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SCREENERS Our favorite films of 2003 |
1. Uptown Girls
(Boaz Yakin). A film
that starts off dull enough to make you want to walk out, but somehow touched
me enough to want to watch it again and again and again. Maybe I'm becoming
too sentimental in my old age. 2. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Peter Jackson). Big beautiful film, although there is more than a hint of a greater film in the extended version. 3. Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle (McG). Very fast and funny, and mainly here for its pure entertainment. No story, no substance, but fucking hilarious. 4. X2: X-Men United (Bryan Singer). A good story line, good look. May suffer (or even benefit) from the fact that I saw it only once, and a while ago. |
5. Peter Pan (P.
J. Hogan) Easily rivals Lord of the Rings for CGI usage. Story is dark and ambiguous as the original book probably is. Marks a welcome change from Disney. 6. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (Gore Verbinski). Pretty good story, SFX etc. Orlando Bloom isn't bad; Johnny Depp is great. 7. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (Peter Jackson). Good, but much improved by the extended edition.  8.
How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (Donald Petrie). Fun, if predictable, romantic comedy. 9. Shanghai Knights (David Dobkin) Good (maybe better) sequel to an entertaining comedy, which is mostly due to the performances rather than the material. |
| L'Auberge Espagnole
(Cédric Klapisch) A glass of lemonade on a hot day. Sometimes that's all you need. Bad Santa (Terry Zwigoff). A cure for what ails you-- at least it'll make you forget about your own stupid problems for a while. Once one accepts that things can always get worse, why play it safe?  Bubba
Ho-Tep(Don Coscarelli). Transcendent schlock, with Bruce Campbell holding his own alongside the great Ossie Davis. Cowboy Bebop (Shinichirô Watanabe & Hiroyuki Okiura). Haven't seen the TV show, but I'll have to check it out now. Great music. Dirty Pretty Things (Stephen Frears).  My
favorite scene of the year. The pathologist muses over a Chinese John Doe:
"I'm sewing up his pockets so he won't carry his bad luck with him to the
next world. If he was an atheist, I'm ruining a perfectly good suit no one
will ever see again -- but if he's a Buddhist I'm sending him to eternal
paradise... for the price of a bit of thread."Finding Nemo (Andrew Stanton & Lee Unkrich). Ellen Degeneres broke my heart and I don't care who knows it. |
The Good Thief (Neil Jordan). Jordan
threw down aces when no one was looking. Great cat-and-mouse from Nick Nolte
and Tchéky Karyo, and a terrific new voice (among other things) in
Nutsa KukhianidzeThe Man Without a Past (Aki Kaurismäki). Pure joy in a junkyard. Along with Belleville, the best use of Gypsy jazz in a film this year. Monster (Patty Jenkins). Charlize Theron deserves every bit of the praise she's getting, but Christina Ricci may have had the harder job. The final murder is as wrenching as the climax of Heavenly Creatures. Russian Ark (Alexander Sokurov). Mesmerizing. Only a Russian would even attempt a project like this. Shaolin Soccer (Stephen Chow). Of course, this is a three-year-old film that ended up not getting released in the states again this year. It still rocks. Spellbound (Jeffrey Blitz). An engrossing flashback to my own school days. I swear "kirtle" isn't spelled like that. The Triplets of Belleville (Sylvain Chomet). Infectious and bizarre, proof that traditional hand-drawn animation need never die. |
| Shari
L. Rosenblum Peter Jackson's overpraised trilogy-ender to one side, and my guilty-pleasure Terminator 3 to the other, for film, at least, 2003 seemed a quieter year than 2002. The top films overall -- the ones I'm listing, the ones listed elsewhere -- seem less flashy, less broad -- less about color and noise and more about shading and suggestion. The films that most affected me, held me most captivated, were those that peeked behind the curtain -- their wizardry in unmasking the wizard masters of society. They tell stories of looking forward and looking back, of impossible ties, inexcusable abandonments, and inexorable tragedies. They give us visions of the joys and pains of enormous small discoveries. 1. Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola).  A whispered
poetic interlude within a neon-lit din, Sofia Coppola's second film pays
homage to the ineffable: the enchantment of bared souls, shared spirits,
and illlogical connections -- the clarity of sleepless nights and restless
days -- and the indelible imprint of fleetingly magical moments. With a
wry look at fitting in and feeling out of place, it is a gentle exposition
of loneliness and self-discovery. An unlikely couple, a softness beyond
sexuality, and a brief encounter of passing perfection with a comical edge.
