I’ve gone on record naming the Coen Brothers as my favorite filmmakers, so it should come as no surprise that they landed two films on my Best of the 2010s list.
I will wait until I get to the next one to talk about the Coens’ decade overall.
But today, a few words about the brothers’ last film of the decade, the Western anthology The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.
Paul Thomas Anderson often shows up at or near the top of critics’ lists of the best living film directors. I’m a card-carrying member of the cult.
Anderson directed my third favorite movie of the 00s (There Will Be Blood) and both Boogie Nights and Magnolia, two of my favorite 90s films. In the 2010s, he delivered a trio of fascinating and wildly different movies, including 2014’s Inherent Vice and 2017’s Phantom Thread.
I was intially surprised to see I hadn’t already posted today’s track, from Rufus Wainwright’s 1999 self-titled debut album.
In fact, I’ve posted only one song from this album, period, the opening cut ‘Foolish Love.’
Looking back at that post, I was reminded why Wainwright has had a relatively low profile on the blog (26 Songs of the Day, including six on Random Weekends). My regular readers, especially ten years ago, just didn’t like him very much.
To paraphrase what old Ben Kenobi once said about the name “Obi Wan”: Sugarland… Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.
Today’s track is a short callback to the title cut on the band’s 2010 album Incredible Machine. It is sung by Kristian Bush, while the longer version (like most of the band’s songs) is sung by Jennifer Nettles.
Of the nine movies so far to win the Best Picture Oscar during the 2010s, only one made my list of the Top 20 films of the decade (that could change depending on how this year’s Academy Awards turn out).
The Oscars got it right by crowning Spotlight, directed and co-written by Tom McCarthy, a depiction of the Boston Globe investigative team’s landmark work uncovering systemic child abuse by priests.
Meet Me In Montauk 