Category Archives: The Room

The Top One Hundred and Six Movies of the Oughts (106-91)

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Longtime readers will know that I’m a fiend for lists the way Sonny Crockett is a fiend for mojitos. Don’t believe me? Check out this blurry video:

My Best of 2009 movie list has been percolating for a while now, with only a few contenders for best or worst film to come before I shut things down at the end of December (oh yes, I won’t stop watching until I’m sure I have it right). Meanwhile, even though I’m uncomfortable with the idea of this decade being 1999-2009, I’ve been pondering my own best of the decade list. This should be something to be excited about, and yet until last week I just couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for it. When I search my soul I come to the uncomfortable but inescapable conclusion that it’s because any list I would come up with would both be horribly incomplete and would betray my populist taste. What makes me more uncomfortable than that is realising that such an admission makes me uncomfortable at all.

Any list I could make for this decade is already off to a bad start when I admit that I’ve yet to see many of the best reviewed and most beloved movies of recent times. The gaps in my viewing history include Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century, Edward Yang’s Yi Yi, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s The Return, and anything by Wong Kar Wai, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, or the Dardennes. I’ve also only seen a couple of (terrific) movies by Claire Denis and a single, memorable one by Michael Haneke. Some film buff I am. This short list is merely the tip of the iceberg. According to this list, I might as well not consider myself a film lover at all, as I’m not looking for movie excellence in the right places (though the entire list is invalidated by the praise for Woody Allen’s technically disastrous and intellectually vapid Cassandra’s Dream: surely one of the ten worst films of the decade).

All of that shame over my taste is wrapped up in feelings of mortification over class and intellectualism and authenticity and so many other things. I know that none of it is important but the expression of some kind of discernment in my opinion helps to legitimise my amateur film criticism, something I take very seriously even when I talk about things that readers might consider beneath contempt (my defence of Michael Bay, for instance, or my enthusiasm for The Dark Knight). Therefore it scares me to openly admit that I’m a sucker for a well-choreographed action scene with some pretty explosions included. No one wants to admit to enjoying those movies without losing their credibility, so why should I be the one to stick my neck out?

Maybe it’s time to get over those silly fears and say it loud: I’m a fan of populist cinema. Yes, I can appreciate works of cinematic art on many levels, though perhaps I might have greater difficulty expressing that appreciation or placing those works in context with works by other artists. However, when I talk about how much I love Joel Silver movies of the 80s and 90s, or Bruckheimer’s output in the late 90s to the current day, I’m on firmer ground. Perhaps this is why Shades of Caruso concentrates on those movies: it’s safer to talk about the joy I get from seeing a movie by the Wachowski Siblings than it is to attempt to unpick the works of Abbas Kiarostami. Any list I would make for the past decade would skew heavily towards populist movies, partially because most of the movies I’ve seen were major releases by Western writers and directors, but also because these are the movies that speak directly to me.

It was upon staring at that shame, and the shame I feel for having that shame, that I said bollocks to it and compiled this list. I hereby reject that shame, expel it from my soul, and embrace the movies that filled my soul with joy or heart-ache. The construction of this list is helped by the clear cut-off point in my past: 1999 was the year I moved out of my hometown for the second time and headed to London, where I found enough time and opportunity to attend more movies. As a result my enthusiasm increased, until I had no choice but to start a blog to use as a pressure valve for this energy. I’ve seen hundreds of movies in that time, and so I expect this list to be incomplete and filled with egregious misses, plus some movies have been missed off (Pan’s Labyrinth) or put low on the list (No Country For Old Men, There Will Be Blood) because I’ve only seen them once. I’ll need to revisit them with a clear head, free of hype, to do them justice.

