After a great deal of discussion on our bests of the decade podcast, we are finally ready to let you in on our director of the decade: Steven Soderbergh. He won an Oscar, made a slew of successful films while keeping his arthouse street cred, legitimized the RED Camera, and pretty much just blew everyone out of the water in the last ten years. But don’t take my word for it, Sunrise provided a great writeup of the man and his decade. Let us know in the comments if you think we chose wisely (or not).

The way in which Steven Soderbergh starts off this decade is with such veracity and force with Traffic and Erin Brochovich, it is a wonder that he not only maintains such consistency towards the end, but implements a fascinating success that is important not only for him as an artist, but for us as an audience.

Leaving the nineties as a “Sundance” poster boy with questionable box office draw, he made a sudden turn with 1998’s Out of Sight and opened the decade with winning one of two Best Director nominations, to which only Michael Curtiz’s 1938 double nomination loss comes close in comparison. While Curtiz was just as much of a workhorse, what makes Soderbergh’s nomination so amazing is the metaphoric weight of self-challenge it represents. This challenge, as it were, is extended beyond his own growth as an artist into the ever-growing challenges he places upon his peers and audience. Read on…

And finally, the moment you’ve all been waiting for: the best directors of the decade according to the candler blog. I’m going to do this a little differently than our first installments on Notable Events, Writers and Actors. When Sunrise Tippeconnie and I recorded this podcast, we tried to sum up the entire decade in 90 minutes. We found it completely impossible. In fact, the time we spent on directors alone was about that much. The discussion was good enough that I thought we should share it here. Instead of telling you who we pick as filmmaker of the decade, we thought you should listen in and hear for yourself. Okay, maybe we’ll tell you soon so keep your eyes peeled for a post about our favorite filmmaker of the decade. In the meantime, sit back, relax and listen in on the musings of a few cinephiles.

 
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Moving forward with our epic podcast of the Bests of the Decade, Sunrise Tippeconnie and myself attempt to tackle the category of actors. It’s the twenty-first century, we’ve decided to do away with the term actress and bring men an women under one big comfy “actor” blanket. Still, we’re not so progressive that we don’t look on the achievements of men and women separately. Listen in as we discuss some of the best performances of the last ten years. From relative unknowns at the outset of the aughts, like Philip Seymour Hoffman, coming into their own, to aging actors finding new footing in their golden years, like Dustin Hoffman, it truly has been an exciting decade for cinema acting. We go through a lot of the top roles, but of course we miss a few. Check it out for our full thoughts, and click through to see the bests as picked by your very own candler blog.

 
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Continuing our discussion of the last decade, Sunrise and I move on to the best writers ofthe decade. To reiterate, instead of making a definitive list, we have opted to simply name a person we think is deserving, and discuss their competition and why they came out on top.

The term “best of the decade” should be defined. We are not just looking for someone whose creative output was particularly impressive over the last 10 years. Instead, in all the categories we discuss we are looking for someone who is the best for the decade, someone who was as important to the aughts as the aughts were to him/her.

The best way to explain is to tell you who our Best Writers of the Decade are (sorry, Sunrise and I couldn’t agree so there are two), since I absolutely despise one of the writers we chose. But it’s not about me, it’s about all of us.

 
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Read on…

O’ Brother Where Art Thou, directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, kicked the decade off with cinema’s first feature digital intermediate.

Recently, frequent candler blog collaborator Sunrise Tippeconnie and I sat down to record a podcast titled “Bests of the Decade”. Instead of making a list of the best films of the decade, we thought it would be interesting to decipher who and what were the most notable people and events in cinema of the last ten years. We would name a best writer, best actor and actress, and best director while discussing their competition as a means of justifying our picks. The plan was to get all of this recorded in one ninety minute show, but instead we ended up blabbing for over 3 hours. As a courtesy, I have gone to the trouble of cutting our conversation up into segments, the first of which covers the most notable developments in cinema during the 2000s. We also go over our methodology and reasoning for composing a list in this manner.

It was one hell of a decade for filmmaking. We saw the proliferation of high definition and the legitimization of video as a screening format. The digital intermediate was introduced, the comic book film re-exploded in Hollywood, the movement once called Mumblecore found a way to speak to an entirely new generation of art-house audiences and filmmakers the world over struggled to translate the nuance of a post-9/11 reality. When you lay out all of the advances and struggles of the last ten years, you might be amazed at how much has actually happened and changed while we were all busy at work. Sunrise and I discuss just a few of these changes in Part I of the Bests of the Decade Candlercast. Since we know we missed a few, we’d love it if you left some more in the comments.

 
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