2005: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (Best of the Noughties: Lists and Suggestions #10)

Call me daft, but maybe the plot of this crime comedy was a little too clever for me: I found it hard to follow. Never mind that, though, because with Robert Downey jr., fast-paced, witty dialogue and a corpse being peed on, it works well enough on a minute-by-minute basis, though it's not quite The Last Boy Scout. (7)

2002: The Pianist (Best of the Noughties Lists and Suggestions #8)

Yes, it deals with grave matters, but let's not fall victim to the pro-problem bias in movie ratings, but instead point out that this film, which is decent overall, suffers from decorative cinematography, grave structural problems (after a good beginning) coupled with the fact that it's hard to make a good film about someone who is on is own (has it ever been done?) and Adrien Brody's eyebrows. (6)

2003: Vozvrashcheniye (The Return) (Best of the Noghties Lists and Suggestions #7)

Two boys meet their father for the first time for years after he has been away without explanation. When he takes them on a fishing trip, and his sons and the audience wonder about his past, it quickly turns out he's not your modern "let's discuss why you and I disagree" type of dad. Photographed with a heavy emphasis on the green-grey part of the colour spectrum, the film confirms westerners stereotypes of Russia as beautifully bleak. Though not too slow, this movie is not for you if you like yours moving at a breakneck pace, and it's not your Saturday night feelgood film either. Maybe most remindful of Jarmush's Dead Man, but set in contemporary Russia, shot in colour, and better. (7)

2007: Zodiac (Best of the Noughties: Lists and Suggestions #6)

Zodiac is a film about the real serial killer of the same nickname and, like most of those films, it has someone else at its center. In this case it's Paul Avery, a cartoonist whose newspaper receives mail from the killer. Not unlike Spike Lee's Summer of Sam (but better), the first 90 minutes or so of this 160 minutes film chronicle the mood in the San Francisco area where the killer plies his trade, while Avery tries to find out who the killer is. And then - the murders just stop. The rest of the film is concerned with Avery's attempt to prove his guesses about the identity of the killer were right - a kind of man on a mission to make a point story.

So, it's basically two films. That worked very well for Vertigo, arguably less well for Psycho, and it doesn't work here at all. Which is a shame: Use of music, acting and, first and foremost, the production design are excellent. One just wishes the parties responsible had had a better story to work with. (6.5)

2003: Kill Bill, Vol. 1 (Best of the Noughties: Lists and Suggestions #5)

There's too much fighting in this film. Why can't these people just get along? (5.5)

2007: There Will Be Blood (Best of the Noughties Lists and Suggestions #4)

Paul Thomas Anderson made Magnolia and Boogie Nights, two of the great movies of the 1990s, as well as the not-quite-as-good-but-severely-underrated/criminally overlooked Punch-Drunk Love. There Will Be Blood is his shot at teaching Orson Welles a thing or two concerning films about American magnates. On the upside, we have Robert Elswit's beautiful cinematography, some memorable dialogue-driven scenes and a very good performance from Paul Dano as the fanatic preacher Eli Sunday (admittedly the kind of role that makes it easy for a good actor to shine). On the downside, however, the film is too slow in a way that, say, 2001 or Once upon a Time in America aren't, and the fifteen-year break in the narrative about two hours into the 150-minutes-film is a simple flaw rather than some bold artistic scoop. Most importantly, however, we never really get to know the film's main character's character. To paraphrase Steve Sailer's view: It is obvious that There Will Be Blood is made by a superior filmmaker. But. (7/10)

Films Not Finished: Best of the Noughties Lists and Suggestions #3

Donnie Darko, Into the Wild, Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi, Serenity, Y Tu Mama Tambien, Yi Yi

The Best Films of the Noughties: Intro

Everybody has a "best films of the noughties" list and they all suck.

So here comes mine. Earlier this year, I asked readers of the other blog to provide me with the titles of movies which ought to be considered for a best of the noughties list - thanks for responses! Having excluded films actually from the 90s, those I had already seen, those I knew I did not wat to see and documentaries and after adding the movies from this incarnation of the IMDb 2000-2009 Top 15 and the few 2000s films that made it onto the TSPTD list of the 1000 most acclaimed pictures in history I didn't know, as well as a few other titles I thought might make my top ten, I came up with a list of 29 films to consider. Of those I started 26 and finished 20. None of them actually made the list.

