The following is part of a continuing series of features breaking down the trends of cinema in the 2000's.
Click below for parts 1-3:
Part 1: Tentpole Franchisees
Part 2: Social Realism
Part 3: Documentary
The creative process doesn’t acknowledge breaks in years or decades, and so compartmentalizing and passing judgment on ten years in cinema is completely arbitrary. Yet this is an easy way to view the passage of time, and the evolution of cinema. Decades have always defined filmmakers. For example when we think of Jean-Luc Godard he’s a 60’s filmmaker, even though he made as many films in the 70’s and 80’s. Same with, say, John Hughes, a man whose influence was as prescient in the 90’s, will always be defined by the 80’s.
With the end of another decade upon us, it’s time to start defining people’s careers, packing them up into a little box to be put away on a shelf never to be tampered with again. And so, even if someone like say, Judd Apatow, were to go on to make film after film of complete and utter garbage, or if he were to be revealed as a pederast, he would still be a 00’s filmmaker.
If you’ve read the previous installment of the Deconstruction of the decade in Cinema you’ll know that the indie-film dominated auteur films of the 1990’s doesn’t quite apply with the same creative force as it did back. The death of almost every art house-sensible distributor in the U.S. helped cause this, same with the risk-averse attitude of the tent-pole mentality of studio heads.
From this largely mainstream perspective, a number of fine filmmakers emerged and will likely be defined by this decade:
Why not start with Judd Apatow? He directed three films in the decade – two successful (“The 40 Year Old Virgin” and “Knocked Up”) and one not so much (“Funny People”). But his influence as writer-producer extends into a number of the decade’s most successful and memorable comedies including ‘Anchorman’, ‘Talladega Nights’, ‘Superbad’, ‘Forgetting and Sarah Marshall’. He also emerged as discoverer of great talent, specifically the young players of his TV series ‘Undeclared’ and ‘Freaks and Geeks’ – Jay Baruschel, Seth Rogan, James Franco and Jason Segal.
Perhaps Christopher Nolan stands tall as the defining filmmaker of the decade. His career essentially started out at the turn of the millennium with his intellectually-stimulating art house noir film ‘Memento’ and ended with the biggest hit of the decade, ‘The Dark Knight’. After a number of filmmakers tried their hand at rebooting the Batman series, it turned out to be Christopher Nolan who impressed Warner Bros and DC Comics with his realistic and humanist take on the superhero. Nolan wasn’t one to sit back and coast on the hype of franchise filmmaking, in between his two huge Batman pictures, he crafted one of the best and most underrated films of the decade – “The Prestige”. A film as profoundly existential and powerful as it was thrilling mass-market entertainment. We don’t know how ‘Inception’ will turn out but his desire to keep working and produce both personal non-franchise films with his own writings is exciting.