So, I decided it was a tad self-indulgent of me to simply foist MY favourite films on you without an organised right of reply. Time, therefore, to publish a survey.
Obviously, as with any survey, it is a self-selecting process. One cannot force people to tick a box (imagine the quality of politicians we’d have if you could) so the people who told me their favourites were the people who wanted to.
I polled people at my place of work, in my (for want of a more accurate term) social circle and through Facebook. This ensured as wide a range of responses as possible.
By the way, all these charts are embiggenable. Just click on them for a closer look.
Age Range:
As you’ll see, I’ve tried to cover an inclusive range of ages, the youngest respondent being 13, the oldest 74. This doesn’t reflect the socio-economic demographic Hollywood targets its movies at, but then I didn’t just want Hollywood movies to be represented.
As with all the charts here, the numbers are a percentage so, for example, in this chart the share of the respondents in the 20 – 40 age-group is 44%.
Geodemographics:
Ah, how we all love poncey management jargon. Since I live and work in the Grimsby / Hull area, it’s fairly obvious that a sizeable proportion of my respondents would too, but I have friends that, wisely, like to keep me at arm’s length. Although it is worth noting that everyone who responded lives in mainland Britain. So, the – ahem – geodemographics of my survey goes something like this:
Gender:
Now, the allegation has already been made to me that this survey will mostly be made up of blokes. Whilst it is true that men are, at least in my experience, more likely to be interested in comparing opinions about movies, they don’t have an exclusive claim over the medium so, without too much arm twisting, 26% of my respondents were female.
So, enough foreplay, let’s get to the point of this post.
It's over to the Returning Officer for the results of the only poll that mattered in 2009:
For this survey, I simply asked people to give me their ten favourite films of the decade. I specifically didn’t ask them to rank them in order of preference, because experience has taught me that that is usually fairly mercurial, one’s favourite film one week is one’s second favourite the next … but the choice of absolute favourites is usually made from a fairly small and consistent field. So the number one might change, but the top ten doesn’t so much.
The results, therefore, do not take into account which of these films are a respondents absolute favourite. My results simply record how many people included a certain film in among their shortlist of favourites. In amongst a fascinating range of different movies, there was a surprising uniformity among certain choices, even though the lists were all compiled in isolation and I have kept the developing picture completely secret. The two front-runners very quickly emerged, constantly jostling for pole position.
Firstly, so they don’t feel left out, the films that didn’t quite make it into the top ten. They each received 6% or 8% of the votes:
Aaaaaaand finally … the moment absolutely no-one has been waiting for … the results of my nation-wide survey, conducted under strict laboratory conditions!
The ten favourite films of the century so far, as voted for by you the great British public. As before, the values on the vertical axis are percentages.
Enjoy:
Interesting?
Surprising?
Feel free to leave a comment below.
Also, just a point of order, I counted trilogies and the like as single films - so Lord of the Rings is a single film, as is Pirates of the Caribbean, the Bourne trilogy and the Harry Potter whateverology. You get the idea.
And, finally, for the cynics who think I asked the half dozen members of my family and turned the results into percentages to hide this fact, I actually asked 50 people. I stopped at fifty because that made the maths of turning the results into percentages something even my poor brain could cope with.
I know, 50 doesn’t sound like much of a population for a survey, but national TV adverts make extravagant claims based on little more, so, if it’s good enough for the likes of L’Oreal, it’s good enough for me. .
Okay, I won't tease you any more ... Here it is; the result you've been losing sleep over ... My favourite films of the decade and therefore the century so far. If you missed them, you'll find numbers 12 to 7 here. Now, read on. Enjoy. Digest. Then disagree in the comments box at the bottom. Go on, you know you want to ...
6: Sin City (2005)
Everything that applies to the technique employed to produce 300, was pioneered by Robert Rodriguez two years before with this decade’s other Miller adaptation.
Whilst I enjoy the intellectual conundrums of writers like Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, my true love in comics is the visceral thrill you get from a melodramatic tale, epically told. There is no greater exponent of this scruff-of-the-neck technique than Frank Miller. In Sin City the unique noir-ish visuals are intrinsic to the fabric of the story and Rodriguez exceeded every expectation by collaborating closely with Miller on converting those visuals to the big screen.
