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2002: The Year in Movies

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

Ending the Year on a High Note

Posted Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2003, at 4:56 PM ET

Who are these people?

Dear David, Tony, and Roger,

David, your post yesterday afternoon was so rich and entertainingly frenzied as you cross-cut between your take and various readers' fresh points of view that it felt like a great climactic chase scene. Tony, yours today was like a well-crafted ending. Conflict not tucked into bed too neatly. Reconciliation on the horizon. Roger, I'd love to hear more from you on Gangs but half-hope you're too busy vacationing, wherever you are, to read this.

Which leads me to feel like ... the blooper reel that plays as the final credits start to roll?

We could have fought harder, but thank God there were just too many good movies this year to stay mad for long. Of course, I'm behind the defense all three of you mounted, at various points in the last week, of critics against knee-jerk critic-haters. But, closing my week with a mixed message as so many movies are doing these days, I do care how the audience feels and factor that in as I try to understand a movie. Not that I necessarily change my mind, but it matters, it's inherently important, when something strikes a nerve. I have no illusions about the fact that posterity will regard the unprecedentedly ambitious, often beautiful The Two Towers, and the whole LOTR project, as the most important movie phenom of our time and that many of our puny critics' preferences will be like pottery scraps buried at Pompei. And who knows? Maybe that's just as it should be.

On the other hand, it's not just blockbusters that strike a nerve. Her Big Fat Annoyingness proved that. And on a much smaller but no less genuine scale, so did The Fast Runner. Who would have thought a three-hour Inuit epic could prove a word-of-mouth success?

Anyway, I'm off to a screening of a film that's coming out four-and-a-half months from now, which means that by the time it's out and people ask me if it's good, I'll have trouble remembering. Such is the life of a long-lead critic.

As always, it's been dizzying, impossible, and unexpectedly fun.

Warmly,
Sarah

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

Ending the Year on a High Note

Posted Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2003, at 4:56 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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