So It's Come to This (The Top 10 Films of 2002, Plus Some)Apr 22 '03 Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line An entire year's worth of film criticism, in one easy-to-swallow gelcap. And a good three-quarters of it is actually on-topic!
To say that my motivation for posting new material on this site is at an all-time low couldn't be more of an understatement. But I do at least want to keep my account active, so here we are. A break from my music-only writing. Monotony kills. Unless you're one of the Academy voters who awarded Roman Polanski this year's Best Director Oscar. In which case, you just love monotony. Anyhow. Ideally, I'd rather not resort to "list" reviews, but that's all I'm willing to do at the moment. Break out the eye-drops. This is long. But, hopefully, worth the effort to read. This is what happens when I don't want to write my thesis over Spring Break and need a constructive way to procrastinate. Top 10 Films of 2002: 10). The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, dir. Peter Jackson. In which Sam and Frodo find a puppy with Dissociative Identity Disorder, Aragorn picks up another unnecessary romantic interest, Merry and Pippin somehow triple in intellect, and director Peter Jackson blatantly recycles footage from a film that wasn't meant to stand on its own. A major problem with The Two Towers, however, is one of pacing, as Jackson intercuts between his three separate story-arcs in such a way that the overall film never builds anything resembling narrative momentum. Given that The Two Towers is the middle section of a single magnum opus, it isn't likely that Jackson could have done much to resolve this problem without ending up with a host of continuity errors. Understanding a problem's context, though, doesn't make it any less of a problem. The other major problem is that the film lacks the moral weight-- the sheer magnitude of the "good vs. evil" struggle, the sense of simply insurmountable odds-- that gave The Fellowship of the Ring such power. Instead, Jackson relies far too heavily on comic relief from dwarf Gimli, on a cut-away to Liv Tyler's Arwen (admittedly, put to much more effective use this time out), and on a completely unnecessary and patronizing bit of auto-critique from Sam in the film's final act to build tone. That said, The Two Towers is epic and breathtaking and quite frequently wonderful-- a worthy, if slightly underwhelming, successor to The Fellowship of the Ring. 09). Solaris, dir. Steven Soderbergh. To say much of anything about the plot of Solaris is to undermine its appeal. The only film in recent memory I've seen in theaters three times, Solaris demands individual exploration, even if it fails to hold up in the end. It's easy to pinpoint exactly where Solaris goes wrong, but it's a puzzle to figure out why it goes wrong. What works about the film-- its captivating lead performances from George Clooney and Natascha McElhone, director Soderbergh's breathtaking cinematography and art direction, and its exquisitely drawn, psychologically complex and profound love story-- works beautifully. What doesn't work about the film-- the indefensible and unnecessary (and out-of-character for Soderbergh) lapses in narrative focus, a cop-out final three minutes that wholly undermine Soderbergh's attempt at crafting a philosophically dense and/or ambiguous film-- is simply infuriating. Soderbergh's ambition here, in taking $50M of Twentieth Century Fox's money and attempting to make a truly challenging, intellectual film, is admirable, but ambition alone neither makes a film good nor excuses its shortcomings. Solaris, which comes ever-so-close to being an outright brilliant film, instead stands as a deeply and irrevocably flawed masterpiece, the year's most frustrating-- although at times its most exhilarating-- film. 08). Catch Me If You Can, dir. Steven Speilberg. Long before he attempted to prove himself as "America's Greatest Director" with a series of human-uplift fables that runs from The Color Purple through A.I. Artificial Intelligence, 2001's worst film, Steven Spielberg directed some of cinema's finest examples of purely escapist filmmaking. His "important" films of the past decade are either marred by patronizing, flat-out awful final acts, or they simply collapse under even the most basic scrutiny. It's Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and even early genre-exercise Duel that stand on their own. With Catch Me If You Can, it seems as though Spielberg listened to his critics and returned to the escapism he does best. And, on one level, Catch Me If You Can is a wildly engaging "caper" film, not unlike Steven Soderbergh's excellent re-make of Ocean's Eleven. Possibly the year's most pleasant