SINCE NOBODY ASKED: MY 39 "MOSTEST" MOVIES OF THE 21st CENTURY (16 YEARS IN...)

A couple of weeks ago the BBC, that well-respected bastion of film culture, revealed its list of the 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century, as determined from the submissions of 177 film critics around the globe. Even more apparently random than the BBC of all entities commissioning such a poll is its timing—such grandiose subjectivity is usually reserved for the big anniversaries, like after 25, or 50, or maybe even after a hundred actual years have passed in a new century. But here we are, 16 years into this new one, and forces are already trying to marshal some sort of groundswell consensus of movie greatness.

Well, it all seems a bit early on, if you ask me. But on the other hand, the BBC didn’t ask me, did they? Frankly, I would have been damned surprised if they had, so much so that I probably would have registered my objections/confusion, however briefly, over the whole enterprise before excitedly going about filling out my ballot. And those that were asked were held to a list of 10 movies from which the ultimate list of 100 would be assembled. How restrictive! The BBC’s top 10 alone features two movies (The Tree of Life and There Will be Blood) that wouldn’t even place in my top 100, and the rest of their top 10 features three that certainly would.

And since I like a silly list as much as the next critic who likes to complain about lists and pretend that she/he doesn’t enjoy making them, I decided to make my own variation on the BBC list. I couldn’t bring myself to label it “greatest” or “best” or anything like that—these are the movies released since 2000 that have meant the most to me and my movie-going experience in those 16 years, so the "mostest," I guess. Nor did I feel compelled to stick to just 10. Like the BBC, I can be random too—if suddenly 2016 is the time we start bloviating about the greatest films of the century, then I can make a list as long as I want. I pick, um…. 39! For extra credit, you can even compare my list with the BBC’s and see for yourself just how out of touch I am with critical consensus! Think of the fun you’ll have declaring what a low-brow jackass I am!

Here then is a list of the 39 movies that have meant the most to me since the advent of the 21^st century, in alphabetical order (linked quotes are from pieces I wrote here at SLIFR):

Antichrist (2009; Lars von Trier)

"And now once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper. I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words, which found no true echo in my heart." - Mary Shelley

"Grief changes shape, but it never ends." - Keanu Reeves

"Chaos reigns!" -- The Fox

Birth (2004; Jonathan Glazer)

"The movie gains strength with each sequence, lending power and emotion to scenes that are staged with absolute clarity of purpose and none of the grandstanding sentimentality that might turn it into, as one writer thoughtlessly claimed, Ghost with pretensions to art and intellect. It’s much easier to write off a movie like Birth with glib, snarky pronouncements like that than it is to engage with the movie on its level and explore some of the questions it asks: What constitutes identity? Is it something innate in us, or is it something projected onto us by others to which we acclimate ourselves, becoming versions of a vision others have of us?"

Boyhood (2014; Richard Linklater)

"Linklater lets the movie sprawl and find its own shape outside of prescribed methods of editing, how he allows it to trickle through the timeline and make room for the sorts of detail that would get sifted out of a more strictly and traditionally dramatic approach. Nothing much beyond the course of everyday experience happens in Boyhood—the movie has also been criticized in some quarters for not being dramatic enough, for being a too generalized portraiture of growing up. Yet the movie captures with alarming sensitivity the way youth, and the way people move through youth toward maturity, makes each decision seem momentous, important, far-reaching, when precisely the opposite may be true."

Captain America: The First Avenger (2011; Joe Johnston)

My favorite Marvel movie, directed by the woefully underappreciated Joe Johnston, who brings wit and feeling to the least of the sort of special effects spectacles he usually directs. Maybe it's simply because of the period setting that this one stands out from all the rest of the Marvel pictures-- it's not beholden to the restrictive mold in which the others are cast. But I think it has more to do with the players-- Chris Evans, Hayley Atwell, Tommy lee Jones, Hugo Weaving, Toby Jones, all great-- and Johnston's sensitivity to them as human beings, not just pawns on the MCU chessboard, that sends this one to the top. (See also Johnston's marvelous epic Hidalgo.)

