The (My) 10 Greatest Movie Experiences of the 21st Century
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The New York Times recently put out a list of the 100 greatest movies of the 21st century.
Some of them are spot-on (yes to Parasite). Some are dead wrong (does Superbad really belong on this list? Even at 100? When Barb and Starr is RIGHT THERE?).
The list was put together by asking hundreds of movie-adjacent people what their top-10 lists are. Going through those individual lists is by turns engrossing and disappointing — your favorite actor, it turns out, probably loves one movie that you turned off in a huff halfway through (David Krumholtz, we need to talk about Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban).
But there’s also something chilly and clinical about top-10 lists. Movie-watching does not happen in a vacuum. It is an experience — watching Aliens is fun enough. Watching it while you’re pregnant is life-affirming.1
Watching Return of the King is a blast. Watching it in a theater full of people in costume is a full-on party.
So I have compiled a list of my top 10 movie-watching experiences of this century. Enjoy.
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1) Moulin Rouge (as watched by me and my high school best friend, Molly, in 2001) –
Moulin Rouge was, to me and my girlfriends, a towering cinematic achievement. We had seen it at the theater, deemed it perfect, then snatched it up once it was on DVD and watched every deleted scene, every Easter egg, every alternate-angle shot.
And so at some point in the summer of 2001 a few of us gathered to watch it for the last time before going off to college.
We watched it in Molly’s family’s TV room – our most common movie-watching spot, in a house where there was always a movie playing, always an open box of those brown, waxy Entenmann’s frosted donuts, always some friend of Molly or her younger brother coming or going.
Until I go to my grave, Molly’s parents’ house will always be among my most comforting places on the planet.
It wasn’t just that it was cozy – Molly’s family had an otherworldly quality in our town of 900 people. Her family flew. On planes. They went to castles in Europe. They collected movies upon movies, shelves of VHSs incredible and strange and awful, including the indie films that the local gas station would never rent. Their bathroom was wallpapered and decked out in tennis decor – in a part of the world where no one played tennis. In their computer room stood a life-size Kevin Sorbo cutout – because Molly’s mom, besides being our high school Spanish and Classic Literature teacher, was also — I am dead serious — secretary of the Kevin Sorbo International Fan Club.2
It wasn’t that her family had (what counted in our small town as) money. It was that they were so fully themselves, so willing to do their hobbies and do them hard, regardless of the fact that there was, simply, no one else like them in the general area.
But back to the movie. I wish I could bottle the full-body, visceral desire I had for Ewan McGregor when I was 18. This was not garden-variety teenage horniness. This was “There is a man who can sing AND dance AND act AND emote AND be boyish yet manly AND let’s also dwell on no seriously his singing, and particularly the effortful rasp his voice makes when he belts anything above an E.” This was a man I didn’t know our lackluster world could produce.
Arguably, my love of Moulin Rouge wasn’t just about Ewan McGregor, though, but Baz Luhrmann’s whole more-is-way-more ethos. Blinking lights and belting and romance and show-tune-ified Nirvana songs and twirling – so much twirling. Here was a movie that did what it did and did it hard. It had a clear message for teenage me: There was a whole world out there where you could be big and weird and even a little obnoxious and celebrated for it.
Is that dramatic? Of course that’s dramatic. But so was I. I was 18.
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2) Moulin Rouge (2001) – This viewing was on a dorm room bed sometime in fall of 2001. Me and my new bestie, Sarah, on a crinkly vinyl dorm room mattress, probably both making filthy sexual jokes about Mr. McGregor.
I remember little about the viewing itself except that it ended with me and Sarah sobbing – full-body-shake sobbing.
Which is to say, this viewing was Peak Big-Emotions-of-Young-Womanhood.
I have no idea what Sarah was crying about. As for me, my sobbing was, yes, about romance and longing and art and the sadness of Satine dying just when she finally got to be in the arms of her soulmate, but it was also probably about being in a new place where I was so clearly out of my league and relieved I had found a friend.
Epilogue: I’ll be honest – I can’t quite stomach Moulin Rouge now. It’s a combination of sharp, stabbing nostalgia and also the fact that Moulin Rouge is simply A Lot. I cringe watching Nicole and Ewan pogo around singing “Spectacular Spectacular.” Nicole Kidman’s Satine does a lot of whooping and squealing in the first half of the movie, which yes I suppose is kind of by design (she’s doing everything for show until Love happens, people) but is also, frankly, annoying.