surprise, then, is the degree to which Catch Me If You Can holds up to deeper examination. Here, the great champion of uplift has made a film about a young man, brilliantly portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio in a career-reviving turn, who would qualify as having Anti-Social Personality Disorder-- Frank Abergnale, Jr. is an honest-to-God psychopath-- and he's successfully played it off as a kind of absurdist comedy. Not only does Speilberg resist the impulse to undermine his dark subtext with a touchy-feely ending, but the underlying darkness behind Frank's character actually accounts for the much of the film's structure. Roger Ebert dismissed Catch Me if You Can as a diversion until Speilberg gets back to "something more important." He's wrong. That Spielberg has finally directed a film that both encourages and withstands genuine analysis couldn't be more important. 07). Chicago, dir. Rob Marshall. The year's most delectable piece of eye-candy, first-time director (and it shows) Rob Marshall's long-time-coming screen adaptation of Chicago fits well with 2002's other meta-films-- with so much "razzle-dazzle," Chicago posits that a lack of substance or a soul doesn't really matter so much. And there isn't much reason to ponder whether or not Chicago's take on crime and celebrity is long past its cultural relevance when Catherine Zeta-Jones honest-to-God does the splits in the middle of her scintillating rendition of "All That Jazz." Unlike Moulin Rouge!, in which the overwhelming sincerity of the romanticism goes a long way to justify the film's shortcomings, Chicago is a fundamentally cynical film that glorifies homicide and is blatantly abusive to its two most sympathetic, most moral characters. To compensate, Marshall, intentionally or not, simply distracts the audience from the weaknesses in his film's story with some impeccable showmanship. Chicago's five principal performers-- particularly Zeta-Jones, John C. Reilly, and Queen Latifah-- are simply amazing, and I can't think of another film this year that I enjoyed watching more. 06). Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, dir. George Clooney. It’s hard to say which of his accomplishments in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind-- the seemingly endless sequence of inventive, masterfully-shot scenes, the star-making performance he evokes from Sam Rockwell, the skillful manner in which he handles one of Charlie Kaufman’s self-reflexive screenplays, the way he continues executive producer Steven Soderbergh’s fine tradition of blatantly mocking an oblivious Julia Roberts, or how he balances absurdist humor with elements of a paranoid thriller and still manages to offer a biting auto-critique on the current state of cinema-- makes George Clooney’s directorial debut so consistently impressive. Perhaps it’s that he managed to direct Drew Barrymore to the first worthwhile performance of her career. Clooney has truly come into his own as an actor in the past few years with films like Three Kings, O Brother Where Art Thou?, and Solaris, but he’s said in recent interviews that he’s more inclined to direct films rather than star in them as he ages. If Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is any indication of what’s to be expected, that’s a decision that would be fully justified. 05). Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner), dir. Zacharias Kunuk. Were its running time not an exhausting two hours and fifty-two minutes and were I not so ADD that I couldn't entirely turn off my sarcastic inner monologue for its duration, Atanarjuat very well might have topped this list. It's an unfortunate catch-22: Atanarjuat's pacing can only be described as glacial, but it's also perfect. There isn't a single reaction shot that lingers too long, nor is there a single image of the barren, Arctic Circle landscape that's out-of-place. Filmed digitally then transferred to a 35mm print, the photography of cinematographer Norman Cohn represents a true arrival for digital filmmaking. The bouncing Yoda of Attack of the Clones simply isn't in the same league as what's on display in every frame of Atanarjuat-- every wrinkle is visible in characters' knuckles as they prepare food, and trails of footprints barely fade back toward a horizon line that sometimes shows the actual curvature of the earth. Kunuk, in his first feature, has crafted a film that does everything the art of filmmaking should do. Atanarjuat is at once familiar yet entirely foreign, in ways more profound than the mere novelty of the Inuktitut language. It is simply a revelatory piece of work that is both tightly bound to a specific, tiny community and also actively defies conventional notions of time and location to strike