Chi-raq (2015; Spike Lee)

“We retain his verse to show love for the universe.” - Dolomedes (Samuel L. Jackson)

"Of the strike, Gbowee says, ‘The [sex] strike lasted, on and off, for a few months. It had little or no practical effect, but it was extremely valuable in getting us media attention.’ On and off for a few months? If you can’t find the humor in this line—in this brilliant, powerful women acknowledging that she and the other women who attempted a sex strike, sometimes caved in to their baser desires (because, in the end, it wasn’t the sex strike that was going to help them succeed anyway, and because they also probably just wanted to have sex), there’s a good chance that the humor of Chi-raq was lost on you. Or perhaps, you just didn’t like the damn movie." 

- Shannon Houston, Paste magazine, on Chi-raq 

CSA: Confederate States of America (2005; Kevin Wilmott)

"She chose to disguise President Lincoln in blackface and travel with him along one of the many secret slave routes. When Lincoln scoffed at the plan, Tubman, never one to mince words, reminded him of the huge bounty on his head. She said simply, 'We're both niggers now, Mr. President.'"

-- Talking head interviewed in CSA: The Confederate States of America 

Death Proof (2007; Quentin Tarantino)

"It takes a while to process than there’s a whole lot less futzing around with the scratched-burnt-torn film aesthetic in Death Proof, and the moment you notice it... is the moment you’ll realize you’ve been sucked in by Death Proof as a movie, not just as an elaborate stunt. It is, I think, one of Tarantino’s best films in that he has found a way to fuse the aesthetic of different of drive-in movie archetypes and apply his relentless cinephilia to a movie that is certainly an homage, but more importantly one that expresses the brutal feeling of a born storyteller for his characters."

Femme Fatale (2002; Brian De Palma)

"The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." - Albert Einstein

"That's what noir feels like to me. It feels like some kind of recurring dream, with very strong archetypes operating. You know, the guilty girl being pursued, falling, all kinds of stuff that we see in our dreams all the time." - Brian De Palma

Gerry (2003; Gus Van Sant)

Lost in America...

"I don't think American independent films have ever really been particularly experimental, except for the original guys from the '60s who were huge influences, like Stan Brakhage, Robert Breer, and Stan van der Beek. They were the true independents. But the American independent cinema as it has grown up at Sundance... A lot of films play to college audiences and are a lot of fun, like Clerks or Pulp Fiction. Sometimes, when an audience looking for Pulp Fiction comes to see Gerry, I'm not sure it works out so well." - Gus van Sant

Gett: The Trial of Vivian Amsalem (2015; Ronit Elkabetz, Shlomo Elkabetz)

You shouldn't be able to look away from that face... and the Elkabetz's harrowing courtroom drama plays like a procedural in which there can be no looking away. It might well be subtitled Scenes from the Death of A Marriage.

"It's easy to blame the one who yells. The one who whispers venom is innocent." - Vivian Amsalem

Gosford Park (2001; Robert Altman)

In the midst of his third act of rejuvenation, the director and screenwriter Julian Fellowes evoke ensemble glories of the past and nod presciently toward future cultural phenomenon Downton Abbey. Altman seems more like Altman here than he ever did in overpraised "comebacks" like The Player or Short Cuts, more free from the pressure of "being Altman." I think Gosford Park is the most purely entertaining picture of the director's late period-- it's an old man's movie that betrays no graying of spirit or energy.  

Grizzly Man (2005; Werner Herzog)

"What haunts me, is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food. But for Timothy Treadwell, this bear was a friend, a savior." - Werner Herzog

Holy Motors (2012; Leos Carax)

"The experience of Holy Motors is unlike any I had at the movies this year; it tickled me with a sensation of giddiness I’d imagine is akin to being a balloon loosed from the grasp of a child, buffeted by currents and rising ever higher, anticipating the moment when the pressure of the air puts a sudden end to its escape, and not caring about when that moment comes. Holy Motors embodies an aim that is oft paid lip service to by filmmakers, yet rarely actually achieved-- the taking of the audience on a journey where each new step, each new image and, of course, the final destination is impossible to anticipate, where seemingly incongruous and random juxtapositions of experience end up feeling unquestionably alive and connected to a uniquely cinematic nervous system."