Mickey Rourke made the first quantum leap towards his comeback as the simple-minded slugger, Marv. Bruce Willis used his star power to bring gravitas to Hartigan. Even the usually wooden Clive Owen was exceptional as Dwight. But the real star of the show was Rodriguez who figured out a way to make the film look, sound and feel like none other.
5: Watchmen (2009)
The Citizen Kane of comic-books becomes the Citizen Kane of comic-book movies. Long thought unfilmable, this adaptation had defeated film-makers who are, frankly, far more talented than Zack Snyder. But Snyder has found his moment and his medium. Only time will tell if he can do anything other than comic book adaptations. But, if not, no matter, because he made this!
The film honours its source material, brings it to life and shines a new light on it all at the same time. The standout sequence was the origin of Dr. Manhattan, brought electrifyingly to life by the inclusion of Philip Glass’ appropriately messianic tunes Pruit Igoe and Prophesies (originally from the mesmerising Koyaanisqatsi). Yes, they changed the ending, but the alien squid never worked real well, so I didn’t mind.
No, it isn’t a passionate film it is, instead, a calm, deliberate meditation on the whole nature of heroes and the humans beneath the cape and cowl. It is a film which, were it released even ten years before, would have been denuded of much of its significance.
Moore and Gibbons’ original work found its moment in the late eighties, when Moore correctly diagnosed that comics readers were becoming disenfranchised with the repetitive simplicity of re-hashed sixties (and thirties) characters. Similarly, only after a decade where superheroes became common coin at our multiplexes could a film come out that asked serious questions about the whole medium and do so whilst bearing all the hallmarks of that medium.
The film is not a replacement for the graphic novel, it is a companion piece to it. The release of the film inspired me to re-read the novel. Twice. The re-reading inspired me to re-watch the film. I expect this symbiotic relationship will continue for a good few years yet.
4: The Incredibles (2004)
Yes, yet another superhero film. This time inspired by rather than adapted from. However much I loved Wall E and was moved by Up, I feel that this is Pixar’s greatest achievement. Placed in some non-specific 50s to 60s American idyll (the so-called Golden Age of comics), the film takes the aesthetic of shows like Bewitched and The Flintstones, mixes in the drama and scale (and music) of the later Connery Bond films and sprinkles with some early 21st century post-modern irony, such as in Edna Mode’s hilarious and utterly sensible deconstruction of the superhero cape.
Craig T. Nelson has, frankly, never been better and director Brad Bird proved, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that the potential he displayed in The Iron Giant was far more than just potential.
The attack on the plane is genuinely terrifying and the battle in the jungle – particularly little Dash’s chase – are among the most thrilling such scenes I have ever seen. But the heart of the film (as with all Pixar / Disney films) is the heart of the family and Bob’s reaction when he thinks his family are dead, shows us that animation really can do anything live action can do … not only as well, but even better!
3: Gladiator (2000)
I’ve always loved a good sword and sandal epic. Ben Hur gets watched altogether far too regularly in my house.
I’ve also long admired Ridley Scott’s visual splendour, even if the films have not been worthy of it. After a blinding start with The Duellists, Alien, his masterpiece, Blade Runner and the flawed gem, Legend, Scott kinda went off the boil, allowing his younger brother, Tony, to take up the reigns as the one to watch. The only glimpse we had of the old Ridley was in 1492. Clearly his forte had become the historical epic. But the historical epic was a thing of the past, something consigned to the memories of his youth. Well, it was, until he got his chance to revive it with Gladiator.
Overcoming the actor’s limited charisma, Crowe’s Maximus is a haunted man, more dead than alive, fighting out of instinct and out of a burdened sense that he deserves to be punished for failing his family. Yes, the film is one part Mad Max to two parts Spartacus, but that only adds to the strength of the viewing experience – our familiarity with the broad strokes of the story make it feel like a folk tale, something that has been carved in stone for thousands of years. I hope for (but don’t expect) a similar effect from their upcoming Robin Hood.
It is testament to Scott’s skill, to his authority and to the relationship he has with the crew he has built up around him, that he could make something so seemingly solid and secure from what was, it turns out, a horrifyingly chaotic production process. The oft-quoted “vengeance” speech was written the night before if was filmed and Crowe initially refused to learn any new lines.