deeper, more truthful insights into the natures of legend and of storytelling. If "universality" is the bane of true criticism (and it's nearly impossible to argue to the contrary), then Atanarjuat may not only be revelatory, it may be a revolutionary film. 04). Spirited Away, dir. Hayao Miyazaki. Although sometimes a bit too preoccupied with its own sense of whimsy, Spirited Away, the latest film by master animator Hayao Miyazaki, director of Princess Mononoke, to find release in North America (via Disney, no less), is hands-down the year's most satisfying epic. That its principal competition for that title is either flawed (The Two Towers, above) or simply awful (Gangs of New York, below) in no way makes that a back-handed compliment. Spirited Away is superior filmmaking, both technically (boasting exceptional voice-over work from Daviegh "Samantha Darko" Chase and Susanne Pleshette) and thematically. A film that both demands and rewards intense scrutiny, Spirited Away is the story of a young girl forced to work in a bath-house in order to be reunited with her parents. Because they've literally been turned into pigs. And the giant-headed old sorceress who runs the bath-house has the power to return them to their human form. There's a dark undercurrent throughout Spirited Away, which makes its inevitable payoff all the more rewarding. With its seemingly endless array of fascinating minor characters and its deeply layered structure, Spirited Away offers the year's richest, most dense narrative and re-establishes the boundaries of what can be expected of animation. 03). Adaptation., dir. Spike Jonze. Really, what can be said about a film that, in terms of criticism, is always a step ahead? A film this layered should offer nearly infinite possibilities for discussion and critique, but Adaptation. already says everything that needs to be said about Adaptation., and that means flaunting its weaknesses as prominently as its many strengths. More than anything, it’s only fitting that this film was released in the same year as a biopic about Jacques Derrida, one of the leading writers of Deconstructionist theory. Charlie Kaufman’s self-reflexive screenplay devours itself for well over an hour then simply throws up its hands, pushes back from the table, and lets director Spike Jonze finish off the few remaining bites. And leaves Todd Solondz to sulk in the corner, with the realization that Adaptation. embodies everything his Storytelling failed to be: intelligent, well-executed, and so much more than just a shrewd concept. 02). About Schmidt, dir. Alexander Payne. For his second consecutive film (following 1999's Election), writer-director Alexander Payne outright explodes the broad generalizations in American Beauty with his remarkable attention to minute detail and his more intelligent, challenging take on the alienated modern man. Building on the shrewd satire of Election, About Schmidt also includes a selection of well-chosen, cutting attacks on "Midwestern values." Brilliant as Election is, however, About Schmidt is a more ambitious and a vastly more mature film that truly heralds Alexander Payne as a major voice in American cinema. In a film that's both an exploration of one's mortality and a "road movie," Payne deftly avoids the clichés inherent in each of those sub-genres, instead crafting a profound personal tragedy that ultimately has very little to do with death and everything to do with life. As Warren Schmidt, Jack Nicholson gives what is arguably the finest performance of an already exceptional career, essentially creating a singular persona for the low standards, sparse accomplishments, and general apathy of Middle America. With each of Schmidt's personal failures, Payne both condemns and, in the more mature tonal shift from Election, eventually mourns for the larger cultural failures they represent. An unqualified triumph of observation, About Schmidt is a film of blistering, devastating realism. 01). Far from Heaven, dir. Todd Haynes. Many of 2001’s best films-- Memento, Donnie Darko, and Mulholland Drive to name just three-- experiment with sometimes wild variations on traditional cinematic narratives, frequently folding back on themselves in surprising, innovative ways or just as often breaking the audience’s tenuous hold on the narrative entirely. The best films of 2002, then, move beyond such experimentation to explore the varying degrees of artifice inherent in the medium of film itself. The two impossibly clever films penned by Charlie Kaufman are the most obvious examples of this, but Kaufman isn’t the only person working in Hollywood who is fascinated by the challenge of stripping away this artifice. It’s an idea that comes into play in some of the year’s worst (Punch-Drunk