It tickles as it touches the heart, and defers to the last to the intimate
detail. 2. Girl with a Pearl Earring (Peter Webber). There is a look in the eye of Vermeer's famous portrait that hints at things beneath the surface -- like the teasing iridescence of a milk-white pearl on a girl's bared ear - come hither and stay back in a single stare. Webber's delicately directed adaptation of Tracy Chevalier's imagined story- behind-the-painting takes us to the heart of that stare, the consummation of the bond between artist and subject, through the sinuous maze of playful light and the color-dance of the seer's inner vision. Scarlett Johannson becomes the girl who becomes the image - breathing the painting into life -- in a city made reincarnate by stunningly attentive camerawork and exquisite art direction. 3. The Magdalene Sisters (Peter Mullan). Mullan's fictionalized exposé of the factual church laundries where penitent and unrepentant girls alike were sent in servitude to cleanse themselves of sin moves us to anger and frustration, to horror and to hatred, to indignation and to tears. It is a treatise on social injustice and religious imposition, on the evils of treating nature as evil, sexuality as crime, and women as the mistresses of men's desires for them. A tale of women abused by women in the service of men, its violence is more softly spoken - a stolen medallion, a shaved head - its retributions more dearly paid. At once feminist and humanist, it takes a stand against controlling masters and complicitous sisters, and takes up cinematic arms against the soulless spirits who would profit from men's fears and ignorance in the name of a god they have invented or remodeled to do their bidding. 4. Sweet Sixteen (Ken Loach).  Tracing
the passage from innocence to the point of no return, Ken Loach takes as
his subject a boy straddling a vast gulf between the child he is and the
man he thinks he needs to be - between insistent sweet faith in imagined
motherlove and cold concession to unimaginable barrenness of spirit. Martin
Compston is effectively understated as the boy and the man both at once,
fragile and firm, committing acts of icy deliberateness and emotional abstraction
in the hope of a mother's kiss. Told with lightness and humor amid the harsh
moments, his story is an unflinching look at what it means to see no way
out -- to act within what one knows when one knows so very little - to move
intently toward success and to reach it in despair. A coming of age tale
at the short end of the stick, it makes you ache for the things you cannot
change. 5. The Man on the Train (Patrice Leconte). With a subtle wordplay in his French title, Leconte follows two men whose well-set tracks cross somewhere in time near the end of their lines. With a spareness of movement, and referentiality both cinematic and literary, a mysterious rider arrives in a dusty mock-western town and into a staid man's world. Perfectly cast, elegantly acted, evocatively filmed and scored, it is a balanced look at life as lived -  two-sided
and individual, solitary and shared. Both men by now out of time and place,
looking back wistfully on what they might have done and who they might have
been, and looking forward apprehensively to the final bows they've built
to, they stand as symbols of man's own perceived choices - inverse mirrors
and psycho-social complements with dual dreams and single possibilities.
Their story as told by Leconte is an elegy in filmed couplets -- or a cowboy's
walk through a poet's imagination into the setting sun. 5. The Man Without a Past (Aki Kaurismäki). With a subversive glint in his camera's eye and a rock-and-roll beat in his soundtrack, Kaurismäki blends social realism with poetic optimism and takes us along with his subject -- a man beaten to amnesia and left for dead -- on the path to resurrection. The story of "M," as it were, has the rhythm and the pathos of a silent comedy -- unflappable and absurdist with a gut-punch tickle. Unfolding in the abject poverty of a community that dwells on society's tattered and forgotten fringes, it milks each image, each sentiment, relentlessly for both comic and dramatic effect, with sharp and laugh-aloud ludicrous mock-repartee delivered in precision without laughtrack or audience-provoking gesture. It is a romance of eccentricity -- an adult fable that crackles with childlike wonderments. 6. The Station Agent (Thomas McCarthy).  From
a bird's-eye-view of loneliness among the willfully alone to an insider's
glimpse of the reaching heart tearing out from the sequestered soul, the
beauty of this film is in its movements -- precise, measured, carefully
unfolded rather than explained - and in its contradictions. Like the title
itself -- fortuitous, I suspect, in its calling up of conflict between standing
still and moving forward (station -- from stare, stand, like stasis -- and
agent - from agere, act, lead) -- it points out the emotional oxymoron created
from the silent spaces we have chosen and the empty places we need filled.
