The film of the lost decade.

December 23, 2019 9:26 AM

What movie best captures the zeitgeist of the aughts?

Over 10 years ago, I asked the question: What movie defines the 90s? Now I want to know which popular movie released 2000-2009 you think defines the aughts.

It seems like at least once a decade, there's a hugely successful movie that taps into the contemporary social zeitgeist that shapes a large part of how people remember an era. Back to the Future in the 80s. Saturday Night Fever in the 70s. Easy Rider in the 60s. Rebel Without a Cause in the 50s.

I'm very much *not* looking for the best film, or your favorite film. What popular movie, fifty years in the future, will be a time capsule of the aughts?

(For the '90s, I gave Best Answer to a poster who chose YOU GOT MAIL with THELMA AND LOUISE and JERRY MAGUIRE as runners-up. It seemed controversial at the time, but now seems almost hilariously apt.)

What film will future generations look at and say "Now that was the Aughts!"? (Films released in 1999 emphatically do not count.)

posted by I EAT TAPAS to Media & Arts (64 answers total)

Avatar.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:28 AM on December 23, 2019 [4 favorites]

Harry Potter films and Lord of the Rings films.
posted by umber vowel at 9:38 AM on December 23, 2019 [2 favorites]

Beyonce's "visual album" for Lemonade.
posted by sacrifix at 9:45 AM on December 23, 2019 [1 favorite]

Idiocracy.
posted by Calvin and the Duplicators at 9:49 AM on December 23, 2019 [11 favorites]

Response by poster: Before I stop threadsitting, for those who didn't read the [more inside], I want to reiterate that I'm looking for films that reflect the life and culture of the aughts that were also released in the aughts (2000-2009).

Certainly AVATAR, HARRY POTTER and LORD OF THE RINGS were high-grossing juggernauts that were part of the cultural discussion of the aughts, but unless you are a wizard or, whatever the hell happened in AVATAR, those movies most certainly don't reflect the experience of living life in the aughts as they take place almost entirely in fantasy worlds.

LEMONADE is a wonderful suggestion for the 2010s, but I really want to limit this to movies released 2000-2009. God willing, I'll be back in ten years for the 2010s.
posted by I EAT TAPAS at 9:51 AM on December 23, 2019 [8 favorites]

The Holiday. Hear me out -- meta, self referential, overbearing soundtrack, wish fulfillment, airbnb.

I think Juno is also a very "aught" movie.
posted by bfranklin at 9:55 AM on December 23, 2019 [20 favorites]

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? (Also, good call on Juno).
posted by ChuraChura at 10:03 AM on December 23, 2019 [13 favorites]

Nthing Juno. Love Actually? Mean Girls?
posted by azalea_chant at 10:10 AM on December 23, 2019 [5 favorites]

Garden State
posted by theodolite at 10:12 AM on December 23, 2019 [13 favorites]

Came to say Garden State also.
posted by wats at 10:16 AM on December 23, 2019

I want to submit this from the 90s thread:

And one other thing: Friends was sort of a last-gasp network TV thing. Friends was the last major network hit before the Sopranos came along, and that changed everything. It could be argued that, for the oughts - the film that represents the decade will be another tv show, but something of actual quality, because tv is in a golden age right now. Part of this I think can be traced back to the world wide web, and the idea in general that consumers don't have to put up with crappy network tv anymore. Friends was kind of the last hugely successful classical sitcom. And by classical, I mean the ones w/ proscenium sets, laugh tracks, and mostly non-continuous storylines. Certainly there have been others since then, but nobody talks about them around the water cooler.

It seems to me that this defines the 90s. It was like a bridge decade between the analog world (like Working Girl) and the digital one. And Friends was sort of that bridge entertainment between old tv & movies (watched either at the theater or when a network showed it or on vhs!) and the adult stuff we can see now whenever and where ever we want.

Sorry for the rambling. Back to work for me.
posted by nushustu at 8:50 AM on May 16, 2008 [1 favorite +] [!]

Should we be considering TV too?
posted by Fukiyama at 10:20 AM on December 23, 2019

I think it might be Mean Girls.
posted by Balthamos at 10:27 AM on December 23, 2019 [12 favorites]

Response by poster: Should we be considering TV too?

