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Trying to Manufacture the Ten Best American Films of 2000Jul 02 '02 Write an essay on this topic.The Bottom Line The best of a bad lot. 2000 just wasn't a good year for movies. And yet I love several of these little films, especially my #1. [For the Record: I'm writing about the Ten Best of 2000 right now because, well, there's no space yet for a Ten Best of 2001, which would be much more timely. Rest assured, when said category exists, my Ten Best of 2001 will exist. But for now, I'm doing a little time travel...] But I've had a little distance from the films of 2000 which made composing this list even more difficult because, frankly, I barely remember any of the films that I watched in 2000 even if I've seen them two or three times since. I'm looking over my list on a little post-it and I have severe reservations about nearly all of the movies I'm going to list. 2000 was a strange year for me for a variety of reasons and as I looked over the films that others considered the best of the year, there were a handful of foreign films there that I hadn't seen. So rather than invalidating this list by calling it the best films of the year and skipping gems that I still need to see (like Yi-Yi for example), I'm just going to list the best American films of the year. That means that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is nowhere to be found, despite being one of my favorite films of the year. There were lots of things within certain films that I liked, even if I can't see putting the film on the list. For example, Caleb Deschanel's cinematography on The Patriot is remarkable. The movie? Not so much. I get a kick out of certain performances in otherwise mediocre or bad films. Erin Brockovich comes across as Norma Rae-lite, but Albert Finney is great and Julia Roberts is the epitome of movie stardom and the best of all that that implies — she takes a fine film and carries it entirely. The Family Guy is mediocre Hollywood fluff, but Nicholas Cage's performance is his best since winning his Oscar. It has a quirkiness that few people properly appreciated because they were too busy dealing with the flaws in the film itself. As for the last films off of this list, I nearly had Sophia Coppola's beautifully made Virgin Suicides at number ten, but it finally got bumped. It's a worthy film. So, without any further babble, here's my list of the Top Ten American Films of 2000. It should be noted that because of the paucity of quality product for the year, my list is in many ways similar to other 2000 lists. I apologize for the lack or originality. 10)Thirteen Days (dir. Roger Donaldson) Granted that Donaldson is Australian and Bruce Greenwood (who plays JFK here) is Canadian, but otherwise, Thirteen Days is as American as it gets. But more importantly, anybody who's read any of my reviews knows that I like smart movies, movies that don't talk down to the audience. This here is a smart movie. Covering the events of the Cuban Missile Crisis in exhaustive detail, Thirteen Days may not be the absolute gospel truth on what went on in the White House during those tense days, but I'm perfectly happy to believe that it was. David Self's script is sharp, Donaldson's direction tense, and the cinematography sterling. Greenwood looks very little like Kennedy at first, but as the film goes along, he convinces you because of how good an actor he is (similar to the way that by the end of Nixon, I was actually somewhat convinced that Hopkins looked like the man). At the other end of the spectrum is Steven Culp's Bobby Kennedy. Culp looks like RFK and sounds like RFK and it's an amazing performance. And yet, Kevin Costner's presence nearly destroys the movie. In fact, I suspect that many many people just dismissed everything else in the picture because of just how horrible Costner's Boston accent is. It's not that his performance is awful, it's just that he can't talk right. When he's silent and thoughtful, he's totally convincing and he pulls of the sincere and quiet family moments better than most actors would. But every darned time he opens his mouth, you get sucked right out of the picture. I choose to ignore all that. Michael Fairman's key scene as Adlai Stevenson at the UN is one of the year's best moments as the entire cabinet watches Stevenson on TV in the Oval Office prepared to have in replaced at the slightest misstep, only to watch the old politician step up on last time. That scene is what great moviemaking is about and it puts Thirteen Days on my list. 9)Chicken Run (dirs Peter Lord and Nick Park) I will forgive the good people at Aardmore for the fact that their first full-length feature isn't nearly as good as their classic Wallace and Gromit shorts. I'm personally just endlessly amused by chickens parodying The Great Escape and Stalag 17 among dozens of other pictures. The Aardman claymation techniques have always mazed me, especially their use of cinematic devices within the medium. Scenes like the dance-hall swing sequence are stunning because you both get lost in the moment and are still aware of just how much work goes into it all. Mel Gibson, Julia Sawalha, Jane Horrocks, and Miranda Richardson do great work in the only one of my Top Ten that's really suitable for children. 