8. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004, Michel Gondry)
Jim Carrey can act?! With Eternal Sunshine, Carrey goes completely against anything he has done before by playing an entirely serious role, in a film which is fairly offbeat and strange.
The story revolves around a romance between Joel and Clementine who simultaneously have their memories of each other wiped after a particularly nasty breakup. Directed by stylish ad-guru Michel Gondry and written by Being John Malkovich-genius Charlie Kaufman, this is a heartbreaking and emotional tale of troubled love.
Kaufman’s superbly written screenplay manages to flesh out the characters in such a short space of time, we feel like we really know the two lead characters.
Also, the film has a beautiful cyclical structure and at the end, when everything all fits together, you see why Kaufman got the Oscar he deserved. Gondry is a marvel too, wonderfully handling the relationships between the characters.
But, it is the visual look of the film that really sets it apart from others. All of Gondry’s effects are done in camera, which must be a bastard to construct but on screen it looks like a dream and it has physicality to it. More importantly, it never shows off or distracts from the story.
7. Inception (2010, Christopher Nolan)
Christopher Nolan’s bold, audacious and unique intellectual blockbuster is the wake up call of the decade to mainstream filmmakers who no longer have an excuse to think that only dumbo franchise movies will make significant sums of money.
Nolan as a filmmaker has always been excellent at combining arthouse ideas with a big budget sensibility. Some of his storytelling asks an audience to really keep up, but at the end it pays off.
I will also take this opportunity to throw in my theory about the end of the film. As those who have seen it will know, Nolan cuts to black before we see Cobb’s spinning top topple, thus leaving us unsure as to whether or not Cobb is still dreaming or not.
My response is that whether it falls or not is not what’s important. What is important is that Cobb ignores it, for the first time in the film he doesn’t look at the top and for the first time we see the children’s faces. He has taken a ‘leap of faith’ and for the first time Cobb is convinced he has arrived home.
6. No Country for Old Men (2007, Joel & Ethan Coen)
Based upon the novel by Cormac McCarthy, the Coen brothers tackle this pulpy, yet oddly unconventional thriller by turning it into one of the decade’s most provocative films. I do love the Coen Brothers and who would have known this decade would produce some of the best films of their career.
The film is largely a very simple and stripped down genre film, and in the hands of any other director, this project could easily have become just another chase movie. But under the eyes of the brothers it becomes something else.
Taking a lot from the source material, the film beautifully portrays the central thematic idea that the world is moving on and becoming a more violent place for elder generations to keep up, they lose their place in society. Violence has become a young man’s game.
If you don’t enjoy looking for allegory in films then there is a masterfully constructed thriller inside this too, a film which knows how to perfectly crank up tension by keeping things composed and quiet.
A deep, thought provoking and wonderfully engrossing picture.
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