There’s an infinite amount of content out there Dear Reader – too many movies to possibly see – so how do ya find the good ones?

Your gut feeling, your friends, reviewers you trust – these folks can steer you.  But sometimes your gut is wrong, your friends wouldn’t know a Ti West film from a Western and the reviewer you’ve been consulting is Ben Lyons.

So – to help you out – I present here films you may have not seen due to the bad ‘word on the street’ – well, the ‘word’ was wrong my friends – here are the 10 Most Underrated Films of the Decade:

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Number 10:  RIGHTEOUS KILL
Sleaze is spread over this B-Movie detective story with a thick trowel, and I love it for that.  It’s the only film in the history of The Film Talk which I convinced Gareth not to see on the basis that it wouldn’t be worth watching.  I was wrong.  My ‘movie spidey sense’ deserted me on this one folks.

It’s the kind of film, that if it had been made in the 50’s in black and white, connoisseurs of cinema would be falling over to watch – they’d have framed original posters of Righteous Kill on their walls and it would have starred Robert Ryan and Ralph Meeker.

Also in its plus column:  I guarantee this will the only film in which Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and 50 Cent share a scene – so savour it.

Bottom line:  watch it when you’re in the mood for a short, sharp and seedy crime flick.

RIGHTEOUS KILL on ‘THE FILM TALK’ PODCAST

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Number 9:  GANGS OF NEW YORK

Yeah this film was nominated for 10 Oscars and a lot of people saw it.  But when it was released there was a general sense that, sure – you have to nominate it ’cause it’s made by Marty Scorsese and cost a lot of money and has stars and and and and…it’s not really any good is it?

Oh yes it is.

When I saw it originally it didn’t make an impact.  Sometimes you can see but not observe as Sherlock Holmes once said, (really, Guy Ritchie, really?).  This famously happened with Blade Runner – which, although it’s a pretty silly film, has had a massive impact on consumer product design which critics and audiences couldn’t see or predict at the time.  This happened with Gangs of New York, (and Australia which gets a nod later in this post).

At the time the press was caught up in stories of the film’s huge budget and gossip about Leonardo and Diaz; but this won’t matter when we’re dead, (same thing happened with Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai – people were aghast that Rita Hayworth’s hair was dyed blond for the role – yet how many people on the street today could identify Hayworth by name if you showed them her picture, 5 in a hundred?).  It’s the film that matters.  Not the story surrounding it.

Now, when I saw it I thought at the time that Gangs should have been the story of Liam Neeson and Daniel Day ‘Look at me ACT!’ Lewis, not Di Caprio and Carmen and all the rest who I didn’t care about one fig.

But I see now that that’s part of the point of the film.

It’s not about individuals – it’s about the sweep of history – of collections of individuals – whose separate choices, in retrospect are inevitable; the mob, the collective we, who, being on the ground level, don’t have the perspective to see what’s really going on.

It’s a magnificent, vital, full-bodied f**k of a film – now that I’m sold on Bluray I can’t wait to see it again in that format – you should see it too – if you’re old enough, and wise enough to see just what’s really in front of your face.

(Also, I’d like one the hats pictured above – just sayin’)

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Number 8:  A.I.
The downbeat reaction to A.I. was clearly due to the odd fact that people aren’t used to thinking while watching a Steven Spielberg film.  They not conditioned to look for recurring themes, motifs and complexity*, and so they missed what was going on just under the surface, (like an itch you’re not sure is there and definitely can’t find), in this strange, strange film.

Strange, because it’s a tribute film.

You don’t get many of those – Birth is another.  Oddly they’re both Kubrick tribute films.  A.I., like Birth which I’ll discuss another time, is filled with compositional nods to Stanley Kubrick pics and this synthesis of Spielberg, the director of films for children and young-adults, and Kubrick, a director, like Tarkovsky, in which the more experienced you are the better the films get, leads to a unsettling feeling while you watch.  You’re like a child who, after the most terrible dream you’ve ever had, wakes up, looks in the mirror, and sees an old person staring back.

That doesn’t sound like a fun viewing experience-date night-bring the gang over kind of film, and it’s not.  Doesn’t mean it isn’t underrated and you shouldn’t see it though.

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(*Though they should be – Spielberg is solid as a director:  such grasp of cinema grammar in Jaws! I say that even though I’m not a huge fan:  I wish he made films for adults, not for kids).

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Number 7:  QUANTUM OF SOLACE
James Bond actioner Casino Royale was a huge success both critically and commercially.  So expectations were high for its sequel Quantum of Solace.  Once it was released, disappointment was palpable.  Viewers found the camera too shaky and the plot, (was there one?), nonsensical.

But, as Gareth said to me after recently re-watching Casino Royale, Quantum makes Casino seem old fashioned.  He’s right.  I loved Casino Royale – but positioned next to Quantum of Solace it’s practically creaky.