Just thinking about the look in his eyes, the tone of his voice and the gravel in those words has sent a shiver up my spine. From the photography to the choice of supporting actors (particularly the redemptive performance from Ollie Reed) to the awe-inspiring soundtrack, everything here is just … right.
Love is something we can, none of us, fully describe or satisfactorily communicate. I can’t explain it properly, I just love that film.
2: The Dark Knight (2008)
It wouldn’t have been fair to finally make The Dark Knight Returns into a movie, because that would have put three Miller movies in my list. But, let’s be honest … in (almost) all but name, that’s really what we have here. Nolan selected the choicest cuts from Miller’s Year One to make Batman Begins (mixed in with the best bits of Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s Long Halloween). For this film, he ram-raided Miller’s vision of the other end of the bat’s career (as well as taking much of the rest of The Long Halloween) to create a film which soared so far above the level achieved by the first, it was barely recognisable as the same thing.
The obsessive, humourless Christian Bale was perfectly cast as the obsessive, humourless Bruce Wayne and yes, his deep, gruff voice was daft, but then so is the idea of wearing a rubber helmet with pointy ears. It is entirely in-keeping with the schizophrenic, self-destructive nature of the character that he would feel the need to talk in a lower register when he’s trying to scare people.
The pace of this astonishingly long film never lets up for a moment, with enough plots, sub-plots and set-pieces for an entire trilogy, yet none of the action is wasted, there’s no padding and the two and a half hours just flash past. Every incident fits together as part of the puzzle, building the picture, progressing the narrative, expanding our sense of involvement and our understanding. I saw this film at the cinema four times and would happy go four more if I had the chance. Two of those viewings were at Bradford’s Imax where, even though it was, thankfully, still only in 2D, the sheer scale gave proceedings a vast extra dimension.
But, of course, the film belongs to Heath Ledger. His Joker is the single greatest performance of the century so far. I’m not saying that because he’s gone. I’m saying that because, when he’s on screen you simply cannot blink. In this dark and dangerous vision of Hell that Nolan and Bale have created, the Nemesis needs to be all the darker, all the more unpredictable and all the more cunning. The look, the tone of voice, the sheer calculated nihilism of him chilled me to my marrow. How do you defeat someone who wants to lose? It echoes the real-world dilemma facing those who confront the Muslim fundamentalists who want to destroy us by destroying themselves. How can you defeat that? How can you defend against it?
Like Watchmen, The Dark Knight demonstrated what a complex and contradictory world we live in and how ill the superhero fits within it. For a superhero to function in the real world, he would have to be mad and, if the world produced mad heroes, then how much worse would the villains be?
Batman’s sacrifice at the end of the film is obvious and perfect. Of course the world is unworthy of such sacrifice. No it can never know, as Miller put it, that Gods walk the earth, for we are too primitive and too fragile a people to deal with the situation we have created for ourselves. Our response to such selflessness would, inevitably, be to provide it with more need.
There are such heroes in the real world, firemen, nurses, aid workers, etc … but God help us all if they ever start seeing themselves as heroes and God help them if we ever start seeing them that way. We need heroes, but that need just makes us feel worse about our failings and that frustration eventually makes us drag our heroes down.
Nolan knows this and his vision of the conflict between The Joker and Batman reflects this bleak knowledge. His Dark Knight is every bit as critical of the whole concept of heroes, every bit as dense a work of modern art as Watchmen (but with far fewer pretentions), yet this superhero film couldn’t exist without the perception and wisdom that Moore and Miller (with more recent support from Jeph Loeb, Warren Ellis and Mark Miller) have brought to the superhero genre in its natural habitat – the comic book.
The Dark Knight is the perfect modern superhero movie. It is the perfect thriller and the perfect drama. I really have no idea where the genre can go from here … save to do what the comics themselves have done and start sadly cycling backwards. I hope this and Watchmen do not mark the high-water-mark of the genre on film but, if they do, if the superhero genre now recedes like an ebb tide, leaving nothing but a memory of greatness behind, it’s a pretty magnificent memory to leave us with!
