Operation Screenshot (Films of the 2000s): Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's 21 Grams (2003)

A new series here at Moon In The Gutter designed to celebrate my favorite films of the decade by using a series of ten stills from each.

Operation Screenshot (Films of the 2000s): David O. Russell's I Heart Huckabees (2004)

Operation Screenshot (Films of the 2000s): David Lynch's Mulholland Dr. (2001)

I typically don't add any sort of commentary to this series, but as fans of Mulholland Dr. will no doubt notice something strange about the following stills I figured one was in order.
When I sat down to capture my weekly ten stills this morning, I figured Mulholland Dr. would be a breeze considering that David Lynch is one the great visual stylists in film history and this is one of his greatest achievements. I soon found myself getting overwhelmingly frustrated with the shots I was choosing as they didn't seem to do the film justice, and the ones that did I had already seen on a hundred other different sites.
When I got to the last half hour of the film though, I was suddenly taken back to 2001 when I saw this for the first time at a theater in Lexington, Ky. and I remembered how floored I was by this section. I thought, and still think, that the last half hour of Mulholland Dr. is as great as any film I have ever seen...a moving, harrowing tour de force by a filmmaker at the top of his game and an actress turning the kind of emotional and spiritual corner rarely seen in film, American or otherwise.
So these stills are from that last half hour and I'd like to dedicate them to Naomi Watts, who became one of my favorite actors of all time in this section. Truth be told, I think the only person who has perhaps been better in front of a camera this decade is Watts herself in any number of extraordinary roles she has been in since. The fact that she wasn't even nominated for an Academy Award for her role in Mulholland Dr. still makes me feel uneasy at best.
This post also marks my renewed love affair with the cinema of David Lynch, a man who was at one point among my top directors whom I lost somewhere along the way. Lately though, thanks to revisiting Twin Peaks and a couple of other factors, I have felt myself totally emerged again in his beguiling and totally original world...something that has given me great comfort as of late.