One more caveat: I’ve not included films from this year. I know, this seems to make the whole process pointless, but I like to have at least a little gap between seeing a movie and putting it in a list this big. The End-Of-Year lists are made with the proviso that I understand how my opinion will change over time, and watching films right up until Dec 31st means I will be cramming in movies even though my opinion of them has yet to settle. Who knows whether time will be kind to these movies or not. I’ve certainly been surprised with how some movies I initially loved have dropped out of my favour, and others that I enjoyed well enough on first viewing are not breaking into the top fifty. For the record, at least three from my forthcoming 2009 list would definitely qualify for inclusion here, but I don’t want to add them now as the year has yet to finish, and I’m hoping two or three more will qualify. Perhaps when I’ve finished compiling my 2009 lists, I will write an addendum explaining where they would go in this list.

And so, here is the first part of my list of the best 106 movies of the period 1999-2008. Why 106? Because I just couldn’t leave the last six movies off without writing a little bit about them, as I enjoyed them greatly and felt they would never in a million years get any list love otherwise. As this post has already run on, I’ll only list the first 16 here, and the next 90 films will be revealed as the week progresses. Yes yes, there are simpler ways of doing this, but anyone who knows me will understand that when there is an easy way and a hard way to do anything, I will ignore both and then do something completely self-indulgent that makes a mockery of my original goal. Just play along. I’ve kept my explanations for why I love these movies as short as I can. I hope I’ve lauded a secret favourite of yours, dear reader, one that has been snubbed by every critic in the land.

Honorary Bad Movie Inclusion — The Room

It is quite simply the worst movie ever made, but its rewatch value, its quotability, and the fearless depiction of the dreadful inner life of its emotionally immature writer and director make it almost infinitely fascinating. Its inclusion here is no reflection of its quality, but of the hold it has over anyone who watches it. It’s a true curio.

106. Avalon

After leaving a screening of Avalon, my viewing companion commented that there is good boring and bad boring, and this was a perfect example of the former. Starkly beautiful and glacially paced, Mamoru Oshii’s ode to the power of gaming predicts a future where our desire to transcend our mundane world will drive us to abandon it.

105. Kung Fu Hustle

What made me love Stephen Chow’s madcap martial arts comedy wasn’t the expertly choreographed actions scenes, great though they were. Neither was it the broad humour, though I enjoyed that too. The best thing about it was how the wacky tone morphed into effective dramatic energy. At first you laugh at the caricatures, but by the final act you fear for their safety.

104. The Mothman Prophecies

Poorly marketed as a bog-standard X-Files-esque alien abduction flick, this dread-soaked thriller is more interested in dramatising our insignificance in the face of supernatural forces that move us around like game pieces. Strong performances and meticulous direction from Mark Pellington help to ground the potentially silly project.

103. Moulin Rouge

At his worst, Baz Luhrmann is a vulgar artiste who has zero impulse control, but when his approach works, it can wrench your heart open. This fearlessly sincere musical is the most successful example of the Luhrman effect. Though many have resisted its garish onslaught, my cynicism melted twenty minutes in and stayed that way.

102. The Rundown (aka Welcome To The Jungle)

What should have been the gateway drug to the paradise that is Loving The Rock instead faltered at the box office, but who cares? For its sheer exuberance and demented asides — not to mention a totally hatstand performance by Christopher Walken — this Midnight Sprint shall be remembered and adored.

101. Solaris

Though Steven Soderbergh’s adaptation of Stanislav Lem’s SF classic fails to capture the essence of that novel (as does the previous version by Andrei Tarkovsky), the result explores equally interesting philosophical questions. Clooney excels as a bereaved astronaut forced to confront living memories of his dead wife, a celestial manifestation distorted by his yearning and twisted perceptions of reality.

100. Mushishi

Katsuhiro Otomo’s live-action adaptation of Yuki Urushibara’s manga is a curious beast. Though overlong, the tale of Mushi master Ginko’s journey through a polluted and hostile pastoral land is a feast for the eyes. The gloomy atmospherics and cascade of ideas more than make up for any flaws.

99. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back

Kevin Smith’s low-budget comedies often fail to fly thanks to their self-imposed parochial restrictions. His ambitious and controversial religious satire Dogma was an improvement upon those early movies but this self-lacerating road-movie was the one that really worked, and well enough to finally make me appreciate his scatological shtick.