Serialized TV should be a different discussion. Let's keep this to works intended to be watched in a single sitting between 80-300 minutes.
posted by I EAT TAPAS at 10:30 AM on December 23, 2019

Superbad
posted by speakeasy at 10:30 AM on December 23, 2019 [4 favorites]

ohh and the Hurt locker
posted by speakeasy at 10:31 AM on December 23, 2019

Agree with Mean Girls.
posted by yawper at 10:32 AM on December 23, 2019 [3 favorites]

I agree Mean Girls. (Look how no one is mentioning The Simpsons Movie- which would have been the movie of the 90’s)
posted by kerf at 10:35 AM on December 23, 2019 [1 favorite]

I want to say Ghost World but I think it has to be Mean Girls. Not only did it capture the zeitgeist of the decade but it also helped define it.

Fifteen years later, I think it's time to admit that, at least in a ironic self-referential way, "fetch" has definitely happened.
posted by grouse at 10:38 AM on December 23, 2019 [4 favorites]

For anybody paying attention, Children of Men
posted by Rust Moranis at 10:42 AM on December 23, 2019 [20 favorites]

I will throw in a vote for Mean Girls.

Is The Social Network too late in 2010 to be considered?

Children of Men is still too 20 minutes into the future for me. Maybe it's only 10 minutes now, but we're not quite there yet.
posted by Fukiyama at 10:47 AM on December 23, 2019

Must surely be Lost in Translation? Dislocated privilege, ennui, celebrity culture, temporary relationships, glamour, wanting to but not being able to climb out of the culture of money and fame that envelops everything, including the film itself.
posted by einekleine at 10:47 AM on December 23, 2019 [24 favorites]

Wall-E

(Honorable mention to 24 even though it doesn’t qualify and I wish it didn’t define the decade, but...it captures the xenophobia, paranoia, and false choices, as well as the rise of binge-watching.)
posted by sallybrown at 10:47 AM on December 23, 2019 [1 favorite]

I think it has to be a "Fratpack" movie, Anchorman or Wedding Crashers get my vote. Cultural juggernauts that that aged like milk.

To me the cultural aughts ended with the recession and I think the Fratpack captures the problematic and surface "fun" of an era that was about to crash.
posted by matrixclown at 10:52 AM on December 23, 2019 [2 favorites]

I'm going to put in a bid for Little Miss Sunshine - drug abuse, disaffected teen, dysfunctional family, child pageants, motivational speaking by a charlatan, glorified vulgarity, happy ending that encourages embracing our flaws, plus Steve Carell.
posted by Mchelly at 10:55 AM on December 23, 2019 [19 favorites]

(I'm gonna have to watch Mean Girls, aren't I. Argh.)

Options include:
* My Big Fat Greek Wedding
* Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants
* The Devil Wears Prada
* Erin Brockovich
* Brokeback Mountain

Since I haven't actually watched all of those, as opposed to knowing about them, I can't say which truly captures the era.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 10:58 AM on December 23, 2019 [1 favorite]

I was going to say Mean Girls even before I read everyone else's comments. Juno is a good choice too.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 11:19 AM on December 23, 2019 [4 favorites]

I’m not quite sure how Back To The Future fits your revised criteria, but in any case American Psycho captures one aspect of the 2000s very well.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 11:21 AM on December 23, 2019

Mean girls Juno are what I thought of, but they are both focused on high school.

The office (tv) captures office work pretty well.
posted by bbqturtle at 11:22 AM on December 23, 2019

It has to be Mean Girls, I think. Juno is the “quirky” alternative. Both are highly self-aware and quippy in a way that’s so 00s. Both are about jaded, cynical teenagers who learn to be more vulnerable and open, which is a good allegory for how the Oughts bridged 90s nihilism/irony and our current decade’s embrace of earnestness.
posted by lunasol at 11:26 AM on December 23, 2019 [2 favorites]

Another vote for Garden State, it immediately jumped to mind for me (came of age in the early 00s)
posted by atlantica at 11:41 AM on December 23, 2019

Garden State was also the first one I thought of.
posted by General Malaise at 11:48 AM on December 23, 2019

I think 25th Hour captured the post 9/11 bleakness perfectly.
posted by night_train at 11:56 AM on December 23, 2019 [4 favorites]

I want to put in a vote for Knocked Up. But I also agree with Mean Girls.

