The Decade in Review

What Happened to Me in the Dark: 2000-2009

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

What a decade! I managed to work as a film critic for the entire decade for about a dozen different newspapers and websites, sometimes fully employed, and sometimes not. I estimate that I saw somewhere between 2500 and 3000 new movies this decade. Even more memorably, my son was born this decade, and I hope to see thousands more movies with him. The following were my favorites from 2000 to 2009.

	1. Yi Yi This was the seventh feature film by Taiwanese filmmaker Edward Yang, and his first to be distributed in the United States. Sadly, it was also his last film, as he passed away in 2007 at the age of 59. Yi Yi -- subtitled "A One and a Two" -- struck me as a classic even as I watched it early in 2001. I watched it again a few weeks ago just to make sure, and it struck me the same way. Its most miraculous achievement is that it seems warmly humanistic and rigorously artistic at the same time. (Usually directors fall in either one camp or the other.) Structurally, it's a bit like The Godfather (without the killings) or like Bergman's Fanny and Alexander, a sprawling family epic, in which we observe several members of one very universal family, but we also view them through long hallways or door frames or windows; Yang constantly reminds us that we're just watching and we may never truly know them. The most revealing character is the little boy Yang-Yang (Jonathan Chang), who likes to photograph the backs of people's heads so that they can see what they truly look like; that's a bit of poetry for the ages if I ever saw it.
	2. Lost in Translation Does Sofia Coppola's magical movie need praising or defending? I think the majority still likes it, but there are a few sour apples who complain bitterly about its misrepresentation of Japan and other quibbles. The reason Japan is misrepresented is because it is seen through the eyes of two different Americans (note how these views differ between their personalities). That's what the title means, too. But if I'm going to praise it, I'll just say that Bill Murray gives a comedic performance for the ages, that Scarlett Johansson perfectly matches him, that it's one of the most beautifully delicate films ever produced in Hollywood, and that it's a bittersweet comedy worthy of Chaplin.
	3. Ghost World Here's Scarlett Johansson again, for the second time in my top three. I love her performance here as Rebecca, the more mature of the two friends and the one who is starting to lose interest in all those cynical quips and all that ironic behavior that her friend Enid (Thora Birch) can't seem to give up. In other words, this is a beautiful, immensely personal work from director Terry Zwigoff and writer Daniel Clowes, including a beefed-up character -- Steve Buscemi's Seymour -- to represent Zwigoff himself, but it's all still grounded in a unique sense of life and truth.
	4. Werckmeister Harmonies Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr made arthouse waves in the 1990s with his seven-hour masterpiece Satantango, though this far more manageable, 2-1/2 hour film is just as great. Tarr passes much of the time simply tracking behind the actors as they walk, accompanied only by the sound of crunching gravel. But at the same time, he conjures up images so gorgeous and startling that they could almost make your heart skip a beat: Janos Valuska (Lars Rudolph) describing the movements of the solar system to a bar full of drunken reprobates, or the first view of a captured whale, seen only dimly from the darkened inside of a giant trailer.
	5. Spider David Cronenberg made three superior films in the 2000s, each a good many miles away from his body conscious horror films of the 1970s and 1980s. His Viggo Mortensen gangster films (A History of Violence and Eastern Promises) earned more attention than did this daring, creepy little character study about a mumbling, shuffling half-being known as Spider (a superb Ralph Fiennes). It was a dive into an uncomfortable, but mesmerizing place.
	6. Inland Empire The general critical consensus is that David Lynch's Mulholland Drive is the movie of the decade, and I can't disagree too much. I love it also and I went back and forth as to whether to choose it or Inland Empire for my list (I'm sticking to a one-film-per-director rule). Eventually I went with this one because it's a bit more unhinged and deranged -- a companion piece to Eraserhead -- but it also feels more like a complete piece, a farewell and a fuck-you to traditional Hollywood filmmaking.
	7. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford The revival of the Western genre in the 2000s thrilled me to no end, from gems like Open Range and 3:10 to Yuma to this masterpiece. Brad Pitt gives a canny performance as a Jesse James who uses his presence and reputation to control a room. Perhaps even better is Casey Affleck's squirrelly, affecting performance as Robert Ford, whose life must go on after James's has ended. Director Andrew Dominik -- only on his second film -- wraps up the whole package in a truly breathtaking package of myth and space and poetry.
	8. Goodbye Dragon Inn The "Taiwanese New Wave" of the 1990s more or less petered out in the 2000s, though Tsai Ming-liang kept the torch burning with a series of increasingly quirky, almost totally deadpan comedies. My favorite is this underappreciated tribute to cinema. It takes place on the last day of a dilapidated movie theater, showing King Hu's Dragon Inn (1967), while the rain pours outside and drips in through various cracks and crevices. The ticket girl has a crush on the projectionist, and various other little dramas play out as patrons very nearly connect, but eventually go their separate ways. Tsai creates a perfect physical space for this disconnect, damp and a little cramped, and very rarely ventures outside. And I would wager that less than 100 words are spoken throughout, but the weird proceedings add up to a very real sense of beautiful sadness.
	9. Before Sunset Lean and light and almost rushed, but intelligent and bittersweet, Richard Linklater's grown-up sequel to his dream-of-youth original Before Sunrise (1995) had even more on the line emotionally, in an even more direct manner. The two would-be lovers (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy) have so much more to share this time, and -- heartbreakingly -- less time to share it in. That ending, with those last two lines of dialogue, deserves a place in the history of great endings.
	10. Let the Right One In I tried out dozens of movies in this last, #10 slot, but none of them felt quite as right as this Swedish vampire film from director Tomas Alfredson. I saw it only a year ago -- in the midst of last year's awards season rush -- and it didn't even make my ten best list. But as the smoke cleared, I realized that it was unquestionably the horror movie of the decade. Over the past decade horror has become one of my favorite genres, if only because it still has so much potential and because it still does not get much love from the general critical elite. This film has its share of gore and scary imagery, but its real focus is on the tender, slowly evolving friendship between two young people. It's a film I will be revisiting for many years to come.