A story in threes rather than twos, it does not look for the easy pairing,
but to the unexpected bonds beyond. |
7. Elephant (Gus Van
Sant). "He
can see no reasons . . . 'cause there are no reasons . . . what reason do
you need to be shown?" Starkly filmed, drenched in an almost hypnotic light,
Gus Van Sant's abstraction of the Columbine tragedy sidesteps easy narrative
for the tension-building ordinariness of an average day propelling itself
toward disaster. His title makes his point: his film is about the enormous
presence that passes unseen - the elephant in the metaphoric room that no
one is talking about. Though not quite as divorced from rationales and explanations
as some may argue -- spitballs, video games, easy gun sales and homosexuality
all figure in the compendium of possibilities he offers -- the power of
his film is not in showing the fires that inspired two young boys to explode
their world, but in showing the stifled explosions burning holes inside
the classmates that they walked among - the ones they silenced and the ones,
no doubt, exploding still. 8. Bend It Like Beckham (Gurinder Chadha).  Challenging
cultural traditions, gender roles, and social expectations, Gurinder Chadha's
crowd-pleaser highlights a familiar formula with subversive ideas. A coming-of-age
tale that addresses racial and sexist preconceptions without faux politesse
or political kowtowing, it never dwells upon political injustices. It crosses
boundaries bouncingly, happily progressive, without looking important and
without looking back, and it finds exhilaration in the individual pursuing
her goals -- beyond the confines tradition or the state may set for her
-- beyond the political machinations of the serious social changers. A feminine
feminist film, it takes girl power out of the girls-only locker or some
girls-vs-boys super match, and shows a girl who wants to do something because
it gives her joy, not because boys do it, did it, or won't let her play.
It is a glimpse of the next step in social evolution -- beyond anger to
exuberance -- moving itself forward with an energy of good will and sure-footedness.
A needed kick . . . |
9. Spellbound (Jeffrey
Blitz). As if in a dream, the quest -- the need -- to spell correctly gains popular momentum. Outside of the sports arena and the drama class, the nailbiting tension and heartrending suspense of competition take form in the geeks' milieu. Not a single hero to root for, but eight -- eight children out of almost 250 contestants -- eight children who memorize dictionaries, struggle at scrabble boards, dream about Greek and Latin roots and irregular plurals, and ache to please their parents -- and eight sets of parents panicked, perplexed, proud, and at their  children's
mercy. Through Jeff Blitz's lens, the national spelling bee becomes the
site of anticipation that gnaws at the belly -- a knife that cuts across
backgrounds and histories and culture and wealth -- a paean to every child,
and the child in every adult, who asks the right questions and takes the
right guesses -- and a hug for every child who stutters, stumbles and frets,
step by step, letter by letter -- muscles clenched, tongue bitten, heart
half-stopped - and then -- eyes wide open, mouth agape --gets it right ...or
gets it wrong. 10. Capturing the Friedmans (Andrew Jarecki). Peeking in through the curtains and under the shades, this unforgiving chronicle of a suburban family ripped apart by allegations of sex crimes and social revulsion is captivating in its every detail. First time director Andrew Jarecki starts with the accusations and investigations, and then pulls back the camera to the larger view of human nature -- the nature of people at their most overwrought - ungenerous, unforgiving, unable to see beyond the darkening blotches on their pristeen visions of what life was to be. 
