Welcome to my 2026 project honoring the first quarter of the 21st century. In this extremely lax project I watch a movie from each year to hopefully give myself some insight with what has changed within cinema during this century. At the very least I’ll have watched 25 interesting films and paired them with a dinner inspired by the movie, the place its from, and maybe a little bit of nostalgia for the past 25 years. You can watch along with me or find out what’s up next by checking out the full list of movies.

Today’s feature is from the year 2000, we turn to Spain and murder most fowl…

Movie: La Comunidad [The Community]
Year: 2000
Director:  Álex de la Iglesia
Country: Spain
The Elevator Pitch: A real estate agent accidentally discovers a bag of cash during an apartment showing which unravels the rest of the apartment building as she tries to escape with the money.

How Was the Movie?:  

We absolutely adored this film. It’s a fantastic crime-comedy movie full of exciting and strange characters the main character, Julia, is the absolute pitch perfect mix of a detestable person you kind of want to root for. As an absolutely insane thing happens to her that leads to more and more of herself and the people around her unraveling the film gains a kind of strange fever pitch to it that actually had me laughing out loud a few times.

This is a kind of interesting film because I’m fairly sure the community in the film was actually supposed to be metaphor for humanity as a whole but the ending and most of the movie are at odds with a clean metaphor. It’s mostly a reverse Gordon Gekko movie wherein, actually, greed is bad. The tenants in the building were patiently waiting to undercut each other after the death of a man who won the lottery but of course greed makes for uneasy truces and then extremely entertaining back stabbing. It’s amazing how fast ‘the community’ falls apart once they realize the money is back in play and how all of them have structured their lives around this money that isn’t even theirs.

This film is a little bit camp and the fight, death, and actions scenes are all almost too clumsy and over the top to be enjoyable but the dialogue is actually quite sharply written and the actors really get a lot of emotion out of over the top lines. While I might argue that this film is more blunt instrument than fine tuned machine somehow it does manage to keep it together most of the run time. Some of the twists and turns are over the top but I didn’t mind it because it always kept me wanting more.

There’s a couple of hiccups that make this a less than perfect film including a third act that drags on a little too long but if you like Clue, Murder on the Orient Express, or Knives Out this will be right up your alley.

What was for Dinner?: 

For dinner I made bacalao a la riojana (Riojana Style Cod), with yellow rice, and sauteed garlic spinach. The cod is poached in a red pepper-tomato sauce. This was actually really good, I have no idea why I thought this would be bad but I almost never poach anything let alone fish so I suppose my expectations were low. The sauce had such a savory flavor but because the fish only cooked for a few minute in it, it meant the sauce could really shine but you could still taste the fairly mild fish. The sides are just heavily spices rice and some quickly sauteed spinach with garlic to make this a complete meal. The only thing I would change is that I might add some chilies in with fish, a little extra zing would have been nice. This was a really enjoyable and comforting meal that came together in about 30 minutes – I’m trying to go less over the top this year with making dishes inspired by the locations/themes of the movie and I think I got off to a good start.

That’s it for 2000, see you in the future year of 2001!