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JR'S TOP 10 FILMS OF THE DECADE:
2000-2009
2019,
2019-2010,
2019 MID YEAR,
2018,
2018 MID YEAR,
2017,
2016,
2015,
2014,
2013,
2012,
2011,
2010,
2009,
2009-2000,
2006
"Good Old JR" Jim Rutkowski
weighs in with his picks for the TOP 10 films of the decade |
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THE BEST OF THE DECADE...
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Movie Reviews by:
Jim "Good Old JR" Rutkowski
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10. Where The Wild Things
Are
9. Minority Report
8. Once
7. A.I.
6. United 93
5. Spirited Away
4. Zodiac
3. The Departed
2. Eternal Sunshine of the
Spotless Mind
1. There Will Be Blood |
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I may have to sue Comic Book Man for emotional
distress. Compiling the yearly list is something I have become used to. But to
whittle down literally thousands of films to a list of 10 is downright painful.
Still, when all was said and done, these ten films were the ones that sprang to
my mind fairly quickly. Yet so many others that I personally love and revisit
time and again had to be left off. So to ease my cinematic conscience, I have
included a large list of honorable mentions at the end. Tastes change. That is
because we, as individuals change. Even in small ways, our perspectives alter.
So in a few years (or even months) if I were to revisit this list, I have no
doubt that the placing of some these would change. But for now, these are the
picks. I won't try to encapsulate what the state of movies were through this
entire decade. Except to say that, I think my list represents individual voices
as well as those rare times when commerce and art can be completely compatible. |
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#10-WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE |
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"...manages to bring a beloved classic to the screen-in ways that are
engaging and powerful.”
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Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers took Maurice Sendak’s
restless and surpassingly simple picture book and turned it into a dark and
complicated fable, one of the most piercingly realistic cinematic treatments of
childhood ever made. The film’s technical brilliance is almost casual — quietly
seductive rather than dazzling — and its high spirits are colored by a
melancholy that grownups may find too sad to bear.. |
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#9-MINORITY REPORT
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A pinnacle for Spielberg and star Tom Cruise, this
near-future sci-fi depicts a world of psychic crime- stoppers but is rooted in
old fashioned film noir. Arguably the best escapist entertainment the director
has produced in two decades. Minority Report rivals some of Spielberg's top
adventure/science fiction epics, such as Close Encounters and Raiders of the
Lost Ark. What's more, it affirms that, even in the 2000s, movies do not have to
be brain-dead to be exciting |
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#8-ONCE |
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This low-key story of a busker on the streets of Dublin (The Frames’ Glen
Hansard) who meets a girl that digs his songs is one of the most heartfelt
celebrations of music ever filmed. Its handheld realism is the cinematic
equivalent of a great live show—a palette-cleanser that strips away layers of
studio lacquer in favor of warm tones and deeply soulful characters. While the
film seems slight at first, the method that Carney uses to de-construct what we
know as the romantic musical, slowly begins to find it's way into the heart, so
that by the end, the viewer is involved on a very deep level with these
characters..
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#7-A.I. |
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"...A.I. is superior"
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Realizing a long-in-the-works project left unfinished by the late Stanley
Kubrick, Steven Spielberg may not have made the film Kubrick would have made,
but he stayed true to his friend’s obsession with how humans react when pushed
to extremes. The film doesn’t focus on a single character challenged by
isolation, war, violence, or jealousy, but turns instead to a creation whose
very existence raises uneasy questions about what makes us human: a robotic boy
who marks the edges of humanity by almost, but never quite, perfectly imitating
his creators. An outcast from a family (and species) where he never fit in,
Haley Joel Osment’s Danny travels the border country between humans and
machines, finally finding the place where that border has no meaning, only to
discover loneliness, isolation, delusion, and death.
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#6-UNITED 93 |
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"... powerful not only in the way it provides hope through the actions
of a few unlikely heroes, but in its ability to take us back through time to a
day many of us would prefer not to remember..."
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For Americans, it’s almost impossible to watch this film more than once. And for
a cineaste, it’s vital to see it at least once. So rarely is the art of film
employed so powerfully in the service of deeply, painfully felt communal
tragedy; more often than not, one overwhelms the other, or does disservice to
it. So, it’s something of a miracle that, so soon after 9/11, Hollywood, of all
places, could produce this movie. The only reason not to watch it would be
because you can’t..
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#5-SPIRITED AWAY
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You may have a noticed surprising absence of Pixar work on this list despite the
fact that no company has made more money, impressed more critics, and pleased
more audiences than the bastard love child of Steve Jobs and John Lasseter.
