Our outgoing decade largely earned its nickname as The Zeroes -- 10 long years of generally underachieving, unmemorable and/or distasteful popular culture. At the movies in particular, in the wide swath between the '00s' milestones and low ebbs, some pretty fantastic material wound up swept away in the cinematic tide: A few cycled in and out of the festival circuit before veering off to DVD, another wound up in international limbo, and yet others were imported to the US for all-too-brief theatrical runs. But all of them are among the most significant efforts of their years -- or any years this decade, for that matter. Here's hoping the '10s are kinder; it all starts with you.
[In order of production date]
· Ken Park (2002)
Larry Clark didn't shatter any narrative ground with this glimpse of fraught skater culture, teen sexuality, broken families and imminent death; he'd been exploring the same themes for more than 30 years as both a photographer (Teenage Lust, Tulsa) and filmmaker (Kids, Bully), and his eye for tortured ennui hadn't really changed much by the time he and cinematographer/co-director Ed Lachman got around to Ken Park. But the increased presence of adults here -- all either perpetrators or victims of corrosive physical and/or verbal abuse -- made this effort the decade's ne plus ultra of generational nihilism. Its capacity for dark humor only compounded the accomplishment, with Lachman observing it all with typical precision. Despite its outrageous opening montage (below, NSFW) and James Ransone's infamous, explicit autoerotic-asphyxiation scene, Park remains unavailable in the US for one transgression only: Its co-producer failed to pay for music clearances in 2002. Just another reason why this decade sucked.
· The Best of Youth (2003)
For all the crap and schadenfreude encircling Harvey Weinstein these days, he deserves all the credit in the world for importing Italian auteur Marco Tullio Giordana's epic for something like a week in 2005. The story tracks the Carati family -- predominantly brothers Matteo (Allessio Boni) and Nicola (Luigi lo Cascio) -- from their young adulthood in 1966 through a series of political, personal and romantic struggles interweaving their lives with their country's own turbulent history. By the time Giordana closes Youth in 2002 -- six hours later -- you can't really help but feel privileged to witness the kind of storytelling on hand here. Easily located on DVD and only a few unfortunate wigs away from perfection, it's worth every ambitious, moving minute.
· Zombie Honeymoon (2004)
I don't remember what ultimately convinced me to see Zombie Honeymoon in a one-off screening a few years ago at NYC's gone-but-not-forgotten Pioneer Theater, but you won't find me second-guessing. To the contrary, David Gebroe's microbudget splatter-romance is a wry little gem of irony and tone featuring a dazzling lead performance by Tracy Coogan. The Irish actress plays Denise, who sprints from her wedding to the Jersey Shore beach house where she and her groom Danny (Graham Sibley) will spend their honeymoon. At least that was the plan until a strange figure lurches out of the ocean, attacking Danny with a viscous black ooze that leaves the newlywed starved for flesh. Initially compelled to flee, Denise sticks with her husband through her rolling bouts of shock, panic, curiosity and heartache. Defying their shoestring budget, Gebroe and Coogan turned around one of the '00s most surprising and sincere movies of any genre; a cult following isn't the worst-case scenario for Honeymoon, but it deserves better.
· The Talent Given Us (2004)
At a glance, Andrew Wagner's feature debut might have "gimmick" written all over it: The director's mother, father and two sisters all play themselves in a cross-country road dramedy about visiting their son/brother Andrew in Los Angeles. The first few wobbly minutes won't disabuse you of that either. And then mom Judy forcefully confides to her husband, "Allen -- I want you to make love to me." It's the first of dozens of wincingly candid, laugh-out-loud funny, are-they-serious-or-are-they-acting moments threading Talent, which won a prize at CineVegas in 2004, landed at Sundance in '05, and finally saw the Wagners themselves promoting the film on the streets of New York and L.A. later that summer. A modest opening accelerated its route to DVD, where it, too, deserves an audience that the '10s can and should deliver. Wagner's 2007 follow-up, the Frank Langella drama Starting Out in the Evening, was better-seen if just as woefully underrated. (Tiny, unembeddable trailer available at the film's Web site.)
· Pusher III (2005)
As the son of one of Denmark's most legendary filmmakers, you probably could have foreseen at least a few of the rebellion issues plaguing Nicolas Winding Refn's first two violent, haphazard entries in his Pusher trilogy. Yet when he reached the second film's exhausting denouement in 2004, one could also sense Refn was exorcising whatever had held back his kinetic portraits of life in Copenhagen's criminal underworld (as well as his grueling English-language debut Fear X). Closing the series in 2005 with Pusher III (cheerily subtitled I'm the Angel of Death), Refn checks back in with the earlier films' drug baron Milo (Zlatko Buric). A junkie aging for the worse every day, and stuck with the added responsibility of organizing his spoiled daughter's birthday party, Milo decides against his better judgment to sell a huge load of mistakenly acquired ecstasy. That requires the intersection of some of Copenhagen's least savory gangsters, a troublesome epidemic of food poisoning, a few hundred consumed cigarettes and an unspeakably nasty final act that makes Refn's 2009 prison fable Bronson look like an afterschool special on deliquency. It also redeems the first two Pusher films, which was no small feat. (Trailer very NSFW.)
· Musician (2007)
Chicago filmmaker Daniel Kraus launched his Work series of documentaries with 2004's Sheriff, a weirdly sublime shadow job looking at the daily routines of a North Carolina lawman. Three years later Kraus returned with this headscratcher following workaholic jazz composer and performer Ken Vandermark. Of course, the idea of observing people at their jobs -- and in fact diagramming entire institutions from the molecular level of their employees -- has long been the province of Frederick Wiseman. But Kraus's apparent ability to catch Vandermark from any given angle whether he's booking shows, writing music, playing a concert or simply living in his own restless head (not to mention a run-time around a third of what the average Wiseman epic runs) makes Musician all the more intensely intimate and expressive. Alternatively, Kraus's real genius may lay in the selection of his subjects; he's currently working on Professor and Preacher.
· The Living Wake (2007)
After his 2002 breakthrough in Rodger Dodger and before his 2009 leading-man twofer of Adventureland and Zombieland, Jesse Eisenberg populated a fistful of indies that landed in various pockets of industry obscurity. They're all worth seeing, including The Education of Charlie Banks, The Hunting Party and, most of all, the beautiful, hilarious The Living Wake. Adapting his one-man show, Mike O'Connell stars as K. Roth Binew, a self-aggrandizing and possibly insane ne'er-do-well storyteller diagnosed with only 24 hours to live. Pedaled through the golden autumn by his rickshaw-driving manservant Miles (Eisenberg), Binew sets about staging a "living wake" attended by everyone he ever knew -- as if they believe his illness or would mourn his loss anyway. It's a fantasy, it's a romp, it's a bittersweet drama, and more than anything, it's a criminally underseen classic whose '07 festival run ended without a theatrical distributor or even, as of this writing, a DVD release. This, even despite Eisenberg's hot streak. So find it when you can.