Runners up are Wedding Crashers and Forgetting Sarah Marshall.
posted by rue72 at 12:17 PM on December 23, 2019 [2 favorites]

I feel like I’m going to be some version of That Guy if I put in a plug for The Royal Tenenbaums but I am putting in a plug for The Royal Tenenbaums.
posted by less of course at 12:26 PM on December 23, 2019 [5 favorites]

There is a lot going unsaid in this question and/or the assumptions of most answers so far. Reading between the lines it sounds like everyone is looking for “What film best defines the 00s of white, middle class America?”. Or alternatively maybe it’s the 00s “of MetaFilter readers”. Which is fine! But it would be good to be clear that this is what we’re defining.

Some alternatives (but still all about white folks, and only stretching as far out as England and France):

Hidden (Caché) (2005)
“A married couple is terrorized by a series of surveillance videotapes left on their front porch.”

Last Resort (2000)
“When a young Russian woman and her son leave Moscow to meet her fiancé, who fails to show up, she declares political asylum.”

Fish Tank (2009)
“Mia, an aggressive fifteen-year-old girl, lives on an Essex estate with her tarty mother, Joanne... She has been thrown out of school and is awaiting admission to a referrals unit...”

Wendy and Lucy (2008)
“Over the summer, a series of unfortunate happenings trigger a financial crisis for a young woman and she soon finds her life falling apart.”

But surely there are some movies that better sum up the decade for the non-white, non-straight, non-Western... etc etc?
posted by fabius at 1:58 PM on December 23, 2019 [15 favorites]

My instinct was Mean Girls too, but I hesitate because kids in 2019 still watch and love Mean Girls. It's relatable for them. Garden State, on the other hand -- totally inscrutable to the youth, but (at least for people of a certain age) it's like, peak aughts. Can you find a millennial who doesn't still have that soundtrack mentally playing over every life event, whether they like it or not?

So I like Garden State for this. Or Juno.
posted by goodbyewaffles at 2:14 PM on December 23, 2019 [4 favorites]

To fabius's point - what about Y Tu Mama Tambien?
posted by ChuraChura at 2:21 PM on December 23, 2019 [3 favorites]

I'd say Shaun Of The Dead, at least for the UK. Garden State seems sort of right. I would have chosen Scott Pilgrim, but apparently that's 2010.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 2:25 PM on December 23, 2019 [8 favorites]

Yeah, so I think Mean Girls is going to be a classic movie of the 2000s, but in a sense it also feels like a movie that just have easily come out in a different time, it's a really smart teen comedy with an edge.

For that reason, I second Lost in Translation, especially for the theme of an emerging global culture in which technology offers the illusion of closeness, but in reality creates isolation.

I also think any movie that is *of* the 2000s needs to have a good cell phone scene in it, which LIT has (maybe Mean Girls does too? Although I think they were still on cordless landlines).
posted by jeremias at 2:41 PM on December 23, 2019 [5 favorites]

In The Loop?
posted by Bloxworth Snout at 2:45 PM on December 23, 2019 [3 favorites]

Y Tu Mama Tambien is an interesting choice... Middle and upper middle class Mexican teens and cousin go on a road trip across their country to find a mythical beach...

I would say it will depend on how many have seen it. In the 90s thread, there were several movies there that were really great choices, but were only put forward by one person.
posted by Fukiyama at 2:54 PM on December 23, 2019

Came here to say Wendy and Lucy - happy to see someone else beat me to it.

I'd also nominate Morvern Callar (2002) for its portrait of grief and aimlessness.
posted by theory at 3:06 PM on December 23, 2019

Gotta say, Idiocracy sure lands as the most prescient film of the era.
posted by Thorzdad at 3:40 PM on December 23, 2019 [6 favorites]

The aughts are hard because they didnt really have a zeitgeist that jibed with the decade. But if you go from 9/11 to the Great Recession the thing that jumped out at me at the time as sharply different from the 90s was the rise of authoritarianisn and young people becoming more traditional / conservative/ marraige /consumerism / image oriented. The rise of the bland white kitchen church lady #bleseed culture started. So I'd vote for Requiem for A Dream as it really encapsulated what felt like a new world view at the time: god/ karma will punish you and you'll deserve it and we'll all watch and be entertained.

