Salon.com > Best of the Decade http://www.salon.com Mon, 28 May 2012 00:30:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Fantasy still can’t get no respect http://www.salon.com/2010/01/06/lotr_nelson/ http://www.salon.com/2010/01/06/lotr_nelson/#comments Wed, 06 Jan 2010 16:07:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2010/01/06/lotr_nelson Why did LOTR drop off the critical radar at decade's end? Methinks it's due to that perennial, fundamental disrespect of the fantasy and science fiction genre, the same reason "sci-fi" literature was/is ghettoized and consigned to the bring-your-own-blacklight section of your local bookstore. See Ellison, Harlan, or King, Stephen. Or better, Dick, Philip, K. (while he was alive). "Fantasy" is just not as critic- or award-friendly as, say, our annual dose of Clint Eastwood directed melodramatic "relevant" Oscar fodder.

Or, as the great Firesign Theatre pinpointed, "honest stories of working people as told by rich Hollywood stars."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/01/06/lotr_nelson/feed/ 39 “Lord of the Rings”: WTF happened? http://www.salon.com/2010/01/05/lotr_wtf/ http://www.salon.com/2010/01/05/lotr_wtf/#comments Tue, 05 Jan 2010 20:06:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2010/01/05/lotr_wtf Last week we received a fascinating letter here at Film Salon Towers (OK, it's more like a deep purple grotto) from Matt Burr, a reader in Austin, Texas. In between bites of excellent Tex-Mex and BBQ, Matt raised a question about Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy and all the recent decade-end lists, including our own Films of the Decade series. I realized it was a question that's been hovering, half-formed, in the back of my brain without quite expressing itself clearly.

I just want to ask [Matt writes] if one of the Salon movie contributors would explain why the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy has been so disrespected by critics. Not just at Salon but also at Slate and in every list I have seen. This suggests that a negative critical consensus has formed about LOTR and I have to admit that that really surprises me. I consider LOTR one of the singular cinematic achievements in film history. But if not that, at least of the decade. And I think there was a time where some critics would have agreed with me. It seems that some sort of gestalt has changed while I wasn't looking.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/01/05/lotr_wtf/feed/ 225 Films of the decade: “In the Mood for Love” http://www.salon.com/2009/12/31/in_the_mood/ http://www.salon.com/2009/12/31/in_the_mood/#comments Thu, 31 Dec 2009 20:31:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2009/12/31/in_the_mood Despite what many think of either the encroaching annihilation of the form or its social or economic irrelevance, film criticism remains a noble and deeply necessary vocation. A number of films and filmmakers excited, disturbed or enthralled me over the course of the past 10 years (I have about 126 titles on a preliminary list of my personal favorites). It's hard if not impossible to pick just one, but the movie that exemplifies what the art form is capable of — the sensual intoxication of camera movement, color, editing and the framing of bodies punctuated by an emotional and narrative roundelay of desire, longing and memory — is Wong Kar-wai's "In the Mood for Love." I’ll never forget the first time I saw it, in the balcony of the Théâtre Lumière on the final Saturday at Cannes in May 2000.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/12/31/in_the_mood/feed/ 12 Image of the decade: Osama and the towers http://www.salon.com/2009/12/31/obl_2/ http://www.salon.com/2009/12/31/obl_2/#comments Thu, 31 Dec 2009 19:20:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2009/12/31/obl The image of the burning towers defined this decade. It dominated waking and sleeping life, political debates and Sunday dinners, birthday parties and weddings and funerals, for a solid year, maybe two, then lurked in the background for the rest of this decade, haunting elections and reelections, military debacles and constitutional fights. And it forced every artist in every medium to start each new piece by first asking if the work was meant to confront the image of the burning towers or deliberately avoid it (avoidance is also a response).

