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2002: The Year in Movies

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

One More Cup of Coffee 'Fore I Go

Posted Friday, Jan. 3, 2003, at 5:09 PM ET

Who are these people?

Hi Guys,

I must take my leave until Monday and Tuesday, when the "Movie Club" will climax with alligators, lynchings, and draft riots. I'd like to say goodbye to Roger, who will be going on a well-deserved vacation, and to invite professional movie critics or civilian cinephiles who wish to contribute to this discussion (or steer it in a radically new direction) to drop me a note at . I will be delighted to bring in more voices/perspectives in the hope of turbo-charging our last two days. (Those of you who feel that we haven't given enough attention to Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers can once again contact me at .)

Here are some topics for discussion:

Storytelling. I still want to talk about modes of cinematic rhetoric. Consider the mixture of narration and still frames in Personal Velocity; the benefits and limitations of the exciting faux-documentary style of Bloody Sunday; the feverish intercutting in Adaptation, Chicago, The Hours, Solaris, even The Two Towers! Are we entering a more playful and self-conscious era in storytelling? Is this a good thing—a precursor to a more evolved kind of filmmaking? Or is it tap-dancing over a void?

The War. No mention of 9/11 in the Movie Club this year … how odd. Meanwhile, the World War II template has made a comeback in the revised form of We Were Soldiers and even The Two Towers! Will such cautionary takes as The Quiet American (and the half-brilliant, wholly suspect Bowling for Columbine) make any sort of impact? Or is it full speed ahead to Iraq and beyond with Hollywood leading the charge?

Gangs. I gave an asterisk to Gangs of New York in appreciation for its ambitions and its attempt to bring wondrously to life an era that few of us learned about in school. But I also wondered if Scorsese's longer cut (which I haven't seen) did more justice to his themes—not to mention set up the climax of the New York Draft Riots a bit better. Any thoughts on Gangs in its present form? Anyone out there who saw an earlier version and wants to comment—on or off the record?

Digititis. Video has given us many gifts this year—among them the noble experiments of InDiGent and The Fast Runner. But it's time to pay tribute to the tenacity of classical filmmaking in the face of raging digititis. I'm so bored with the Miracles Are Cheap feeling of movies like Attack of the Clones that I couldn't even bring the proper awe yesterday to a great exhibit of 500 years of trompe-l'oeil at Washington's National Gallery. (It's a fabulous exhibit; I'm just jaded when it comes to the art of illusion.) The more-than-decent Spider-Man was ruined for me when in midstream it turned into a video game with a little man swinging from building to building: I knew there was no danger to a collection of 1s and 0s … Thanks to Steven Spielberg for speaking up for the texture of celluloid, and for going out of his way to make Minority Report look so grainy. Thanks to Martin Scorsese for not building all of 1863 New York inside a computer, and to Roman Polanski for limiting his digital FX to a few blocks of rubble. It seems a forgone conclusion that once theater chains take a deep breath and spend the money that movies will be distributed via some sort of digital projection system. But what will be lost when the animators take over? Is Gollum going to be the year's best supporting actor?

Miracles. In the spite of the above, what were the most miraculous human moments at the movies all year? I think of Adrien Brody fumbling with a can of pickles in The Pianist, Jack Nicholson toasting the assembled in About Schmidt, Diane Lane reliving her lover's touch on a train in Unfaithful, and Fiona Shaw coming face to face with her audience, my favorite meta-moment of the year, in Triumph of Love.

Until Monday—
David

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

One More Cup of Coffee 'Fore I Go

Posted Friday, Jan. 3, 2003, at 5:09 PM 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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