The Top Ten Best Movies of the 2000's

The 2000's might go down in history as one of the more uneventful decades ever. Or maybe it was just the unnatural slumber most people are in now that sentient technology has taken over most of our lives. But then there were a number of small pieces of art that stood out as shimmering examples of how art has not yet faded from the human soul. Following is a list of the ten greatest movies of the past decade according to me:::
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10. In the Mood for Love - Wong Kar Wai - 2000 - Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung

In the mood for love is what a really steamy, sexually explicit affair between two movie characters would look in the real world. They never touch, they never kiss. But in the simple words they share and the bond of fraternal love that they develop, is a million hours of bedroom gymnastics.

Two decent people, in love, in over their heads, with nothing but choreographed lights to bring out their inner urges.

Best Scene: Chow whispering year's worth of secrets into a hole at Angkor Wat; leaving us, the audience the only witnesses to how his heart felt.
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9. Spirited Away - Hayao Miyazaki - 2001 - (Animated)

Hayao Miyazaki is known to most of the world as the man who brought Heidi into ever juvenile heart that ever lived. However, in Japan he is revered as a virtuoso of animation. Spirited Away is his magnum opus. A rather trippy story of a girl lost in a spirit world trying to desparately free herself and her parents, the story is quite Japanese in its styling with cheerful characters, outlandish monsters and babies the size of firetrucks. But what counts in the end is the sheer amount of oneness a person watching this movie has in relation to the little girl, constantly rooting for her and hoping that her good heart would get her out.

Some call it campy. Some call it good old-school 2D anime. I call it the one of the best movies ever.

Best Scene: Sen and the other servants of the bathhouse trying to clean a colossal sludge spirit.
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8 .Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - 2004 - Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet

It's rather sad to say, but this was the movie with which I realised that there was more to Kate Winslet than a damsel in distress on a boat and Jim Carrey than almost everything he had done till then. Also, it told me that I share my world with a genius called Charlie Kaufman. It also made me realise how much every moment meant. And in Joel Barish's inner, decaying dream about the girl he fell in love with, made me think how much every person I shared those moments with meant. And it had some science-ey stuff too!

Here's a movie thats great to watch on a sleepy dawn or a day when it pours. Actually, it works almost anyhow and anywhere. But then, its great just to see how much ambience matters. And a bloody great script too.

Best Scene: Joel, on remembering the first night he spent at a beach house with Clementine realises what he's running away from.
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7. The Pianist - Roman Polanski - 2002 - Adrien Brody

The Pianist is Roman Polanski embracing his childhood which he spent in concentration camps during World War II. Polanski, standing tall on count of masterpieces such as Chinatown did not need to make another great movie to cement his place in history as an icon. And in The Pianist he didn't try that. Instead he made a movie that cut through to the bone. There were no bloody messes, no piles of corpses, no walking skeletons. Instead of showing how many people died, he showed how one of them stayed alive. That, fueled by Adrien Brody's silent yet devastating take on Władysław Szpilman is all that needed to put him back in the annals of the greatest movie directors of all time.

You can say The Pianist is just another person trying to cash in on history's greatest movie plot. However, a plot is essentially what this movie lacks. As does most of our human life. And that's what's shown here, a human life through adversity.

Best Scene: Szpilman, now back in Warsaw performs Chopin's Grand Polonaise brillante in E flat major to a large audience, an incandescent phoenix returning from the ashes of the bearded cripple we see throughout the movie.
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6. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly - Julian Schnabel - 2007 - Mathieu Amalric

Consider this: There's been a multitude of movies about locked-in syndrome. Not only that but also amnesiacs, the retarded, people with low IQ's, dyslexia, paralysis, AIDS, cancer blah blah... It's almost every actor's ticket to critical appraisal as are seen in the movie promos which revolve around the "poor old freak". The Diving Bell and the Butterfly does not even show the actor for over half the movie. Instead of that it makes the viewer the diseased thanks to some brilliant cinematography by Janusz Kaminsky. Instead of being a massive ensemble piece about hope and struggle, it shows Jean-Dominique Bauby as what he was: a man with a delimitating disease. It shows him as a person with feelings wanting to watch football on the evening TV or lusting for his attractive doctor. And they show the people around him as what one would expect good medical people to be, caring and intellectual with some brilliant acting all around.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is claustrophobia at its best. Not a minute can you not empathize with the lead character. And for once, the empathy is not one mired with pathos or struggle. Instead it's one of a person living his day to day life which is what makes this movie so more remarkable.

Best Scene: When his speech doctor comes up with a new novel way to teach him to communicate, the first words Bauby musters up are "I Want Death". The following few moments of disappointment on the doctor's side and how she gets him to comply are perfect examples of medical professionalism that a hundred seasons of Grey's Anatomy won't be able to sully.
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5. The Lives of Others - Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck - 2006 - Ulrich Muhe

Based in cold war East Germany, The Lives of Others is quite possibly the most moral movie in this entire list. Ulrich Muhe gives one of the best performances of the decade as Wiesler, an officer in the East German secret service whose job is to crack down on enemies of the state. His next target is a controversial writer who's drugged up girlfriend is coveted by a powerful Central Committee member. What ensues is the secret service officer's quest to protect the young writer whose prosecution he finds amoral and unjust.

Brilliantly acted but more so exceptionally atmospheric, The Lives of Others shows repression at its best and worse and how power corrupts absolute power. There's a certain amount of deceit and betrayal which is the underlining idea of the movie and also a sense of catharsis. In the end, the good guys seem to be the ones most affected and for the worse. However the movie ends with them in the spotlight, which is the essence of the movie: Singing Praise for the Unsung Hero.