The image of the burning towers loomed front-and-center in antiwar documentaries, morose battlefield thrillers and home-front dramas and jingoistic “Why We Fight” military action pictures. It hid in the shadows of so-called torture porn, a genre infatuated with implacable evil and helpless fear. It was answered with revenge-themed thrillers and epic fantasies -- popcorn pictures that treated evil as a real thing, a demonic force that must be fought. It lurked between the lines of TV’s most acclaimed long-form dramas, which created whole communities and then studied the moral codes and choices of their inhabitants. And you saw it in nine years’ worth of breaking news coverage, partisan talk shows and political commercials -- many of which dealt, directly or obliquely, with the burning towers, wars fought in response to the burning towers, the relative correctness of constitutionally suspect laws passed to prevent more towers from burning. And you saw it in absentia -- in TV shows, novels and comic books, songs and video games that made a point of not acknowledging the burning towers because, for God’s sake, there had to be safe harbors somewhere.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/12/31/obl_2/feed/ 66 Films of the decade: “Rejected” http://www.salon.com/2009/12/31/rejected/ http://www.salon.com/2009/12/31/rejected/#comments Thu, 31 Dec 2009 17:55:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2009/12/31/rejected The past decade of movies included several cosmic explorations of lunacy, from "Punch-Drunk Love" to "Grizzly Man," but none impacted me quite as much as Don Hertzfeldt's mesmerizing animated short film, "Rejected," made in 2000. (You can see it embedded below.) The premise is incredibly simple: An animator continually fails to create consumer-friendly TV commercials as he quickly loses his mind. But there's brilliance coursing through this fundamental strangeness. Hertzfeldt crams riotous absurdity and profound epistemological inquiry into a trippy shot of comedic inspiration. In less than 10 minutes, he hurls through a series of endlessly quotable non sequitur vignettes ("Mah spoon is too big!") as his rudimentary characters grapple with their absurdly untenable existence. It's sheer madness in bite-size chunks of hilarity (with a keen anti-consumerist message to boot), delivered entirely by way of stick figures less complicated than the earliest cave paintings.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/12/31/rejected/feed/ 3 Films of the decade: “Casino Royale” http://www.salon.com/2009/12/31/casino_2/ http://www.salon.com/2009/12/31/casino_2/#comments Thu, 31 Dec 2009 14:43:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2009/12/31/casino It feels pretty strange to nominate a James Bond movie as one of the decade's best examples of filmmaking craft — the series had been photocopying the same formula over and over for decades ever since the glory days of Sean Connery, and even longtime fans like myself had given up hope that the franchise would ever feel exciting or vital again. Imagine my surprise when Martin Campbell's 2006 "Casino Royale" turned out to be a fantastic, full-service entertainment in an era when the standards for big-budget cinema have plummeted: It's a thriller with action scenes that further the character development (and how rare is that?), a romance between two leads who have movie star charisma to burn, and finally, a heartbreaking tragedy.

On one end of the spectrum, I love the deliriously fun chase sequence in which Bond pursues an acrobatic would-be terrorist through a construction site. Notable for its lack of shaky camerawork or ADD editing, the scene gradually evolves into a game of "Can you top this?" as Bond realizes he's met an opponent he'll have to outthink rather than outfight. It's his first lesson that if he's going to survive, he'll need to become something more than just a glorified hit man.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/12/31/casino_2/feed/ 8 Directors of the decade: No. 1: Charlie Kaufman & David Chase http://www.salon.com/2009/12/31/seitz_no1/ http://www.salon.com/2009/12/31/seitz_no1/#comments Thu, 31 Dec 2009 02:31:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2009/12/30/seitz_no1 David Chase, the creator of HBO's "The Sopranos," directed just two installments of the series' eight-year run, the pilot and the finale. Charlie Kaufman is mainly known as a screenwriter and has directed one theatrical feature, "Synecdoche, New York." Why are two people known mainly as writers sharing the top slot on this list of the decade's most important directors?

They're here because they spent the decade working within the same entertainment industry that otherwise prizes reassuring clichés and flashy stupidity, and produced work that was more compelling and unified than the work of all but a handful of full-time movie directors. They're here because their visions kicked down the doors of the audience's and the industry's preconceptions and showed them what's possible. They're here because their insights into human nature (not coincidentally the title of one of Kaufman's scripts) are so sharp and evocative that when we want to remember what it meant to be alive in the aughts, we'll only need to watch an episode of "The Sopranos" or a movie written by Kaufman and it will all come flooding back.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/12/31/seitz_no1/feed/ 18 Films of the decade: “The Ballad of Jack and Rose” http://www.salon.com/2009/12/30/thompson_16/ http://www.salon.com/2009/12/30/thompson_16/#comments Wed, 30 Dec 2009 18:45:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2009/12/30/thompson Several of the decade's most beguiling cinematic risk takers flew well under the radar. Joanna Hogg's "Unrelated," warmly received in its native Britain, has yet to cross the Atlantic, although the writer-director's perceptive gaze at a "mature" woman's summertime fancy toward a young hedonist has "art-house hit" stamped all over its passport. Other expectation-defying films were openly jeered (Spike Lee's""She Hate Me," Woody Allen's "Anything Else") or were held captive by archaic copyright laws (Nina Paley's "Sita Sings the Blues").

