The Story of Movies in the 21st Century Is One of Context Collapse

New York Times

4 hours ago

It's mostly the internet's fault, but in the past 25 years, the lines we drew in the 20th century got blurry. Time and space have collapsed. Now you can attend a meeting across the country, text your long-distance boyfriend halfway around the world, and watch a decades-old movie from another hemisphere on TV at home, all in one day. We've learned to make friends with people we've never met and develop obsessions with things we'd never have known about had we lived at any other point in human history. The story of the 21st century, among other things, is a tale of crumbling contexts and newly porous boundaries.
Small wonder, then, that our 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century list, created by polling hundreds of directors, stars and other film professionals, shows the same trend. Every list tells a story about its maker or, in this case, makers. It's clear, for instance, that the movies they remember were mostly not reboots, remakes or franchise fare, which have become Hollywood's bread and butter. Star vehicles are fading. And while streaming has elbowed in and upended how we watch movies, there's only one film on the list produced by a streamer — No. 46, Alfonso Cuarón's 'Roma,' which Netflix gave a respectable theatrical release.
All interesting trends, some encouraging and some troubling. But what strikes me most about the list is this: Long-held categories in the movie business are fading, just like they are in the broader culture.
Until pretty recently, for instance, common wisdom held that commercially successful genre fare and self-serious awards films didn't overlap, and that auteurs would pick a lane and stay there. Christopher Nolan's 'The Dark Knight' (No. 28) seemed like an outlier in this respect, a Batman movie so good that when it failed to be nominated for best picture in 2009, the academy changed the number of nominee slots from five to 10. But since then, other horror, superhero and action flicks have increasingly sneaked into awards conversations, including 'Get Out' (No. 8), 'Mad Max: Fury Road' (No. 11), 'Black Swan' (No. 81) and 'Black Panther' (No. 96).
That may explain the triumph of 2022's best picture winner, 'Everything Everywhere All at Once' (No. 77), a whimsical and occasionally deranged pastiche comedy blended with a sincere-hearted family story that pays obvious, sometimes ironic homage to a number of genres: martial arts, melodrama, science fiction, surrealism, even video games. In fact, some of its references also appear on the list, like Wong Kar-wai's 'In the Mood for Love' (No. 4) and Ang Lee's 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' (No. 16).
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