The 69 Films That Defined My 2000s

by thelostboy
January 8, 2010 10:45 AM
0 Comments

And here lies the end of 2000s list-o-mania.

I can’t tell you how ridiculously difficult it was to narrow down hundreds and hundreds of examples of remarkable films down to the 69 I finally stuck with. And after various incarnations of ranks, I decided against doing so, and just have listed them in alphabetical order. Which totally goes against my nature. But it just felt right.

I feel like this decade was a very introductory one in terms of my relationship with cinema, particularly world cinema - which is a very overwhelming arena to enter. I was only 16 when the decade the began, and hate to admit I doubt I'd seen more than a dozen foreign language films at that point in my life. I can remember vividly claiming around that time that my favorite film was a tie between "Edward Scissorhands" and "Reality Bites." There was no decent video store in the town I grew up in, and our 3-cinema theater rarely thought outside a very studio-driven box. So over the course of the first few years of this decade, I really began to experience films in a different way - and not just films of the 2000s. This decade was also where I first saw everything from "Citizen Kane" to "Blow-Up" to "Scenes From a Marriage" to "Harold and Maude" (for four random examples).

So what I may or may not seem to be getting at is... the experience of the films I list here - each and everyone I can bring myself back to so vividly - feel almost too precious to reduce to rankings. And I feel too new at this to have a large enough grasp to place them in order. More over, I don't really feel like the 69 films as a whole represent my opinion of the best filmmaking of the 2000s, but more the filmmaking that defined my decade. If that makes sense?

So to the 2010s, and a full decade of cinematic access... In the meantime, here lies the 2000s:

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days