98. I Heart Huckabees

It achieved an awful notoriety as the movie where director David O. Russell lost his mind on set and bollocked Lily Tomlin, but I Heart Huckabees was also a disorienting blend of philosophy and Dada-esque nonsense, often incomprehensible but almost always entertaining. However, unlike many chaotic cult movies (ahem, Richard Kelly), this actually made sense if you unfocused your brain while watching.

97. Shanghai Knights

Shanghai Noon was fun, and the pairing of Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson was more successful than the tiresome team-up of Chan and Chris Tucker in the Rush Hour movies. The London-set sequel was a massive improvement, mostly because helmer David Dobkin was the only US director who seemed willing to spend time with Chan to create fights almost as complex and funny as his classic Hong Kong work.

96. Michael Clayton

Clooney again in full force, this time as a corporate fixer who gets messed around once too often. What could have been a rote corporate thriller instead becomes a fascinating character study, one where terrible decisions are made in good faith, and good decisions happen for the wrong reasons. It also propelled Tilda Swinton into stardom: for this I am eternally grateful.

95. Mulholland Drive

Is it poor form to admit that upon first viewing I didn’t understand anything about David Lynch’s tinsel-town nightmare? All that I knew was that the final scene was almost unwatchably terrifying. Days later, the mood of dread still lingered. That residual horror — and Naomi Watts’ excellent star-making performance — is enough to justify inclusion on this list.

94. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

Easy to forget how big an impact this movie had on first release. Even though the final installment of the trilogy ripped all of the fun from the franchise, the first is still a near-perfect swashbuckler. The first appearance of Captain Jack Sparrow is a contender for Best Entrance of the Decade.

93. The Prestige

Initially the blatantly obvious “twist” at the end of Christopher Nolan’s adaptation soured an experience that had been extremely pleasurable. Upon repeated viewings, it becomes apparent that the Transported Man trick is not the point of the movie. Instead, Nolan is more interested in painting a picture of a man driven to unthinkable acts because of his thirst for revenge. Compared to dreadful fallout of that psychological damage, magic is nothing.

92. The Chronicles of Riddick

Many choose to focus on the flaws and hubris of David Twohy’s Space-Conan-meets-Lord-of-the-Rings hybrid, but that occasionally inspired vision – and that amazing twist ending — are enough to justify the entire ambitious, galaxy-hopping project. Another film where the cult grows every year, with the prospect of a continuation of the saga now tantalisingly close.

91. eXistenZ

Arriving between the reality-warping brain food of Alex Proyas’ Dark City and The Wachowski’s Matrix, Cronenberg’s only self-scripted film of the decade was greeted with an initial burst of excitement and then seemed to be forgotten. A shame. It’s his most playful movie since Naked Lunch, skipping gleefully between levels of reality and throwing in traditionally unpleasant body horror with abandon.

Okay, that’s enough for now. Keep checking back to see more updates as the week progresses.

Stringer Bell and Sasha Fierce in: Futile Attraction

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In the 80s and 90s Michael Douglas was the go-to guy to play men harassed, used, abused and manipulated by women, as seen in the White-Men-Under-Attack trilogy of Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct and Disclosure. After his screen avatar’s bad luck was purged by David Fincher in The Game his screen appearances have become sporadic. The next generation demands a new macho hero who can be hunted by the kinds of obsessive, dangerous women that only exist in movies. In Obsessed, the man attempting — and failing — to fill Douglas’ shoes is Idris Elba, who plays executive Derek Charles with a relentless and tiring intensity the movie doesn’t warrant. Happily married to his former assistant Sharon (Beyoncé Knowles), Charles is stalked at work by a temp assistant, Lisa (Ali Larter). At first she merely seems infatuated with Elba, but after he rebuffs a couple of aggressive approaches she becomes crazed, interpreting his rebuffs as evidence of his love for her, prompting her to insinuate herself into his life a la Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction and Jessica Walters in Play Misty For Me.

