ol' eddy wrecks

One connection between this and 2001 they didn't mention in the podcast (maybe this is apocryphal), but at one point Kubrick was planning to end 2001 with the Star Baby coming back to earth, triggering all the nuclear missiles, wiping out humanity, making way for the new type of man (repeating the theme of advancement in the Dawn of Man scene being advancement leading to the destruction of the old). But ultimately decided, he just ended his last movie the exact same way, so no. The decision to make the president not sickly/etc, was, if the logic of the scene needed a comic straight man for everyone to play off against. You can still things like tissues in some of the scenes because they had already started filming it with him sick.

apologies the video I found has an a/v sync issue

Slight addendum to my previous post: looking at Producer Josh's list, it does look like it's purely US films.

I noted this as well (because my best film of the decade isn't eligible for the list - both foreign and a documentary). I think Amy & Paul stuck to that criteria (or tried to) during their episodes (going year-by-year). e.g. When they mentioned Raw, it was as an "extra movie, but not choice because it's French and therefore not eligible for the list." When asking guests their best movie of the decade, it's not surprising they didn't bother to adhere to AFI list criteria/probably weren't told/didn't care/etc. I suspect Josh and Devon, in not sticking to the AFI criteria for their lists, probably just ignored it, since they already have their top 100 (or whatever) for the decade which already takes a lot of effort, and imposing "American-only" seems like an arbitrary restriction when talking about the best films you've seen this decade (e.g. imagine being someone who does a best-of list, and then asked, "oh by the way, can you choose just the films eligible for the AFI list." It'd feel like something was lost. That's just my 2 cents.)

Paul & Amy continue their Best of The Decade miniseries, picking their favorite films from each year of the 2010s! This episode focuses on the years 2016-2019, and they’ll discuss a misunderstood technical achievement, a groundbreaking horror debut, and a centuries-spanning meditation on death, among many others. Plus: looking back on an infamous Oscar debacle. Next week is the final episode of our Best Of The Decade series! Follow us on Twitter @Unspooled, get more info at unspooledpod.com and don’t forget to rate, review & subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts. Photo credit: Kim Troxall

Between Lady Bird and Eighth Grade, I'll mention in terms of coming of age stories, while probably not a best of the decade, but We Are The Best! was a lot of fun and pretty good. So, if you liked those other two movies, you might want to check it out if you haven't seen it. /random thought of movie from past decade coming to mind.

IDK what hardware/app you're using, but sometimes when watching a movie on my firestick, I need to go into installed apps and do a force stop, clear cache, launch application. The main offender is usually the Shudder app, primarily with its "live" channels feature.

I listened to the episode this morning, so I've already forgotten what exactly were on Devon's & Josh's lists. I just remember Adam McKay had the same film of the decade as me (The Act of Killing) - go figure. It was hard getting it down to 10 and there were some definite mental debates I had, but the following 5 (unranked) seemed to be the definites on the list (with the exception of The Look of Silence, but only because The Act of Killing was already there, but the more I thought about it, the more I felt it needed to be there): The Act of Killing + The Look of Silence: I'm surprised both Amy and Adam look at it and feel some hope because one of the killers felt remorse at the end. I mean, it was one killer, and it was more anguish as he started to be able to imagine what it must have been like for the people he killed (and it was mentioned before he was having issues sleeping), but for the most part, I came away thinking, that the people who did this are not going to have any type of mea-culpa about this. The fact that so many of the people in the credits are listed as anonymous emphasizes that. The Master: Rather than take Amy Adams as The Master, I took the movie to be a reflection on such things as religion, and its role in society. Such as to give focus and direction to those in society who desperately lack it and the responsibility to do so - even if the foundation of it all is made up. And the rituals, people, and ideas (and ideas of people) we willingly subjugate ourselves to in order to get that direction. It's Such a Beautiful Day (aka The Everything will be Okay trilogy, or The Billogy (another Don Hertzeldt animated short, World of Tomorrow was mentioned on the podcast - 16 minute animated short on Vimeo). I don't know if this counts as part of this decade since I think the first two parts of the trilogy came out last decade. However, the third part, and the release as one complete film happened this decade. This movie gives me a weird emotional gut punch of acceptance and hope in the third chapter that it became something I found myself returning to not infrequently (the short runtime, roughly one hour probably helped). World of Tomorrow starts of stronger, and has its second chapter (mentioned in the podcast), but it's clear there's still another chapter to go, and until that happens, and I see it, I prefer It's Such a Beautiful Day. World of Tomorrow starts off stronger in its first chapter. Inside Llewyn Davis: I feel like I have a much more depressing take on this than producer-Josh (I think it was). But I'm running out of time and need to go to bed. Next set of movies to round out the top 10: Under the Skin (I'm surprised Paul was surprised by people mentioning this one a lot. Lots of people loved this movie when it came out) Berberian Sound Studio Sorry to Bother You The Death of Stalin Moonlight Just missed the cut (and were in my original top 13 which I couldn't pare down until now) Greenberg Anomalisa Annihilation I will say as someone who owns both Kill List and A Field in England (but I own more movies than I should) - Kill List is a lot more accessible. A Field in England is more like... The Lighthouse in terms of opaqueness - but with much thicker accents - but with the outfits of The Witch. I can't tell clothes apart.

