The MoFo Top 100 of the 2000s Countdown

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I haven't seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It's never felt too interesting to me.

Seen: 51/95

My Ballot:  
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That elusive hide-and-seek cow is at it again
I haven't seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It's never felt too interesting to me.

Felt like a round disc, to me.





That elusive hide-and-seek cow is at it again
Ok. I'm done for the day before I get banned or driven out of the village by torch and pitchfork.



Here's a 15 minute interview with Jim Carrey and Michel Gondry about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind...

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Check out my podcast: The Movie Loot!



Here are the six from my ballot that didn't make the collective Top 100...



Götz Spielmann's Revanche (2008) is a beautiful film about revenge, guilt, and forgiveness surrounding the aftermath of a bank robbery. It is a very Noirish plot but develops into something much deeper, a meditation on loss and consequences. The undercurrent of possible violence remains throughout, but ultimately the human beings involved separate from their wrath-filled archetypes. It is a very good film. I had it as my third pick. I knew it had little chance of actually making the countdown but I had to be true to myself. If you've never seen it check it out, and maybe when this list is rebooted again in ten or fifteen years it will find its way into the collective?




Also from 2008, Ari Folman's animated confessional Waltz with Bashir was my fourth choice. With all of the PIXARs I knew would be on the list as well as Miyazaki somewhere near the top, again, I didn't realistically hold out much hope this bit of animation would make the list. But I included it because I think it is brilliant and beautiful. Blending autobiography, documentary, history, and memory into this animated feature is such an unexpected concoction that mesmerizes me. Ari Folman meets up with a friend he hasn't seen in years, a man who is being haunted by nightmares of their time serving as Israeli soldiers in the 1982 Lebanon War. In Proust-like fashion Folman searches through time and memory to piece together things he has been repressing himself. It all would have worked as a straight documentary or as a drama, but the otherworldly vibrance of the entire thing being animated is trippy and in the end compelling in a way more traditional representations of the story likely could not have achieved.




Pedro Almodóvar's continuously expanding cinematic legacy is simply amazing, and to date Hable con Ella - Talk to Her is my favorite among favorites. That no Almodóvar movies made it in one of his strongest decades is both perplexing and maybe telling. I don't believe there are a consensus one or three of his films that are universally considered to be his very best. Maybe his output is so voluminous and they're all so damn good that even among his fans and in his professional critical praise there are simply too many favorites? Whatever vagaries of balloting kept him off of this list it is a bit of a glaring omission. No Almodóvar films made our MoFo Top 100 Foreign Films List either, which also seems almost impossible and perhaps even criminal (in a cinemaniac sense). Talk to Her was all the way up at number six for me. The stories of these two men and the comatose women they love is super frickin' dark and sexy and unsettling and beautiful and tragic and funny. In a word, Almodóvar!




Curtis Hanson's adaptation of Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys (2000) is witty and funny and elegant and apparently it isn't well-enough remembered by MoFos to make the cut. Maybe it suffers a bit in that Hanson, who died in 2016, has a filmography that is highlighted in the middle by two excellent book adaptations in L.A. Confidential and Wonder Boys, but surrounded by objectively much less prestigious and memorable movies on either side - decent if routine thrillers like The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and The River Wild before, and then all over the map afterwards with 8 Mile, In Her Shoes, Lucky You, and Chasing Mavericks? The success of L.A. Confidential coupled with the great script drew an amazing cast, headlined by Michael Douglas in what I think is easily the performance of his career, Frances McDormand, Robert Downey Jr., and Tobey Maguire with every single supporting role likewise filled to perfection. The movie is often laugh-out-loud funny with a terrific tone that mirrors the weariness and promise embodied by the two main novelists in the story. It plays like a 21st Century Billy Wilder piece for this fan and I love the damn thing. It was eleventh on my ballot and could have easily been even higher. Hell, maybe it's just the English Major in me?



I had Gangs of New York on my ballot at number twenty-three. Martin Scorsese is my all-time favorite filmmaker if forced to choose just one, but this decade, despite finally winning him that Oscar, is not one of his strongest. The Departed is the only title to make the list. I have already detailed what I think about that movie. Scorsese only had three total narrative features in the decade - Gangs of New York, The Aviator, and The Departed - versus six films in the 1990s and five in 2010s. That is partly because Gangs of New York and The Aviator were both huge, expensive period pieces with long pre and post-production periods. I like both of them just about equally but ultimately chose Gangs somewhat strategically guessing the towering, over-the-top fun of Daniel Day-Lewis' Bill the Butcher, like the work in the P.T. Anderson flick that made the Top Five, might have it appear on enough MoFo ballots to crack the Top 100. My guess was wrong and instead had I given those three little points to The Aviator it would have just made it. Strategy-shmattegy.

