of long takes that the sheer technical wizardry threw me out of the drama. Seeing it again on DVD, the brilliance of the film hit me. It's in the best tradition of political science fiction: a nightmarish vision of the future doubling as a commentary on post 9/11 society. It cements Clive Owen's position as a great, complex leading man. It does what any movie featuring Julianne Moore should do: kills her off early. And it has a terrific use of progessive rock: King Crimson's mellotron is the perfect soundtrack for a near-apocalyptic future London. Also, as IMDb reminded me, it bears an uncanny resemblance to Sergio Martino's 1983 post-apocalyptic cheesefest 2019: After the Fall of New York ... proving that the best steal from the best!