15 Films of the 00s I Could Not Stand
(Unfortunately, no mustache can redeem this film.)
I tweeted this list already, but I'd like to re-do it here, with the opportunity for some slight expansion.
15. Capote (Bennett Miller, 05) Just so much worse than In Cold Blood (or Infamous, for that matter); also, Philip Seymour Hoffman was ridiculous trying to act short.
14. Munich (Spielberg, 05): besides the worst sex scene in a serious film ever, Kushner's script is confused, not ambivalent, about vengeance. No one seems convinced that they're really having an ethical crisis and not just a bad day—least of all Spielberg. Only bright spot: Mathieu Amalric.
13. Gangs of New York (Scorsese, 02) chemistry between Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz was way off; would have preferred Leo and Daniel Day-Lewis getting it on—that would have been an intriguing film.
12. Oldboy (Park, 03) I never understood the excitement; all the revelations at the end were duds and the action was paced poorly, often mistaking mere brutality for energy. Come to think of it, that mistake defined most of the filmic output of the decade.
11. Half Nelson (Fleck, 06) What happens when you make a film about a cynical, directionless protagonist: you get a cynical, directionless film.
(Nice cannon placement; still a terrible film.)
9. Master & Commander: The Fart Side of the World (Weir, 03) First time I ever rooted for the French in a naval fight.
8. The Departed (Scorsese, 06) 151-min long films based on 97-min source material shouldn't win Oscars for Best Editing. Maybe for Most Editing.
7. AI: Artificial Intelligence (Spielberg, 01) Spielberg's effects and humorlessness siphoned off the humanity and the uncertainty that Kubrick might have given it.
6. Ray (Hackford, 04) Worst biopic of the decade: an extremely crowded field but this one wins hands-down. Parody would have had more pathos.
5. Waltz with Bashir (Folman, 08) You might think extreme arrogance and reflections on the fragility of life wouldn't mix. And you'd be right.
4. Pan's Labyrinth (del Toro, 06) It's sad when the director is more of a child than the girl who's carrying his film. For contrast, Spirit of Beehive.
3. Irréversible (Noé, 02) The experiment with temporality didn't redeem the noxious pointlessness of the film; without its rape-scene sensationalism, what?
2. The Lives of Others (Donnersmarck, 06) This I actually have a full-blown argument for, or rather, against.
(That look expresses how I feel about this decade's output from Clint.)
Comments
I liked Capote. Thought Hoffman was great; didn't care he wasn't short.
Gangs of New York I thought was overrated but not unenjoyable.
Many of the others (that I've seen) I have little quibble with (and completely agree with the odious Million Dollar Baby). However, I loved both Punch-Drunk Love (it may or may not help that I've studiously avoided Adam Sandler's other movies) and Pan's Labyrinth (seriously, this is a marvelous movie; I've never understood the detractors on this one), and can even offer up a spirited defense of AI (I think it's quite underrated).
But it's quite possible that I'm just missing something important in both--I would like to hear your spirited defense!
I guess we'll have to disagree about Oldboy, but I don't have anything against Hollywood, just against movies that are egregious wastes of money. And I will be posting not just 15, but an entire top 50(!) but at the end of the year.
By the way, just to add to the vitriol, my thoughts on Synecdoche NY:
Synecdoche, New York might be the most facile movie I’ve ever seen. It would be the thing left over if you took everything that was good out of Rushmore and replaced it with dishonesty. It is a sophomore college student who’s never been hurt, always thinks it’s the most clever person in the room, and has never had to notice how meaningless both of those things are. It thinks post-modernism is cutting edge and that representing representation is a meaningful thing to do. It is a self-indulgent and solipsistic masturbation to a poster of solipsism and self-indulgence, and it thinks this is an accomplishment. It says “do you see what I’ve done here?” as if ironically mocking its own pretensions. But it is pretentious. It is dull. It thinks wretchedness is art, but it’s not even art by that standard. It still thinks it’s cool to say “fuck” nonchalantly. It could learn a lot from the worst Woody Allen movie ever, but it won’t. It doesn’t understand that Kafka and Dostoevsky were real people who wrote about real people; it thinks they are brand names. Instead of a plot, it has deus ex machina, and instead of deus ex machina, it has a McArthur genius grant. Instead of characters, it has clichés. It’s an argument for why white people should not be allowed to use magic realism. It uses a monstrous caricature of homosexuality and an unselfconscious misogyny as tropes for life’s unfairness. It thinks selfishness is noble and its consequences, tragedy. Its jokes aren’t funny, so it tries to pretend that this is what it was going for. It thinks there’s something deep about the idea that people are going to die, and something genius about dwelling on it. Years from now, it won’t even look back and realize what a horse’s ass it was being. It is a bad movie.
Andrew, the problems you named with the movies I liked better don't really add up a "can't stand it" assessment. So I can only conclude there was something more visceral at work.
Also, it's a bit unfair to lump Million Dollar Baby together with Crash. Do you realize how much work went into making Crash that bad?
I was surprised that you didn't mention Charlie Kaufman at all. For me, the biggest disappointment of the '00s was watching Kaufman navel-gaze more and more until he imploded in Synecdoche.