Those movies showed the male protagonist’s culpability, with the message being “Mess around, and you will suffer for it.” Here writer David Loughery and director Steve Shill seem to be saying “Guys, there are some crazy women out there, and they’ll fuck up your life for no reason.” This doesn’t even pass muster as a morality play. It’s just another movie stating that there is no such thing as the Other any more. No matter how well you live your life, people are going to hunt you down, drug you with Rohypnol, rub up against you while you are in a fugue state, and listlessly kidnap your child, though “relocate” seems to be a more accurate description for what she does, as the nefarious Lisa merely moves Derek and Sharon’s son from his crib to their car.

The worst that happens to Derek is that he is accused of having an affair. The evidence for this is entirely provided by Lisa, and yet despite the flimsy nature of it (for example, listing him as an emergency contact number, or writing about the imaginary affair in a diary), at least two women automatically believe he is in the wrong. In one of the stupider scenes of the year, a police detective (Christine Lahti) investigating a suicide attempt by Lisa interrogates Derek in the crowded waiting room of a hospital with Sharon sitting next to him. As the scene descends into incomprehensible histrionic chaos, we see Elba desperately trying to prove his innocence while both women irrationally dismiss his pleas. The movie seems to be saying that it just doesn’t pay to be honourable, because women will always distrust their man.

It’s tempting to think Obsessed is intentionally trying to trade in the most witless and offensive gender stereotypes possible, as some kind of poorly signposted satire on gender politics. The male characters (including Jerry O’Connell and Bruce McGill) are either flamboyant homosexuals mincing around the office or leering sexist pigs whose idea of small talk is to discuss how sexy women love to extort money from them with their feminine wiles. Still, at least gender politics are addressed, albeit ineptly. The potentially inflammatory racial implications of having the only black characters in the film threatened by a predatory and insane white woman are ignored altogether. Apparently, this was to avoid repeating the themes of Loughery’s previous movie Lakeview Terrace, which featured a racist black cop menacing a white family.

It quickly becomes clear the filmmakers are only interested in cranking out the least provocative thriller possible. With a blameless hero victimised by a villain who has no recognisable human qualities, even the dependable nightmare scenario of being framed and losing everything is diluted by the vast amount of contrivance needed to place our hero in jeopardy. We’re merely expected to wait — unmoved and unoffended by the mild PG-13 thrills — for the villain to get her comeuppance, which comes in a protracted and absurd finale, when Sharon returns home to find Lisa in bed. The poorly choreographed catfight that follows is violent but bloodless, and finally provides Knowles with something to do other than chide Elba. After mouthing some unconvincing threats and killing Larter, Knowles is comforted by her husband, and the last shot is of her, not the man who has been onscreen for most of the film. I’m not the only person confused by this shift in focus. Did Knowles — who co-produced the movie with her father Mathew – sign on just so she could film a long fight scene? Why would that appeal to her? Did she hate the third season of Heroes even more than I did? This mystery is the only aspect of the movie that invites further reflection.

Obsessed is as dreary and toothless a thriller as you’re ever going to see. Unimaginatively plotted by Loughery — the man who wrote Star Trek V: The Final Frontier — the viewer waits for anything shocking or interesting to happen and gets little more than some one-note shouting from Elba and some lazy misogyny. All that’s left for the viewers to occupy themselves is mockery of the risible dialogue (“I’ll take up that slack. That is one smoking hot piece of ass!”) and direction. TV director Shill has worked on almost every notable show of the past ten years, including The Wire and Deadwood. However, he started out with EastEnders, Emmerdale, and The Bill, and it is these uncinematic melodramas that provide the closest link to his work here. Overlit, poorly blocked, and littered with even more establishing shots than in Tommy Wiseau’s notorious bad movie classic The Room, Shill fails to transform Loughery’s script into even a passable movie. Apparently the working title for Obsessed was Oh No She Didn’t. It’s a pity they went with the straight-to-DVD-esque title it now has. If they’d retained the original title, at least the laughs elicited by this dismal failure might have seemed intentional.