Scorsese had been trying to get Gangs of New York made since the 1970s. The advent of the digital age finally made it feasible by the 2000s. Marty's first foray into the world of digital effects leaves his movie with a look unlike anything he had made before, but the tale of brutality and revenge on the mean streets of Manhattan is of course right in line with his oeuvre. While not top tier Scorsese I like it significantly more than The Departed and find as the years go by that as I watch it more and more it rises in both my esteem and his filmography.




This was a very strong decade for Clint Eastwood, and though Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby both won multiple Oscars and both made this countdown, for my taste his masterpiece in this period and one of his greatest films is Letters from Iwo Jima (2006). I had it as my one-pointer. That it was not revealed at the beginning of this countdown means at least one other person had it on their ballot. I hope there were more than two of us. Clint made a pair of films on the subject of the infamous WWII battle, the first being Flags of Our Fathers about the men who hoisted the Stars and Stripes in one of the most iconic photos of the 20th Century. That was adapted from a best-selling book and seemed poised for greatness. But even as a massive Eastwood fan I found that film surprisingly ineffective. So I went into Letters from Iwo Jima, which would show the battle from the Japanese perspective, with lowered expectations. As disappointed as I was with Flags, Letters was harrowing and beautiful and moving. It is another vote that I figured would be wasted in that it was unlikely to make the cut, but I had to show some love for what I think is one of the finest War films ever made.

I have two more coming in our MoFo Top Five, but here is the rest of my ballot...

HOLDEN’S BALLOT
1. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (#86)
2. Dancer in the Dark (#49)
3. Revanche (DNP)
4. Waltz with Bashir (DNP)
5. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (#6)
6. Talk to Her (DNP)
7. Children of Men (#17)
8. Amélie (#16)
9. The Lives of Others (#41)
10. The Pianist (#31)
11. Wonder Boys (DNP)
13. Zodiac (#9)
14. Synecdoche, New York (#46)
15. Moon (#48)
16. Fantastic Mr. Fox (#70)
17. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (#92)
18. A Serious Man (#66)
19. Adaptation. (#43)
20. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (#51)
21. Downfall (#28)
23. Gangs of New York (DNP)
24. Memento (#11)
25. Letters from Iwo Jima (DNP)

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"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream it takes over as the number one hormone. It bosses the enzymes, directs the pineal gland, plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to Film is more Film." - Frank Capra



This was a very strong decade for Clint Eastwood, and though Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby both won multiple Oscars and both made this countdown, for my taste his masterpiece in this period and one of his greatest films is Letters from Iwo Jima (2006). I had it as my one-pointer. That it was not revealed at the beginning of this countdown means at least one other person had it on their ballot. I hope there were more than two of us. Clint made a pair of films on the subject of the infamous WWII battle, the first being Flags of Our Fathers about the men who hoisted the Stars and Stripes in one of the most iconic photos of the 20th Century. That was adapted from a best-selling book and seemed poised for greatness. But even as a massive Eastwood fan I found that film surprisingly ineffective. So I went into Letters from Iwo Jima, which would show the battle from the Japanese perspective, with lowered expectations. As disappointed as I was with Flags, Letters was harrowing and beautiful and moving. It is another vote that I figured would be wasted in that it was unlikely to make the cut, but I had to show some love for what I think is one of the finest War films ever made.
Coincidentally, I also had Letters from Iwo Jima as my 1-pointer, though I figured since Mark had included it on his list of foreign language films, he might include it on this list. At the time Flags of Our Fathers came out, there seemed the possibility it could be a great film--until I saw it. Letters was everything Flags was supposed to be.

I also like all the other films from your list that didn't make it, including the very underappreciated Wonder Boys, which I've watched a few times. And I considered Gangs of New York. That was a film I didn't fully appreciate until I saw it a second time years later and I realized what a tremendous film Scorsese had made.
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I also like all the other films from your list that didn't make it, including the very underappreciated Wonder Boys, which I've watched a few times.
Wonder Boys was #39 on the MoFo Top 100 of the Millennium List but fell all the way off. The Fountain (#31) and Talk to Her (#35) were the only higher-placed eligible films from that list to also not make it this time.




