More than 5,000 movies were released in the decade between 2000 and 2009, and some Fridays, it seemed like most of them were Saw sequels.
That was probably just an illusion. The Aughts (as opposed to the Ought Nots) were actually a good time for films, a time when we met Harry Potter and Jason Bourne, when Martin Scorsese and the Coen Brothers got their Best Picture Oscars, when we put on our new 3-D glasses and – despite complaints from some crabby quarters – witnessed movie magic exploding around us.
Most of it was forgettable, at least to those who remained untraumatized by the Pink Panther remakes, but some of it was classic. Sifting through the thousands of movies they saw and reviewed in the past decade, Canwest film writers Katherine Monk and Jay Stone have come up with their lists of the Top 5 of the 2000s.
Jay Stone:
2. A History of Violence (David Cronenberg, 2005): Part western, part film noir, and part revenge fantasy, Cronenberg’s thrilling, disturbing film has grown with time.
It stars Viggo Mortensen as an average man in a small American town who interrupts a violent crime, and is then heralded as a hero and – in the blast of publicity – apparently mistaken for a man with a violent past. A multilayered masterpiece, it finds echoes of the culture of intimidation in a bullied schoolboy or a wife (Maria Bello) who is surprised and excited by her suddenly dominating husband.
Cronenberg wants us to think about the horror of violence, but also about our own enjoyment of it on screen: When Mortensen’s character faces down a criminal (Ed Harris) or has his showdown with his own brother (William Hurt), we become complicit in a classic tale of good vs. evil, but with a unique darkness at its heart.
– Full lists at canada.com.
