Favorite Films by Decade: the 2000s
My assignment: Choose a movie from each decade of my life that has had the most personal impact, starting with the 1940s and ending in the 2020s.
We’ve already covered the 1940s, ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s and continue now with the 2000s. These aren’t necessarily the “best” movies of the decade or the most innovative; they represent the films that resonated most with me, either from my initial viewing when they were released or when I first engaged with them in subsequent years.
Some rules to keep these lists doable: 1) Only one film each decade by a particular director; 2) only English-language movies, due mainly to gaps in my knowledge about foreign-language films except for Italian neo-realism, French New Wave and the works of Akira Kurosawa, and 3) no TV miniseries.
I’m sure I’ve missed some great movies that should be on these lists. Yet this still leaves hundreds, if not thousands, of movies to choose from.
Let the arguments continue.
The 2000s:
“Dirty Pretty Things” (2002):
Stephen Frears is a versatile, veteran British film director who has made outstanding movies and TV shows in Britain and the U.S. in a variety of genres since the late 1960s, including “My Beautiful Laundrette,” “Dangerous Liaisons,” “The Grifters,” “High Fidelity,” “The Queen” and “Philomena.” But “Dirty Pretty Things,” the story of two undocumented immigrants in London who are endangered by both the British deportation authorities and the unscrupulous manager of the hotel where they both work, is my favorite.
The movie, built on a screenplay by Steven Knight, is also a tense thriller. Chiwetel Ejiofor, in his first major film role (and a decade before his commanding performance in “12 Years A Slave”), plays Okwe, a Nigerian doctor in exile who works as a minicab driver during the day and as a desk clerk at a hotel at night.
In the few hours he has for sleep, he stays on the couch of Senay, a Turkish immigrant (Audrey Tautou) fleeing an arranged marriage who also tries to exist on two low-paying jobs, as a seamstress in a sweat shop and as a maid in the same hotel. Crucial roles are played by Sergi Lopez, in a brilliantly villainous performance as a sleazy hotel manager, and Sophie Okonedo, as a prostitute working at the hotel.
As depicted by Frears, London is very much like New York—a city of enormous size and energy that could not function without the labor of hundreds of thousands of unsung and often unseen immigrants. In “Dirty Pretty Things,” it takes a talented director working with a superb cast to meld the story of its protagonists’ difficult lives as immigrants into a suspenseful and unforgettable genre film.
Close behind:
“Munich” (2005): One of Steven Spielberg’s few box-office failures was also one of the director’s most nuanced and thoughtful movies. Working with writer Tony Kushner for the first time in what would become a fruitful and ongoing partnership, they made this suspenseful story about an undercover Israeli hit squad assigned to kill those behind the heinous murder of 12 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich.
But the leader of the squad (played with understated strength by Eric Bana) begins to have moral qualms about their mission and its contribution to the never-ending conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.
“The Pianist” (2002): Director Roman Polanski drew on his own experiences as a child in Poland hiding out from the Nazis to tell the story of Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody), a Jewish classical pianist who evades German deportation to the death camps and hides out in Warsaw with the help of the Polish resistance.
“Best in Show” (2000): One of my favorite comedy directors, Christopher Guest, and his gifted repertory company of comic actors (Michael McKean, Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Parker Posey, Fred Willard, Jane Lynch and Guest himself) deliver an uproarious faux documentary on one of my favorite species—dogs.
“The Constant Gardener” (2005): Turning away from the Cold War, novelist John le Carre found a gripping subject in western pharmaceutical companies dumping their dangerous projects in the Third World, a story told exceptionally well by director Fernando Meirelles and actors Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz.
“The Aviator” (2004): Director Martin Scorsese and star Leonardo DiCaprio explore the fascinating career and troubled psyche of the eccentric aviation pioneer and Hollywood producer Howard Hughes.
But, perhaps you’re wondering, how could he leave out “The Bourne Identity,” “Brokeback Mountain,” “Good Night, and Good Luck,” “25th Hour” and “The Wind That Shakes the Barley”?
Coming next week: The 2010s
Bruce Dancis spent 18 years as the Arts & Entertainment Editor of the Sacramento Bee, after previously serving as an editor for the Daily Californian, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, M.I. (Musicians’ Industry) Magazine, Mother Jones and the Oakland Tribune. He also wrote about Film and TV History in a weekly column about DVDs that was syndicated by the McClatchy and Scripps Howard news services. Since 2003 he has co-chaired a summer film program at the Three Arrows Cooperative Society in Putnam Valley, NY. He is the author of “Resister: A Story of Protest and Prison during the Vietnam War” (2014, Cornell University Press) and appears in the documentary film “The Boys Who Said No! Draft Resistance and the Vietnam War” (2020). He lives in Cardiff, CA, and Putnam Valley, NY.