Someday my son will want to watch it and (please God) he will be enthralled, even while I will squirm. This will be the correct response, on both our parts.3
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3) In Bruges (2008) – Let me tell you about a wonderful, ridiculous, privileged-American-kid thing I did in my mid-20s, which is that I went to Europe for an entire summer with Molly. We did this thing called WWOOFing, which for the uninitiated stands for Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms. Basically: we went to work on a few farms in Europe for free, in exchange for the privilege of being in Europe.
(As my dad’s farmer friends told him: “She can work on farms here and get paid, you know.” Yes, I knew.)
I had quit my job as a church youth group leader, given away most of my secondhand Ikea furniture, and ferried my remaining belongings to my childhood bedroom, ready to go to Europe for one last hoorah before I’d move to Washington, D.C. and try to be a journalist.
In practice, WWOOFing meant lugging haybales and penning horses for a very sweet family in Greece, lugging haybales and cutting lavender at 4 AM (and enduring countless bee stings) for a kind but strict family in Italy, and lugging haybales and shoveling cow shit in the hills outside Barcelona for a man named Juan who stared at Molly’s tits and my legs and referred to us as “la morena” and “la rubia” (“the brunette” and “the blonde”).
This was the summer Molly taught me that quitting is not losing. Which is to say: one day, as I was near tears shoveling cow shit in a way that Juan would never find acceptable and would just redo himself later while shaking his head and muttering, Molly looked at me and said, “You know, we can leave.”
Angels sang. Clouds parted. God turned her gentle countenance upon me and said, “Right on.”
We packed up our clothes and took a bus to Barcelona, where we showered and immediately scouted out an English-language movie theater to see whatever was playing. That happened to be In Bruges.
It was heavenly…and not just because of the magnificent Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell, neither of whom is capable of doing wrong. No, it was heavenly because there was air conditioning and popcorn and, crucially, no middle-aged man staring at our tits/legs.
To this day, In Bruges is a sort of code for us – a way of talking about a cinematic experience that verges on the life-changing.
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4) Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (2012) – I had just covered my first Iowa caucuses of my first presidential campaign as a reporter. I was wired. I was in a crappy Baymont Inn in the northern Des Moines suburbs at 8 PM. I was done packing. I was 29.
Would I try to go to sleep before my 6 AM flight? Or would I stay up all night? What was showing late at the Merle Hay Mall multiplex? GHOST PROTOCOL? Sure why not?
And so I went alone to a late-night showing and realized I had, without trying, picked one of the great action movies from one of the great action franchises of our time. Simon Pegg? Leah Seydoux as a femme fatale? Tom Cruise blowing up the Kremlin? Tom Wilkinson, just being Tom Wilkinson? I am a 9 PM bedtime girl, and so it is high praise when I say I felt a full-body fuck yes to staying up past midnight with this movie.
Months later, I thought to myself: Had that movie really been that great? Was it that I had been exhausted and happy to go home and also 29? Or was this a fucking incredible movie?
And so I rented it. It was indeed a fucking incredible movie.
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5) Gentlemen Broncos (2015) – I am going to guess here that you, dear reader, have not seen this movie, because no one has seen this movie, the third feature film from Jared and Jerusha Hess, the people who brought you Napoleon Dynamite.
Their second film, Nacho Libre, starred Jack Black – a plus for any film – but unfortunately starred Jack Black as a Mexican wrestler, which is to say that it was uhhhhh pretty racist at its core.
Gentlemen Broncos is, fortunately, better than that. It is also profoundly, deliberately, self-assuredly strange. It’s about a home-schooled Idaho kid named Benjamin who writes a science fiction novel, which a famous sci fi novelist (played by Jemaine Clement, doing phenomenal voice work) gets his hands on and plagiarizes.
Subplots include Benjamin’s friends making a God-awful movie of his book and his mom (a loopy Jennifer Coolidge) (that’s redundant, I realize) as a single mother who pays the bills by sewing and selling outrageously ugly nightgowns, while she dates a mulleted Mike White, whose defining trait is owning and constantly lugging around a white-and-yellow python.