Best Scene: Now a postal officer, Weisler, walks the street delivering letters. In a car, the man whose life he saved (the writer) drives by and finally sees him. His gift to Weisler is a dedication in his next book, a story of how he survived the old communist regime.
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4. Lost In Translation - Sofia Coppola - 2003 - Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson

Bill Murray might easily be the most underrated actor of all time. In Lost in Translation, as Bob Harris he plays exactly that: an underrated human being. In a seemingly overfriendly land, he strives to get some realism and gets it in the form of Charlotte, played perfectly by Scarlett Johansson. What ensues is a plaintive, passionate romance without any fireworks or late night lovemaking shows. Instead, Ms.Coppola shows a bond formed that would've totally been ruined by any of the usual gimmicks. To round it off, we see two people with their souls intact in a world slowly etching towards commercialism as it would in the next few years.

To cap it off, the scenes are absolutely gorgeous. The best ones, unlike most cases are not the ones integral to the plot or having some particular deep meaning. Instead it's the lonely moments when Charlotte gazes outside her hotel room window or Bob taking running on a treadmill with instructions in Japanese. In fact, its myriad scenes like these which when taken together form the backbone of this movie which makes a simple story of two lost and confused souls meeting into one of timelessness.

Best Scene: Though almost everyone would agree on the ending scene as Bob whispers something in Charlotte's ear, I really loved the scene where the two return from a party with their Japanese friends and as their cab takes them home, Sometimes by My Bloody Valentine starts playing and she glances back at Bob with one of the most caring, love-filled eyes looks ever.
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3. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days - Christian Mungiu - Anamaria Marinca

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 days is a relatively unknown movie considering how well appraised it was by the critics. In spite of taking place in a Romania almost completely alien to the average city guy, the underlining story talks of cultures and politics. Instead, it emphasizes these things in a way so straightforward, so uninterrupted that it feels more so that you're watching a thriller set in real-time in a place that could almost be any place imaginable where there is a policy on abortion.

Though abortion, friendship and a hunger for freedom are the underlying messages here, the main thing that strikes you almost immediately is the absolute tick-tock pacing of the movie and some of the most natural and brilliant dialogue ever heard. To top it off, there's also some great acting and one sit is all you need to realize why this movie one the Palm d'Or at Cannes.

Best Scene: Otilia and Gabita , the two linchpins of the almost covert crouch down and gaze at the prime cause of all the misery they've faced that day: Gabita's dead fetus.
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2. There Will Be Blood - 2007 - Paul Thomas Anderson - Daniel Day Lewis

The movie begins with one man struggling in a mine-shaft, searching for precious metals. By the middle of the movie, he's in the process of building an Uncle Scrooge-esque empire. And by the end, he's done it. Except that he's lost everything in the process. Ultimately, Paul Thomas Anderson's masterpiece based on Upton Sinclair's Oil! is a tale of a tortured soul who exacts revenge on the world around him. However this soul, Daniel Plainview is one we do not loathe or hate. Instead, he might just be the coolest, meanest, most badass movie character of all time. And he has the money to show for it too.

In the end it's not the world that destroys him, it's he himself.

Propelled by Jonny Greenwood's heart thumping score and Daniel Day Lewis providing the greatest acting performance of the decade, There Will Be Blood is sinister, visceral, dirty and absolute gorgeous to look at. There's nothing like watching a bunch of people trying to leech oil from a place where if you try and look behind the characters in the frame, all you see is sand. Also, it gives us a character that will have its imprint on our minds for a long time. It's hard to say if this movie would have mattered without Day Lewis' performance. But then Day Lewis is there in the movie, which makes this choice in the list all the more valid.

Best Scene: After explaining to him how he has ruined his life Plainview, in a fit of rage and power kills Eli, the preacher who he has hated oh so much. As his attendant comes to get him, realizing how this murder will ultimately ruin him, the once articulate man can only muster two definitive words: I'm Finished!
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1. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King - 2003 - Peter Jackson - Viggo Mortensen

In spite of what almost every starry eyed Harry Potter, Twilight etc. fan might ever tell you, The Lord of the Rings has to be the ultimate depiction of fantasy ever put on film. Historically many were interrupted, but just couldn't be done because of the huge scale. Well, thanks to computers this was finally achieved in the 2000's. The Lord of the Rings movies were completely unlike any other. And this was because; the wars in the movies were in fact their essence. Long gone were boring, tedious romances (though there were a few here, but who really cared about Eowyn?) and made up characters in bad make-up. Instead they were replaced by realistic orcs, colossal creatures and scenes that made you wish everything was back to the middle ages again. This of course, is representative of the whole series.

However the movies still kept their central core ideas together, never breaking down into graphic displays of CGI or rudimentary humor. Though the individual performances were great, this is the modern Godfather in terms of ensemble performance. After seeing them, it was almost impossible to imagine the characters in the book as anything else. And of course, there were amazing developments in special effects technology which would move movies ahead by many years. Case and point: Gollum, easily the best mascot for the first half of the 2000's. In spite of the long length and the multiple endings the Lord of the Rings, especially the last one remains the pinnacle of last decade's movie making.

Best Scene: Though hard to pick, it would have to be the ending where the whole of humankind bowing down in respect for the four little hobbits who saved the world. For the whole series though, I would consider the Last March of the Ents as my favorite.