8)O Brother Where Art Thou (dir The Coen Brothers) Only the Coen Brothers would watch Preston Sturges's brilliant Sullivan's Travels and decide to actually make the movie that pompous filmmaker Joel McCrea proposes. Not that they made John L. Sullivan's version of O Brother Where Art Thou, of course. The Coen's annual exercise in genre revision goes back down South for a strange hybrid of tones somewhat based off of The Odyssey but mostly not. People who spend too much time looking for links to Homer's work are likely to be nearly as frustrated as people who are still convinced that Fargo was a true story. Do the Coen Brothers talk down to their country bumpkin characters? Certainly. But they also love them. There are hilarious supporting turns by Tim Blake Nelson, John Turturro, John Goodman, Holly Hunter and Charles Durning. And towering over all of it is George Clooney in the best performance Clark Gable never gave. He's all slick Southern charm and hair grease. And what cinematography! Roger Deakins creates crop fields the likes of which the screen has never seen. Not to take anything away from Peter Pau's darned good looking work on Crouching Tiger but the fact that he beat both Deakins and Caleb Deschanel for the Oscar is just hilarious. Pau's photography was beautiful and handsome. Deakins made art. The film also features a wonderful grassroots compilation that was a surprise bestseller and an even bigger surprise Grammy winner. And yet, this isn't even one of the Coen Brothers' five best movies. But in a bad film year, even decent Coens is better than nearly anything else out there. 7) Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai (dir Jim Jarmusch) Like I just got done saying about O Brother, even so-so Jarmusch is pretty remarkable compared to everything else out there. This may be his most visually polished film and it's certainly his most accessible film, but I wouldn't take it over most of his 80s and 90s output. That being said, for all of its accessibility, it's a vastly misunderstood film. It's an American racial allegory stretched across the boundaries of American popular culture, hip-hop culture, and Asian philosophy. It's a balance that only Jarmusch could strike and that only Jarmusch could strike while also making an totally hilarious film. It's a portrait of dying cultures and of the hybridization of cultures that are taking their place. There's no room in modern society for the old school mobsters led by Henry Silva, but there's also no room for Ghost Dog's (Forest Whitaker) adherence to the code of the ancient Samurai. It's a world where the younger generation must learn to meld multiple identities in order to survive. As is always the case with Jarmusch films, Ghost Dog centers around a love of language and the notion that while some languages (hip hop and French) are culturally specific, there are also ways for that language to unite people. Whitaker is great, though his appearance in Battlefield Earth just months after this film was released, nearly got Ghost Dog kicked off the list. Robby Muller's cinematography and the soundtrack by the RZA create perfectly realized visual poetry, or jazz, or hip-hop. 6)You Can Count on Me (dir. Kenneth Lonergan) Just as a bad summer film nearly got Forest Whitaker kicked off my list, I'm also slow to forgive writer Kenneth Lonergan for the fact that just months before the release of You Can Count on Me, he was a credited screenwriter on The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle. How does something like that happen? But I do forgive. You Can Count on Me is Lonergan's first film as a director and it shows. It's generally dull to look at and sometimes it's kinda visually ugly. Lonergan is, first and foremost, a playwrite and even though it was written for the screen, You Can Count on Me is pretty much a filmed play. It's on my list because between Laura Linney, Mark Ruffalo, and Matthew Broderick, You Can Count on Me offered three of the year's best examples of how to act for the screen. All three of those actors are stage veterans and all three have frequently had trouble finding the perfect parts on screen, but this is the best work Linney and Ruffalo have ever done and it's Broderick's first totally satisfying adult performance. The success of the movie comes down to the character dynamics between different pairs on-screen. Linney and Ruffalo, Ruffalo and Rory Culkin (as Linney's son), and Linney and Broderick. Every exchange is perfection. Smart little films like this don't get the recognition they deserve and as uncinematic as it may be, I'd rather watch this movie a hundred times than ever have to sit through A Perfect Storm ever again. Lonergan's film knows human relationships and interactions. Wolfgang Peterson had a big digital wave wipe out a bunch of bad Boston accents. Good riddance, but no emotion. 