Martin Schneider writes:
The Village Voice has been publishing that year-end film poll combining the assessments of a few dozen critics since 1999. I enjoy it every year, because I’m a dorky cultural maven type, and it pleases me to see these aesthetic preferences totted up in a list for people to argue over. They love Claire Denis, I love Claire Denis, everybody wins.
This year the big winner was The Hurt Locker, which I enjoyed very much but maybe not as much as these critics. That’s fine, The Hurt Locker was terrific.
The list that has me steamed is the list of the best movies of the decade. After I had studied the list for a little bit, I couldn’t decide whether to conclude that cinema had died during the “Noughts” or that movie critics are stupid—or both.
Here is a list of the top ten finishers:
Mulholland Dr. (10)
In the Mood for Love (5)
The 25th Hour (5)
La Commune (Paris, 1871) (4)
Zodiac (4)
Yi Yi (4)
Dogville (3)
The New World (3)
There Will Be Blood (3)
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (3)
That’s a pretty depressing list, if you ask me, and the other 40 finishers really aren’t any better (which makes sense, if you think about it—they did finish lower). Among those 40 movies are Brian De Palma’s preposterous Femme Fatale and the third Star Wars movie; I’ll let you judge from that how seriously these critics were taking this task.
Let’s go through the top ten, quickly. Mulholland Drive is all kinds of awesome, and it’s not possible to overpraise it; no problem there. Ditto In the Mood for Love, but even there, it may be a bit too “pat” an arthouse fave—it’s great but a little studied. I’ll return to the other second-place winner in a moment. Zodiac was a very impressive movie indeed, and I regard myself as its champion to some degree, but, well, it’s got some problems. Yi Yi was wonderful. There Will Be Blood is a bit like Zodiac, awfully powerful but with serious flaws. The other four movies I haven’t seen, which in itself is fine.
I have to take a moment to address The 25th Hour. That this movie can finish tied for second in a poll of this sort is a terrible condemnation of the current state of film criticism in this country. The 25th Hour came out in 2002, and was directed by Spike Lee. It starred Edward Norton, maybe you remember it. I feel strange directing such ire at the movie, because I really like Spike Lee’s movies, I think he’s a highly underappreciated presence in our film culture, too often damned or derided as “political” or “tendentious” when he’s actually a pretty original and canny director who has few peers.
But The 25th Hour is not very good. It is overlong, overwrought, turgid, and self-important. I’m looking now at Lee’s filmography, and I think I would put it about eighth, of his movies. It’s not a terrible movie, it’s not a mess, it’s an honest attempt to make something powerful. But it doesn’t work, and has little of the panache, lightness, wit, or visual flair that come to mind when you are considering a list of the ten best movies of the past one year or ten years. Having The 25th Man finish second for the 2000-2009 period is quite a bit like stating that Martin Scorsese’s greatest movie is Bringing Out the Dead.
To his credit, J. Hoberman (my favorite film critic of all time), in his introduction to the poll, appears to recognize this ridiculous result when he writes:
The Voice poll, which queries film critics throughout the country, had The Hurt Locker on 54 out of 94 ballots; its margin of victory surpassed the runner-up…by the poll’s largest percentage since David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive swamped Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love back in 2001. (These two movies get a rematch in our film of the decade category, with Mulholland Drive defeating runner-up In the Mood even more decisively this time around; the big news there is that Spike Lee’s The 25th Hour, a weak 25th in the 2002 poll, ties for second place.)
So that’s just baffling.
But more to the point, the list, the full list, is just a disgrace. There are certainly some splendid movies in there, but the overall package is lacking in zest. It is a list that confirms the wisdom of my decision to decrease my movie intake during the decade, and what kind of message is that to send?
After stewing about the list for a spell, I spent a quarter-hour brainstorming to create a list of fun, inventive, interesting, amusing, worthwhile movies that did not make the Voice‘s list at all, and which might—might—elicit a smile from a movie-lover somewhere. I’m not a film critic, I don’t do this for a living, and it took me the time to make a plate of grits (hat tip to My Cousin Vinny, 1992) to slap it together. It’s amazing to me that the people who do do it for a living, given many weeks to think about their opportunity to spread their delight in the medium they so love, are this unable to produce a list that does anything like that.
What follows is not my top-anything list, it’s more like the larval form of one. It is merely a list of movies that would make me want to safeguard the decade’s cinematic treasures rather than throw them in the Gowanus Canal, as the Voice‘s list does. To repeat: not a single one of the poll’s critics saw fit to mention any of these movies.
A History of Violence
Adaptation
Amelie
American Splendor
Beau Travail
Borat
Brokeback Mountain
Donnie Darko
Eastern Promises
Ghost World
In Bruges
Inglourious Basterds
Lost in Translation
Milk
Monsoon Wedding
Munich
No Man’s Land
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Primer
Rachel Getting Married
Sideways
Syriana
Talk to Her
The Assassination of Jesse James Etc.
The Departed
The Fantastic Mr. Fox
The International
The Motorcycle Diaries
The Prestige
The Queen
The Savages
The Squid and the Whale
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
The Triplets of Bellville
The Visitor
This is England
Training Day
Watchmen
Y Tu Mama También
Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I have something queued up to watch on Netflix. Catch you later!