Meghan O’Keefe’s Top 10 Best Things of Decade: ‘Fleabag,’ ‘The Guest,’ and ‘Jupiter Ascending’

I will defend the honor of Jupiter Ascending until my dying day, partially because I love how audacious the Wachowski siblings are, but mostly because of Eddie Redmayne’s performance. As Balem Abrasax, Redmayne slurs, slivers, whispers, and hollers through the most decadent performance of all time. His level of commitment — speaking that way specifically because a wolfman bit out the character’s larynx!!! — is mesmerizing. I know Redmayne won his Oscar for The Theory of Everything, but it should have been for Jupiter Ascending. 

Where to stream Jupiter Ascending

SPOILERS, but whatever…

There is no more underrated film this decade than Adam Wingard’s The Guest. Jupiter Ascending has its zany defenders, Justice League has its fanboys clamoring for the “Snyder Cut,” but The Guest only has its loyal few, like me.

The Guest tells the story of a handsome veteran named David (Dan Stevens) who shows up on the doorstep of his deceased best friend. He says he’s there to honor his fallen comrade by looking out for the family. What happens next is the stuff of nightmares. The Guest is a vibrant homage to ’80s horror films, and a searing look at the anxieties striking middle America throughout the ’10s. Is the film’s big bad David, the military industrial complex, toxic masculinity, gun culture, or the never-ending war in Afghanistan itself?

Whatever you make of The Guest, The Guest goes hard. So hard it ends with a chilling, and darkly comical, “thumbs up.”

Where to stream The Guest

Inside Llewyn Davis might be the movie that moved me the most in the last decade. It’s a bitterly comic look at one down-on-his-luck folk musician’s incessant failures. I could wax on and on about the Coen Brothers as filmmakers or the incandescent cast or even how cute that cat is. However, this movie came to me at a pivotal time in the decade, when I was deciding between sticking with comedy (an art that I thought I loved, but didn’t love me) and pursuing entertainment journalism and TV criticism. Since I’m writing this, you know what I picked, and I have been all the happier for it.

Where to stream Inside Llewyn Davis

For my money, there was no greater television series in the last decade than Twin Peaks: The Return. In fact, there’s probably no better show in television history. Strange, disturbing, absurd, and ultimately incredibly rebellious, Twin Peaks: The Return is a motherf*cking work of art, and I’ll be spending the next 10 years of my life trying to figure it out.

Where to stream Twin Peaks: The Return

Fleabag is the rare show that arguably deserves two spots on this list. Both its first season, which looked at the intersection of grief and guilt, and its second, which saw our heroine fall in love with a man of god, are picture perfect. However, what Phoebe Waller-Bridge accomplished was also a one-two punch that proved what a genius writer and performer she was. She managed to outdo her electric first season with an even more transcendent season one, and through it all, gripped us with wit, wisdom, and raunchy humor about the human heart.

Where to stream Fleabag

Look, I don’t care how disappointing the finale of Game of Thrones was for you. You can never take how much I love the Battle of the Bastards away from me.

Not only is this one of the most ferocious depictions of medieval battle ever caught on screen, but it marks one of the few “wins” in Game of Thrones. Jon Snow and Sansa Stark’s victory over Ramsay Bolton was maybe the moment when the plot finally shifted. Until that point, our protagonists had all dealt with a good five seasons of nonstop trauma, tragedy, and torture. After this moment, the characters could coalesce and work towards fighting the Night King and his invading army.

Nevertheless, the sheer nerve of this sequence remains thrilling to watch, and as Netflix’s The King recently proved, the Battle of the Bastards will influence how filmmakers tackle medieval battle scenes for years to come.

Where to stream Game of Thrones

Because it’s hot, that’s why.

Where to stream Captain America: The Winter Soldier

John Mulaney has long been one of my favorite comedians, but he truly outdid himself when he wrote and performed the best political joke of the Trump era: his “horse loose in a hospital” bit from his Netflix special, John Mulaney: Kid Gorgeous at Radio City. As I wrote in 2018, the bit works not because it takes shots at Trump, but because it captures the chaos of living through his presidency. It still rings true, and will remain the best, most cathartic explanation of what this era felt like.

Watch John Mulaney: Kid Gorgeous at Radio City on Netflix

It is our editors’ policy that we can laud anything we want in these personal lists, and so, I need to praise the once glorious, and now dead, “Meatball Mondays.”

For years, I would go to a little restaurant on the Upper West Side called Polpette, where the happy hour deal was outrageous. $5 for a goblet of wine, $5 for a plate of truffle fries, and $5 for two house meatballs drenched in sauce. On Mondays, the deal was even better. You could get a whole plate of spaghetti and meatballs for less than $10. It was the most affordable place to get good food and wine in Manhattan – and then it closed. A sister location is still open on 71st street, but they no longer revel in the glory of “Meatball Mondays.”

I shall never know a better weekly ritual, nor a better meatball joint. RIP, Meatball Mondays.

It took me a while to figure out what I would put in my 10th and final slot for my favorite pop culture experiences of the decade. Would it be Crazy Rich Asians, a movie I re-watch every couple of weeks? Would I give a nod to Becky Lynch, my wrestling queen. Or would I go with my heart, and elect the SNL sketch, “Wells for Boys”?

In the end, I went with the piece of pop culture that I have stuck with the longest throughout the decade: Paul Scheer, June Diane Raphael, and Jason Mantzoukas’s consistently hilarious podcast, How Did This Get Made? The podcast launched all the way back in 2010, and I listened to the first episode the week it came out. (Mostly because I had just seen Burlesque and needed to laugh about it.)

Over the years, the format has changed, but it is a consistent pop culture mainstay in my life. It has literally provided me with years of laughter, and a welcome escape from the crueler side of film criticism.

Thank you, HDTGM for making the ’10s all the more fun and tolerable.

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