5)Requiem for a Dream(dir. Darren Aronofsky) Every film in my Top 5 features drug use as a major plot point. That just strikes me as odd. Does it strike anybody else as odd? 2000 seems to have been The Year of the User. I don't know that I'd realized that at the time. Some of these films condone drug use (or at least suggest that a little pot smoking isn't the end of the universe), but I can't imagine a film that screams JUST SAY NO any louder than Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream. To be honest, Aronofsky's Pi annoyed the heck out of me. It's mix of math, pretentiousness, and religious babble gave me a headache and left me uninterested in his follow-up. Finally, after enough convincing, I made it to the movie and saw a movie that shook me, but that I had no interest in ever seeing again. I've since relented and purchased the DVD, but I haven't watched it. I guess I'm waiting for the day when the temptation to use smack becomes just too great. Then I'll whip it out and scare myself straight. Lots of films have wasted images or uncalculated frames, where the director is just trying to skip through something unimportant to get to his pet image. In Requiem there isn't a frame that doesn't bear the signature of Aronofsky and his DP, Matthew Libatique and his editor Jay Rabinowitz. Many people will probably view this movie as something of a film school in a can, since no picture, cut, or line of dialogue is random, everything is kicked up. And the story of four drug users works because all four of the lead performances come from unexpected sources. All of the actors were asked to go to places most of us will never travel. There wasn't an easy bit of acting in the film and yet everybody is great. Marlon Wayans? He'll never do any better than this. Ever. That's a promise. I've seen Scary Movie 2 and I know that everything he does from now on will only desecrate the fact that Requiem proves that heaven forbid he can act. Jennifer Connelly's performance is raw and real and yet another step in her transition from Career Opportunities to winning an Oscar. Ellen Burstyn already had an Oscar, but she deserved another for this film (I love you, Julia, but I'm sorry). And Jared Leto is surprisingly good. Thanks to their dueling Prefontaine movies, I've always viewed Jared Leto as the poor man's Billy Crudup, but he does well here. I should still note that Bill Crudup has two movies in the top five, so even when he does well, Jared Leto will never escape Bill Crudup's shadow in my mind. 4)Jesus's Son (dir Alison Maclean) Episodic in nature, slow in pace, and relaxed in its visual style, Jesus's Son is like the anti-Requiem. They're both very good film, but I prefer Jesus's Son's approach to drug addiction and drifting through life. I can't think of any movie from 2000 that had me so hard one minute and had me holding my breath in shock the next. Billy Crudup plays a simple, strung out young man named FH. He's like Forrest Gump only with more drug use. With a script based very very heavily on Denis Johnson book, Jesus's Son features one of cinema's great unreliable narrators, a voice-over from a man too addled to remember his name, much less to be trusted to accurately recall events as they actually occured. You don't trust FH (which stands for F*ckhead, appropriately). You sometimes don't really like him. But you grow to love him as he goes along on a series of adventures that lead him from state to state, tragedy to tragedy and drug to drug all hopefully on the twisted path towards recovery. You love him because Billy Crudup is so pathetically self-destructive and he's so funny. There are lines here that in the script probably seemed totally serious, but since Crudup is incapable of giving a straight line reading (to his credit) there's an off-kilter humor to even the darkest moments of his journey. Along the way he meets an amazing supporting cast including Holly Hunter, Greg Germann, Dennis Hopper, Denis Leary, and Will Patton. He falls in love with a junky played with amazing spunk by Samantha Morton and he hangs out in a hospital with Jack Black. I'm personally of the opinion that a little Jack Black goes a long way and this film offers exactly the