City of God (Cidade de Deus) (2002)
Director:Fernando Meirelles
Co-Director: Kátia Lund
Writer: Bráulio Mantovani
Actors: Alexandre Rodrigues, Leandro Firmino da Hora, Jonathan Haagensen, Douglas Silva, Alice Braga, Seu Jorge

It’s appropriate, somehow, that God gets His place in title of the best movie of the decade. (And yes, I’m not only saying it’s my favorite, I’m saying it’s THE BEST.)

At this level of the game, it’s not enough to simply be very creative or very good or even very lucky. You’ve got to have it all. Fernando Meirelles is lucky enough to have it all. The movie-making here is very sophisticated and completely visionary. Meirelles gives the film over completely to the story and the characters, bending his technique to the world inside the film and the way this story must be told. You can’t watch this movie without noticing that he does some crazy stuff with the camera. He paints beautiful and menacing pictures of what child-hood gone wrong can be.

Dynamics is the key to Cidade de Deus. It’s a very funny movie, and action packed most of the time, and it’s a crime drama, and it’s a buddy movie, and it’s hip without trying to be, and the music is stirring and soulful, and it digs joy out of the darkest corners of existence, but at it’s heart it’s very serious business and very sad.

Traffic (2000)
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Writers: Stephen Gaghan
Actors: Benicio Del Toro, Jacob Vargas, Michael Douglas, Luis Guzmán, Don Cheadle, Miguel Ferrer, Topher Grace, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Albert Finney, James Brolin, Dennis Quaid, Salma Hayek

Soderbergh is so fucking methodical. Starting around the turn of the last century, probably with Erin Brockovich, Soderbergh has embarked on a long series of genre-experiments, like Picasso learning Rembrandt and Da Vinci. He doesn’t always produce an exceptional example of whatever genre he’s studying, but he’s clearly absorbed the lessons. And every few films he makes an out-and-out narrative experiment like The Girlfriend Experience, Bubble, or Full Frontal.

The greatest benefit (for film fans) of all this creative meandering comes in his movies like Traffic. What genre is this? Ultra-real? True-est grit? Suffice to say, the cast is incredible, and Soderbergh puts them through the paces in an unbroken stream of edgy set-ups in an effort to show as many sides of the “drug war’ as possible. It’s a tribute to his seriousness about the project that Soderbergh managed to get real senators commenting on film. It’s evidence of his dedication to it, that he actually took his film crew into the most dangerous, desolate part of downtown Cincinnati. And it’s a mark of his matchless technique that the movie, 10 years later, remains emotionally affecting in so many ways. The politics are vexing, the personal stories (especially that of Erika Christensen’s waning Caroline) are dispiriting. It’s this pairing of incredible technique, unbounded creativity, compassionate storytelling, and missionary devotion that make this perhaps the best movie of the past 10 years, and definitely one of the best films ever made.

American Splendor (2003)
Directors/Writers: Shari Springer Berman, Robert Pulcini
Actors: Paul Giamatti, Earl Billings, Danny Hoch, James Urbaniak, Judah Friedlander, Hope Davis, Harvey Pekar, Joyce Brabner

This movie is pretty relaxing for me and that’s one of the things I like about it. It’s also about comics, and is the most successful attempt so far to put some of what comics (underground comics, anyway) are all about on screen. The film’s fractured narrative, interspersed with real footage of its subjects, sometimes even intermingling with the actors who are playing them, necessarily echos the episodic structure of Harvey Pekar’s comics and and one of the methods that give comics their unique power. It’s something that film doesn’t often do, and certainly doesn’t often do with success.

Despite that, though, it’s a really simple “slice of life” story about what’s, on the surface, really just about the crap people face everyday. Real people, the salt of the earth, going to normal jobs, where they don’t make much money, going to the supermarket, trying to do something of value, collecting people and things about which they hope to care. Yes, eventually David Letterman gets involved, and Harvey gets cancer, but even those more extraordinary events are vehicles to showcase the heroics acts of ordinary effort.

When I watch this movie, I settle into the jazz music and the funky-Cleveland setting, laugh to myself and the good bits, marvel at James Urbaniak’s sly turn as Crumb, and eventually get overtaken and moved to tears by the sincerity of the filmmakers’ handiwork.

The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

Director: Wes Anderson

Writers: Anderson, Owen Wilson

Actors: Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow, Luke Wilson, Owen Wilson, Bill Murray, Danny Glover, Alec Baldwin

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
The Two Towers (2002)
The Return of the King (2003)
Director: Peter Jackson
Writers: Jackson, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens
Actors: Sean Bean, Cate Blanchett, Orlando Bloom, Billy Boyd, Ian Holm, Ian McKellen, Dominic Monaghan, Viggo Mortensen, Mirando Otto, John Rhys-Davies, Andy Serkis, Liv Tyler, Karl Urban, Hugo Weaving, Elijah Wood, David Wenham, Brad Dourif, and so on and so forth …

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) The Two Towers (2002) The Return of the King (2003) Director: Peter Jackson Writers: Jackson, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens Actors: Sean Bean, Cate Blanchett, Orlando Bloom, Billy Boyd, Ian Holm, Ian McKellen, Dominic Monaghan, Viggo Mortensen, Mirando Otto, John Rhys-Davies, Andy Serkis, Liv Tyler, Karl Urban, Hugo Weaving, Elijah Wood, David Wenham, Brad Dourif, and so on and so forth …

It would be pretty difficult to over-estimate the amount of time my wife and I have spent with these movies in the past 8 years. In fact, if you add the time we’ve spent with the books, as a result of bring driven back to them once The Fellowship of the Rings had left us speechless, and the time we spent playing the Official Lord of the Rings Trading Card Game (stop laughing), and the amount of time we’ve spent watching all the DVD extras on the three different of them we’ve purchased, and the time we’ve invested in re-watching the entire extended trilogy 6 or 7 times, I’d have to say it would be nearly impossible to over-estimate that amount.

Not since Star Wars has a series of movies captured our imagination, and I’m using the royal We here, meaning all of us. I don’t think I know anyone who just skipped over these films completely (yes, that’s your cue to speak up, friends). Even the Oscars were compelled to recognize the achievement.

Has ever a work of literature been brought to the screen more faithfully? With as much obvious love for the matter? Has ever so much money and effort put towards entertainment been so clearly justified by the end result? Has anyone ever been so perfectly cast as Ian McKellan or Viggo Mortenson? So many movies this decade have completely failed to live up to the buzz, have disappointed in such brutal and heart-reding ways. And though the Lord of the Rings has some flaws (I’ll be happy to document each of the 37 in another post), percentage-wise, it maybe the most wisely-made movie of the decade.