It's Official, the At The Movies Guys are idiots

Neither Michael Phillips nor A.O. Scott picked any Lord of the Rings movie in the top 10 of the last decade.  The movie that I, and their viewers, picked as number one.  What did they pick as number one?

A.O. Scott picked WALL-E.  A very good movie.  But even my wife, who loves cute animated films, dropped her jaw at this pick.  We will have to rent it again to see.

Michael Phillips picked There Will Be Blood.  This is the kind of movie that critics love, because they can fire their full rhetorical blasts of praise and compare it to another good but completely overblown movie, Citizen Kane.  Check some of the comments, easily available via a cursory Google search:

"a film of Darwinian ferocity, a stark and pitiless parable of American capitalism"

"(director) Anderson is an artful renegade who restores your faith in the harsh power of movies. This is his bloody and brilliant Citizen Kane."

"about Day-Lewis. "Gargantuan" is a puny word to describe his landmark performance."

"epic American nightmare, arrives belching fire and brimstone and damnation to Hell"
 

But Roger Ebert has it right:


"its imperfections (its unbending characters, its lack of women or any reflection of ordinary society, its ending, its relentlessness) we may see its reach exceeding its grasp"

I've seen There Will Be Blood.  In my opinion, it was a movie written and directed with the express purpose of appearing to be "great".  Designed to appeal to critics, arriving with hoopla and Oscar buzz.  But not a great movie.

Best Movies of the Decade

I don't watch "At the Movies" much (since it isn't Siskel and Ebert anymore) but did catch it the other night, and they were counting down the "Best Movies of the Decade".  Since each critic had his own selection, and we were at #2, that's a total of 18 films.  I have seen none of them.  My wife has seen only one of them.  Maybe we are really out of touch.  Several of them I haven't even heard of.  For what it's worth, which isn't much, only one (Million Dollar Baby) won the Academy Award, though several were nominated.

I'm really wondering about their choices next week for the best film.  For them to have any credibility with me, it has to be one of the Lord of the Rings movies.  But these guys are really into filmaking and art - maybe they will be like the the Editors at the Modern Library who didn't even rate Lord of the Rings in the top 100 novels of the last century, instead preferring more "literary" works like Ulysses, Lolita, and Sons and Lovers, while the common people voted for books people actually read, like Ayn Rand, Tolkien, To Kill a Mockingbird, and, in a particularly insightful pick, H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness.  Some of the popular votes are dubious and repetitive (there's way too much Ayn Rand and Hubbard), but, all in all, I think they did a better job than the "pros".

So, drum roll please...  Here are my picks for the ten best movies of the last decade

1. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers - my favorite of the three
2. Heaven
3. The Wrestler
4. Walk the Line
5. The Bourne Identity  - again, my favorite of the three, though all were strong
6. Bend It Like Beckham
7. Finding Nemo
8. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
9. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World  (if only for the music)
10. Little Miss Sunshine

Plus a few honorable mentions (the two critics get 20 total)

• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban 
• The Fountain  this one was weird and ultimately baffling, but had wonderful visuals and tried to be something
• O Brother, Where Art Thou?  it's bonafide!
• The Bank Job
• Legally Blonde  (a guilty pleasure)
  

Is Conspicuous Consumption America's Enduring Legacy?

Noted sci-fi author David Brin argues for this in a recent article and on his blog.  He argues "that the period of Pax America has been generally positive", and considers U.S. policy in the years just after World War 2.

Instead of annexing territory and looting the defeated enemy, (e.g. Franco-Prussian war, Treaty of Versailles) President Truman, Nobel Peace Prize winner George Marshall, and General Douglas MacArthur,developed an unprecedented historical policy of "countermercantilism" to lift up the defeated. 

"the clearly stated intention was for the United States to lift up their prostrate foe, first with direct aid.  And then, over the longer term, with trade."

Before this, normal empires practiced mercantilism, favoring home industry, and using other countries, particularly colonies, as sources of raw materials and as export markets.  The British Empire is a prime example of this, but so were the Chinese, Moguls, Romans and Greeks.

"America became the first power in history to deliberately establish countermercantilist commerce flows.  Nations crippled by war or mismanagement were allowed to maintain tariffs, keeping out American goods, while sending shiploads from their factories to the United States ....

What this amounted to, however, was the greatest aid-and-uplift program in human history. A prodigious transfer of wealth from the United States to Europe, Asia and Latin America."

Now, some of this was done to defeat totalitarian Communism.  Which was also, overall, a good thing for humanity.  While he makes it clear that he is no neo-conservative, Brin calls for the reflexive America loathers to give it some credit:

"Even if America is exhausted from having spent its way from world dominance into a chasm of debt, the United States does have something to show for it the last six decades. A world saved. Billions of human beings lifted out of poverty. That task, far more prodigious than defeating fascism and communism or going to the moon, ought to be viewed with a little respect."

Should the 21st century become the "Chinese Century", as many have postulated, when historians look back upon it, will they find any similar commitment to uplift the human race?  One can hope.