right amount of Jack Black. He has one long scene and will make you cry with laughter and potentially tear up with sadness. Great writing. Great directing. And barely anybody saw this movie. Oh well. 3)Traffic (dir Steven Soderbergh) As epic as Jesus's Son is intimate. Traffic was hailed by some critics for taking an ambitious stand on the drug war. And that makes me laugh to no end. If you actually watch the movie, you'll realize that by the end, the film advocates nothing more risky or provocative than family love, continued law enforcement, and midnight baseball (subbing for midnight basketball). It's a total liberal treatise on handling drugs in America. And since I'm a good bleeding heart liberal, I buy into the film totally, no matter how obvious it is. In fact, Traffic has many more flaws than Jesus's Son and moments where it's vastly clunkier. But I award ambition and artistically Traffic tries really hard. Based on a British miniseries, Stephen Gaghan adapted Traffic into a three part story and Soderbergh (shooting the film as Peter Andrews) color-coded each section to help us keep things straight. The cool blue section involves Drug Czar Michael Douglas who, ironically can't keep his pretty young daught (Erika Christensen) from freebasing. He's learning about the political side of the drug industry, while his daughter is learning about the supply side. In the orange section of the film, Tijuana's one decent cop, Benicio Del Toro, deals with a country where the line between the government and the drug business doesn't exist. And in a slightly different colored section, in San Diego, DEA agents Don Cheadle and Luis Guzman attempt to use Miguel Ferrer's minor dealer to get at Steven Bauer who appears to supply drugs to the West Coast, a fact that his wife, Catherine Zeta-Jones wasn't aware of. The stories intersect at interesting places and the film is never less than intelligent in its depictions. There are arguments to be made regarding its occasionally problematic racial depictions, but this isn't the place for that. Every performance in Traffic is strong in this amazing ensemble. Del Toro was well-deserving of his accolades. 2)Wonder Boys (dir Curtis Hanson) We're getting to the point on my list where totally pure reactions are in play. I just love both of my last two movies, but might have a difficult time adequately defending my love. Wonder Boys, for example, is only a partial adaptation of Michael Chabon's amazing novel (far better, for my tastes, than his more acclaimed Kavalier and Clay). It leaves out characters and subplots that fans of the book probably love, since I know that I miss them. What Steven Kloves captures is the tone of the book, which is darkly funny and yet is also an epic personal tragedy. Michael Douglas is amazing as Professor Grady Trip, a man who wrote one great book and now is afraid of being thought a one hit wonder. The character in the book is a huge fat man and Douglas didn't bother to put on more than a few pounds. But he *is* the spirit of Grady Tripp. He's funny, but worn down by life, overreliant on pot, finding satisfaction only in the arms of another man's wife (Frances McDormand). The film's treatment of the writing process rings true at every point, from the harsh idiots in the college writing course to the writer's block to the construction of characters out of real life. Curtis Hanson here shows as steady a hand with comedy as he showed with the neo-noir of LA Confidential. This movie just totally works for me and perhaps I'll talk more about it later. But perhaps not. And NUMBER 1: 1)Almost Famous (dir Cameron Crowe) Pure personal cinema. Period. This movie is honest, beautifully rendered, wonderfully writter, and any other possible number of superlatives I could throw out there. For me, I can judge a movie based on just how much I let it get away with, how many liberties it gets to take. All I know is that the scene on the touring bus where everybody begins to sing Elton John's "Tiny Dancer" could have become tripe so easily. Even the smallest misstep could have sent the scene from "good sentimental" to "Pay It Forward sentimental but Crowe holds the line. Every time I've seen the movie I notice new things in the performances by Frances McDormand (again), Billy Crudup (again), Patrick Fugit, Jason Lee, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Noah Taylor, and especially Kate Hudson. Pure Magic. And there you have it. Feel free, of course, to voice your opinions, to agree and disagree. This list is, unfortunately, pretty much what it is based on the quality of the films released in 2000. It was a horrible year for movies. Maybe I should take the time to write a Worst of 2000 list. That's bound to be more fun.  |
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