I wasn’t trying to be a hero.
Picking the “best” (you have to put that word in italics for a variety of obvious reasons) 50 albums of the last decade was impossible. Writing about them was worse. But totally worth it (for my sake if nobody else’s).
I also put in the time agonizing over the 40 best jazz albums, but no one else cares about those. I also started with the 30 best movies which quickly became 40 and finally 50. It could easily be 100, but I don’t do this for a living. And even if I did…
But one thing I’m sure about is what movies really did it for me (of which more later). And then there are the really special scenes. There are tons of them, clearly, but then there are the really special ones.
One thing I’ve wanted to get off my chest, however, dates back to when There Will Be Blood hit the screens and way too many critics declared that this was the performance of the year or the decade or the century or whatever. More on that later, and my point is not to denigrate the…great Daniel Day, although I think he has reached Meryl Streep status where, no matter how annoyingly mannered or mechanical his performance in any given film, his aesthetic halo (in his case, the self-indulgent crown of thorns) precedes him. It was a very good performance in an almost very good film, and I think that is both fair and frankly a bit generous.
But if we’re going to talk about acting that makes the silver melt off the fucking screen, let’s talk about Clive Owen in Closer. Or more to the point, what I’ll simply refer to as the scene. If you’ve seen the movie you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, you owe it to yourself. And make no mistake, it’s not a great movie, but Clive Owen is typically great. In this scene he does the unthinkable, which means he matches –and quite possibly surpasses– the purposeful intensity Jack Nicholson brought to the table when he had his A-game in the early-to-mid ’70s. Scenes like this and this and this and this and this and especially this.
Put this one, the scene, in that conversation and next time somebody brings up There Will Be Blood explain to them that there already was blood.