Mean Girls is a teen movie thay could have been set in any era, imho.
posted by fshgrl at 4:11 PM on December 23, 2019 [2 favorites]

Although I forgot about Amelie. That might have been peak pre 9/11 quirkiness. And it was an international sensation, not just US.

Has anyone ever rewatched it?
posted by fshgrl at 4:29 PM on December 23, 2019 [1 favorite]

Mulholland Drive
posted by speicus at 4:49 PM on December 23, 2019

Garden State > Little Miss Sunshine > [me handwaving at a third movie from late in the decade when I stopped watching movies, maybe Juno] would be a good way to watch how "serious indie" movies developed for people who were, say, in college in the mid-aughts.

Napoleon Dynamite was an extremely important movie in terms of tone and subject matter, though I think its influence peaked in the early part of the 2010s. (People mostly watched it in ~2004 or whenever that was, but—and to be clear I love Napoleon Dynamite and Homestar Runner, which is in a similar position—the awful "I mustache you a question" forced Reddit-y quirkiness that Napoleon Dynamite presaged didn't come until later.)
posted by Polycarp at 5:30 PM on December 23, 2019 [2 favorites]

Doesn't it have to be The Dark Knight? Not just a prime example of a post-9/11 film, of which we had a lot, but also an indelible watermark in the evolution of popular film's obsession with superheroes, superheroics, and comic-inspired morality tales. It's a movie about a white guy, but it affected how these stories are told across the board, from Washington D.C. to Wakanda.

Not for the better, in my estimation, I hasten to add. My own personal choice for a film that defined the zeitgeist of that decade would probably be Mulholland Dr (and I love that someone had the moxie to suggest the great Morvern Callar but it's not exactly a "popular film," is it?) but sometimes it feels like The Dark Knight Changed Everything when it comes to genre cinema, which is let's face it the dominant mode in studio filmmaking today. See also: 28 Days Later, Cloverfield and War of the Worlds, but The Dark Knight is the big one.
posted by Mothlight at 5:34 PM on December 23, 2019 [2 favorites]

The Room. Weird, paranoid, bleak and unsexy.
posted by vespabelle at 5:37 PM on December 23, 2019 [3 favorites]

Or alternatively maybe it’s the 00s “of MetaFilter readers”. Which is fine! But it would be good to be clear that this is what we’re defining.

The original poster was asking for "a hugely successful movie that taps into the contemporary social zeitgeist", so that seemed to be pretty clear.
posted by jeremias at 5:53 PM on December 23, 2019

Response by poster: The original poster was asking for "a hugely successful movie that taps into the contemporary social zeitgeist", so that seemed to be pretty clear.

Indeed, this should be a movie that grossed enough on its original release to be part of the general public consciousness surrounding its release in the aughts. That holds worldwide - I don't want to restrict this to American movies, and films like Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN or AMELIE (which had huge box office in their countries of origin) should certainly be part of the discussion. However, I'm not sure WENDY AND LUCY and MORVERN CALLAR, both movies I dearly love but aren't in the mainstream zeitgeist even in their home countries, are in that same boat.

THE ROOM, on the other hand... that's certainly an interesting and difficult consideration.
posted by I EAT TAPAS at 6:33 PM on December 23, 2019

Huh, a shame that Fight Club came out in '99.

In that case I'm going to suggest Rent (2005). For suburban teenagers, it was such a potent if confused symbol of rebellion and self-expression. (I think the first queer kiss I ever saw on the big screen?) We didn't know that the recession was coming and we'd be spending the next decade living at home instead of living La Vie Boheme.

Honorable mention to V For Vendetta (2005), but like Fight Club it was more a prophecy than a sign of the times.
posted by toastedcheese at 6:48 PM on December 23, 2019 [1 favorite]

I'd argue that Fight Club was pure 90s nihilism and Y Tu Mama Tambien was too nuanced and left too unresolved. The naughts abandoned all that and brought the morality play and the neatly tied up ending back in a way no one had since the early 60s. In times of uncertainty we want to know what happens to our characters at the end of the story I guess.

Probably the defining movie was The Dark Knight / Iron Man if you were a certain kind of teenage boy or a studio accountant but a film like The Hurt Locker, Knocked Up or Garden State were more meaningful to most people's reality in the US.

