StemCell Therapy

In the future, when people try to imagine what it was like to live in our time, there will be lots of artifacts to sift through: TV shows, YouTube videos, selfies on Instagram, as well as the traditional things, like newspapers and news reports.

But movies will have a special place.

A few things make movies a particularly good measure of what was happening and what people were thinking at a particular time. First, theyre meant to be watched by large groups, and so theyre intended to please almost everyone. This means that if a movie endorses an idea in strong terms, you can assume that either that idea was widely held or, at the very least, reasonable people thought that idea was widely held. Almost nobody makes a movie with the intention of offending the audience.

Second, movies are not spontaneous. They are meticulously composed fantasies, created to please viewers at a particular time, and as such they consciously and unconsciously capture the aspirations, assumptions and values of their day. They give the facts of the era the cars people drove, the phones people used but also capture the hopes and expectations, the ideas that people had about themselves.

So, we are now 20 years into the 21st century, a fifth of the way through. Today, were looking at 20 movies that people in the distant future can look at if they want a crash course on what Americans were thinking, feeling and experiencing in the first two decades of the 21st century.Each one captures an idea or a moment or a style that helped tell the story of their time, and ours.

Following 9/11, the national trauma that began our current era, movies suddenly began telling stories of civic collapse. Sometimes it was an invasion, sometimes zombies woke up, but the idea that ran through all these films is that civilization, something we thought was built on rock, was quite fragile and could actually go away. Blindness, in which a huge swath of the public suddenly lose their eyesight, was a mystical yet brutal treatment of this idea, a real plunge into the abyss.

Honorable Mention: A more popular version of this concept (from a post-apocalypse standpoint) can be found in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015).

Written by and starring Oakland natives Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal, this film told an affecting personal story about friendship, while dramatizing a number of current social issues, such as the strains of gentrification and the tension between the police and the black community.

This is very much a personal story, but because director Richard Linklater filmed Boyhood over the course of 12 years, it captures, as no film ever has, the incidentals of life over a long span of time the toys and the computers that people used, the haircuts that were popular, how people carried themselves and how families interacted.

By taking two straight archetypes and making them gay, this Ang Lee film about a rodeo cowboy and ranch hands secret relationship made pop cultures most powerful case for gay marriage, at a time when most Americans were against it.

Honorable Mention: Gus Van Sants Milk (2008), about the assassinated gay rights leader, presented the gay rights movement as a great American movement in the tradition of Martin Luther King and civil rights.

It was just another exciting, well-made Roland Emmerich action movie, except as the climate crisis has worsened, its images of superstorms, frozen oceans and mass migrations have stayed in mind. Essentially, it presents the climate version of the civic chaos film. We thought we could take the weather for granted. It turns out, we couldnt.

Jacob Aaron Estes wrote and directed this story of a mild-mannered obstetrician (Tobey Maguire) whose life begins to derail. A shrewd moral document, the movie steers the audience into taking the doctors side, while subtly revealing that every one of his problems is due to moral laxity. The film is, in essence, an indictment (and a record) of modern morality, which means that most of the audience watching never even figures out that the Maguire character is a bad person.

Starring Renee Zellweger and Ewan McGregor, this satire of early 1960s sex comedies was also a commentary on the fluidity of romantic and sexual mores in general, so that, in the end, when the movie contorts itself to please a modern audience, it both records the 2003 notions of right and wrong and slyly shows that these ideas will someday also seem outdated.

A running and increasing anxiety of the 21st century has been the notion that computers could take the place of people, or begin to dominate human life. This low-key film starring Oscar Isaac and Alicia Vikander, playing an android with impressive intelligence, made the most frightening and persuasive case for how that might happen.

A British and American counterterrorism team sits in a boardroom trying to figure out when to strike a cabal of suicide-vest-wearing terrorists, in this powerful film about awful choices in modern warfare. It contains the already classic curtain line from Alan Rickman, as a British general: Never tell a soldier that he does not know the cost of war.

Until this decade, the Civil War was always presented as a noble dispute between two equally worthy sides. This film presented the Confederacy as a political and social evil, which was stamped out in one Mississippi county, under the leadership of a Confederate deserter named Newton Knight. Theres a goosebumps moment when Gugu Mbatha-Raw looks at the baby she has had with Knight, trying to decide whether hes black or white. Finally, Mbatha-Raw says, Youre just a brand-new thing, arent you?

Honorable Mention: Quentin Tarantino got the ball rolling by presenting slavery as an unmitigated evil in Django Unchained (2012), and director Steve McQueen followed with the Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave.

The spiritual sickness of modern life the loneliness, the longing, the problems of connection, the distorted and mournful eroticism was captured beautifully in this film, starring Emily Blunt and written by Erin Cressida Wilson.

Honorable Mention: Chloe (2010), a film in the same vein, also written by Wilson. And Watchmen (2009).

Steven Soderbergh made the first and best film about the Great Recession, with porn star Sasha Grey as a high-priced call girl who finds herself slipping. Its about someone finding out shes not as special as she thought she was, which is the bitter lesson for everyone in a recession.

Honorable Mention: The Wolf of Wall Street.

A vacation movie set in New Orleans during the Essence Music Festival that depicts adult female friendship and modern-day sexual mores in real ways, while demonstrating what was hilarious in 2017.

Honorable Mention: Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates (2016).

Justin Long and Drew Barrymore meet and fall in love, but theyre separated geographically by their careers in a film that captured the anxieties of young Americans trying to enter the job market during the recession.

Joaquin Phoenix fell in love with a Siri-like computer operating system in Spike Jonzes tale of the near future, in which the human personality becomes distorted by technology.

Honorable Mention: Robin Williams starred in The Final Cut (2004), which imagines a future in which everything people see and hear is recorded by a computer chip in their brains, thus transforming human interaction for the worse.

A lot of movies are making oblique commentaries about President Trumps administration, but this Ike Barinholtz comedy directly addressed the alienation, the bitter discord and the darkest fears that this presidency has introduced into modern American life.

There have been a number of 9/11 movies, but no film captured the aftermath of that tragedy the sick feeling we all carried with us better than this masterpiece from Spike Lee.

Honorable Mention: United 93 (2006), Paul Greengrass film about the hijacked flight that crashed in Pennsylvania.

This Brady Corbet film attempted and succeeded in telling the moral history of the 21st century, through the story of a high school girl who survives a school shooting and becomes a pop star.

This celebration of the female principle, through the avatar of a superhero, made in anticipation of our first female president, became a focal point of aspiration and a statement of value when the election didnt go as planned.

Honorable Mention: Black Panther, which positioned Oakland as a focal point in a Marvel superhero film.

With Vin Diesel at the center, this aggressively directed Rob Cohen movie introduced a new kind of action film and a new kind of 21st- entury cool, which had something to do with tattoos and shaved heads. And what was all this cool fighting going up against? Terrorists, of course, intent on making the world unlivable.

Read the original:
20 movies that tell the story of our century (so far) - San Francisco Chronicle

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