Love, Storytelling, Full Frontal) and in many of its best films (The Rules of Attraction, Talk to Her, Solaris). What elevates Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven above all of them are Haynes’ razor-sharp intellectual focus and, more importantly, how that focus doesn’t limit the film to a mere intellectual exercise. Instead, Far from Heaven is a film of genuine emotional resonance that succeeds because Haynes so meticulously exposes the deeper issues that drove the 1950s melodramas of Douglas Sirk. In addition to its status as one of the most stunningly beautiful films ever photographed, Far from Heaven is also the year’s most consistently well-acted drama, with outstanding supporting performances from Dennis Haysbert, Patricia Clarkson, and Viola Davis, and career-reviving work from Dennis Quaid. Still, Far from Heaven undeniably belongs to Julianne Moore. Her Cathy Whitaker embodies an entire culture’s social pretenses and repression. The greatest achievement of Far from Heaven is that her opportunity for personal redemption-- an opportunity that shrinks exponentially over the course of the film-- seems to bear the exclusive burden for the social changes she doesn’t know will eventually come. Via this unwitting radical, Haynes turns simple dramatic irony into something deeply affecting and tragic. Because I'm thorough... Then We Have: 11). Y Tu Mama Tambien. A subversive, leftist, and intelligent variation on Road Trip that veers unexpectedly into nihilism in its final act. 12). Narc. The year’s most singularly unnerving image: an unhinged Ray Liotta carrying a double-barreled shotgun. 13). The Rules of Attraction. Were Dawson’s college years this interesting, I probably would’ve watched every episode. Or not. 14). About a Boy. It’s no High Fidelity, but it’s like a younger, more acutely self-aware About Schmidt. 15). Secretary. The year’s most believable love story. Complete with riding crop. 16). jackass: the movie. Not having seen The Kid Stays in the Picture or Standing in the Shadows of Motown (but having seen Bowling for Columbine), I’ll defend jackass: the movie as 2002’s best documentary. 17). The Quiet American. Graham Greene? I think we’ve all seen Bonanza. 18). Changing Lanes. Benny from the Block takes on Samuel L. Jackson. Hmm. Wonder who wins? 19). Lilo and Stitch. Elvis-singing aliens aside, Lilo and Stitch is Disney’s most realistic animated feature and a very pleasant surprise. 20). Talk to Her. Well, it’s better than All About my Mother, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, or Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, but this still feels like an obligatory rather than a deserved mention. 21). Roger Dodger. Hide the children. Specifically, from Campbell Scott. 22). Panic Room. As close as David Fincher has come to a crowd-pleaser. 23). Reign of Fire. Burninating the countryside. 24). Frida. Like Pollock, but with a unibrow instead of action painting. Also, Ashley Judd inexplicably plays a Mexican in the stupidest casting decision since the last time Penelope Cruz made a movie. 25). Igby Goes Down. Or, Holden Caufield Gets an Even Sillier Name. Things you miss when the local two-screen art-house theater runs My Big Fat Greek Wedding for thirty-something weeks: The Piano Teacher, Frailty, 24 Hour Party People, Road to Perdition, City of God, The Good Girl, Moonlight Mile, 8 Femmes, El Crimen de Padre Amaro, Morvern Callar, Femme Fatale, Lovely and Amazing, Bloody Sunday, Personal Velocity, Russian Ark, Heaven, The Grey Zone, Love Liza, Tadpole, Sunshine State, Max, Spider. And, yes, this means that I saw Bowling for Columbine, The Pianist, and The Hours. And, on balance: --------------------------------------------------- If forced to choose between another viewing of these five "worst" films of 2002 and, say, The Hot Chick or The Adventures of Pluto Nash, Nos. 5 - 3 would probably win my vote. But I'd gladly sit through a double-feature of Enough and The Sweetest Thing before watching either Punch-Drunk Love or Gangs of New York again. In a year with such high-brow offerings as Crossroads, Scooby-Doo, Fear-dot-com, and Men in Black II, those two films (each of which, incidentally, boasts one of the year's best performances) still stand-out as examples of simply terrible filmmaking. So, the five worst films of 2002: 05). 