Working from the facts before us, Jarecki takes sides, but he does not make
excuses -- he hints at answers, but gives place to truths unknown. Police
bias and social bandwagoning stand side by side with bad lawyering, unmanaged
guilt, and broken links between husband and wife, parent and child, each
taking their place in the unmaking of a world. It is a sobering, and thought-provoking
work that lingers on past its immediate conclusions. |
| Honarable mentions: In the Cut (Jane Campion), Lawless
Heart (Tom Hunsinger and Neil Hunter), School
of Rock (Richard Linklater), In America
(Jim Sheridan), The Housekeeper (Claude Berri), L'Auberge
Espagnole (Cédric Klapisch), Raising
Victor Vargas (Peter Sollett), Pirates of the Caribbean
(Gore Verbinski), Shattered Glass (Billy Ray), Terminator
3: Rise of the Machines (Jonathan Mostow). Untracked in 2002: Last year there were two films that I did not list with my top ten, but that have stayed with me throughout this one: Heaven (Tom Tykwer, from Krzysztof Kieslowski) and Read My Lips (Jacques Audiard). Small films with a powerful presence, each an odd sort of love story between oddly matched partners, they should have been given honorable mention . . . A year too late, I'd like to correct that omission. |
| Myron
Santos Talking up the lesser-knowns, sorta: |
| American Splendor (Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini). There's a shot of the actors (Paul Giamatti and Judah Friedlander, sitting in directors' chairs) silently observing the real-life figures they're portraying (Harvey Pekar and Toby Radloff, poking through jelly beans) that ranks as one of the most fascinating I've ever seen.  Chihwaseon(Im Kwon-taek). This film about legendary Korean painter Ohwon is a rare biopic that seizes upon and recreates both the thrill of the artist's life and the brilliance of his art. City of God (Fernando Meirelles). The Scorsese from Ipanema. Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola). Yeah, what everybody else said. Also featuring the year's best soundtrack, featuring The Jesus & Mary Chain and the rebirth of Kevin Shields / My Bloody Valentine (makers of "Loveless," the best album of the 1990s). |
The Man on the
Train (Patrice Leconte). The story of a chance camaraderie between
a bank robber and a retired teacher, both in the autumn of their lives,
exchanging wishes about choices and dreams -- learning and remembering and
lamenting the differences between each, the disappearance of each. The ending
is a slight misstep, but the film had me weeping until then. Spider (David Cronenberg). "Cronenberg's best" simply isn't adequate praise. An extraordinary trip through the Mobius strip of Ralph Fiennes's mental-patient thoughts. Other films take a psychological condition and bend it to  fit
the shape of a genre or political message. Or they place the condition on
a point along a "sane-insane" spectrum, depriving you of understanding.
Cronenberg puts you in Spider's world and allows you to understand it from
within. Not at all a thriller, but something more provoking, profound, and
unforgettable. |
|
James
Snapko |
| GO TO PART THREE |
 |
Can
a paranoid, misanthropic file clerk in a Veterans Affairs office in Cleveland
be a worthy subject of art? Who wants to know?! Between Harvey Pekar himself,
Paul Giamatti's great rendition of same (don't listen to Pekar -- Giamatti's
spot-on), and graphic renditions by R Crumb & Co., one has a dizzying
sense of the comic importance of a very ordinary but very unusual life.
The Oscars, natch, missed this one -- what the heck is it: graphic docu-fiction?
Whatever! At least it snagged a Best Adapted Screenplay nod. 
Finding
Nemo (Andrew Stanton & Lee Unkrich). 
Now
some folks are complaining that this one is a tad shallow. I'm shocked
-- shocked! -- that anyone would ever think that Tarantino is a shallow
filmmaker. Surely, they forget the existential despair of Reservoir
Dogs, the philosophical ruminations of Pulp Fiction, the ummm,
. . . the . . . heck, if you don't mind cartoon blood everywhere, this
is just a darn good time. Slap the whole thing between a pair of quotation
marks and watch the film references pile up faster than the bodies. And
Uma should never work with anyone other than QT! I can't wait for Volume
2. 
Master
and Commander: The Far Side of the World (Peter Weir).
It's
last on the list, but if I had to pick a First Place, this one would get
it (so far). Penn's role here is more subtle and even better than in Mystic
River. Del Toro's convict-gone-to-God is nearly as amazing a turn,
and Melissa Leo is underrated as his skeptical and desperate wife. Naomi
Watts is cemented in my mind as an actress who doesn't need makeup to
make us forget that she's beautiful and pay attention to her acting. The
fragmentation of time pays off by knitting three sets of characters together
from the beginning in a tragic sequence of events whose inevitability
pushes that uneasy question back at our faces: What makes life worth living?
Pirates
of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl:
Who would have thought that a movie based on a theme-park ride (The
Country Bears, anyone?) would be one of the most entertaining films
of the year? A nice mix of adventure, humor, horror and not -- Ahhhrrrrr!"
-- taking itself too seriously. 
As much
as I appreciated Michael Moore's effort, this is the documentary that should
have won the Oscar last year. The visuals are absolutely breathtaking, as
we follow the globe-spanning journeys that thousands of birds take each
year. No computer effects, no obvious set-ups -- just pure documentary filmmaking
at its finest. Simply put, this is a wonderful movie. 
I have
come to the conclusion that it is impossible for Pixar to make a bad movie.
Although the premise of their films has bordered on formulaic (buddy comedies
set in an anthropomorphized world just out of human view), it is a formula
that works, and they always seem to find a new twist to make it feel original.
