This list was made for a couple of different reasons - first of all, in response to the Entertainment Weekly list of the New Classics in film, music, TV, etc. That list stretched all the way back to 1982, which I thought was a little silly, since it's pretty much understood that movies like "Pulp Fiction", "Goodfellas", "Blue Velvet" and the like are venerated classics. There's really no need to re-venerate them, since everyone had a year/decade/century/millenium-closing list back in 2000. It seems like the real question is about any "great" films produced in the 8 2/3 years since that time. More personally, 2000 was the year that I first had movie reviews produced in the Sac City Express and the News and Review, and it was when I initially started considering myself a quasi-professional critic. Thus, these are essentially the 40 best movies that have been released since I became a working critic. I would leave to hear which films you feel that I should or shouldn't have included here, especially anything obscure I might not have seen.
A couple of things to note - for the purposes of expediency, I included all three "Lord of the Rings" as one entity; however, I counted "Kill Bill" as two separate volumes and "Grindhouse" as one amorphous Experience. In all cases, it only served to boost the rankings of these films, and anyway it's my list and I can do what I want.
1) The Man Who Wasn't There (pictured above)
2) Lord of the Rings trilogy
3) About Schmidt
4) Requiem For a Dream
5) Kill Bill, Vol. 1
6) The Grindhouse Experience
7) The Rules of Attraction (pictured below)
8) Memento
9) I'm Not There
10) Bully
11) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
12) There Will Be Blood
13) Talk to Her
14) Punch-Drunk Love
15) Zodiac
16) The Prestige
17) The Squid and the Whale
18) Sexy Beast
19) Far From Heaven
20) City of God
21) Little Children
22) The Royal Tenenbaums
23) No Country For Old Men
24) 5X2
25) Borat
26) Before Sunset
27) Bad Education
28) Black Book
29) Team America - World Police
30) What Lies Beneath
31) Nine Queens
32) The Dreamers
33) Unbreakable
34) The Pianist
35) The Departed
36) Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
37) Storytelling
38) The 40 Year-Old Virgin
39) The Secret Lives of Dentists
40) American Psycho
Monday, August 25, 2008
The Top 40 Films of the Millenium
Produced by DB at 8:00 AM
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6 comment cards:
Will you leave this stuff up while on hiatus? Because I will need to refer to this list often while you are out tasting cake* or whatever the engaged do.
Gbomb
*Um, get something good. ok?
Darcey would probably kill me if I gave away any details, but rest assured that our Freeport Bakery cake will be some ballin'-ass shit.
-DB
very interesting. I liked About Schmidt a lot, too. You have given me the confidence to proudly proclaim that I like a later Jack Nicholson movie.
What about "The Departed"? And then there's...yeah, that's all I got. Actually, "Blood and Wine" was a pretty good little film.
-DB
I thought he was the weak link in The Departed. But he's been in some fucking great movies so his later career is forgivable.
Yeah, there is no doubt that aside from "About Schmidt" and arguably "The Departed", Nicholson has been phoning it in for the last couple of decades. It's just too bad that he hasn't made a ghastly art of his apathy like Brando did.
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