My Movie Decade

By Edwin Davies

January 3, 2011

They're going to need the mother of all zombie showers.

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The last ten years were pretty momentous for me in terms of films, not just with regards to the many great films that were released in that time, but also in how I was able to see and experience those films changed. At the turn of the century (I cannot stress how weird it is being able to use that phrase in relation to my own life and have it be factually correct) I was 14 and living in a small village in rural England, where the only cinemas were a 30 minute car journey or an hour bus journey followed by a 40 minute walk away. To say that my exposure to the great panoply of cinema was somewhat limited is an understatement to rival "King Kong was unusually large for an ape."

As the decade wore on, that changed. I left home and moved to a big(ish) city that had an arthouse cinema. I also made friends with people who had radically different tastes to mine, and through them was exposed to all sorts of new music, books and film. Plus, I had a student loan and there was no way any of that was going to go on learning materials when I could spend it on DVDs. My horizons broadened immeasurably, and whereas my 14-year-old self would rather lose a thumb than go and see a slow, portentous black-and-white film about life in early 20th century Germany, the 23-year-old me named Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon one of the best films of 2009. And the 24-year-old me pretty much agrees with that decision. Good job, Past Self!

Rather than just list the films that I thought were the best overall, I have broken the list down by year. This is altogether fairer than just paying no heed to the years, since there will always be one or two years in a decade which have a better crop of films, but it also allowed me to rediscover films that I had forgotten about, the sort of great films that would not have leapt to mind unless I was placing such restrictions on myself. Films like...




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2000



Chicken Run

Nick Park and Peter Lord's film is an hilarious parody of prison break movies - specifically The Great Escape - which is full of the love of cinema that has been the signature of Park's other great creations, Wallace and Gromit. The stop-motion animation is stunning, the script is peppered with great dialogue (I quote the line "I don't want to be a pie! I don't like gravy" with a regularity that really is not normal) and the characters are warm, likable and hugely charming, even if one of them is voiced by Mel Gibson. It has even had a disproportionately huge impact, since it has often been cited as the impetus for the introduction of the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. Not bad for such a fowl film (BOOOO!).

American Psycho

Bit of a change of pace; from plucky chickens to Christian Bale murdering people to the smooth sounds of Phil Collins. Bale gives easily my favorite performance of his as Patrick Bateman, a Wall Street yuppie bastard who moonlights as a serial killer (or does he?) and has an obsessive knowledge of the music of Huey Lewis - much like most serial killers. A bleakly hilarious take on the equally dark book, American Psycho is a brilliant satire of a very particular kind of shallow, narcissistic creep, the sort of person who thinks that the lettering on his business card is of more intrinsic value than human life.


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