The funniest scene in this film defies description. But hell, let me try. It is a prolonged, deeply uncomfortable, unspeakably hilarious sequence that takes place on a school bus, where a teenage girl asks Benjamin to apply lotion to her hands, while another teenage boy looks on and says, over and over: “Oooooooooh. Oooooooooooh.” I am not doing it justice. I am, however, tearing up giggling while I type this.
Can I wholeheartedly recommend this movie? I mean, look.
Look.
As with many films a decade or more old, certain aspects of it, erm, have not aged well.
But also: this deeply silly film has a deeply earnest message about creativity: even Bad Art is still good. Whether it’s a cartoonish fantasy novel or a homemade feature film or ruffly neon-orange satin nightgowns – Gentlemen Broncos is saying that it’s ok to be invested in making the thing you love, even if no one else loves it.
But back to the viewing experience: I do not 100% remember the name of the man I watched this with, on our second date. It might have been Brandon?
What I do remember is that five minutes in, I had buried my face with my hands. I was honking. I was braying. I was weeping with joy.
“What is this movie,” I begged. “This is genius.”
It was also our final date.
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6) Mission Impossible: Fallout (2018) – A packed theater. My fifth date with the man I would later marry. I was vibrating with excitement at getting to hang out with this man and also getting to see the latest Mission Impossible movie.
We sat, holding hands and mashing our arms and shoulders and legs together over and around the armrest. However close could we get, we wanted to be closer.
We shared popcorn, trying to eat it primly, neatly, in the style of early-daters everywhere.
We watched, rapt, as the villains revealed the three spheres of plutonium they were going to use to blow up the world.
And then this handsome, kind, dashing man I was falling in love with leaned over and whispered in my ear: “Those are balls.”4
We snickered. We held our breath. We snorted. We couldn’t hold it in. We giggled.
We had to leave the theater. At which point we cackled and hooted until we found the car and went back to his place.
This, my friends, is love.
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7) Gentlemen Broncos (2019) –
ME: [cackling as a thicc albino python vomits on Mike White]
SPOUSE: [vibrating with hatred of this vile film I have imposed upon him]
This is also love.
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8) Stand 2 Pee (2019) – I will not link to this movie. I will not include an image from this movie. If you want to look it up, I suggest googling it on anything that is not a work or public connection.
My spouse and I visited Sarah – of the aforementioned Moulin Rouge sobfest – and her husband, Eric, at their home, where the two of us introduced us to The Media Server.
The Media Server is an unholy piece of technology to which Sarah and Eric have uploaded the various cinematic oddities they have picked up online or at Goodwill or garage sales.
What followed was a demented film fest that will never be recreated in my lifetime.
They opened with a film called Stand 2 Pee, which was an instructional film teaching women to pee standing up. I simply cannot describe it without fearing for my day job because of being, as employment lawyers might put it, aggressively pervy.
What followed was a short documentary about a man who cooks salmon in his dishwasher. There was a colorful, star-wipe-laden travesty about some guy’s homespun religion. At least, that’s what I remember.
This is another movie experience where my spouse and I diverged. Partway through, he leaned over and whispered, with more than a hint of panic in his voice: “Can’t we watch a 30 Rock?”
Of course we couldn’t! I was enjoying…well, not the movies themselves, but rather, the pure joy in Sarah and Eric’s voices as they said, over and over, “Wait wait wait oh man here’s a really weird one.”
LIFE LESSON: There are two kinds of people in this world: those who, when told “ok hold on let me show you something fucked up,” nod and say “yes please” and those who say “no thank you.” Both are valid ways of being.
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9) Barbarian (2022) – I maintain that we need to study how pregnancy rewires women’s brains, because here is a 100% true thing that happened during my pregnancy: I developed what was, for me, a superhuman tolerance for horror movies. Not just a tolerance – a craving.
Alien. Aliens. The VVitch. Midsommar. Films I had shied away from. Suddenly, I was PUMPED to watch these. I watched them and giggled, a maniacal gleam in my eye. And so I when Spouse suggested Barbarian, my answer was an emphatic oh fuck yes.
And boy oh boy I was correct. This movie found me doing constant squawks of delight and fist-pumping and cackling. A horror movie built around an Airbnb reservation gone wrong? Justin Long was in this?!? A terrifying hairy monsterwoman was trying to BREASTFEED Justin Long? Was I having a stroke?