The animation is superb and the voice casting spot-on. But not only is Finding
Nemo beautiful to look at -- the story is clever, engaging and most
of all, fun. 
More
campy Johnny Depp fun! Rodriguez knew better than to let this movie take
itself too seriously. As with its predecessor, Desperado, Rodriguez
doesn't worry about how ridiculous the plot may be; he just has fun with
the movie, and so do we. Antonio Banderas is great to watch as the gun-toting
mariachi, but once again Depp steals the show as a peculiar FBI agent with
a penchant for pork. Not a profound movie by any means, but certainly an
enjoyable one. 
This was
certainly my most-anticipated movie of the year, and it did not disappoint.
Jackson did an amazing job weaving together all of the characters and storylines
into one beautiful, coherent package. The visuals are, once again, fantastic
-- Shelob is frighteningly real, and I realize that I don't even think of
Gollum as computer-generated anymore. But as with the first two parts, it
is the attention to detail that really makes the movie stand out. It is
obvious that everyone involved in the LOTR films, from the director and
cast to the designers and technicians, was determined to create something
truly special. The only frustrating thing is that we have to wait for the
Extended Edition to see the complete film, but at least that gives us one
more part of this amazing experience to look forward to.
I normally
dislike Charlize Theron (though mostly because of the roles and movies she
chooses to take on), but she truly impressed me in the role of serial killer
Aileen Wuornos. If I hadn't known going in that it was her, I never would
have guessed. Theron's performance is extraordinary, but the film as a whole
is also very well done. I was afraid it would be one-sided or preachy, but
it wasn't. We do become sympathetic to Aileen as we begin to understand
her motivations. However, we are also shown how horrible her actions really
were. And although it has been overshadowed by Theron's amazing transformation,
Christina Ricci also gives an excellent performance as Aileen's one true
friend. 
With
the follow up to his knockout film Amores Perros, that showed us
a brutal vision of modern Mexico, González Iñárritu switched gears a bit
with an English language film about three people inextricably connected
by a series of tragedies. The film is well shot, edited, and has some
fine performances from the leads actors (Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, and Benicio
Del Toro). The driector utilizes the same elliptical storytelling method
we saw in Amores Perros, but not to the same degree of success.
While the film realizes some very nice emotionally charged moments, it's
all a bit heavy-handed --fortunately not enough to dissuade me from putting
it on this list. 
Phillip
Seymour Hoffman is an American cinematic treasure. The film isn't as good
as Kwietniowski's previous film, Love And Death on Long Island,
but Hoffman (as usual) gets lost in the character he portrays, which makes
the film very engaging. Posing as both a critique of the financial fraud
associated with the Reagan era, and a psychological portrait of a small
man caught up in big money, it's more successful as the latter, simply
because of Hoffman's brilliant performance. 
I
stand by the Coen brothers' film not because I'm a fanatic, but because
they just keep making good films. Not only are they immensely talented
people, they've surrounded themselves with an extraordinarily talented
crew. Everything seems to click for the Coens. They're amazing screenwriters,
they're astounding visualists, and they're funny. This time around they
downplayed their role, taking a back seat to George Clooney and Catherine
Zeta-Jones. But they always have something to say, even if it is hidden
in a star vehicle like this one. I just saw a preview for their next film
due out this spring, another kind of "light" comedy starring
Tom Hanks. Mark my words, they're up to something. 
A
startling, powerful, and sometimes horrific film about a young journalist/photographer
and what it meant to grow up in the 70's and 80's in Brazil. There are
some unforgettable moments in this film, mostly due to the graphic realism
of its depiction of the utter poverty and depravity that comprises the
lower-class world in Rio De Janeiro. The film is unlike any other I've
seen since Goodfellas; it's an epic and takes place over time,
but what makes it stand out is the hostility and indiscriminate violence
that these young boys and girls in Brazil endure to survive in their world.
The premise is perfect: a person who takes pictures -- an observer --
becomes the avenue to show the culture the film inherently critiques.
It's not an overtly biased critique, but it is harsh. Brazil has had,
and continues to have, its economic struggles, not to mention the increasing
class stratification and high illiteracy rates. The filmmaking is top
notch too; visually it's masterful with both beautiful and gruesome images
conveyed through camera movement and color symbolism, and the editing
is nicely done -- mostly using the cut to punctuate and convey meaning
along the way. I'm surprised this film has been nominated for four Academy
Awards. Hopefully the nominations will give it the exposure it deserves.