1: The Lord of the Rings (2001, 2002, 2003)
I haven’t read the book. There, I’ve said it. I tried, about twenty years ago, and found it a leaden, simplistic travelogue filled with unpronounceable names and unlikable characters. Imagine my surprise, then, when I first watched Fellowship of the Rings and found a sense of awe, of fascination and of joy that I had not tapped into since my early teens when Star Wars opened my eyes for the first time.
Despite its nine (or eleven) hour runtime, despite it’s shapeless (and repetitive) narrative, despite its substance having been siphoned and recycled a million times in the fifty years between the book being published and the film being released, Peter Jackson managed to make it fresh and vibrant and compelling.
His frankly mad casting decisions were inspired (if I ever meet him I will personally thank him for not casting Connery as Gandalf) whilst his entire nation full of never-before-seen locations was perfectly captured by Andrew Lesnie’s cinematography. The costume design and set design showed a care and attention to detail that paid due diligence to the heritage and culture that had grown up around the book, while the special effects put together by Jackson’s spin-off company WETA showed the big American boys that they couldn’t have it all their own way.
These films were as satisfying to know-nothing newbies like me as they were to hard-bitten fans who know the book inside out and can even read it in the original Elvish. That is a considerable achievement! As was getting the funding in place to make the full trilogy from a studio which then, to a great extent, stood back and let Jackson spend its money very much as he pleased.
The performances were a joy, from Mortensen’s earnest, honest Aragorn, to McKellen’s mischievous, occasionally camp Gandalf, via the wide-eyed innocence of Elijah Wood’s Frodo and the steadfast loyalty of Sean Astin. Who knew any of them had that level of commitment within them? Well, Peter Jackson obviously did as he persuaded them ( as well as a crowd of brilliant, committed supporting performers) to sign-up for the three-year slog of making a film in the wrong way on the wrong side of the planet. Where did they go right?
Well, they went big. How ridiculous must it have seemed when Jackson began planning the sheer scale of the battle scenes for The Two Towers and The Return of the King? How gob-smacking was he eventual result? How long was the journey between the ambition and the execution? I don’t imagine many film-makers would have the stamina to take on so inconceivably huge a responsibility, and yet exceed expectation so fully and miraculously.
The world Jackson’s army of film-makers create is utterly convincing. Not since I was a child has my disbelief been so fully and cheerfuly suspended. Every stick and stone feels real, and you fully appreciate the weight of age that hangs in the air everywhere. This is world building at its most perfect, logical and beautiful. For me, the three volumes of this film – for I consider it to be one long film – were not nearly long enough. Middle Earth is a place I didn’t just want to visit. I wanna live there!
The Lord of the Rings is so much more vast than, say, Roland Emmerich’s anodyne end of the world movies The Day After Tomorrow and 2012 because, unlike them, its drama, whilst huge, is seen from eye-level. It was always Tolkein’s intention to see huge earth-shaking events from the perspective of the smallest, seemingly least significant players, and Jackson honours this throughout. Yes, he draws on millennia-old prophesies and the oldest of nobilities and the greatest of kingdoms, but we see it all from the knee-high perspective of the halflings. We feel their awe, their helplessness and, ultimately, we roar out approval at their steadfast bravery.
Yes, the film takes twelve hours to tell us that size doesn’t matter; but we have to explore, in the greatest detail possible, the epic sweep of Middle Earth, to fully understand what is at risk, what the world stands to lose, to fully appreciate the burden that rests on those small Hobbit shoulders.
The film venerates the abilities of the little guy, damns the failures of the corrupt and craven leadership that lead to the brink of defeat then takes the optimistic view that, however far down the road to self-destruction we go, the little people can be saved and are worth saving.
Given what’s been going on on our Earth over the last decade … and what we fear will be happening in the decades to come … that’s a message worth remembering.
So, I decided it was time to put together my list of favourite films of the decade, to see what the ‘noughties’ had to offer posterity.
Outside of the cinema it has been a troubling time and, as is traditionally the case, the cinematic art has responded by bravely offering a distraction from the woes of the world, as well as revelling in exploiting them mercilessly.
I don’t think it accidental that, in this decade, when The Western World was being led to the brink by seemingly insane leadership, we suddenly developed a hankering for super-heroes, for those characters who – in the tradition stretching back to the Cowboys of the Wild West and the Private Eyes of the Prohibition - stand up for what’s right, unsupported, unpaid and often unrecognised, just because somebody has to!