Well, we're going at this for different reasons. For me, the point of watching movies on a list is the idea of being exposed or revisiting movies that I think are worth my time in some way. Ranking on the movies seen seems more like an afterthought or exercise (technically, the people who voted for the actual list didn't rank most of them either). I don't get to watch as many movies as I'd like, so I'd rather spend what movie watching time I have to watching movies I want to see, rather than go back and confirm movies I strongly suspected I wouldn't like (or have seen and knew I wouldn't like) that I don't/still don't like them. But I guess it all comes down to a prioritization of time and what on wants to get by following along with the podcast.

Correction - Joe Talbot, the director, is not a person of color. That was a mistake on my part.

Probably not. I haven't posted my letterboxd name (I'd prefer not posting it publicly just because of vague privacy concerns). I'm not doing the whole ranking the AFI list, and don't really use it much for social interactions - e.g. I don't really write reviews, more like jotting down notes out loud. I rarely even give star ratings (and the ratings I give are often inconsistent, comparably). I do try to give likes/dislikes, but even that's unreliable. It's mostly just a means for me to keep track of what I've seen and when. I do follow a few critics on there (though it turned out, they don't really post many reviews on there either - which in retrospect, isn't surprising).

A statistic that I don't know what to make of it: According to letterboxd, I've logged just over 1000 films in my diary. I have diary watched dates going back to 2010 (though those were recreated from notes since I joined letterboxd in the middle of the decade). My current list of films watched is basically the same number as my diary entries (i.e. the number of films I know I've seen that I've flagged roughly equals the number repeat watches). Of the films I've seen, about 230 of them were from this decade. This works out to roughly 100 movies/year (or or roughly, 2/week). But only 23 movies from this decade per year. Or about 2 per month.

Bumping this to say, I noticed Best Years of Our Lives ended up on the criterion channel recently. The (lack of) availability of Best Years on streaming services was a point of discussion on the podcast, so I felt this was worth noting.

The demographic of Hispanics who identify as white wasn't really the demographic I grew up around. So I feel like me making any pronouncements about that demographic and how it fits into the US and its concept of race or ethnicity would be me pontificating on a subject I don't feel like I have the appropriate knowledge to talk about (and the impression Roma leaves me is Cuaron would identify himself as White, Hispanic). I'm content with leaving it at, "it's complicated," for here.

So... Just caught up with Ash is Purest White (2018/2019 | China). Recommended. Crime drama that spans over a decade. It's on Kanopy, so free for everyone. Not making my best of the decade list - but worth seeing. Still have An Elephant Sitting Still (2018/2019, China) queued up on the criterion channel. It's a long one, so will hopefully get to it by this weekend.

Yeah, I think I saw someone else also classify it that way in an earlier discussion of this topic in the recent threads and also thought, that's a tricky subject (for Americans) for the reasons you laid out (I think you also see these ethnic/class divisions show up in John Sayles' Men with Guns). Or maybe someone listed another movie that made me think of the trickiness that would be presented by Roma (probably someone listed Gravity as a movie by a PoC) - and then didn't think to call it out as I listed it here.

Yeah, that's why it's on my list of callouts for the year and not my best of list. (So I'm taking your statement more at Amy naming it). Generally, I think movies can be really good in spite of a bad ending, it usually requires a lot of cohesive stuff working and making peace with a non-ideal ending. That didn't happen to me for LBMiSF. There were aspects in the ending that I liked, but just.... IDK. I mean, the theme of wanting a place and having a sense of identity tied to it (and your need for it) - that made sense. IDK. I still felt it was worth watching. Just not single best of year.

