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2002: The Year in Movies

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from: Roger Ebert
to: David Edelstein, A.O. Scott, and Sarah Kerr

Ten Thumbs Up

Posted Tuesday, Dec. 31, 2002, at 11:47 AM ET

Who are these people?

Dear David (and Tony and Sarah),

Of course it is useless debating the titles on a Top 10 list, even more so their placement (although I do get e-mails from readers wondering why I placed one title at No. 7, another at No. 8). The purpose of such lists is to provide readers with ideas for movies they might want to see; if enough critics put Talk to Her on their lists (and I think it is on every list I have seen except my own), people will cave in and go to see it. I have nothing against the film, and I gave it four stars in the Sun-Times, but there were others I valued more, to wit:

1. Minority Report
2. City of God
3. Adaptation
4. Far From Heaven
5. 13 Conversations About One Thing
6. Y tu Mamá También
7. Invincible
8. Spirited Away
9. All or Nothing
10. The Quiet American

On this list the title that stands out is Werner Herzog's Invincible, which was all but ignored by the public. It got some favorable reviews ("fresh" in the Tomatometer "Cream of the Crop" tabulation, "rotten" in what I guess is the Not-Cream category), but in general what David calls Movieville ignored it. Amazing and sad that the visionary genius of the German New Wave could return with a film so pure, original, and powerful and hardly make a ripple.

I may have jumped the gun on City of God, which officially opens later in January, but since it played at every festival on earth in 2002 and qualified as a 2002 film for the Oscar foreign language category, I think it's better placed on this list than in hindsight a year from now. What a remarkable film —for theme, for story, and for their marriage to a visual style of astonishing complexity and loveliness.

Regarding your remarks about Adaptation, I will simply say that the closing scene, the melodrama in the swamps, is the only ending the film could logically have: It must sell out in total cynicism to McKee in order to be true to itself. Any other ending would be wrong. Kaufman is thumbing his nose at Hollywood, at McKee, and at those audience members not willing to see what he is so clearly and bravely doing.

I went to see Minority Report again in December at a theater in Times Square, just to be sure it was as brilliant as I remembered. It is. I read somewhere recently (maybe in an article by one of you) that just because Howard Hawks is so entertaining, we should not lose sight of how good he is. Same goes for Spielberg.

Mike Leigh's All or Nothing is illuminating in the way it learns to care for the kinds of characters Leigh has sometimes patronized in the past. The uncouth and hostile couch potato son is closer to modern youth than the vast majority of recent movie teenagers.

Best performances of the year? I agree about Diane Lane and would add Nicolas Cage for Adaptation. Should the academy just cave in and name Viola Davis and Brian Cox the two supporting winners, for their bodies of work this year?

Best,
Roger

the movie club
entries
1234567891011121314151617181920
from: Roger Ebert
to: David Edelstein, A.O. Scott, and Sarah Kerr

Ten Thumbs Up

Posted Tuesday, Dec. 31, 2002, at 11:47 AM ET
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Roger Ebert is the Chicago Sun-Times' film critic. David Edelstein is Slate's film critic. You can e-mail him at . Sarah Kerr is Vogue's film critic. A.O. Scott is a film critic at the New York Times.
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Notes From The Fray Editor:

The Movie Club Fray has been busy adding to and subtracting from the critics' lists (additions: Ararat, The Two Towers, Jackass; subtractions: Minority Report, anything that hasn't been in wide release, The Pianist). One item of note: critics should entertain gender-switched hypotheticals at their own peril. Ebert's feminized Igby reminds pnuge of Wish You Were Here; Edelstein's Man-Hours reminds DeaH of American Beauty. jknyc tracks down Ebert's Howard Hawks reference. There is also a smart Spielberg thread—that is, one about narrative and character development and not the omnipresent "bad dad"—here, with seanweitner, simparker and Rachel doing most of the bandying.

Remarks From The Fray:

The reason I felt betrayed by Adaptation's climax was because, just as Mr. Ebert claims, it was thumbing its nose at the members of the audience who didn't understand how "brave" it was. That's a pretty damning criticism from one of the movie's admirers. It's okay to thumb your nose at the start of such a movie--pre-empt criticism, confound expectation, etc. But by the end you should be making a movie for those in the audience who DO understand how brave you are. The best possible ending for this film would have been a true compromise, an actual adaptation by Kaufman; or, on the other hand, as un-McKee an ending as possible, something that Kaufman truly loved. If he was writing the ending for someone who didn't understand the rest of the movie, then it's understandable that I, who liked the rest of the movie, felt so alienated.

Worth it, however, for that gorgeous final time-lapse shot. Most elegant time-lapse photography since Boys Don't Cry.

-- simparker

(To reply, click here.)

"Can you imagine the outcry if Igby had been a teenage girl and her lover the 40-year-old best friend of her father?"

That sounds a lot like David Leland's "Wish You Were Here".

-- pnuge

(To reply, click here.)

Mr. Edelstein says that a man making the same choice as the woman in The Hours would be looked upon as a monstrous coward. It really wasn't too many years ago that Kevin Spacey won an Oscar for playing a man who made just that same choice. His character is seen as liberated for choosing to get high and lust after a rose-covered teen. Mentally, at least, he left his wife and children to live for the first time until he, ironically wasn't alive anymore.

-- DeaH

(To reply, click here.)

The quote about Hawks being enjoyable was in the Sunday NY TIMES Book Review section in a review on Elmore Leonard. [It is; here. The review is by Salon's Charles Taylor and he is citing Robin Wood.—Fray Ed.]

-- jknyc

(To reply, click here.)

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