Well, one of my favorite films of the decade was David Fincher's Zodiac.
The wearying parade of best-of-the-year lists is compounded, this year, by the best-of-the-decade lists. I exclaimed aloud when I got an email from an editor a couple of months ago asking for us to put together the best-films-of-the-decade list. Is it really the end of the decade?
My movie-watching skills at the beginning of this decade were not up to snuff, to put it mildly. (I’m pretty sure I thought A Beautiful Mind was an art film when I first saw it.) I think I’ve come a long way since then.
This is especially interesting to me because I’m using film as the basis for the research writing class I’m teaching next semester, and I know that many of my students are from a background similar to mine and also haven’t had much experience with truly good film. I’m having them read Jeff’s book and explore The Auteurs, but there’s only so much I can do in a class that’s not actually a film class. So how to teach them what makes a movie good?
A.O. Scott is thinking about this too, as he does in his article “Screen Memories,” published yesterday. This passage is intriguing:
Most critics, when they assemble their personal canons, will implicitly follow the director-centric impulses of the auteur theory, even if they retain some skepticism about the theory itself. That is, we will gravitate toward favored filmmakers, with plenty of room for argument about choices within a given body of work — why “Letters From Iwo Jima” and not “Changeling”? — as well as about the stature of particular artists. Are the Coens profligate geniuses or clever, cold-hearted pranksters? (“Both” may be the only acceptable answer.) Is Soderbergh a protean visionary or a formalist hack? (See above.) Such arguments, infinitely extendable and happily interminable, are what sustain film criticism in its various incarnations, professional and amateur, printed, blogged and tweeted.
This kind of argumentation has the double appeal of being both stimulating and fundamentally conservative. It allows us to think about cinema — a restless, constantly changing art form — as something fundamentally stable and coherent, in the way that other arts are imagined to be. And the emphasis on great directors and their masterpieces is also useful as an organizing principle for festival programs, film-studies syllabuses and museum retrospectives. It is, in other words, the institutional form of film criticism.
I don’t know if we at Filmwell are planning to compile a best-of-the-decade list, but I’m curious to know what our readers think. What are your best films of the decade? What criteria do you use? And is there a film that you once thought was brilliant that now wouldn’t make your list at all?