The Nathan Rabin's Happy Place Impressively Unconventional List of the Ten Best Films of the Decade
10. Twin Peaks: The Return
We’re going to be honest: we did not technically “watch” any of David Lynch’s transcendent television masterpiece Twin Peaks: The Return. We didn’t have to “see” it to know that a television show that ran on pay cable channel Showtime for eighteen episodes was far and away one of the best movies of the year, if not decade. Why stop there: Does Twin Peaks: The Return wipe its hairy ass with Citizen Kane in terms of cinematic brilliance? Sight unseen, I’m going to say yes.
Twin Peaks: The Return has James Belushi, AKA “The Beloosh.” What does Citizen Kane have? That Joseph Cotten nerd? Some hokey symbolism involving a sled (full disclosure: I haven’t seen Citizen Kane either)?
Lynch’s triumphant return to television was so powerful, and so intense that you didn’t have to watch Twin Peaks: The Return to sense its all-time greatness deep in your bones.
It’s a vibe in the air, a very David Lynch kind of feeling that makes you ponder life’s most important questions. What is cinema? What is life? What if life is really cinema and cinema turns out to be life? What if it turns out that what we consider life is actually the dream of a mad man portrayed by either Jack Nance, Harry Dean Stanton or Ray Wise?
What’s the difference between “television” and “film?” Does that difference matter?
Why must we put labels on things? Why must words and labels mean anything at all? Can’t we all just banana tango Happy Jack Barbecue Senator?
Twin Peaks: The Return jimmied opened the door for entertainment not traditionally considered film to dominate best films list. This important, wildly unconventional and pretty much definitive list of the best films of the past decade blows the doors off that motherfucker with ten tons of dynamite and a whole lot of outside the box thinking.
9. This amazing chili my friend Claire made for me and the wife when she was recuperating from her first delivery
Sometimes quality cinema takes the form of 100 minutes of compelling drama, hilarious comedy, pulse-pounding action or documentaries that expose horrific injustices and serve as catalysts for social change. And sometimes quality cinema is your friend Claire bringing you and your wife some chili after the birth of your first child.
Just thinking about that chili and its bold, distinctive flavor transports me to another time and place in the same way a great film would. It may not have been directed by Stanley Donen or Bob Fosse but my very strong memory of that chili irrefutably stands as top-tier cinema under my new, more expansive understanding of the term to mean literally anything.
8. My fuzzy memories of seeing Big Fan at Sundance and the party that followed
Forget limiting it to movies: few memories are as treasured if fuzzy as the wonderful evening I saw my friend and former coworker Rob’s directorial debut Big Fan debut at Sundance before an absolutely rapt, spellbound crowd.
Then I got blackout drunk on Grey Goose and cranberry juice at the party that followed and remember nothing about that evening except that, according to my roommate at the time, I apparently came home at 5:00 A.M, belched loudly, then passed out.
True, this happened in 2009, but nothing that happened in cinema in the teens, from the brief popularity of ”The Harlem Shake” to Kanye West meeting Donald Trump at the Trump Tower can compete with it in my mind, but shouldn’t everyone be encouraged to make up their own definition of cinema that applies to whatever they say it does?
7. The birth of my first son, Declan
Few films have affected me as powerfully or as profoundly as Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master. I find myself returning to it again and again in my mind, re-playing some particularly haunting moment or mourning the tragic loss of Philip Seymour Hoffman anew.
The Master was a once-in-a-life confluence of auteur, heavyweight thespians and impossibly, almost unfairly juicy subject matter.
As someone obsessed with Scientology, who counts Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix among his all-time favorite actors The Master felt like it was made specifically for me.
Yes, watching The Master for the first time was an unforgettable emotional experience, but nothing compared to what transpired when I saw my first son for the first time in the delivery room sometimes in 2014 or 2015, or maybe 2013. It changed my life forever for the better in a way that’s synonymous with cinema that challenges as well as entertains.
6. The birth of my second son, Clinton I think his name is?
I would have to be a monster to put one son on this list but not the other. I challenge any “real” film critic to tell me the name of a movie better than my son’s cherubic smile? Or his delightful laugh? I mean, I’m sure the Safdie Brothers are excellent filmmakers but nothing they’ve done can measure up in the joy and satisfaction I felt looking in awe at the birth of my second son some time over the course of the last couple of years.
5. Albert Nobbs
The last ten years have not been completely devoid of “conventional” movies that measure up to random life experiences that I’ve had but there is one: the 2011 costume drama Albert Nobbs, starring the incomparable Glenn Close.
4. The delivery of famously eccentric relief pitcher Dan Quisenberry
What is film? According to Sam Fuller in Pierrot Le Fou: “Film is like a battleground: love, hate, action, death… In one word, EMOTION.”
I would never argue with the master but I would extend that definition to include the unique, submarine delivery of legendary Kansas City relief pitcher Dan Quisenberry. And also everything else on this list and everything in the world.
3. Hillary Clinton being elected our first female President
What’s that? You’re saying this didn’t actually happen? That’s right: we’re including a non-event on our definitive list of the ten best films of the teens. How trippy is that? I bet that knucklehead Charlie Kaufman (whose films, full disclosure, I have not seen) couldn’t come up with something that mind-blowing. Or, it’s like something from Black Mirror, which we’d put on this list except that, as an unusually cinematic television show streaming on a site that features primarily movies, it’s so disgustingly conventional for lists like these that, to be honest, I’m a little disappointed in myself for even thinking about it.
2. The Star Wars Holiday Special
Oh, technically, the Star Wars Holiday Special is not a movie, but rather a holiday special but does it not play in the haunted multiplex of the mind EXACTLY the same way a more traditional piece of cinema might. Did it not fulfill the ultimate goal and purpose of cinema in introducing us to Chewbacca’s entire family: wife Malla, father Itchy and son Lumpy AND find time for a Boba Fett cartoon, song from Jefferson Starship and erotic dance by Diahann Carroll?
By definition, isn’t such a wonder inherently better cinema than pretty much every movie made in the past ten years?
1. Baby Yoda gifs
When historians of the future look back at the most important and influential films of the teens they’ll undoubtedly be focussing on Twin Peaks: The Return, the birth of my sons and Yoda gifs from The Mandalorian.
Who can resist that little green charmer?
Look at Baby Yoda’s adorable punim and tell me that anything in Uncut Gems (a movie we haven’t seen) can compete!
OMG!
Look at his little face!
I can’t even!
Baby Yoda, I wish you were real and could be my pet or best friend or child!
In conclusion, the teens were a wild decade for film dominated by the births of my two sons, the oppressively ubiquitous “Baby Yoda” fad and Twin Peaks: The Return, whose reception in some particularly cinephile-intensive circles illustrated irrefutably that movies are whatever you want them to be, including, or rather particularly, television shows.
Twin Peaks: The Return proved that not just by topping lists of great cinema from Sight & Sound and Cahier du Cinema but also winning the Kentucky Derby, placing third in the race for Mayor of Newark, New Jersey and absolutely dominating the Miss Juggalette Pageant at last year’s Gathering of the Juggalos.
All hail the new cinema, for in the new cinema all is film and film is all!
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