But of all the masterworks denied their rightful place in the noonday sun of mainstream recognition, the one dearest to me is Rebecca Miller's "Ballad of Jack and Rose." By turns a frenetic comedy, a sun-dappled meditation on nature worship, and a poignant study of how hippie idealism sputters in a materialist world, "Ballad," above all, centers on the intimacies that develop in father-daughter relations given the absence of a mother figure. Miller handles the incest theme with great delicacy, hiding neither behind manufactured sentiment nor falsely ironic hipster posturing.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/12/30/thompson_16/feed/ 5 Films of the decade: “The Five Obstructions” http://www.salon.com/2009/12/30/debruge/ http://www.salon.com/2009/12/30/debruge/#comments Wed, 30 Dec 2009 14:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2009/12/30/debruge Special effects may have dominated the decade, granting fanboys access to such previously inaccessible playgrounds as Middle-earth and the Marvel universe, but the way I see it, the true star of the past 10 years has been the documentary. In retrospect, the aughts saw the rise of reality TV and its spawn, from the successful debut of "Survivor" in 2000 to YouTube and its myriad X-rated counterparts.

Oddly enough, while scripted television series tried to emulate classical Hollywood filmmaking (à la "Sopranos"), the movies went in the opposite direction, embracing handheld pseudo-documentary tactics (from the long, single-shot action scenes in "Children of Men" to the amateur-eyewitness conceit of "Cloverfield"). Where virtually no audience had previously existed for documentaries, normal folks started to seek out nonfiction films in theaters.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/12/30/debruge/feed/ 4 Directors of the decade: No. 2: Miyazaki & Pixar http://www.salon.com/2009/12/30/seitz_miyazaki/ http://www.salon.com/2009/12/30/seitz_miyazaki/#comments Wed, 30 Dec 2009 02:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2009/12/29/seitz_miyazaki In the moments before the January 2001 New York Film Critics Circle got under way, the winner of the group's best-actor award, "Cast Away" star Tom Hanks, stood at the center of a circle of journalists and industry colleagues shaking hands and making small talk when a party guest approached, removed a microcassette recorder from his coat pocket and played a tape of his toddler-age child reciting a couple of Cowboy Woody's lines from "Toy Story 2."

"Yes, indeed," Hanks said. "I am America's babysitter."

He was only partly right. Thanks to repeat showings of the "Toy Story" films on DVD and cable, Hanks' animated alter ego has doubtless mesmerized millions of tots for untold numbers of hours. But America's true babysitter is Hanks' employer on the "Toy Story" films, Pixar, along with the other animation houses, including Disney and DreamWorks, that have competed for pieces of the family entertainment business that Pixar has dominated since "Toy Story 2" came out a decade ago.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/12/30/seitz_miyazaki/feed/ 39 Films of the decade: “Gladiator” http://www.salon.com/2009/12/29/picado/ http://www.salon.com/2009/12/29/picado/#comments Tue, 29 Dec 2009 18:40:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2009/12/29/picado "Rome is the mob … The beating heart of Rome is not the marble of the Senate, it's the sand of the Colosseum."