Bolded are my best 10-13 of the decade list, italics are more honorable mentions. (I’m going by release dates on letterboxd, which gets me into trouble for 2019 since half of my 2019 movies were released in 2018). Sorry for all the spacing, I first typed this up in a google doc and pasted. *: directed by a woman +: directed by a person of color 2016 - Moonlight (+) Patterson I only caught up with Silence recently, still evaluating it. Andrew Garfield might have been too weepy for my liking in it. Moonlight - I couldn’t tell if I misheard if Paul said he couldn’t think of another movie like it or if he said, he could only think of artsy European films to get another movie like it. Anyhow, Barry Jenkins referenced Wong Kar Wai as a strong influence on the film (I’d say mostly In the Mood for Love, some Happy Together) - which were movies that touched me deeply in my developmental years. I didn’t get that emotional response from Moonlight which makes me think it’s more just me being dead-inside in my later years. 2016 is a good year for horror directed by women Raw*, The Love Witch*, I am the Pretty Young Thing in Your House*, and Under the Shadow*. If you liked Parasite (+), The Handmaiden (+) was released this year, which if you haven’t seen, might be worth checking out (I don’t recall it having the socio-economic commentary that Parasite has though) - you might like it. 2017 - In a year that had The Phantom Thread, The Florida Project, First Reformed, Zama*, Lady Bird *, and It Comes at Night… the sole movie that made my best of the decade list was… The Death of Stalin? Yeah, looking at that list, it kind of surprises me as well. I really like well done, political satire and this hit the sweet spot for me. I think for a few years now I’ve been wanting to see a dark comedy of the final days of the czars before the bolshevick revolution. This transition of power seemed like the closest thing I could hope for. It’s no Strangelove but it’s the best work I’ve seen from Iannucci (IMO). Though admittedly, this detail is a reminder that the “better than” relation of ranking movies is not induced from a larger set (best of the decade) to a smaller set (best of the year) - the latter, it’s hard imagining I’d take Death of Stalin over both The Phantom Thread and The Florida Project. Yeah, there’s mathematical terminology for this type of stuff. I’m less enthralled with Get Out (+) than some people are. I enjoyed. It’s good. I’m really glad it did as well as it did. I hope we keep getting a lot more Jordan Peele movies (I still haven’t seen Us). I just don’t love/think it’s an all time great movie. 2018 - Sorry to Bother You (+), Annihilation Remember when I said I liked political satire… Yeah, Sorry to Bother You shouldn’t be any surprise after 2017. Annihilation was definitely a tough call. Stalker is a better movie, it is so much doing the same things as Stalker - but I really do like Stalker (despite how infrequently I seem to see it). The style and sounds of Roma (+) has remained with me. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is great. As part of calling out movies from women and people of color: If Beale Street Could Talk (+) High Life (*) Shoplifters (+) Leave No Trace (*) 2019: Nothing from this year is making my best of decade. As I said before half of my 2019 viewing is showing up as 2018. So far, the movie that’s sticking with me the most and am looking forward to revisiting at some point is… The Lighthouse. Callouts for POC and women: Parasite (+) Atlantics (*+) The Last Black Man in San Francisco (+) - lusciously shot, especially the interiors. It felt like a movie that was building towards something, but as Amy pointed out, that ending wasn’t good. At least, it didn’t really seem to work for me (I would have to go into the detail of my issues with most of the play, plus why does it exist?), but still - go see it. Horror Noire (*+) - if you want a short documentary on African Americans in horror films, i.e. more a movie to lead to other movies

Also portrayed by an actor who was what, 20 or 21 at the time. I suspect it also makes people feel less uncomfortable with age issues when the face portraying it isn't actually that young.

I haven't brought up the subject of the protagonist's age with friends (I also haven't seen it), but is it usually 17 with a post doc student or just barely 18 (just out of high school) and with someone older? I mean, it's less creepy than the age difference in Manhattan (Woody Allen's personal life aside) which was a 17 year old and a 40 year old, but still. Fwiw, I believe the age of consent in most the US wouldn't classify 17 as statutory rape, but I think it is close to 50 percent (weighted by population - a lot of Midwestern states have it at 16, IIRC - which l, growing up in California, found to be... weird. Which now as I write that makes the, "this wasn't an uncommon experience at 17," seeming more likely).