Idiocracy (2006; Mike Judge)

"Idiocracy’s tendency to democratize stupidity is its saving grace— everybody is an equal-opportunity doofus, even our hero, who can’t believe his own level of condescension towards the denizens of this dumb society largely because he knows in his heart that he isn’t all that bright either... Judge displays some genuine empathy for these hopeless dopes, and perhaps it’s his attitude towards these folks—ambivalence mixed with appreciation for their neutralized potential as human beings—that sparks the heart of this movie while at the same time it confuses its audience (and its studio backers) as to just how to see them, as victims or perpetrators of the movie’s central problem."

In the Mood for Love (2001; Wong Kar-wai)

“He remembers those vanished years. As though looking through a dusty window pane, the past is something he could see, but not touch. And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct.” - Wong Kar-wai

"You notice things if you pay attention." - Su Li-zhen Chan (Maggie Cheung)

Inglourious Basterds (2009; Quentin Tarantino)

"In Inglourious Basterds, the war is capsulized in classically mounted, sometimes agonizingly drawn-out bouts of conversation and horrific release... Each chapter is built around conversations between antagonists that illustrate the methodology of warfare, the tantalizingly twisted thickets of wordplay, in which language itself is often central to deception or exposure, followed by an explosion of violence during which as many things go ghastly wrong as may go right."

Inside Llewyn Davis (2013; Joel and Ethan Coen)

"Those expecting an earnest documentary approach to the cultural climate informing Inside Llewyn Davis, one which precisely lays out the scene and the means by which we are to understand it from a historical perspective, will inevitably be put off by the Coens’ typically perverse challenge to understand a landmark moment in musical history from the point of view of a fly on the wall. We are, after all, inside Llewyn Davis, a place where music has lost its meaning as a social tool, as a means of reciprocal human connection, or as anything other than the nearly abstract expression of pure talent and the desire to be recognized."

Jackass: The Movie (2002; Jeff Tremayne)

I saw J:TM when it was first released, just about two years after my first daughter was born and a few months before my second would arrive-- in other words, just at the point when I was supposed to be putting away childish things in favor of focusing on the responsibilities of parenthood, of being a true grown-up. So of course the Jackass troupe's aesthetic of self-destructive arrested development and barely suppressed homoerotic shenanigans was just the ticket. I can't shake the feeling there's some socially significant madness within this bodily-harm-as-performance-art methodology. But when Johnny Knoxville (made up as a deranged senior citizen) gets kicked out of a mini-mart for relentless shoplifting and shouts indignantly at the shop's owner "I was Lon Chaney's lover!", who cares about significance? I just like to laugh.

Letters from Iwo Jima (2006; Clint Eastwood)

"From headquarters. We regret that we are unable to send reinforcements to Iwo at this time. We earnestly hope you will fight honorably and die for your country."

Without ever discounting the lionization of the Greatest Generation, Eastwood offers an enormous and overwhelming act of empathy for the men fighting on the other side. Interestingly, this was a far more convincing and deeply felt film than its companion piece, Flags of Our Fathers.

Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003; Joe Dante)

"The theatrical cartoons that (Warner Bros.) produced after 1960, which I remember having to suffer through at the movies, were just abominable. They weren’t funny, they were badly animated, they were sub-television level and almost everything they’ve done since is just a pale shadow of what the great cartoons were. I can tell you from experience that the people currently running Warner Bros. have no interest or understanding of that period or those characters. I was making a movie for them with those characters and they did not want to know about those characters. They didn’t want to know why Bugs Bunny shouldn’t do hip-hop. It was a pretty grim experience all around." - Joe Dante

All that said, I think LT:BIA  captures the Termite Terrace spirit remarkably well, flaws and all-- it's exhaustively, and exhaustingly, funny, and it was the first movie my then-three-year-old daughter and I bonded over. (We saw it opening night and three more times together in the theater!) I understand Dante's frustration, but this end-user will always be grateful for the Warners legacy he managed to conjure on screen.

Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003; Thom Andersen)

"The film's second section, "The City as Character," considers films such as Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity, films that, for better or worse, contributed to the character of Los Angeles and how it was perceived throughout the world. It was Wilder's film, Andersen asserts, that convinced the general population that Los Angeles was the world capital of murder and adultery, a perception that provided the film industry with the white-hot nucleus of a campaign of exploitation that continues to this day. Wilder, throughout his career, Andersen suggests, was not himself interested in what made Los Angeles a city, but rather in what made it not like the other cities he knew, and therefore he may have had a keener eye for geographical detail as a result."

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015; George Miller)

"Mad Max: Fury Road seems like an epic summing up of everything that has ever compelled Miller to put images on film, and the use of similar words in their titles will serve to remind viewers, if they could possibly forget, which summer action spectacular truly embodies the furious. Essentially one long, extended chase, Fury Road is so dynamically, startlingly choreographed that you begin to feel as though Miller himself is possessed by the glorious promise of unchecked propulsion, directing his picture almost as penance for, and an exorcism of the inertia that plagued Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome."

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015; Guy Ritchie)

"Given the ugly hash he’d previously made of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective in two misconceived, cluttered and cacophonous features, the last thing I expected from Guy Ritchie’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E. was anything that could be remotely described as visual wit or elegance. But maybe even more so in this age, when bloated and degraded blockbusters are the multitudinous coins of the realm, a big-budget spy picture conceived initially as just another nostalgic cash cow has the capacity to surprise us when it looks to classic forms and attitudes not as something to be slavishly, crassly replicated but instead to be used as a comment on where the genre is now, and why it’s so often no longer as much as fun as it could be."

Maps to the Stars (2015; David Cronenberg)

This might be the scariest Cronenberg movie since The Fly. It's certainly the director's funniest ever. This is an RPG shot straight into the black heart of the Hollywood dream machine, where the resulting explosion splatters nightmares onto every clean surface. The uproariously mean-spirited, vengeful tenor of the director's collaboration with satirist Bruce Wagner is contagious, and by the end I was convinced that if the day of the locust wasn't already nigh, it well should be. What a double bill this would make with Seed of Chucky!

Meek’s Cutoff (2011; Kelly Reichardt)

"Kelly Reichardt’s beautiful, otherworldly Meek’s Cutoff seems not only distanced by how much time has passed since it washed over my eyes and through my head; it seems distanced by its very existence. Reichardt frames her film as if we were looking through a stereopticon at opaque images piped directly from the past... The movie’s images may be opaque, but they are pointedly not sepia-toned—Reichardt’s images are immediate and harshly lovely, attendant to the tactility of the desert, in long-shot long takes as well as lingering close-ups, and sensitive to the tension of the unrelenting sun, as well as that of the creeping nightfall that surrounds these travelers who know not where they’re really going."

No Country for Old Men (2007; Joel and Ethan Coen)

"As for America’s innocence, it’s hard to truck with the notion of a country built on slavery, genocide and sustained systematic economic and social oppression as having much of a claim to anything coming close to it. No Country for Old Men resonates with the strains of mythology we’ve built up as a nation in order to close our eyes and hope that when we open them, Anton Chigurh will have walked away from the coin toss, advising us not to put our lucky quarter in our pockets, for fear of mixing it up with our loose change and turning it into just another quarter. Which it is."

O.J.: Made in America (2016; Ezra Edelman)

"However obvious the evidence may have been against him, however bungled by prosecution the apparently slam-dunk case ended up being, the Simpson verdict was perceived by many blacks across the nation, according to the evidence and testimony accrued in Edelman’s film, as a huge emotional release, payback to a system that repeatedly failed to provide justice for the likes of Eula Love, Latasha Harlins and Rodney King. And it’s to Edelman’s credit that a conclusion like that one has its place in the context of the larger conversation O.J.: Made in America engenders, neither summarily dismissed nor thoughtlessly endorsed but instead woven into the expressive, reverberating fabric of this unusually evocative, angering and enlightening work."

