Jeff Chen recently asked, “Since everybody else is making lists of their top ten films of the decade, does that mean I have to, too?” I wouldn’t presume to speak for him, but my own answer to the same rhetorical question is a sheepish “yes.” Jeff ended up making his list, too, although I don’t know how sheepish he felt about it.
Anyway, here are my top ten…nah, screw it—twelve favorite movies of the decade just completed, i.e., 2000-2009.
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“Inevitably, [writer/director Lars] Von Trier’s spartan aesthetic has American critics citing Our Town, but in both method and spirit Dogville has much more in common with Brecht’s The Good Woman of Setzuan (written in Denmark, ironically), another sorrowful disquisition on the mercenary aspects of human nature. Anything this ostentatiously artificial demands to be read as allegory, of course, and charges of anti-Americanism aren’t entirely groundless — certainly the film is very, very critical of the way that the U.S. treats its underclass, and to argue that Von Trier isn’t entitled to feel that disgust without having set foot in the continental 48 is patently absurd.”
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[Writer/director Florian Henckel] von Donnersmarck has set his film in the East Germany of 1984, five years before the Berlin Wall collapsed. It was a time when the terrifying Stasi, the secret police, made it their business to use an extensive network of spies and surveillance to know every secret thing about their citizens.
Unlike other German films, most notably 2004′s landmark Goodbye, Lenin, Lives is hardly an exercise in what’s called “Ostalgia”–nostalgia for the good old days of the East. Instead it is an inside look at how a surveillance society, set up to discover and prey upon human weakness, has the ability to make everyone a potential suspect and destroy everything it touches.
The Lives of Others does all this beautifully, but it is too well-acted a film, too meticulously plotted and carefully directed, to be satisfied with that alone. It’s also finally too smart to be content with telling anything like a familiar story.”
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“If Capturing the Friedmans were less shapely and less of a masterpiece, I’d find it less troubling. Both times I’ve seen it I’ve felt that by the end practically everyone associated with the film seems tarnished in one way or another: the ostensible subjects (the Friedmans, an upper-middle-class Jewish family in the Long Island town of Great Neck), the members of their community who helped destroy much of their lives, the filmmakers, and the audience. We’re all tainted by the graphic exposure of family wounds, diminished by what we think and feel–and by what we don’t think and don’t feel.”
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Here’s the idea: make a Google Map wherein each placemark on the map contains a link to an audio or video source of that place’s authentic accent/dialect — for example, documentaries which can be rented or found at libraries, or radio segments that are archived online (like at the NPR website, and the sites of some specific public radio shows). The important thing is that the media sources contain the speech of ordinary people (i.e., non-actors). See also the screenshot at right for an example of what a placemark on the map would look like.
If this is your first visit to C&B you may be wondering, “Who the hell is this guy, and why does he have a blog?” It’s a reasonable question, so I’ve dedicated an entire page to answering it: check out 
Chelsea Cain
Assaf Cohen
Amy Stewart
…nwood…
2 Hot Girls in the Shower
A Lethe
Tara Dublin
Konradical
Life 2.0
Lucrezia's Delight
Memoirs of a Barista
The Moving Target
