TimesOnLine's 100 Best Films of the Decade: Now Disc. 1. Hidden (Cache) (Michael Haneke, 2005)

10 Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008)

"Provocative London-born artist McQueen directs a revelatory Michael Fassbender in a movie that purports to tackle the infamous 1981 IRA hunger strikes but is actually a hypnotic meditation on the ineffable mystery of human life. Achingly profound."

I'm sure this one fits in more with your expectations...

 

Mark my words: Fifty years from now, this segment will be played in a seminar titled, "The Collapse of the American Empire."

 

Very brutal, also. (Hunger)

 

I wouldn't call Hunger one of the best films of the decade either, but it is extraordinary. If Michael Fassbender doesn't become a major player in Hollywood, it'll be Hollywood's loss.

 

9 The Queen (Stephen Frears, 2006)

"Compassionate and intelligent, witty and wicked, this account of what happened behind the Palace gates after the death of the Princess of Wales is a crown jewel of a movie. Helen Mirren is a very human HM."

 

And the third part of the trilogy, The Special Relationship, premiered this year too.

 

The Queen is an amazing film. Mirren deserved the raves she got and Sheen is her equal as Blair. A fascinating, transfixing film. You can't take your eyes off the screen.

 

Helen Mirren's performance was brilliant. The fellow who played Blair (can't remember his name ) was quite good too.

 

My favorite line in The Queen is when Tony Blair (Michael Sheen) says of the Royal Family, "will someone please save these people from themselves?" He's right too.

 

Great line indeed.

I suppose this film really heralded the arrival of the immensely talented Peter Morgan on the Hollywood scene, really. He's probably one of my favourite writers working at the moment. I thought The Queen was indeed tremendous, but with Sheen delivering the film's best performance rather than Mirren. I should take a look at it again, though, and keep an eye out for Roger Allam. I liked James Cromwell as Phil the Greek as well. I'm not sure that it's the 9th best film of the decade, but whatever. I think it's the best of Frears' work that I've seen.

 

Casino Royale (Martin Campbell, 2006)

"The high camp of the Brosnan era Bond is ditched, and Fleming?s hero returns rebooted (and Bourne-ified), with an intense turn from Daniel Craig, and some breakneck set-pieces. An opening parkour-style chase through Madagascar sets the tone."

 

I notice that on this list the two Bourne sequels are joined as a single entry, and I think Casino Royale/Quantum of Solace ought to be as well.

CR is great, but incomplete. QoS makes it a whole story.

 

I disagree. I think QoS feels like nothing more than an appendix to CR... it's the only Bond film that doesn't really feel like an individual entity.

It does a few interesting things, but it's waaaay too stylistically discordant with CR for them to truly be considered two parts of a whole. And putting QoS in the top 100 of any decade would be borderline offensive.

CR, however, is a fully realized, full-blooded film that shakes off the stupidity of the Brosnan era of Bond films while still maintaining high-concept action and fast-paced thrills. I think it is a tad unwieldy at times, and a few beats miss their marks, but once it's finished, it's quite satisfying. He truly is James Bond at the end, which is why I thought QoS was purely extraneous. Campbell can make some stinkers, but when he's working with a good script, which the Paul Haggis-refined Casino Royale script is, he can create top-notch genre entertainment, just like he did with GoldenEye and The Mask of Zorro. It's certainly the best Bond film since the Dalton era, at any rate.

However, TimesOnLine is insane.

 

Oddly enough, I find myself re-watching QoS far more frequently than CR. I think the film's elements are more well-integrated.

CR basically starts with 45 minutes of "Bond Begins" then shifts to "Casino Royale" for an hour fifteen (a distinction I felt even before I'd read the book), then gives us another twenty minutes of "Bond Begins" for good measure. QoS feels more of a piece with itself.

And Bond is most certainly not status quo Bond at the end of CR. When Fleming's Bond says, "The bitch is dead" he means it; when Craig's Bond says it you can tell his feelings are by no means resolved.

 

I'm a much bigger fan of QoS myself, and think CR is a much better movie after watching both parts.