Only Lovers Left Alive (2014; Jim Jarmusch)

"The possibility of having a historical overview was really interesting to me, because there’s a point where Mia Wasikowska’s character calls them snobs, when they’re throwing her out of their house, which on a certain level they are. It’s important it’s in the film, in a way. But who wouldn’t be considered a snob if you’d been alive for a thousand yeas and had all of this knowledge and accumulated experience? That’s ten, twenty times as much as any normal person. The idea of seeing history in a timeline by having lived through it, but from the margins, from the shadows: observing it half in secret is very interesting to me. I’ve always been drawn to outsider type of characters, so what more perfect shadowy inhabitants of the margins are there, than vampires? Who are not undead monsters, by the way, they’re humans that have been transformed and now have the possibility of immortality, but are reliant, like junkies, on blood." - Jim Jarmusch

Perfect Sense (2011; David Mackenzie)

"Mackenzie conjures horror without pyrotechnics and a glorious, agnostic acceptance of the ultimate cold comfort, when you know someone is near after all the lights have gone out, even when your body can no longer tell you for sure. It’s an apocalyptic romance, moving to the unchartable interior poetry of the heartbeat, which simultaneously holds court, and clasps hands, with impending darkness."

Premium Rush (2012; David Koepp)

“(The “Wilee Vision” scenes, when the camera freezes and we see Wilee decide which route to take through an intersection) were the one time when we were allowed to use effects — allowed by our own rules, that is. We wanted the movie to be a stunt movie, not a CG movie, and wanted it to be about what well-trained actors and stuntmen can do physically, and to have that joy of watching something like an athletic performance as well as the usual performance. So we didn’t want to use effects, but in those scenes, because we were in his head space and it was a fantasy anyway, we decided to give ourselves some latitude and figure out a cinematic way to show the decision-making process a person goes through in those moments. Obviously there are several different components in those shots, so you shoot bit-by-bit and assemble the shot.” – David Koepp

Room 237 (2013; Rodney Ascher)

Room 237 has been criticized for elevating the nitpicking mania of marginalized viewers to the level of film criticism, and it is true that there’s a certain similarity between what goes on here and the sort of geeky-smart exegesis found in modern video essays, ones produced by reliably intelligent writers as well as the kookier fringes of the fanboy brigade. But what Ascher does here hardly negates 32 years of serious consideration of a movie that by no means holds a consensus of quality either among critics or the public. Some of the defensive railings against the film from reputable critics imply a presumption that Ascher lends credulity to either the notion that the theories in his film belong on the same platform as traditional film criticism, or to the veracity of the ideas themselves. But what makes Ascher’s approach admirable is his refusal to editorialize about his subjects, to use his movie to demonstrate a hipster’s directorial aloofness, a constant invitation to chortle at the plausibility of what’s being offered. The invitation is not to award these theorists the credibility of seasoned film critics but instead to allow the audience the luxury of deciding for themselves how to process the wildly conflicting information, a method strangely similar, if the interviewees are to be believed, to the one which Kubrick employs in his own film.

Seed of Chucky (2004; Don Mancini)

"...one of the more audacious chapters in horror movie franchise history, stretching the restrictive casing of familiarity until it could hold no more, giggling like mad as the whole thing exploded all over the audience, its star and the system which helped bring it to life. That said, Seed of Chucky is hardly a flippant, punk “fuck you” to fans of the series or to horror movie conventions. It plays with those conventions, sure, and it also delivers the scares-- just not precisely always on the expected beats. However, at its black little heart the movie is a twisted love letter to Hollywood that’s as close in spirit to Billy Wilder as it is to the slasher rule book-- if, that is, Wilder could have ever conceived of a plastic doll serial killer collecting a sperm sample, to be used in the nonconsensual artificial insemination of a pulchritudinous descendant of Norma Desmond, by masturbating over an issue of Fangoria."