Runners Up (alphabetical order): A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001, Steven Spielberg, USA), Bright Star (2009, Jane Campion, UK), Broken Flowers (2005, Jim Jarmusch, USA), Crimson Gold (2003, Jafar Panahi, Iran), Flight of the Red Balloon (2007, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan/France), Friday Night (2002, Claire Denis, France), George Washington (2000, David Gordon Green, USA), Gran Torino (2008, Clint Eastwood, USA), The Hurt Locker (2009, Kathryn Bigelow, USA), I'm Going Home (2002, Manoel de Oliveira, France/Portugal) In the Mood for Love (2001, Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong), Memento (2000, Christopher Nolan, UK), Mysterious Object at Noon (2000, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand), The New World (2005, Terrence Malick, USA), No Country for Old Men (2007, Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, USA), Pan's Labyrinth (2006, Guillermo Del Toro, Mexico/Spain), Punch-Drunk Love (2002, Paul Thomas Anderson, USA), Russian Ark (2002, Alexander Sokurov, Russia), Saraband (2005, Ingmar Bergman, Sweden), Shaun of the Dead (2004, Edgar Wright, UK), Spirited Away (2001, Hayao Miyazaki, Japan), 25th Hour (2002, Spike Lee, USA), Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008, Woody Allen, USA), The White Diamond (2004, Werner Herzog, Germany)

Memorable Performances:
Juliette Binoche, Flight of the Red Balloon
Penelope Cruz, Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Laura Dern, Inland Empire
Marcia Gay Harden, Mystic River
Samantha Morton, Morvern Callar
Meryl Streep, Adaptation
Naomi Watts, Mulholland Drive
Johnny Depp, Pirates of the Caribbean
Robert Downey Jr., Iron Man
Ralph Fiennes, Spider
Philip Seymour Hoffman, Capote
Bill Murray, Lost in Translation
Brad Pitt, The Assassination of Jesse James
Adam Sandler, Punch-Drunk Love

December 23, 2009