8 Mile, dir. Curtis Hanson. A film that much of the MTV generation can applaud because they never saw Billy Elliot, Flashdance, Saturday Night Fever, Rocky, or Rebel Without a Cause, 8 Mile is a crowd-pleaser for a crowd of people who don't know any better. It's the same problem that occurred four years ago, when idiot high school students who had never heard of Dangerous Liaisons raved about the originality of Cruel Intentions. The lesson? For a generation that's supposedly more media-savvy than book-smart, the kids ain't all right. That Curtis Hanson, having directed two of the best American films of the past decade (L.A. Confidential and Wonder Boys), would fail to bring anything new to such a stale formula is simply mind-boggling. It's the reason 8 Mile is a failure to anyone who saw it with the expectations that it could not only be good, but even great. Instead, like Britney Spears' starring vehicle Crossroads, a film with no burden of expectation whatsoever, 8 Mile leaves Mandy Moore's hyperglycemic A Walk to Remember as the year's most artistically satisfying music-to-film star transition. 04). The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, dir. Peter Care. A film that makes one wonder if perhaps Panic Room was a fluke and Jodie Foster is still intent on career suicide. She's not the star of ... Altar Boys, but she gives a shrill supporting performance, and her production company fronted the money to see this film made. Both of those are decisions, while of lesser magnitude, comparable in their wrong-headedness to her re-make of The King and I. That ... Altar Boys taints the reputation of poet William Blake with didactic, far-too-literal interpretations of his work is just as inexcusable. The kind of faux-intellectual, self-congratulatory art-film that consistently turns larger audiences away from independent films, ... Altar Boys is something of a coming-of-age tale, albeit approached with such contempt for its subject (Kieran Culkin, in a performance not all that different from his work in the superior Igby Goes Down) that its logical conclusion would be either a castration or, at the very least, a male chlamydia exam. Instead, the conclusion involves someone getting mauled by a cougar. Ooh, edgy. 03). 25th Hour, dir. Spike Lee. Spike Lee's weakest films-- Summer of Sam or Bamboozled, for instance-- can at least boast a certain degree of technical proficiency / style to support his status as one of America's most widely-revered directors. 25th Hour, however, is a film that is impossible to justify on nearly every level. Shoddily edited, inconsistently photographed, terribly acted (even by Edward Norton and a sleepwalking Philip Seymour Hoffman), and cursed with a hilariously awful score, 25th Hour is such a disaster of technique that it's basically the art-film equivalent to Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning. And that's to say nothing of the film's content. Lee usually wears his political agenda prominently on his sleeve, but here his politics are either internally confounded or undermined by the film's technical problems. It's an ultimately bizarre decision that the first cinematic love-letter to post-9/11 NYC would have a thoroughly unsympathetic convicted drug dealer as its protagonist. Offensive to no good end, 25th Hour, if nothing else, offers further evidence that Lee is both a misogynist and a homophobe. That his mouthpiece for these forms of bigotry is positioned as one of "America's new heroes" makes 25th Hour a contemptuous political think-piece and a confusing entry to Lee's catalogue. 02). Punch-Drunk Love, dir. Paul Thomas "PT" Anderson. An anemic "romantic comedy" more akin to the truly reprehensible The Other Sister than to the milquetoast offerings of Meg Ryan and Sandra Bullock, Punch-Drunk Love is, above all else, a smug film from an increasingly smug director who was never very humble in the first place. The fatal flaw in Punch-Drunk Love (and I do mean fatal: unlike Solaris, there's no way to qualify this garbage as a "flawed masterpiece") is that, when it comes to the film's protagonist, Barry Egan, director Anderson attempts to have his 12,150 boxes of Healthy Choice Pudding and eat them, too. To be succinct (for once): That Barry Egan "gets the girl" at the end in no way justifies the extent to which the preceding 80 minutes comprehensively fail to recognize Barry Egan as a serious character. Punch-Drunk Love fails, then, because Barry Egan is a character who deserves to be taken seriously. Like Warren Schmidt, Barry Egan is a fascinating, deeply troubled take on the modern man-- that the "girl" in question is a total cipher undeserving of being called a "character" is another matter entirely. Adam Sandler's achievement in his performance here is comparable to Hilary Swank's wholly unexpected turn in Boys Don't Cry. A key difference, then, is that director Kimberly Peirce didn't break from her film with unnecessary, too-long reaction shots to remind the audience that she had cast "Hilary Swank... y'know, the girl from The Next Karate Kid and Buffy the Vampire Slayer... isn't that a riot?" in her film. Nor did she repeatedly