Well, this was great news to me. I learned to read on black and white Spider-Man reprints and have carried a deep, primitive love of superheroes in my DNA ever since.
Musicals made a (sort of) comeback, for the first time since the sixties, as did screwball comedies. Films in increasing numbers were aimed fairly and squarely at women (they were easy to spot, they generally had the words ‘Wedding’ or ‘Bride’ in the title).
Documentaries and serious political films rose to the fore in a way unseen in cinema since the dark, cold days of the 70s … a decade with which, movie-makers quickly noted, the noughties had much in common.
There was also a disturbing rise, as there inevitably is when we feel under the heel of bad leadership, of dystopianism … when we despair of the present, we project that depression into the future. We watched the world come to an end in a wide variety of ways, the most common of which was zombie holocaust … oh, we never seemed to tire of popping to the multiplex, watching ourselves eat ourselves to death, then going for a pizza.
On the other side of the entertainment coin, special effects achieved a level of authenticity and ubiquity previously unparalleled. They are now so easy and cheap they can help hide the workings of even the most modest of films.
They also afforded the return (after nearly fifty years away) of the historical epic. Suddenly film-makers didn’t need to rebuild Rome one-to-one scale and hire a million extras, the computer could do the bulk of that work for them.
As more and more Imax screens popped-up, cinema became a spectacle again, in a way that only our grand-parents will remember if they were there in the picture palaces when the Cinemascope screens were unveiled.
At home, the aim of having a television screen the size of a wall came tantalisingly close, and the Blu-Ray disc gave you the quality of image you needed to watch upon it. The prices of Blu-Rays are starting to drop now, too, which is all to the good. Finally, the term ‘home cinema’ actually has some meaning beyond the purely hyperbolic.
And so, to my favourite films of the decade.
I arrived at this list very methodically. Firstly, I compiled a list of every ‘good’ film I’d seen in each year. That took quite a while. Then I ranked those films, the top five (or so) were strictly in preferential order, the rest were just films I couldn’t bear to leave out. Most years there were between twelve and fifteen films in my top tens … I just couldn’t cut the lists any shorter than that.
By this measure, 2001 was the dullest year of the decade, with only nine films I thought worthy of mention. 2004 was the busiest year with fully 17 films in my, ahem, top ten.
Consequently, for my list of the decade, I had to only include films which occupied the top spots of my annual lists, and fill the gaps with a few of the films that came second. This led to shocking revelations (shocking to me, at any rate) when films like There Will Be Blood, No Country For Old Men, O Brother, Where Art Thou, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Monsters Inc (narrowly) failed to make the cut because they were released in the wrong years. In weaker years they would have been right up there. But in the years they were released, they were just nudged out. After much consideration, I decided to consign Casino Royale, 2006's best film, to this same twilight zone because it simply doesn't mean as much to me as some of the runner-up films from other years. So, Casino Royale would be film 13. Unlucky for them.
These omissions horrified me but I had to have some semblance of a method, so the judge’s decision is final. Even so, I still managed to sneak fourteen into my top ten.
If I’d been putting this list together ten years ago (hmm … the best of the nineties … there’s a thought) I’d have chosen a lot more independent movies, because that’s where the quality writing and the experimental ambition lay, but, in the decade since then, those film-makers and those ambitions have crossed over to the big-budget mainstream.
The films that are being churned out by the Hollywood factories these days are (at least occasionally) more creative and more visually original than at any time I can recall. The new technology allows film-makers to try out new ideas almost for free, and enough of the audience is receptive to the new and unusual for the distributors and exhibitors to allow it to happen. I don’t think there has been as much innovation in film-making since the grand days of the silents, when the gloves were off and everything was being tried for the first time.
These are not necessarily what I consider to be the best films of the decade, but they are the films for which I have the greatest affection and/or admiration. They are the ones I re-watch the most and have the most fun with.
There are some obvious themes in here, and some possibly depressingly obvious choices, but I don’t care. These films are my mental comfort food. They tap in to enthusiasms that have bubbled away in my soul since childhood and are now, for the first time ever, bursting out on to the big screen and into the public consciousness. It would be disingenuous of me to be sniffy about them swapping media from their four-colour pulp-paper origins.
