I really love watching movies. Call me a masochist, but even after countless hours of screening flicks for review, I’ll sometimes put my notebook and pen aside and happily plant my over-padded backside in an under-padded theater seat.
I’ll be honest, though, when we crossed the finish line for the decade, my initial reaction was probably much like yours. It felt like Hollywood was obsessed with three categories of filmmaking:
- Big splashy spectacle pics (The whole Perfect Storm/Pirates of the Caribbean/2012/Avatar shindig) that deliver an over-the-top CGI explosion to the screen.
- Push-the-envelope “adult” films (40-Year-Old Virgin, Brokeback Mountain, Borat, The Reader, The Hangover, etc.).
- Get-out-your-buzz-saw-and-machete gore-fests (Saw VI, The Descent, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, My Bloody Valentine—to name but a few).
That’s an over-simplification, of course, but it can sometimes feel like the days of the simple, family-friendly popcorn-muncher are long gone. I heard one popular TV commentator say that he wasn’t looking forward to the next decade of films if they’re like the stuff we saw the last 10 years.
I’m not quite so pessimistic, however. Once I got past my initial gut reaction and thought about it, I came up with a good number of movies from the decade that fell into my favorites list. Just about everything put out by Pixar, for instance (Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, WALL-E) gave me my money’s worth of cinematic joy. In fact, I think this past year’s Up is definitely best-picture material—it drew me in emotionally and had me smiling and wiping my eyes within its first five minutes.
But we reviewers are always spouting off about what we think. So why don’t I shut up for a change and give you the floor? Help out your fellow bloggers and tell us what films from the last ten years have been your favorites.
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