Quantum is the shortest James Bond pic ever made.  Also the grittiest.  And the most urgent.  There are lingering shots of poor people in the film.  Let me type that again:  there are lingering shots of poor people in the film.

Why?

Because that’s what the film is about – the massive inequality between wealth and poverty in our world.  It’s a Bond pic in which the ‘bad guys’, (the World’s Most Evil Hedge Fund?), are surreptitiously trying to acquire Bolivia’s water supply.  In this film it’s not enough anymore for the powerful to just make money off the backs of the poor – that’s not evil enough for these people – they have to strip the exploited of their human rights as well.  This is hard stuff.

Also, Bond and the Girl, exhausted and dejected, have to wait in line to take a bus.

As to the shaky cam element of the pic – once I saw it in Bluray it all became clear, literally.  Films today are being shot by people reviewing the footage in real time on a monitor on the set.  Subsequently, sequences in movies today are being designed, (whether consciously or not), for people to watch at home where they can see the whole frame in their field of view, (the anti-iMax).  If you’re in a theatre watching Quantum then the screen is too big for you to catch the action unless you sit in the back row – this pic is better at home, (and the Bluray version is so much clearer than a theatrical print that it’s practically a different film).

(QOS also has the greatest ‘assembling of villains at a meeting’ scene ever in a Bond film – its use of music, of silence, of silence with violence, makes this probably the best sequence in the Bond Series).

QUANTUM OF SOLACE on ‘THE FILM TALK’ PODCAST

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Number 6:  TAKEN
No one took this film seriously – it’s just an ugly, brutal revenge thriller, right?  Wrong.

It’s one of the films of the decade and tells a story that, well, it may be the first story ever told.  I go into detail on the why Taken is one of the vital pictures of the 2000’s here:

‘Taken’ aka “We used to outsource these things”

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TAKEN on ‘THE FILM TALK’ PODCAST

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Number 5:  THE HAPPENING
M. Night Shyamalan’s terrifying eco-thriller was laughed out of the theatre by audiences and critics.

Well, not on the night I saw it.  On the night I saw it the audience was scared out of their friggin’ minds.  Reading the reviews it was clear that The Happening was caught up in the M. Night backlash – for whatever reason people really dislike the guy, (I could care less, we landed on the Moon using Newtonian physics, and Newton was a world-class as***le – so who cares about the personality of the artist?  To rework Hitchcock’s phrase:  “it’s only the movie”).

With this in mind – if The Happening had been Night’s first film it would have been praised to the sky.

This is a film in which, (pardon the spoilerish pun), people couldn’t see the forest for the trees:  they complained that Marky Mark’s character was an idiot – but,  that. was. the. point.  We’re all idiots.  Don’t we see what we’re doing?  I’m not saying we’re destroying the planet, cause that kind of anthropic centrism is laughable*, but we are making it a worse place for us to live in.

In addition to the vital themes of the pic, in concrete, visceral ways the film is packed with thrilling, terrifying moments – and it has the greatest billboard scene in movies, (after the Warren Oates cameo in Badlands of course).

But, alas, there’s so much bad juju surrounding M. that the film will be better served if you wait a while before seeing it.  So set your Google Calendar or iCal or whatever mechanical counting device you use with a reminder to watch the film in 20 years.

If we’re still here that is.

THE HAPPENING on ‘THE FILM TALK’ PODCAST

(*Hey folks – guess what? The earth doesn’t ‘care’ about us – it was here billions of year before we got here and it’ll be around billions of years after – we’re just a tiny film of life on this globe here for an instant).

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Number 4:  MIAMI VICE
Ok.  Now.  Miami Vice.  The Michael Mann film from 2006.

Is amazing.

It contains some of the most astonishing moving pictures ever made.

If you know what you’re looking at than this film will astound you.  To help out in that regard I’d suggest you take college level courses on the architecture of the 1930’s, contemporary aeronautics, criminal investigation as it pertains to inter-agency field work, the Law of the Sea, the history of the narcotics trade in the Americas and practical bar-tending.

It is, in sum, a visual catalog of where we are now.  In every scene we see that which we’ve seen before – but presented with more clarity, precision and accuracy than could possibly be expected in commercial cinema, (but not so surprising though when you learn that the production cost of MV exceeded that of the annual budget of the Miami Police Department).

My wife, who is, among many other things, a pilot, punched her fist in the air during the scene in which Jamie Foxx takes off from an absurdly short runaway.  She’s not the fist punching type.  Or the going to movies with guns, violence and blood type.  Yet she punched her fist in the air.

Why?

