The Birds' Nest: The BEST Y2K Films
by Sienna Axe, Zac Bentz, & Morgan Stone
Morgan: One of my favorite parts of films from the 2000s has to be the fashion. There is something about seeing the bright colors, the layering, the gaudy accessories - they just do something to me. Don't get me wrong, I love the music, the cheesy animation, the jump cuts, but there's something about how this fashion has influenced the person I have become. Where would I be without Daphne's violet and purple fits in Scooby-Doo (2002)? What if I had never seen Mean Girls? The fashion was pink, bright, often unabashedly feminine, and sometimes just simply ugly. I love it. I love it so much.
Sienna: The 2000s were a beautiful time! I mean that! I think everyone has a special place in their hearts for the decade that taught them what "cool" looked like, no matter how misguided it may have been. And the effects are so crazy—it's so wonderful to watch a whole industry try (and fail) to really test the limits of CGI for the first time. I mean, this is a decade that ended with Avatar (2009)! How crazy is that! My favorite stop along the way, though, is obviously Speed Racer (2008). It's not every day you see what feels like hours of monkey toddler bullshit bookmarked by two of the most beautiful sequences ever put to film. I love it endlessly.
Zac: I love how deliciously self-serious the early-2000s were, and i especially love how that self-seriousness, in hindsight, doesn't land AT ALL. But it was also an era marked by some genuinely incredible art that I genuinely believe could only have been made in that extremely specific cultural context. Like 2002's Punch-Drunk Love, which is one of my favorite films of all time, and feels as early 2000s as you can get but uses that to its ultimate sensory and emotional advantage.
Check out the full Letterboxd list here: https://boxd.it/jlPBm
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