2022 Mofo Fantasy Football Champ
25 2000s films from the millennium list didn't make the cut here, a true representation of voting pattern shifts here at Mofo, for better or worse.



25 2000s films from the millennium list didn't make the cut here, a true representation of voting pattern shifts here at Mofo, for better or worse.
Which ones didn't make it?



I count twenty-six: The Fountain, Talk to Her, Wonder Boys, A History of Violence, Ghost World, Solaris, Crash, Signs, Gran Torino, Gone Baby Gone, Road to Perdition, Hero, Man on Fire, Gangs of New York, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring, Brick, King Kong, Traffic, Once, Lars and the Real Girl, Good Night and Good Luck, The Darjeeling Limited, American Splendor, Brotherhood of the Wolf, Black Dynamite, and The Bourne Identity. Plus another dozen 2010 or 2011 titles that were ineligible: The Social Network, Inception, Black Swan, Toy Story 3, The King's Speech, Drive, True Grit, The Tree of Life, The Help, The Artist, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.




Ghost World
Once
American Splendor

I think these are the only ones that I even considered that didn't make my list. Most of the others weren't even briefly contemplated. Also, haven't seen a few (Spring Summer etc, Brotherhood of the Wolf, Goodnight and Goodluck), that are vaguely in my wheelhouse that I should probably get around to.



28 days...6 hours...42 minutes...12 seconds
I count twenty-six: The Fountain, Talk to Her, Wonder Boys, A History of Violence, Ghost World, Solaris, Crash, Signs, Gran Torino, Gone Baby Gone, Road to Perdition, Hero, Man on Fire, Gangs of New York, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring, Brick, King Kong, Traffic, Once, Lars and the Real Girl, Good Night and Good Luck, The Darjeeling Limited, American Splendor, Brotherhood of the Wolf, Black Dynamite, and The Bourne Identity. Plus another dozen 2010 or 2011 titles that were ineligible: The Social Network, Inception, Black Swan, Toy Story 3, The King's Speech, Drive, True Grit, The Tree of Life, The Help, The Artist, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
I feel like I'm always alone in liking The Darjeeling Limited. I would always take some comfort in thinking at least people liked it more than Steve Zissou, but according to this list, that is not the case.
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Suspect's Reviews



A system of cells interlinked
I count twenty-six: The Fountain, Talk to Her, Wonder Boys, A History of Violence, Ghost World, Solaris, Crash, Signs, Gran Torino, Gone Baby Gone, Road to Perdition, Hero, Man on Fire, Gangs of New York, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring, Brick, King Kong, Traffic, Once, Lars and the Real Girl, Good Night and Good Luck, The Darjeeling Limited, American Splendor, Brotherhood of the Wolf, Black Dynamite, and The Bourne Identity. Plus another dozen 2010 or 2011 titles that were ineligible: The Social Network, Inception, Black Swan, Toy Story 3, The King's Speech, Drive, True Grit, The Tree of Life, The Help, The Artist, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
Yimou's Hero was on my ballot, but...

WARNING: "Hero" spoilers below
I figured it had about as much chance of making the list as the titular lead had of surviving that final volley of arrows...
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528 points, 28 lists
Spirited Away
Director

Hayao Miyazaki, 2001

Starring

Rumi Hiiragi, Miyu Irino, Mari Natsuki, Takashi Naitō

#5






Seen it, but no vote.

I saw this for the first time in 2018; it was my second Studio Ghibli film, after Princess Mononoke, and just like that one, I really didn't jive with it. Here's the review I wrote back when I saw it. To be fair, anime is not a "genre" I'm used to, although there are a few ones I've liked. I remember that back in Corrie, Takoma did offer some thoughts and feedback about my issues with the film which helped put some things in context, but I would need to give it a rewatch to see how it fares now.


As it is...

Seen: 79/96

My ballot:  



Spirited Away is on the short list of animes I've seen. I remember it being quite nice, probably the best Ghibli film I've seen.

Seen: 52/96

My Ballot:  



Studio Ghibli makes some very good looking movies. The trouble is, they also make movies that I don't like and Spirited Away is not an exception to that.

I'm slightly annoyed that this is the highest placing animated film. Damn Miyazaki.