 

I loved Royale to death but didn't watch Quantam. But this is an absurdly high ranking.

 

I can barely watch QoS. It is kind of an interesting entry as it eschews the traditional mistakes bad Bond movies have always been making, and instead comes up with its own totally different set of mistakes.

Casino Royale, on the other hand, is fantastic. It reboots Bond as a believable human being. And it does something remarkable by elegantly balancing a more realistic, quieter element with plenty of exciting bombast, and somehow one doesn't completely compromise the tone of the other.

 

I love QOS myself, but CR is a better movie. Bond's character is perfectly captured, there's an excellent balance between action and character, the villian is quite good, the actors are fantastic, and there are so many amazing moments -- the prologue, the opening action sequence, the poison sequence, the torture scene, the mind-blowingly awesome ending ("The name's Bond. James Bond." BWA DUH BUH! BWA DUH BUH! . . . there has never been a "$&@% YES!" cut to credits quite like that) . . . even the credits sequence and song are Bond highlights. Literally the only thing wrong with the film is that it's a hair too long in the slow lull between the torture scene and the action finale. It doesn't need QOS to stand as a genuinely awesome movie.

 

Is it weird that I find OHMSS's ending a stronger resolution than CR's?

 

Not at all. On Her Majesty's Secret Service is a film of complete and utter excellence, save for an inexperienced, earnest, but perhaps not very nuanced lead performance. It might be the single strongest "film" in the canon, in terms of being a film that can actually stand on its own merits outside of the franchise, outside of From Russia With Love, which is one of the most well-oiled thrillers ever made in my estimation. And OHMSS easily has the strongest actual ending. Has to be one of the most shocking end to any film, really, when you think about it. But in knowing the character, it's tremendously effective and in an odd way satisfying, I think.

I think Casino Royale, though, is the first film since OHMSS that approaches that kind of level, even if there are greater Bond adventures like The Spy Who Loved Me, For Your Eyes Only, and The Living Daylights in between.

Interesting that OHMSS's conclusion and CR's conclusion should be brought up, considering their (relative) uniqueness in that Bond isn't ending the film bedding some broad. The women are kaput by that point, and we get a defining moment in the history of the character.

I will say this though - the Bond theme blaring at the end of CR: awesome.

The Bond theme blaring over the credits of OHMSS: not cool. Total tonal clustercuss. Should have been an instrumental of "We Have All the Time in the World." Or even silent. The way that's scored actually ruins the scene for me.

 

I find CR and QoS both excellent for different reasons, like two widely disparate sides of the same coin. Of the two I feel that CR merits inclusion on this "100 Best" list, while QoS is a narrower continuation of the more sprawling CR story, a tying up of loose ends. I also think the cinema of QoS is not as compelling as its predecessor.

I love QoS, I'm glad it exists and as I think Halcyon said, I'm more likely to throw it on for a satisfying Bond experience than CR, largely because it's shorter and snappier and the action scenes are more briskly paced and jarringly edited, which I appreciate.

But CR has an undefinable "specialness" to it, a gravitas or significance which QoS, for all its scathing socio-political commentary, lacks. Therefore, CR is the more deserving for inclusion on a list of films which future generations can look back on and review.

 

Not for those who found themselves asking: "How did one of the most potentially interesting characters in film get saddled with so many lousy, insipid movies?"

After the sheer stupidity of the later Connery installments and entirety of the Moore and Brosnan eras, Casino Royale seemed nothing less than a miracle. How the same writers/producers of wretched Die Another Day and the director of the overrated Goldeneye managed to create the greatest Bond movie ever made is beyond my comprehension.

CR wasn't merely a competent return to form (a la Timothy Dalton), it was the best action-adventure of the past decade. At the very least, it deserves a place in the Top 20.

 

7. The Last King of Scotland (Kevin Macdonald, 2006)

"Forest Whitaker gives one of the great performances of the decade as Idi Amin. He nails the Ugandan dictator?s deadly charm ? he?s a charismatic monster; part amiable buffoon, part stone-cold killer."