"Gladiator," Ridley Scott's epic starring Russell Crowe, proved that timeless sentiment with blood and glory in 2000. And no one's done it better for a decade — not that they haven't tried. "Gladiator" spawned a legion of imitators. Crowe's Academy Award-winning portrayal of the Roman general turned slave turned gladiator breathed life back into the sword-and-sandals genre, and rose from the dust of "Cleopatra's" glittering tomb with a vengeance. But "Alexander," "Troy," and Scott's own "Kingdom of Heaven" (without Crowe) paled in comparison, even when they followed so many of "Gladiator's" established patterns, right down to the mournful female ululation over a classical soundtrack.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/12/29/picado/feed/ 19 Films of the decade: “Chop Shop” http://www.salon.com/2009/12/29/di_novi/ http://www.salon.com/2009/12/29/di_novi/#comments Tue, 29 Dec 2009 14:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2009/12/29/di_novi Back in 2008, long before the Obama juggernaut was humbled by double-digit unemployment and the war in Afghanistan, a film entered American theaters that seemed to capture the spirit of the political and cultural moment. The story of a young boy defying abject poverty to pursue his dreams, it spoke to the harsh realities that Americans were enduring in the twilight years of the Bush administration, as well as to the hopeful, multiracial future embodied by the half-Kenyan, half-Kansan's historic ascent. Ramin Bahrani's "Chop Shop" demonstrated that you didn’t have to go all the way to Mumbai to make a serious film about poverty and that some of the decade's greatest cinema shared at least one thing in common with such inner-city squalor. It was often lurking right around the corner, in places familiar yet unexpected.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/12/29/di_novi/feed/ 3 Directors of the decade: No. 3: The Coen brothers http://www.salon.com/2009/12/29/seitz_coens/ http://www.salon.com/2009/12/29/seitz_coens/#comments Tue, 29 Dec 2009 02:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2009/12/28/seitz_coens Looking back over Joel and Ethan Coen's run of work this decade — an output that produced such hits, conversation pieces and headscratchers as "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" "The Man Who Wasn't There," "The Ladykillers," "Intolerable Cruelty," "No Country for Old Men," "Burn After Reading" and "A Serious Man" — I'm struck not just by its diversity, ambition and sense of craft but by its sincere engagement with the most basic and important struggles in life.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/12/29/seitz_coens/feed/ 16 Andrew O’Hehir on the best movies of the decade http://www.salon.com/2009/12/29/decade_2/ http://www.salon.com/2009/12/29/decade_2/#comments Tue, 29 Dec 2009 02:23:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/andrew_ohehir/2009/12/28/decade A year of living one's life and watching movies can be considered in the abstract, as if it were an interesting phenomenon that happened to someone else. A year doesn't seem to matter that much. Sure, we're all that little bit older than we were last year. We've survived the tomato blight and the release of "Hotel for Dogs" and grown accustomed to the once-implausible phrase "President Obama." But it was just a year. We've lived through a bunch of them already, and most of us are hoping for a decent number still to come.

A decade isn't like that. A decade is heartbreaking in its depth and scale. Odds are you're going to end up having spent 10 to 15 percent of your life in the 2000s, and none of us is quite the same person we were back in the halcyon days of Monica Lewinsky, "The Matrix" and "Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me," to name a few quasi-memorable artifacts of the late '90s.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/12/29/decade_2/feed/ 17 Stephanie Zacharek on the best movies of the decade http://www.salon.com/2009/12/29/best_of_decade_movies_2009/ http://www.salon.com/2009/12/29/best_of_decade_movies_2009/#comments Tue, 29 Dec 2009 02:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/feature/2009/12/28/best_of_decade_movies_2009 Forget movies that are 30 — or even just three — years in the past: Pictures cycle through theaters so quickly today that it's easy to feel nostalgic about movies that were released three months ago. This week's must-see movie, the one all your friends are talking about and all the blogs are flogging, will be next week's "What was that thing called again?" There are still instances in which word of mouth can expand a movie's popularity over several weeks (the low-budget megaphenomenon "Paranormal Activity" is a perfect example), but it's rare these days for a movie to have much of a shelf life in theaters.

So what does that mean in the context of a "best of the decade" list? By 2009, a movie released in 2001 can seem like ancient history. And yet sifting through the movies I've loved over the past 10 years has made the past decade seem shorter, not longer. Getting off the "What's new this week?" treadmill only makes you realize how quickly time passes — and also realize that movies released at the beginning of the decade can sometimes seem as fresh as if they were made yesterday. Maybe it really is too early to feel nostalgia for Edward Yang's "Yi Yi" or Richard Kelly's "Donnie Darko." But revisiting them in my memory — or on DVD — makes me appreciate how enduring they are, compared with, say, fairly recent hits like "Transformers 2" or "The Proposal," movies that were certified "big deals" during their respective opening weeks.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/12/29/best_of_decade_movies_2009/feed/ 33 Films of the decade: “Spirited Away” http://www.salon.com/2009/12/28/kois/ http://www.salon.com/2009/12/28/kois/#comments Mon, 28 Dec 2009 18:09:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2009/12/28/kois "I think we should let our children watch animation only once or twice a year," director Hiyao Miyazaki told an interviewer in 2001, the year "Spirited Away," one of the most wonderful films of the decade, was first released in Japan. "There are too many things around us to relieve our unsatisfied hearts and boredom. This is the fault of adults; it's adults who are in the wrong shape. Children are just mirrors, so no wonder they are in the wrong shape."

