2002: The Year in Movies
Dear David, Roger, and Tony,
PRINT
DISCUSS
E-MAIL
RSS
RECOMMEND...
Facebook
MySpace
Mixx
Digg
Reddit
del.icio.us
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Sphere
StumbleUponWarm hellos to you all, and a very Happy New Year's Eve. Thanks for getting us off to such a juicy start. It's been a good year, no? I want to second your praise of many actors and pick a nit or two, but to begin with here's my list:
1. The Fast Runner (Atanarjuat). I wish that Hollywood would produce an epic as simply engrossing as this Inuit myth of a hero harassed by a bully and his scheming sister. The story, carefully gathered from oral accounts by elders, then shot in unnervingly modern documentary style, immerses you in its exotic milieu until you feel like you could build an igloo. But it's universal, too. It shows the tipping point in any human culture that leads to the first morals and laws.
2. Spirited Away. The great Japanese animator Miyazaki's tale of a smart little girl in a rickety old amusement park, mingling with the oddest fantasy zoo of creatures—cute, majestic, and godly, spheres of gummy goop. Miyazaki combines a grownup's humanity with the free imagination that many of us possessed at the age of 7 and that all but the geniuses lost.
3. Far From Heaven. Todd Haynes' luscious, kitschy but compassionate riff on Douglas Sirk 1950s melodramas has a great social conscience without feeling humorless, disturbingly good sets and outfits that function like beautiful prisons, and transcendently good acting by Julianne Moore, Dennis Quaid, and Patricia Clarkson.
4. About Schmidt. Yes, it's a little broad in two or three places, but it's more often right on target and more engaged—angrily, lovingly—with this country of ours than most. I actually like the fleeting touches best—the nails-on-a-chalkboard wedding music; Kathy Bates sucking a meat bone bare at dinner and throwing it too loudly onto her plate. I see more compassion in it than critics who found it smug and tougher satire than those who thought it went gooey at the end. But more on this later …
5. I'm Going Home. A companion piece to About Schmidt, in a way, this study of an aging Parisian actor (the sublime Michel Piccoli) facing the twilight of his career, of his generation's way of thinking about art, and of his own gradually exhausted body—tells you in a nutshell what cosmopolitan Europe meant, for a while, in the second half of the 20th century. John Malkovich has a wicked cameo as a pretentious, huckster Yankee film director.
6. Talk to Her. Though, like Roger, I'm beginning to wonder if it's being ever so slightly overpraised.
7. Adaptation. Nicolas Cage as dueling schlemiels! I saw this very early and alone in the screening room for a long-lead deadline, and without fellow witnesses I wondered, is Charlie Kaufman sane? Is Columbia Pictures sane? Am I, at long last, sane? I'll try to explain Thursday how I read the ending rather differently than Roger and David do.
8. About a Boy. David's entry gets at what I so admire about this adaptation of Nick Hornby's novel, besides the performance of Hugh Grant, finally recognizing and exploring his inner pig. What's fun here is the storytelling swiftness and shrewdness—like young Muhammad Ali next to the lumbering, always expositioning moves of so many comedies.
9. The Pianist. I couldn't improve on David's description.
10. Bloody Sunday. Enormously sympathetic performance by James Nesbitt as the well-meaning liberal who couldn't hold back chaos; more intelligent and purposeful than so many you-are-there voyeurism fests.
That's it for the time being. Now I look forward to trading ideas: about the trend this year toward ambivalent, arguable endings. About the success of smaller, niche movies across the country (welcome, except in the case of Her Big Fat Greek Annoying Phenomenon). About the best movie music in years—from lush orchestral scores to throat-singing to Caetano Veloso's haunted-lullaby voice—playing a crucial role in almost all the movies on my list, not to mention Morvern Callar, and of course 8 Mile and Chicago. And much more ...
Best,
Sarah
News of the World Hush-Money Scandal: How Much Did Rupert Murdoch Know?
Obama's Nominee for NIH Chief Is an Evangelical Christian. And That's OK.
It's Way Too Soon To Call the Stimulus a Failure
I'm Having a Dinner To Celebrate My Divorce
Can the Kid Who Settled Child-Abuse Claims With Michael Jackson Finally Speak Out?
Fake News You Can Dance To
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.)
(1/2)