True, each Pixar film is a gem in its own right, and it’s widely rumored that
the devil has gross points on Lasseter’s soul. However, if you’re talking
animation with an unparalleled power to provoke pure wonder and wide-eyed
enchantment, even Lasseter would gladly bow down to Hayao Miyazaki. Watching
this film is not only to feel like a child again, it’s to dream like a child
again.
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#4-ZODIAC
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David Fincher is notorious for his hyper-demanding, Kubrickian pursuit of
perfection, where even the simplest shot can demand a hundred takes. With that
in mind, rarely have filmmaker and subject been as compatible as in Fincher’s
Zodiac, a mesmerizing procedural that follows the still-unsolved case of a Bay
Area serial killer all the way down an obsessive-compulsive rabbit hole. What
begins as a gorgeous evocation of a region under the grips of a cryptic serial
killer—the opening, from the fireworks on July 4, 1969 to the haunting “Hurdy
Gurdy Man” sequence that accompanies the first murder, is as good as it
gets—becomes all the more fascinating once the case goes cold and only a
miserable few can’t bring themselves to let it go. It’s an obsessive movie about
the nature of obsession, made by a man who can’t distance himself from the
puzzle any more easily than his bleary-eyed characters can.
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#3-the DEPARTED |
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"Scorsese’s movies usually have an operatic quality; this one reaches
the heights of Shakespearean tragedy.”
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Martin Scorsese finally won his Oscar for this crime classic that some felt was
too old-school to be profound. Watch it again, doubters, and this time pay
attention. By casting Leonardo DiCaprio as a cop pretending to be a hood and
Matt Damon doing the opposite, Scorsese hit us with harsh glimpses of how
corruption starts in childhood. Damon's character was hooked at 12 when a local
hood (Jack Nicholson in full Jack glory) bought him off with groceries. This
uncompromised vision of a society rotting from inside remains a triumphant
bruiser of a film. Even in a decade when Scorsese scored with Gangs of New York
and The Aviator, The Departed was his personal best.
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#2-ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND |
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PA film is many things, among them a defiance of mortality and a hedge against
the fading of memory. All films—from the best to the worst—say something about
the way we thought and acted and felt at a particular time and in a particular
place. But they’re also artful lies, constructed realities that bend the world
into a shape guided by the obsessions of those who make them. (Or the commercial
interests of the marketplace, or a momentary whim.) In this, they’re much like
memories, which act more subjectively and self-servingly than any film. Painful
rejections get blurred. Estranged friends fall victim to careless erasures. We
can’t remake the past, but we constantly try to make it a place in which we’re
more comfortable living. The Charlie Kaufman-scripted film takes this process to
an absurd, moving extreme by positing a world in which technology facilitates
our ability to smooth out our past, eliding over the events that hurt us, and
removing the people who did the hurting. It’s a freedom that comes, as the leads
played by Kate Winslet and a never-better Jim Carrey discover, at a considerable
cost. It’s the rare film that shows us who we are now and who we’re likely, for
better or worse, forever to be.
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#1-THERE WILL BE BLOOD |
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Classic, innovative, and totally insane, Paul Thomas Anderson’s masterpiece
drinks every other movie’s milkshake. It’s also the great critique of the
American character at the start of this century. Anderson stripped away all
illusions and forced us to confront our age’s win-at-all-costs ethos with his
brutal, touching story of a California oilman who gains the world and loses his
son. It’s not an easy piece to swallow, but like a flaming oil derrick lighting
the night sky, it inspires awe, fear, and respect. (And watch carefully for the
tender sadness of a flashback that makes you feel pity for a psychopath.) There
Will Be Blood may still be ahead of its time, but one day, we may well speak of
it in the same hushed tones we use for Citizen Kane, The Treasure of the Sierra
Madre, Lawrence of Arabia, and The Godfather. Bowling to Brahms’s violin
concerto will never be the same again. |
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In alphabetical order, these are the honorable mentions...
25th Hour
Amelie
BORAT
CHILDREN OF MEN
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Grizzly Man
LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA
Millions
MOMENTO
Mulholland Drive
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
Oldboy
PAN'S
LABYRINTH
Talk To Her
The Bridhe
The DARK
KNIGHT
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
The HURT LOCKER
The Visitor
UP
WALL--E
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Images © Copyright 2019 by their respective owners No rights given or
implied by Alternate Reality, Incorporated
Review © 2019 Alternate Reality, Inc.
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OTHER REVIEWS... |
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(aka "Old Reviews")
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