Well, there's different levels of "against" - e.g. there's Amy's "I would eye-roll if they put a superhero movie on the list," and then there's, "I'd make room for something else." I have deference to authority on certain genres, or more, eras. And then there's also, "I respected it more than I enjoyed it," which still implies one thinks the movie is good even if they didn't enjoy it. I don't think Star Wars would qualify as that for me (one person I knew in college described the Star Wars movies as being empty fluff. I'd have to agree). In terms of voting for something because of influence, I think I need that elaborated more before I can comment on it. Because there's a lot of different vectors of influence (because depending on what type of influence you're talking about, I don't know that I've actually cast such a vote - at least one purely on influence). So, what type of influence do you think Star Wars has had that makes it worthy of being on a list called "Greatest American Films of all Time"? Well, maybe one segment of American cinema. And that might just be more about cultural impact and less about quality (but that's a longer topic). The more I think about this line, the more I'm curious about the people who haven't seen Star Wars growing up. Because it's like, when I grew up, it's just something I'd assumed everyone had seen, because it was everywhere. Then as I got to high school, I realized, there were some people who had seen it a lot. So when I meet people as an adult, in roughly my demographic that has never seen the OT, I am a little curious about their thoughts on the movie if they do see it. Which to your statement, I don't know, I don't feel like they're really missing that much. Yeah, I think that might Amy more trying to figure out why it got so ingrained into children's culture (though I think realistically, it wasn't just that) and hypothesizing one reason. I was using that re-watching on VHS more as a symptom of, something you loved as a kid so much. I think that since its presence was overtly present (merchandising!), that some people can't separate their experience from watching it as children from how they would feel about the movie if they encountered it for the first time today (but that's speculation on my part).

From the episode, it sounds like June has never seen any of the original Star Wars. I would have liked/been curious to have had her as an extra guest, so we could get the response of someone to Star Wars who encountered it for the first time as an adult.

Depends what you mean by "against". I don't like Star Wars, I don't think they're good movies, at least wanting in the sense of what one might phrase as "substance to connect to on some emotional level". But I'm also that way towards most action/adventure movies, and I feel like I'm voting "no" more than most people, so are we surprised? Now, of these type of movies, I'm the least surprised if, of any of them making a best of list, it's going to be Star Wars, but that's more just recognition that a lot of people love these movies to some interwoven into their DNA type of things (relatedly, looking at the BFI polls, Star Wars ranked about 174 with critics and 224th with directors. Based on past whittling down to ~US films, that probably means 87th with the critics. https://www.bfi.org.uk/films-tv-people/4ce2b6b738e6d/sightandsoundpoll2012). If by against, you meant, I would choose 100 other movies before this one to put on a best 100 movies list, then yes, I'd fit that category. I think for some perspective there, you know how Amy speculated about the effect that this was the first movie everyone owned on VHS and rewatched it to death? Well... while I really liked Star Wars when I was in grade school, the movie, that I rented so many times, that after a month my parents just bought me the VHS, and then after rewatching it so much, they had to buy a replacement? Transformers: The Movie (1986). If I were to just assume, because I watched it so much as a child, that meant, I would want it on a top 100 movie list, I'd feel that'd be a little daffy.

I know other people have given their explanations for this, but I prefer just going with the, "we're part of the problem," explanation. Granted, when the topic of why the AFI hasn't released an updated list, I wasn't the person who said they're too embarrassed to release another list with such poor representation in this time. (I think I gripe more about the lack of independents). I guess, if people wanted to at least rectify this a bit, listing off their top two movies directed by a POC for each year and their top two directed by a woman. And then see how poorly we still do. And... if you'd do as poorly for me, list off the top two regrets of movies in each category you wished you've seen but haven't (if you aren't happy with your answers to either of those). Because, tbh, one of the real purposes of these lists and awards is it causes people who might otherwise not watch these movies, to do so (either from ignorance, or just time constraints). ETA: I'd suggest as part of this, if you wish to include international films, to put on the restriction to exclude countries like Japan, Korea, and China, which have a notable presence in world cinema and doesn't have the dynamic of a film maker coming from a minority demographic (well, unless it does, is suppose. e.g. A Japanese film from a Korean immigrant). I'm not sure how to classify Indian films with that, since they have a huge movie industry, but I don't really see Indian movies showing up in American theaters.

Slight obversation/counterpoint, the big movies Bleary and I listed in the 2000's weren't directors coming out of the gate creating masterpieces, but rather at minimum (PTA) a decade after they became big in the arthouse world, produced some high points of their careers. I'm not sure how that translates to the 2010's though (in terms of I don't know who we'd expect to be breaking out this decade - other than maybe Jonathan Glazer - and that's depending on if you hated or loved Under the Skin). Oh wait, I haven't seen Parasite, but possibly Bong Joon Ho?