Maybe The Beach. As a metaphor for how the promise of the 90s got totally fucked up. Or Zodiac which kick started millennials obsession with serial killers and death.
posted by fshgrl at 7:39 PM on December 23, 2019

It came out in 2010 but based on graphic novels written earlier: Scott Pilgrim VS the World
posted by pushing paper and bottoming chairs at 8:51 PM on December 23, 2019

Another vote for Children of Men. Mr K came in, read the thread, and agrees wholeheartedly with Children of Men. All the kids weren't talking about it, but it reflected something so true to many of us.

(I'm assuming you meant "true to" rather than "popular")
posted by kestralwing at 10:21 PM on December 23, 2019 [1 favorite]

Children of Men is a really good choice, and more prescient, but I think I would narrowly pick The Dark Knight. At least if we're talking about the zeitgeist within the U.S.

IMO "post-9/11" is the dominant theme of the whole decade, and Dark Knight truly captures America's devastatingly idiotic reaction to 9/11. Violent, paranoid, histrionic, bleak, amoral--but most of all, stubbornly, overwhelmingly childish. The world depicted in that movie is exactly the world that 75% of the country thought it was living in.
posted by equalpants at 12:07 AM on December 24, 2019 [5 favorites]

X-Men

Preempted the superhero trend, and part of the contemporary popularization of "geek" culture. "Cool" but pre-grimdark.

Just a taste of the self-aware, meta irony that would get over-the-top in later years.

A mainstream (read:white) movie with a strong black female character who was pretty much a token, but not presented as a cultural stereotype, object of pity, or joke.

A lead character who is literally a superhero, but living out of his car (ok camper) and barely scraping by. Pretty damn relatable to a lot of the lost generation whose super college degrees had them living out of their cars or moving back in with their parents. Remember when having to move back in with your parents or live out of your car was a big, shameful deal, that thousands of people were suddenly experiencing?

Encapsulates a lot of fear and fantasy about technology and social change, and predicts the fascism upswing that actually followed 9/11, the recession and Obama before any of those actually happened.
posted by windykites at 6:51 AM on December 24, 2019

On non-preview, just saw your comment about fantasy movies not fitting your criteria. Feel free to flag for deletion, my apologies.
posted by windykites at 7:00 AM on December 24, 2019

I’m going to say Bowling for Columbine which not only did really well box-office wise for a documentary but kind of reflects the new dominance of unscripted storytelling in that era.

Fiction picks: Little Miss Sunshine, Love Actually, Devil Wears Prada.
posted by warriorqueen at 11:36 AM on December 24, 2019 [3 favorites]

Actually I am changing my vote to Love, Actually, a truly abysmal movie but reflective of certain cultural I dunno what.
posted by less of course at 11:53 AM on December 24, 2019

Adding my vote for Lost in Translation, with honorable mentions for Little Miss Sunshine, Ghost World, Garden State and for Amores Perros.
posted by gudrun at 12:40 PM on December 24, 2019 [1 favorite]

Team America World Police.
Fuck the Aughts.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 7:46 PM on December 24, 2019 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: In contrast to last time, there seemed to be a lot of consensus here, with MEAN GIRLS taking the lead as the movie that best captured the zeitgeist of the aughts, and JUNO and GARDEN STATE as runners-up. I'm not sure I can argue with that, although there were certainly lots of other great selections.

I do find the notion of THE ROOM being the film that captured the zeitgeist of the aughts an interesting one, especially surrounding the notion of incompetence and narcissism becoming popular entertainment, in some sort of parallel to the surge of similar trends in reality TV, the Internet and the mainstream media.

See all of you in ten years.
posted by I EAT TAPAS at 7:52 AM on December 26, 2019 [2 favorites]

Came to this late, but my vote is Josie and the Pussycats.

Josie and the Pussycats was meant to be a sendup of early aughts consumer culture, a Dawn of the Dead-type rebuke on trends and marketing, much like how George A. Romero’s original film was a rebuke on mega malls and shopping. In 2019, though, Josie and the Pussycats feels more like a celebration of a bygone era, or at the very least a reminder of a pre-recession, pre-iTunes and Spotify, pre-buying-movie-tickets-on-the-internet-so-you-don’t-have-to-listen-to-Mr.-Moviephone era in which everybody blew their babysitting money at the mall.

And it’s funnier than you’d expect, too.
posted by ejs at 6:13 PM on December 26, 2019