So, here’s me and my dozen of the decade:
12: X-Men 2 (2003)
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The first grown-up superhero movie. I’ve never been a fan of origin stories, but the first X-Men movie neatly side-stepped this by dropping you into an ongoing situation. The mutants were already mutants, deal with it. But the conceit really came together in X2. Packed to the rafters with stand-out moments, I still thrill at the attack on the school, featuring Wolverine at his fiercest and most noble, while Brian Cox casually exudes evil intelligence. Magneto breaking out of his plastic cell is a tour de force of spectacularly applied logic. Alan Cummings’ Kurt Wagner is deliciously twitchy and restrained yet provides the most captivating ‘pre-title sequence’ of the decade and tops the film off with the most inspired act of instinctive heroism.
Neither the X franchise nor Bryan Singer have been as good since. Suffice it to say, I’m more than a tad excited at the thought of his in-development X-Men: First Class … even though it will be an origin story.
11: Wall E (2008)
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The film that has more heart than any other in my countdown, has the fewest people and the least dialogue. It’s that rarest of things, a proper science-fiction film which sees the world through sympathetic non-human eyes and where the narrative rises logically from the diegetic world the film-makers have created. It manages to be a swingeing indictment of our present environmental policies (the opening fly-by swoops past a wrecked, failed wind-farm) and our over-consumption (Buy n Large is a far more economical critique of our bloated, self-destructive culture than Supersize Me or The Corporation were) whilst forgiving us our trespasses and moving on to tell a positive story where, simply put, a robot’s capacity to evolve and eventually to feel love saves the human race from creeping extinction. If a simple trash-compactor droid can do it, surely the rest of us can too!
10: Stardust (2007)
The best fantasy of the decade and a huge improvement on Neil Gaiman’s po-faced source novel. The mix of worldly-wise humour, beautiful special effects and innocent fairy-tale motifs made for a winning combination. The star-turn is definitely Robert DeNiro, finally realising what his fellow method actor Dustin Hoffman rumbled about twenty years ago – you can have fun! The best of Gaiman’s boundless imagination is retained, and brought vividly to life. I would love to see director Vaughan’s take on Sandman!
9: 300 (2007)
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Yes, another film based on a comic. There’s a theme developing here, is there not! I love the way technology has allowed creative film-makers to stretch the boundaries of what is visually possible and to do it for a reasonable budget. So, this film was shot in largely empty green rooms with everything added by the special effects bods later on. The result is an extra-ordinarily faithful graphic novel-to-screen conversion.
Narratively, what Snyder and his writing team added to Miller’s original, namely the whole Queen Gorgo / Theron sub-plot simply added to the thrill of the ride, as well as addressing the inherent, inevitable sexism of the source material. No, the emphasis on the Queen didn’t make the film seem any less homo-erotic, but, given the mythological nature of the story, that simply didn’t matter.
Butler pulled off a seemingly impossible feat of humanising and adding dimension to a dogmatic, obsessive character, whilst hanging on to his dignity … in a loincloth. He actually makes you give a damn about him and his men. The Spartans were the original superheroes and, as such, their function is to inspire, rather than to endure.
8: Inglorious Basterds (2009)
Quentin Tarantino’s grand return to form. Featuring what should (but probably won’t) be an Oscar-winning turn from Christoph Waltz. I worry about including a film in my top ten of the decade when it is barely three months old, but I am confident that the years to come will find the recently-acquired Blu-Ray of this visiting my player frequently. My full review of it is here.
7:
(2004)
The funniest and most quotable film of the decade was even more of a delight because it came from nowhere. Yes, I’d watched and loved Spaced, but bitter hard-won experience teaches one to expect the least when TV comedians get their shot at the big screen. Yes, it’s a zombie movie (yawn), yes its title is cringe-inducing but, like a proper story, it spends the first 30 – 40 minutes getting us familiar with the characters and their world, before chomping into them. Filled with far-too-many vignettes to recall here, there is enough over-the-top gore to keep the zombies in the audience happy but the emphasis is absolutely on the living.
This film has, by far, the most satisfying conclusion of any of the recent zombie flicks, it was the only recent zombie film (until Zombieland) where you actually want the characters to survive and it is the only zombie film that has, forever, changed my perception of Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now.