No. I was super-pregnant and having the time of my life.
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10) Moana (2024) – The day after Election Day. I had been working for weeks straight. I hadn’t had a full night of sleep during that time. But I had done it – I had finally done it. I had come back from maternity leave and covered a primary and a general election campaign, including two conventions and a shooting, and I had left my perfect, beautiful son for days and weeks, and now I had come to the finish line and…
And now what?
I don’t know what I had thought would happen after Election Day. It’s not like this was my first presidential election. But it had been my first one as a lead reporter on the winning campaign. And so I think I thought I’d get to November and reach some kind of career nirvana, knowing for sure what my purpose or calling is, knowing what steps to take next. Or maybe someone would crown me a knower of things, outstanding in some way, handing me a book contract immediately.
I think I thought I’d have a firmer grip on how American politics works, how to think about what policies people wanted. I’d stand and declaim to the world about How Things Are, I’d know how to be a Great Reporter.
You can laugh. You can be annoyed. This was self-involved. But try to understand: it had been a long, rough year. I think I was hoping to see The Light, whatever that is.
But then I looked out upon my future and realized: it would just be more reporting. An endless sea of reporting.
(Or, as a boss once told me: the reward for shoveling shit is more shit.)
This would all resolve eventually. I’d get back on the horse and get back to the rhythms of reporting – breaking news, feature, breaking news, analysis, podcast.
But for that one day, I was drowning.
I came home and sobbed from exhaustion.5 I looked at my son and sobbed harder. Was all that time away worth it? I had no idea.
Know what made it better? Trundling to the basement with some goldfish crackers and a two-year-old, burrowing into the corner of the sectional with our respective favorite blankets, turning off the lights, and watching Moana.
Is that sentimental? Of course that’s sentimental. But so was I. I was exhausted and in love with my kid.
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YOUR LATEST LINKS
Patton Oswalt tells one of his greatest movie experiences — In the second half of this video, Mr. Oswalt (one of our finest comedians) tells about the funniest movie of all time: Jerry Maguire while his brother is wasted.6
My top 10 – Not that you asked, but the top 10 movies of this century are (in no particular order): Parasite, Mad Max: Fury Road, Edge of Tomorrow, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Mulholland Drive, Rachel Getting Married, The Lost Daughter, Spirited Away, Tar, Bottoms, Portrait of a Lady on Fire. This was 11 movies, but I don’t care.
My semi-regular Blank Check manifestation practice – Once again, I am putting out into the universe my desire to be on Blank Check. I don’t know what qualifications are demanded of this, but let me just say: I’m just going to keep writing about movies as an application of sorts.
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MY STUFF:
I went to the G7. Then I came back home. Trump was at the G7 in Canada for just over 24 hours before deciding to come home early. He hasn’t, shall we say, endeared himself to other G7 leaders over the years.
Trade, trade, and more trade. I am nearing semantic satiation with the word “tariff.” And that isn’t going to stop (July 9 is coming fast, my people). Anyway: our president threatened to end trade talks with Canada, got them to roll back their digital services tax, announced a vague step on trade with China, and announced a tariff deal with Vietnam.
My budding maternal self felt Sigourney’s “GET AWAY FROM HER, YOU BITCH” in my marrow.
This was not a political statement. This was before anyone knew Hercules’ politics.
That said, the version of “Roxanne” in Moulin Rouge rocks, slaps, and bangs.
Up close, they always look like landscape.
I WANT TO BE CLEAR THAT MY EMOTIONAL REACTION WAS NOT ABOUT WHO WON THE ELECTION.
I think about “I’M SEEING DEAD KINGS!” at least once a month.
Anus jokes. Reminds me of one of my dad’s favorite jokes that involved a pirate and a parrot on the pirate’s ship. Boy howdy, how my mom (PEO Chapter President) hated it when he shared that one with “polite company.”
Is the year 2024 correct for the year you watched Moana? And you covered the winning presidential campaign? Just making sure I have that right. Moana came out in 2016. But Moana 2 came out in 2024.
I adore your movie experience sharing... it got me thinking of my own. Not best movies, but best and most memorable movie watching experiences. Children of the Corn, Pink Floyd: The Wall, Now & Then with Christina Ricci taping her boobs down... lots of goodies in there.