THE LOVELY BONES

The Lovely Bones, director Peter Jackson's long-awaited take on Alice Sebold's beloved novel, is a stupefyingly bad movie, the kind of big-screen debacle that makes you wonder if its entire creative team wasn't suffering through some hideous, collective blockage of talent all throughout filming. You can feel it going wrong in the first minutes, when a car's quick swerve results in an unconvincing and inappropriately comedic loss of a hubcap, but the shock of Jackson's endeavor is that practically nothing in it goes right. Tonally, just about every scene here feels a little bit off, and the rest feel way, way off; it's almost as if Jackson, screenwriting collaborators Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, and a (usually) wildly gifted cast purposely set out to make the absolute worst Lovely Bones adaptation possible.

After telling friends and family members that, for 2010's first issue of the Reader, I'd be compiling a list of my 100 favorite movies from the last 10 years and ranking them in preferential order, a few of them asked me, "So how do you do that?"

Runners-Up to the 10 Favorites: Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, District 9, Duplicity, The Hangover, The Informant!, 9 - the animated one, Paranormal Activity, The Princess & the Frog, Public Enemies, Star Trek.

Runners-Up to Those Runners-Up: The Cove, An Education, Good Hair, He's Just Not That Into You, Humpday, Julie & Julia, Michael Jackson's This is It, Taking Woodstock, Up, Zombieland.

The first thing to say about this list is that because of my nature, my favorite 100 movies from 2000 through 2009 are culled from viewing that would under no definition be considered comprehensive.

How little do I see? Of 45 Best Picture nominees so far this decade, I've taken in 31. So I've missed nearly a third, including winners Gladiator and Million Dollar Baby. (The other nominees I've so far skipped: Atonement, The Aviator, Chocolat, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Finding Neverland, Frost/Nixon, Gangs of New York, Juno, Letters from Iwo Jima, Little Miss Sunshine, The Reader, and Seabiscuit. For something drawn from broader experience, look at Mike Schulz's list.)

It is certainly possible that some of these movies, if seen, would be on this list. Based on what I know about myself and these movies, though, there's a far greater likelihood that bypassing them was a sound choice. That's a sign of a less-than-fully-open mind, certainly, but it's also a matter of priorities: Do I think this movie would reward my time investment as much as [a different movie, sleeping, Wii, etc.]?

My 100 favorite movies of the decade follow, with links going to essays written for CultureSnob.net. After that are discussions about five filmmakers with multiple movies on this list.

The Top 10

1. Memento
2. Pan's Labyrinth
3. Requiem for a Dream
4. Oldboy
5. The Royal Tenenbaums
6. No Country for Old Men
7. The Mothman Prophecies
8. Mulholland Drive
9. Donnie Darko (original theatrical version)
10. The Descent (international version)