A Serious Man (2009; Joel and Ethan Coen)

"When the truth is found to be lies
And all the joy within you dies
Don't you want somebody to love
Don't you need somebody to love
Wouldn't you love somebody to love
You better find somebody to love

Your eyes, I say your eyes may look like his
Yeah, but in your head, baby, I'm afraid you don't know where it is
Don't you want somebody to love
Don't you need somebody to love
Wouldn't you love somebody to love
You better find somebody to love"

- Darby R. Slick

"Embrace the mystery." - Clive Park's father

Speed Racer (2008; The Wachowski Brothers)

"Oddly enough, it was seeing Jean-Luc Godard’s similarly irreverent pop culture mash-up Pierrot le fou on the big screen a month or so before Speed Racer bowed that best prepared me for what the Wachowskis had in store for those few of low expectations who passed through the opening-day turnstiles. Like Godard, the Wachowskis integrate their pop-culture-soaked point of view on the material into the very skeleton of the filmmaking itself; each cut, either jarring or graphically continuous, adds a degree of emotion that can blindside a viewer with its candy-coated beauty or with a flurry of gasp-inducing disorientation. Any of the movie’s spectacular, gravity-defying race scenes qualify for such a description, but the movie’s triumph is that it has infused its entire visual approach with the same intensity, and the result is not nausea, as has been widely reported, but instead a kind of transporting, transcendent euphoria."

 

True Grit (2010; Joel and Ethan Coen)

“Of course, True Grit is a Western, but we never considered our film a classical Western, and honestly never thought about genre at all. We didn’t talk about John Ford or Sergio Leone, even though we like their films. Really, we were driven only by our enthusiasm for Charles Portis’s book. We loved the language in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country, which is really about the region, while in True Grit it’s more about period: people did speak more formally and floridly. But I think that the great thing about the book is this compelling first-person narrative, from a girl so young, and we wanted to put the audience in her mind, so they’d see the story through her eyes. The music was important there, too. Choosing that hymn (“Leaning on the Everlasting Arms”) was important, because that Protestant attitude is such a part of who Mattie is. The music speaks of faith and certitude, and that she has in spades.” – Ethan Coen 

25^th Hour (2002; Spike Lee)

"(I chose not to ignore the reality of 9/11) because I am a New Yorker and a couple of studios had a chance to show stills of the WTC but they chose to punk out. The project was based on the bottom line. I don’t think they should fear the sensitivity of the movie going audience. I don’t think Spider-Man would have made a nickel less if they would have kept those images in, but that’s their decision and on this film I was able to implement my decision and I would like to add that the decision regarding 9/11 was not a big decision. I made that in a millisecond. I knew I was going to do; I just had to think how I was going to do it. That was a much bigger and harder decision because I didn’t want to offend anyone and we still knew there was a way to deal with it in a tasteful way but not run away from what happened. We did not want to do something that looked like it was slapped on.” – Spike Lee

Under the Skin (2014; Jonathan Glazer)

"It begins with an act of interstellar birth, preverbal linguistic formations coursing almost subliminally on the soundtrack, and ends elementally, in fire and under the calming descent of snow, its gaze pointedly pleadingly back in the direction from whence it started. Between these points Under the Skin fashions an alluring near-perfect expression of the elusive, mysterious task of defining humanity, as well as chilling glimpses into the secret methodology of observation and harvesting of that humanity which leads to destruction and, perhaps, transcendence."

The Witch (2016; Robert Eggers)

"The Witch operates on such a level of visual and tonal confidence that I often wondered if maybe it wasn’t Eggers who was possessed. Outside of a tendency to rely overly on the atonal crescendos of the score to build, and then momentarily dissipate dread, the movie barely makes a misstep. According to the writer-director, the sort of arcane yet lyrical dialogue with which the movie luxuriates—“Thou shalt be home by candle-time tomorrow”-- was derived almost entirely from period court transcripts and historical accounts of alleged witchery. As righteous as that sort of pursuit of authenticity might be, it’s the mingling of it with the director’s desire to stir an ambiguous response in his audience, to unnerve viewers who may be atheistically convinced of the folly of religious conviction with the possibility of supernatural influence, which fuels the movie’s most profoundly frightening impulses."

Zodiac (2007; David Fincher)

"Histories of ages past

Unenlightened shadows cast
Down through all eternity
The crying of humanity

'Tis then when the Hurdy Gurdy Man
Comes singing songs of love
Then when the Hurdy Gurdy Man
Comes singing songs of love"

- Donovan Leitch

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