Chihiro, the heroine of "Spirited Away," is in the wrong shape. Grumpy and sour, 10-year-old Chihiro whines at her parents about their move to a new town; timid and apprehensive, she clings so that her mother, irritated, shakes her off. Trapped in the spirit world in which the film takes place, Chihiro is belittled by the staff of the bathhouse where she gets a job. "What a dope!" one character says. "You're the most pathetic little girl I've ever seen," another says, laughing, "a stinking, useless weakling."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/12/28/kois/feed/ 9 Films of the decade: “Up the Yangtze” http://www.salon.com/2009/12/28/kenner/ http://www.salon.com/2009/12/28/kenner/#comments Mon, 28 Dec 2009 12:28:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2009/12/28/kenner A few of my favorite films of the 2000s are "Precious," "Sin Nombre," "City of God" and "Maria Full of Grace." All of these films took me to worlds I knew little about. And in each of these films, I felt the hand of a director guiding the experience.

I also loved "Michael Clayton," a wonderful thriller that exposes the greed and short-sightedness of a giant agrochemical firm. It certainly fed my paranoia while making "Food, Inc."

On the documentary front, I loved a film by the Chinese-Canadian director Yung Chang called "Up the Yangtze." It is the story of a valley in China being flooded to create a dam. I wasn't sure if I was watching actors or real people. It turned out to be all real people who felt very comfortable letting the camera into their lives. It had a very theatrical feel. It is a beautiful film.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/12/28/kenner/feed/ 6 Directors of the decade: No. 4: The Dardenne brothers http://www.salon.com/2009/12/28/dardennes/ http://www.salon.com/2009/12/28/dardennes/#comments Mon, 28 Dec 2009 03:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2009/12/27/dardennes So much of modern cinema is built on visual flourishes and technological gimmicks that it's easy to forget that the most enthralling special effect of all is the sight of characters moving through space, their body language, facial expressions and mundane actions telling you what they believe and feel. The Belgian filmmaking brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne — writer-directors of "The Son" (2002), "L'Enfant" ("The Child," 2005) and last year's "Lorna's Silence" (2008), believe this, and they've created a distinctive aesthetic around their conviction. They tend to tell stories about poor or working-class people. They employ long takes, existing locations, ambient sound and natural (or natural-seeming) light to connect the characters to their surroundings, and emphasize how the characters' physical environment and social conditioning shape their personalities and affect (sometimes dictate) their choices.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/12/28/dardennes/feed/ 1 The best viral video of the decade http://www.salon.com/2009/12/27/decade_viral_video/ http://www.salon.com/2009/12/27/decade_viral_video/#comments Sun, 27 Dec 2009 02:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/2009/12/26/decade_viral_video Long ago — the 90s — the word "viral" applied strictly to illness, and we had only an inkling of how awesome it is to dance at weddings, defy gravity and laugh at the funny things cats and toddlers do.

This decade changed that. Though we never want to hear words such as "Miss South Carolina," "inspirational comedian" or "Numa Numa" again, and while we sometimes wonder if those hours spent engrossed in "Planet Unicorn" were hours squandered, we fully cop to a deep, abiding love for viral video.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/12/27/decade_viral_video/feed/ 37 Films of the decade: “Elf” http://www.salon.com/2009/12/24/elf/ http://www.salon.com/2009/12/24/elf/#comments Thu, 24 Dec 2009 20:28:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2009/12/24/elf There may be greater movies. There may be more important ones. There are certainly others with subtitles and all that schmancy symbolism they taught in film school.

But was there a movie this decade that flat out comes together more pleasurably than "Elf"? Is there another that can elicit such guffaws from you — and your 5-year-old?

Jon Favreau's 2003 comedy isn't memorable simply for catapulting SNL MVP Will Ferrell to the Hollywood A-list — although it did. It stands out because it has become, like "A Christmas Story" and "It's a Wonderful Life," an undisputed holiday classic.

From its opening moments, the tale of an orphaned human baby's accidental upbringing in Santaland tugs at our nostalgia zone with its lushly orchestrated score and Rankin-Bass-homage winter wonderland setting. But this is no cheap reproduction; it's a delight in its own right.

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