Best Movie of the Decade (Two Years Ahead of Time!)

So before we reach 2010 (and my goodness, I still have my little Y2K paperweight close by; isn't time a bitch?) and we have the endless obligatory lists of 'Greatest' this and 'Best of' that of the first decade of the new millennium, let me go out on a very small limb and make a prediction that, I assure you, will not be overturned in the next twenty-four months.
Mullholland Dr. by David Lynch was the best movie of the past ten years, and in another ten years it will rightfully hold its place as an American classic, perhaps the last one for a long time to come.
Now, I see very few movies nowadays. Pitifully few. And that's not because I don't want to see movies anymore. It's simply because nothing, and I mean nothing, has the ability to get me excited about going to a movie theater. I bring that up because, just this past weekend, a whole nation of young and probably dangerously gullible women jumped for joy at the release of the Sex & the City movie.
I envy them so much. Honestly. I wish I could get that excited over the big screen version of a second rate television show, but alas, even though I was a HUGE fan as a kid, the new Get Smart film just ain't doing it for me.
Seriously, I want to get excited over an upcoming movie. I remember that feeling as a youngster, that torturous counting down of days until Saturday came (my family were strictly weekend movie goers), the anxious anticipation, the bliss of seeing a thirty-second commercial clip on TV to whet my appetite.
I adored that feeling.
There have been some movies over the past few years that have impressed me considerably. George Clooney has directed a few very interesting films (who'd have thought?), and stared in quite a few more. And the documentary genre has at least been revived in the public's mind, if not always for the better.
But only a few, in my mind, really stand out.
Last years Zodiac was a fascinatingly dark, unpleasant film about an equally dark subject, brilliantly shot on digital camera, and Mark Ruffalo was done a huge disservice by not receiving an Oscar nod for his understated, nuanced performance. Robert Downey Jr. of course should just be nominated for every damn thing he does. The guy is a freakin' genius (Jake Gyllenhaal, the only true weakness of the movie, not so much).
Another film that left an impression on me, though it lacked the originality of Zodiac, was 1999's fictional portrayal of porn star John Holmes' decent into murder, Wonderland. Much too bleak to reach wide popularity (and any film that features a cameo by Paris Hilton must automatically be deducted a few points just on general principle), it nevertheless used the classic Rashomon structure to nice effect, and Val Kilmer was the perfect choice to flesh out one of the sleaziest lead characters in a mainstream movie since Travis Bickle. Josh Lucas flat out stole the film playing Ron Launius, one of the baddest bad guys to come along since James Remar and Sonny Landham played 'Ganz' and 'Billy Bear' in 48 Hours.
But while I respect both of those movies, and think that Zodiac's reputation will increase in stature over the coming years (unless the man the filmmakers pegged as the most likely suspect, Arthur Leigh Allen, is definitively discovered to have not been the killer, which is more likely than one would imagine), neither of those films came close to achieving anything near the mythical title of a 'Great Film'. And looking at the increasingly downward spiral that Hollywood is taking, it doesn't require a cultural genius to predict that we're likely not going to be getting anything better anytime soon.
And thus, Mulholland Dr.
David Lynch's greatest film, bar none, and one of the most bizarre, disturbing and just flat out eerie experiences of my entire life. A film that left it's warped aura hanging around in my head for a full week after seeing it, like a tormented ghost stubbornly clinging to ones senses.
Like everyone else who's seen the film, I couldn't make heads or tails out of it at first. Hey, that's how you know you've seen a David Lynch creation, right?
The character change midway through baffled me, the blue key, the box, the laughably incompetent hitman, the cowboy, the young director and his terrifying superiors, the beautiful amnesiac...what the hell was this thing? And yet there's just enough of a continual thread, provided mainly through the cheery character of Betty, played exquisitely by Naomi Watts, to keep you thinking you're on some kind of pathway, albeit through a very convoluted maze.
It makes no sense to try and explain the officially recognized interpretation of this movie (and many might be surprised that there was one to begin with). But I will say that once the main plot development of that interpretation is realized, it's absolutely devastating, one of the most tragic elaborations of what is, at heart, a simple and all too familiar story - the innocent hopeful with stars in her eyes, naively walking into her own destruction.
I can't recall a film whose aftermath stayed with me like it did with this movie. As a literal theme, which is how any other director but David Lynch would have filmed it, the plot would've been horribly depressing on its own, and no doubt full of Hollywood's love of sanctimony and faux self-immolation, a ritual they undergo quite willingly but also condescendingly. It is a form of confession and condemnation that historically they have applied only as a talisman to absolve themselves of guilt, or perhaps more accurately, to hide their complete lack of guilt from their own eyes. The myth of 'classic Hollywood', once the far away land of magic where the glamourous pagan gods of cinema resided in palaces and the Makers of Dreams wielded power akin to the deities of ancient Greece on Mount Olympus, barely exists anymore. The sacrament that was once almost the sole possession of these priests of Old Hollywood - fame, celebrity - is now dispensed on every street corner, as diluted as the grape juice passed around in a Protestant church. It no longer contains any divine attributes at all, if it ever did to begin with.
Mulholland Dr., for all its Lynch-ian surrealism and magic-show diversionary tricks to distract your eye and mind, is at its core an old fashioned tale of a girl who still believes in the rituals of Classic Hollywood, and who learns the hard way about the judgment and damnation that awaits those who attempt to resurrect gods best left dead.
Magical in its barely concealed misery, almost ethereal in its ability to lure you into the dream world of both its main character and its director, gorgeously photographed (Lynch has since swore off film altogether, vowing only to work in video), it is a movie that flirts with the kind of cinematic perfection that nearly disappeared after the 70's, and the more times I see it the more perfect it becomes.
I would imagine that Kenneth Anger loves this film, given that Hollywood Babylon is practically its Siamese twin.
By far the best movie of the decade and, I imagine, of quite a few decades to come.