Source Code
Directed by Duncan Jones
Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga, Jeffrey Wright
Release date: April 1, 2011

Graceful and complex cinema has been a stranger to the bulk of Hollywood productions recently. Long being that elusive beast that promises to resolve all triviality and heighten mediocrity to something astounding when it is adequately attained by a mind that is a true visionary. Inception, the most recent studio picture to attempt such originality, confounded us until our brain cells finally evaporated. We are still trying to gather our wits. But enter director Duncan Jones. He seems to have an artistic ability to present outlandish material in a straightforward manner while keeping our brain cells intact throughout the process. Refinement is what he is after, displaying, through his work, a contemptuous indifference to traditional and conventional norms. We saw hints of such audacity in Jones’ debut film Moon, which isn’t nearly as sophisticated and entertaining as his second feature film Source Code, a film that is proof that Jones’ mind barely senses the lifeless characteristics of conventional cinema. Characteristics, to him, that are ever diminishing.

Due Date
Blu-ray/DVD Combo
DIRECTED BY: Todd Phillips
WRITTEN BY: Alan R. Cohen, Alan Freedland
STARRING: Robert Downey Jr., Zach Galafianakis, Michelle Monaghan, Jamie Foxx, Danny McBride, RZA, Juliette Lewis
Warner Home Video
RELEASE DATE: February 22, 2011

Have you ever had to share an inordinate amount of time with a complete and total stranger? It rarely leads to a lifelong friendship, and more often than not it can become one of the more uncomfortable situations you can find yourself in.

Just such a situation develops in Due Date, the new comedy from Old School and The Hangover director Todd Phillips. The movie follows Peter Highman (Robert Downey Jr.), who’s on his way home to be there for the birth of his first child. Fate has other plans for Peter, however, when a couple of chance encounters with an awkward aspiring actor named Ethan Tremblay (Zach Galifianakis) sees him put on the no-fly list. To make up for the incident, Ethan offers to share his rental car with Peter, and off the two strangers go.

Before long, Peter grows impatient with Ethan and realizes the strange man is simply insufferable. He attempts to ditch him a couple of times, but an unexplainable feeling of guilt for the pathetic Ethan and his little dog keeps Peter coming back…and keeps getting him into ridiculous and hilarious trouble.

If you’ve yet to see director Duncan Jones‘ Moon, you should immediately remedy that…trust us.

After you’re all caught up, you can join us all in being excited for Jones’ sophomore effort, Source Code. The movie stars Jake Gyllenhaal as a man who discovers that he’s being programmed into the final minutes of another man’s life just before a bomb on a train goes off, killing many people. It turns out that it’s part of a secret government experiment to try and identify and stop those responsible for the bomb before another much larger attack is executed. He’ll have to re-live this man’s final moments over and over again on his mission, and also finds himself trying to save the life one of the passengers on the train.

Be sure to head on down below, where you can read the full synopsis for the movie and check out the first trailer for Duncan Jones’ Source Code now!

Due Date
Directed by Todd Phillips
Starring Robert Downey Jr., Zach Galifianakis, Michelle Monaghan, Jamie Foxx
Release Date: November 5, 2010

Ever see a trailer that is so good that you can’t believe the movie could possibly hold up to all your huge expectations and it turns out that it doesn’t? That in a nutshell is Due Date. Now, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The movie, directed by Todd Philips (The Hangover), is hardly a bad film. It just a film you’ve seen before.

Due Date follows Peter (Robert Downey Jr.), a father-to-be trying to catch a plane back to his wife in Los Angeles. Peter, by chance, meets up with Ethan (Zach Galifianakis), an aspiring actor en route to Los Angeles and the two immediately get off on the wrong foot. Things go from bad to worse when both Peter and Ethan get tossed off their plane (thanks, in large part, to Ethan) and are forced to drive across country together to make their destination.

NOTE: For structural reasons and to ensure that this list is super-duper pretty at all times, we’ll be posting this same intro for all sections of The Decade List. If you’ve already read all of this, you can just head down to the continuation of our list!

Let’s just get it out of the way right off the ol’ bat: yes, we know it’s been a few months since we left the decade. Most folks undertook this heavy task pre-2010, but we decided that it would be a little bit better to let the new year settle in a bit before hitting you with something of this magnitude.

So here we are, geeks: we’ve officially arrived in FUTURE *cue retro ’50s sci-fi music* and still we have no freakin’ flying cars yet. What’s the deal with that? While it is pretty exciting to be inside of the year 2010 — a year that always seemed unreachable to us mere mortals — we are also exiting another entire decade that leaves us staring at one majorly epic task. That task? To search, dig, locate, retrieve, organize, polish, and present the very best films of the past ten years!

We must once again declare that this list is also simply opinion. You are are without doubt going to find movies here that you hate and do not think deserve to be included. You will surely think of movies that you think should not only be on here, but that should be at the very top of the list. There will even be some that I have not seen and thus, can not add. Even at this very moment, I sit, worrying and wondering if I’ve forgotten any that I would include; that’s just the way things fly when compiling something this massive.

With all of that said, we invite you in to relax and check out Chapter III our list, The Decade List: The 59 Best Films of the Past Ten Years!