The Top 5 Everything of the Decade (For Better and Worse)

It's tough to say how we'll remember the last decade. The Internet destroyed industries and filled the world with cheap and accessible pornography. The real world was much less full of boobs. Rather than trying to sum up such a complex time period by sharing our favorite things, we asked our staff (Dan O'Brien, David Wong, Jack O'Brien, Michael Swaim and Robert Brockway) to pick the things that were memorably great, awful, weird (or all three) enough to represent the glorious clusterfuck we just lived through.

David:

Batman Begins.

The birth of the Gritty Reboot. Either due to post-9/11 cynicism or anti-Joel Schumacher rebellion, halfway through the decade we decided it was time to strip away fantasy and wonder and replace it with bloody faces and angst.

Casino Royale would follow suit, and the trend would continue right up until the final week of the decade with the violent and sexy reimagining of Sherlock Holmes. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is either spinning in his grave, or unable to spin because of his erection. Or maybe spinning despite the erection, creating a hollow knocking sound on the coffin lid.

Dan:

The Dark Knight.

If Batman Begins is where Christopher Nolan floated the idea of a realistic superhero movie, The Dark Knight is where he perfected it. Let's ignore the fact that TDK kicked more ass than we knew was available for kicking. And let's ignore the fact that its Oscar snub was so horrifying that the Oscar committee decided to add five more nominees to the category this year. Dark Knight made a category larger and, as science will tell you, it follows that the category is also now more in charger.

This movie was not only a critical and commercial smash hit, but it also marks the first time in my life where I noticed regular, non-Internet-dwellers caught up in online, viral marketing. Online games designed to build hype used to be simple distractions but, for TDK, it was an event that left the Net and bled onto the real world. For example, if you were one of the lucky ones to sign up for the Joker's Army early, you received a cake, a cell phone and an advanced screening of the first seven minutes of the movie. And everyone wanted in.

Searching for pre-release Easter Eggs and going on scavenger hunts that tie into the movie's marketing wasn't just for Internet geeks anymore. Geekdom had entered the mainstream.

This also marks the first time I tried to fuck a movie.

Jack:

The Bourne Trilogy

In the span of five years, the Bourne franchise managed to do what great franchises like The Godfather, Terminator and Police Academy couldn't: pump out a near flawless trilogy. As Brockway points out, our decade was pretty good at that. (Suck it Time).

However, despite what my colleagues tell you, a film's hero didn't have to wear a ridiculous costume to be relevant in the 00s. Bourne was the perfect metaphor for our reeling, technology obsessed decade. He was recovering from a traumatic event just like the rest of us following the summer of 2001's series of deadly shark attacks.

Never forget.

And while amnesia may be the oldest screenwriting trick other than showing boobs, who better to represent the Internet age than an empty vessel trying to make sense of a non-stop barrage of pure stimulus. Bourne's mood in the face of his strange new world was the same as ours: an inexplicable desire to beat the crap out of everyone he encountered along the way. Bourne's hands responded to this desire as impulsively as ours, moving faster than thought to attack faceless adversaries using pure muscle memory (his balled-up fists of fury get a slight edge over our 70-f-word-per-minute typing hands in the category of badassery).

Robert:

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.

Before Lord of the Rings, if you asked somebody to spend 12 hours of their life with you watching midgets and elves mud-wrestle, you would've just gotten weird looks from every normal person and ended up spending the night with a man who drives a van for a living.

Now, not only is it perfectly acceptable to know what an orc is; you would actually sound kind of stupid if you didn't. Seriously, if you said the phrase "what's an orc?" to somebody now they would laugh in your face, and that's all because of Lord of the Rings. It not only brought the oft-neglected fantasy genre to the forefront, it made the epic a hot property again. And the 2000s were defined by the epic. So much so that three hours is considered an acceptable length for any kind of movie now--fucking Funny People was a three hour long comedy!

That's especially impressive when you consider that the modern epic has to compete with shortened attention spans, video games and the Internet (and all the free pornography that entails). Getting people to sit still for three straight hours nowadays is an impressive enough feat, but getting them to do so on three separate occasions when your protagonist is a doe-eyed dwarf who spends more time staring blankly and not reacting than the entire cast of The Hills... well, that was nothing short of a miracle.

Swaim:

Borat

When I saw the Borat movie at the 2006 San Diego Comic Con, the film floored me. Maybe it was because I was seeing it a month before it came out or because Brian Posehn was in the audience; but as a comedian, as a spectator, I was absolutely enthralled.

And even though Borat hasn't held up to that level of scrutiny, I still think Sacha Baron Cohen made the movie of the decade for a few reasons. Perhaps most importantly, the movie is "real," or at least some of the peoples' reactions are genuine. Yes, a lot was preplanned, and yes, some of the racist rednecks maybe didn't get a fair edit, but be honest: You didn't think about that when you watched the movie. All you thought was "holy shit, did that guy really just say he wants to hang gay guys?!"

It had the reality TV aspect that has driven so much of our media this decade, and the absurdist subversion of it all, down pat. And since most scenes were totally stand-alone, the entire film was, in effect, a series of hilarious YouTube videos. And when you think about it, isn't a YouYube video of a fat ugly naked guy running into a room of businessmen titled "this is why Bush sucks" exactly the sort of thing that could be framed and labeled "2000-2009"?