Because in Miami Vice we see flight as it has never been depicted – you get some real sense of what it’s like to be up in the air – piloting a man-made machine that lets you fly.  That’s just one example out of hundreds – in this way Vice is an extraordinary film.

It speaks to the decline in our film-going culture, as all the selections in this post do actually, that it’s not recognized for what it achieves.

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Number 3:  THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, (henceforth referred to in this post as TAOJJBTCRF), is a clear and simple illustration of an interesting phenomenon that effects all of us.

What do I mean?

Well – I first saw this film in the States – it had been out for a few weeks and was already disappearing in theaters due to dismal reviews and tepid audience reaction.  I was just as stunned at this as I was by the film – a movie with the most courageous, innovative cinematography a commercial picture has had in a decade – with performances, direction and script to match.  Yet it was still commercial in the contemporary corporate style.

In past decades a pic like this that exuded quality, seriousness, star power and breathtaking craftsmanship, all within the framework of what is deemed commercially acceptable would be the Best Picture winner of the year, hands down.

But here in the States?  Pffttt.  Nobody wanted to know.

The day after I saw TAOJJBTCRF I flew to London for a photoshoot.  And was stunned on my arrival at Gatwick to see posters for TAOJJBTCRF laden with critics’ praise – TAOJJBTCRF was clearly seen by reviewers in the UK as a masterpiece.

What does this mean?

Nobody knows anything.

Which leads me to:

Number 2:  NATIONAL TREASURE: BOOK OF SECRETS

Ok, this one is a bit of a cheat.

It’s not that National Treasure:  Book of Secrets is underrated – meaning it’s not a good film that people misunderstood as bad – it’s special in that it isn’t rated at all.

And because of that people didn’t realize that they were watching what may be the most important film of the decade – in that with National Treasure: Book of Secrets the concepts of originality, wit, humor, in short – of humanity, (meaning that which is written by a human hand), are dead.

What am I talking about?  I’ll tell you.  You know how, if you were typing a script’s first draft, you might write in the margins ‘insert action sequence here’, or ‘maguffin needed to drive plot spring – some sort of secret book – figure out by Tuesday’; that kind of thing.

Well.

In National Treasure: BOS it appears that they actually went ahead and shot this first draft, or more accurately, they shot what seems to be a computer generated outline for the film.  BOS doesn’t appear to have been written with any human involvement – so the ‘maguffin’, the secret book that US Presidents have been hoarding since the birth of the Republic is called…

…wait for it…

The President’s Secret Book.

I have not once sliver of doubt in my mind Dear Reader that in years to come it will be revealed that BOS was the first large budget film written wholly by a computer program - and for that reason National Treasure: Book of Secrets is the most underrated film of the decade.

Or it would have been if not for the travesty of misunderstanding that greeted the movie below.

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Number 1:  AUSTRALIA
What the hell?

I try to stay away from reviews, previews, capsule synopsis, posters, purloined internet images, intentionally leaked purloined internet images – anything that will give me some clue as to what a film is about before I see it.

Why?

Because I’ve screened so many films that even seeing one frame of a flick will cause it to unfold and spill its mysteries to me.  Don’t believe it?  Ask Gareth sometime – I’ve stopped telling him which films not to see after the Righteous Kill misstep, but before that all it took was a couple of seconds of some trailer on iTunes for me to inform my dear co-host that, correctly, a film was a stinker, even though he was convinced of the opposite.

I say this so you’ll know that before I screened Australia I had no idea as to its subject matter, who was in it, how much it cost, etc. etc.  All I knew was that it was directed by Baz Luhrmann.  I recall that I may have been expecting a 90 minute musical.

What I saw instead was the greatest 1940’s epic Hollywood never made.

In 500 years, when movies are merely a curio to our replacements, (I imagine they’ll be vat-grown bio-synthetic descendants of the computer algorithm that wrote National Treasure: Book of Secrets), Australia will be held up as one of the great ‘Big Pictures’.  It’s better than Gone With the Wind.

Full of love and lust, treachery and villainy; scenes of great beauty and despair, it really is the great barnstormer of the studio system that was never produced, (and of course in 500 years time whoever is around won’t know the difference – Hugh Jackman and Clark Gable will be contemporaries in their minds).

It’s also the kind of film that, as with with Gangs of New York and Miami Vice, will soon never be made again.  Not only not made, but unable to be made.

People or synthoids will look back at these films just as we now look back at Medieval Cathedrals*, marvel and exclaim “just how did they pull that off?”

AUSTRALIA on ‘THE FILM TALK’ PODCAST

(*I’m sure I’ve heard this thought somewhere before – but I can’t find the source – if anybody knows please tell me and I’ll update the post – thanks).

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Ok Dear Reader -  that’s my Underrated list for the 2000’s.  Next week: the 10 Most Overrated Movies of the Decade.   Prepare yourselves.