The Best Movies of the 00’s

This list was even harder to put together than my top albums of the last decade. I see a lot more movies than I buy CDs — an average of about 50-60 per year — and I love enough of them to put together a solid top ten list every year. Even looking at only the top fives, that’s 50 films vying for ten spots.

That said, many of these titles were no-brainers. The most difficult task was narrowing down ten or so titles to fill in the bottom half of this list. As with the album list, I could easily reshuffle the deck and swap out some of those films for these, depending on my mood, but I suppose the fact that I’ve settled on the ten that I did says something.

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The Best Albums of the 00’s

If you had told me way back when the decade began that at the end of 2009 my top two albums would be by Rihanna and Brad Paisley, I’m sure I would have called you crazy and booted you back into your time machine. My growing fondness for certain pop/R&B and country artists is definitely a development I didn’t see coming and one that has made the last ten years more interesting.

Looking over the ‘best of the decade’ lists in various publications recently, I’m reminded that my tastes fall pretty much dead center between the excessively commercial and the fiercely independent. Nothing on the list below will have anybody scratching her head asking “Where does he find these obscure acts?” But with a couple of exceptions, you’re not going to find any chart-toppers either.

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The decade (in music) so far

eminemAwhile back I posted my finalists for the best films of the 00s. Now I turn my attention to the best albums.

This is a harder assignment because I find my musical taste fluctuates a lot more than my movie taste. A band I obsess over today might not get much play 6 months from now. I tend to go through phases where I’ll play all of an artist’s albums for weeks at a time and then shelve them for a couple of months before revisiting them.

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The decade (in movies) so far

gene_hackmanI can’t believe we’re already half a month into 2009. I’m still trying to get used to describing this decade as the 00’s and here we are a year away from sewing it up and entering the 10’s.

We’re also a year away from the inevitable ‘Best of the ’00s’ lists, so I figured I’d go ahead and get a head start on mine. The past nine years have delivered some wonderful films and it’s going to be extremely tough narrowing them down to ten.

For starters, I’ve done the not-as-tough job of winnowing my favorite films since 2000 down to a list of 20. At the end of 2009 I’ll add any standouts from this year to the list and do the hard work of highlighting just ten.

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