Tyler's Best of the Year List

Wow, didn't expect to see Crouching Tiger there at all. (Not that I'm not pleased. Or is 2000 just a weak year given what you've seen?)

I have to see this Werckmeister Harmonies movie that everyone is raving about on this site.

Anyways, glad to see Mystic River and Spirited Away high up for their years.

Not a big fan of Ang Lee, and yes Crouching Tiger may be a bit shallow and suffer from some pacing issues, but there are moments of visual brilliance that deserve their recognition. 2000 is in fact, a great year for film when one compares it with the weaker years of 2006 and 2009.

Watching Werckmeister Harmonies is like watching the reinvention of the cinematic language, sorry for the hyperbole.

Unlike most people on this site, I am actually very impressed by Eastwood's later films which show a greater depth of maturity. Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby are among the best American films I have seen.

And so that concludes the decade. In no particular order...



The Decade In Film: Top 10

Mulholland Drive (Lynch, 2001)
Synecdoche, New York (Kaufman, 2008)
Werckmeister Harmonies (Tarr, 2000)
Yi Yi (Yang, 2000)
Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (Gondry, 2004)
Zodiac (Fincher, 2007)
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Puiu, 2005)
Cache (Haneke, 2005)
Extraordinary Stories (Llinas, 2008)
4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days (Mungiu, 2007)

What about me? I was able to guess quite a few. Where's my dap?!

Also are you going to continue and do the 90s lists, or now that we're getting the official Mofo 90s list are you going to leave it to keep your choices secret for now?

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Alright, here's your cookie.

Anyway, I decided not to do the 90s because of HL's Mofo 90s list. I'd probably reveal my list once the countdown begins, and after I have seen more films of the decade.

I will continue doing the 90s, and you all can figure out the list I sent to HL.

1999: The Year In Film



1999:
1. Eyes Wide Shut
2. Beau Travail
3. Being John Malkovich
4. All About My Mother
5. Peppermint Candy
6. The Wind Will Carry Us
7. Audition
8. Sleepy Hollow
9. The Matrix
10. Seventeen Years

Eyes Wide Shut gets under your skin like a Lynchian nightmare (in fact, this movie reminded me of Blue Velvet), a movie that on the surface appears calm but with raging undercurrents down under. It's erotic and frightening, with the score and colours consistently shaping the film into an engaging dream-like trance.

99 was a great year, and good job including Eyes Wide Shut, Being John Malkovich, and All About my Mother. The Matrix is pretty good to. I'll check out Beau Travail, I never even heard of it.

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It's a French arthouse film almost without a plot and full of homoerotic undertones. I wasn't impressed but a large group of critics loved it. Predictably, it flopped at the box office.

Good recommendation! Added to my to-watch-list

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San Franciscan lesbian dwarves and their tomato orgies.

Eyes Wide Shut is top tier Kubrick and a genuine masterpiece. It definitely has a lot of similarities with Lynch, which is probably part of why I love it so much.

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"Puns are the highest form of literature." -Alfred Hitchcock

I beg to differ. It's far from top tier Kubrick. It's nearly perfect camera work (to my amateur eyes), but it's not up to Kubrick standard. It lacks freshness and erotic thrillers were basically all over the place back then. Kubrick's films were based on clinical precision and the final result usually gave the word 'genre' a gigantic kick in the nuts. Eyes Wide Shut didn't do that at all imo. He spent over two years re-editing it to somehow make it better than it was.

The orgy scene was top notch though.

Eastwood ranked higher than Orson Welles in the last kinema junpo poll of foreign films (measured by total votes conferred to the movies of both directors).

But Eyes Wide Shut is so much more than an erotic thriller. You could interpret the majority of the film as an extended dream sequence. Also, as an eerie, disturbing study of sexual jealousy and relationship detachment I think it's virtually unparalleled. I love the aura of paranoia and mystery the film creates, which not only reinforces the internal feelings of Tom Cruise's character but also very much adds to its entertainment value. In addition to the Lynchian elements, I also think that Eyes Wide Shut, like The Shining, has quite a lot in common with Last Year at Marienbad in terms of tone and style (not to mention the fact that both films at least somewhat revolve around the nature of attraction).

You don't have The Straight Story on your list, therefore, your list is invalid. Neither do you have Boys Don't Cry. Also, check out Girl On The Bridge, if you haven't, which I assume you haven't as it's not on the list. There's also Ratcatcher, which seems to've picked up a bit of a following over the last year or so, maybe due to We Need to Talk About Kevin?

There again, 1999 was such a good year, that I won't bother with all the other films I'd try to squeeze onto a top 10 of the year, all of which, with the exception of Sleepy Hollow and Being John Malkovich, you've managed to miss.

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5-time MoFo Award winner.