I have already reviewed two of those (Where the Wild Things are and Avatar) and will post reviews of the remaining 22 (preceded by an enumeration of the films I didn't finish) throughout the coming weeks. I'll post reviews of the actual top ten one at a time on Sundays and Wednesdays, starting tonight.

For the purposes of this list, a film is from the 2000s if it was generally released in theatres anywhere in the world for the first time in one of the years in question - festivals don't count (hence #7 counts as a 2000 movie). We're talking about fictional films of at least 45 mins. length. New versions of older films don't qualify - no Apocalypse Now Redux (which otherwise would certainly have made the list).

When I call this a list of the best or the greatest films of the decade it should be understood that we're talking about (a) the best of the subset of films I actually saw (b) according to my own personal taste - it emphatically is not a list of the most important or innovative, let alone the most popular or best-reviewed films.

Follow using the Best of the Noughties and the Best of the Noughties: Lists and Suggestions tags.

2009: Where the Wild Things Are

Spike Jonze's film about the mildly unruly boy Max's adventures in a land of benevolent monsters manages some moments of beauty and is otherwise professionally done (although Jonze should have cut down on the shaky camera in my view), but my enjoyment of the film was marred by observing how right down to the last stain on Max's face the product was painstakingly geared towards the target audience - not young boys, mind you, but the kinds of parents that don't allow plastic toys in their homes and will no doubt reach the conclusion that this is the kind of film young boys ought to like. The boys themselves, one imagines, would rather watch Transformers 2. (6)

2009: Avatar (in 3-D)

The main thing most people are going to watch this for is the new 3-D technology and this works really well. I didn't find it as impressive as I thought I would (presumably because I've seen a lot of 3-D in the real world), but it looks realistic and is quite a bit of fun to behold.

Apart from that it is really not a good movie. Early on, we learn that the humans/Americans (often the same thing in this kind of movies) are on that planet because there's a precious resource to harvest (some stone). If in the process of getting it you have to kill some of the natives, so be it. But throwing bombs on their heads is maybe not the most clever way of making the natives voluntarily letting us harvest their planet, someone opines. Hmm, is it just me or is the screenwriter trying to make a comment on recent US foreign policy? (In general, the dialogues all sound like they were written by a fourteen-year-old boy, which may or may not be a deliberate choice by Cameron.)

The natives, however, aren't all that much like Afghans. Burqas? No, sir! Just think of the first five clichés that come to mind when I say "noble savage" and you know everything about them. They are so in touch with nature that while an animal the throat of which they've just slashed is bleeding to death, they inform it that its life-energy will be preserved. They keep a straight face, too. And their trees? They're not just trees; under the surface, all of their roots are interconnected and the memories of dead natives are stored there. (Regrettably, this is not referred to as the greenternet.) Cameron has really taken this whole Gaia idea in. And he lets it out!

But at least he has taken something in from the nonscreen world. A rare case. Almost all of the scenes seem second-hand. She at first wants to kill him and is furious when she is ordered to spend time with him. Hmmm, wonder whether they'll end up together? Like that. All of the time.

The screenplay also has structural problems, or, to put it differently, it doesn't have a single twist in it - you can predict the way the story will go after about ten minutes. Come to think of it, I thought that there would be a twist (concerning one specific character) that did not happen. On the other hand, between the two of us Heidi and I exactly predicted what would happen to the Sigourney Weaver character.

But let's not be picky about such things: Where the movie's really got to shine is the visuals. Well, I already mentioned the 3-D and the film's got some really nice shots of valleys, etc. But: The natives (and hence the avatars, which or who are designed to resemble them) look crap. So do the sort-of-horses. So do the sort-of-dinosaurs. In fact, every nonhuman animal in this film looks shite. (The plants look o.k.) What's worse: The film is basically set in two places; the military base and the forests. The military base is shot is shot in grey and blue. The forest is shot in green and blue. After half an hour I found myself longing for red, yellow and brown. And it's a long film.

I'm giving the movie 5/10 because the 3-D thing, as I may have mentioned, works really well. I strongly advise you, however, to see it in 2-D, irrespective of the size of the screen.