play Brandon Teena's very realistically drawn psychological issues for comic effect. As director Garry Marshall did in The Other Sister, Anderson approaches his character-- and, as writer of the screenplay, Barry Egan is as much his character as Sandler's, making his direction all the more illogical-- with a heavy-handedness that's both condescending and patronizing to the character and to the audience. Barry Egan Does the Darndest Things may as well have been the subtitle for the film. As it stands, Punch-Drunk Love is redeemed only by Sandler's revelatory performance. The slick, distinctive (and, as with David Fincher's work, self-conscious and show-offy) visual style he displays is nothing new for Anderson. Sure, he can direct a pretty spectacular car-crash, but he already proved that in Magnolia, and he's out-done twice by Spike Jonze in Adaptation.. Yes, Punch-Drunk Love is his most "focused" film, in that it juggles only two storylines and doesn't have an over-moralized conclusion, but it's also driven by a love story that is completely unbelievable, leaving the film with no real purpose. Anderson desperately needs to re-evaluate the direction in which his career is heading. The problem with both Boogie Nights and Magnolia was one of pretense as Anderson was clearly in love with his designs on auteurism, but at least those films showed his respect for his own ideas. That he entirely fails to take any of his ideas seriously in Punch-Drunk Love, with the exception of his loose construct of "an Adam Sandler art-film," results in a smug picture that is fundamentally disrespectful of the art of filmmaking-- a masturbatory tone-poem celebrating its writer-director's amusement with how clever he thinks he is. 01). Gangs of New York, dir. Martin Scorsese. Scorsese, whose Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, and Casino give him a more rightful claim to the title of "America's Greatest Living Director" than Speilberg, sets his sprawling, long-delayed epic Gangs of New York in the "Five Points" region of Manhattan, so named because five main corridors extend outward from a common point like the fingers of an open hand. The palm of this hand, then, is an expansive open-air market over-run with prostitutes and manure, which serves as the backdrop for the film's two battle scenes. It also serves as a metaphor for Gangs of New York itself. The film is a massive, steaming pile of horsesh!t. The opening battle sequence, the reasons for which are never explained and which the film's young protagonist is illogically allowed to observe first-hand, sets up a plot structure as formulaic as that of 8 Mile. That it takes Leonardo DiCaprio's character a full three hours of film to avenge his father's death is inexcusable and speaks to the complete lack of discipline Scorsese shows in his direction of Gangs of New York. Scorsese, reputation be damned, directs this film with the stupidest person in any given audience in mind. There's no other explanation for the repeated flashback scenes he uses to remind the audience that specific characters were, in fact, in the movie no more than twenty minutes earlier. The final thirty minutes of Gangs of New York are so sloppily pieced together that the film is almost suffocating, despite well over two hours' worth of preceding material that could have been cut without losing anything of value. Between the two battles-- the first of which is beautifully choreographed, the second of which ends with an unintentionally hilarious geyser of blood-- Gangs of New York devolves into a nearly endless sequence of revisionist history vignettes loosely tied together by both an unnecessary romantic subplot involving Cameron Diaz (out-acted in an almost identical role by, of all people, Heather Graham in From Hell) and by a series of terribly written and terribly read voice-overs from DiCaprio. His narration is written in such laughable prose that it sounds lifted from Jewel's Chasing Down the Dawn. One of his final lines is, "The earth was shaking now, but I was about my father's vengeance," and DiCaprio delivers it with a ferocity that is Halle-Berry-saying-anything-in-X-Men inappropriate. DiCaprio's foil, interestingly, transcends the conflict of the plot and actually illustrates all of the deeper problems with Gangs of New York. As "Bill the Butcher," Daniel Day-Lewis gives an already legendary performance that is entirely wrong for the film in which he finds himself. He's clearly the only person-- other than Jim Broadbent, who gives a similarly excellent performance in his smaller role as Boss Tweed-- involved with the production of Gangs of New York intelligent to realize the only way that this material could possibly work: as high camp. Instead, his magnetic, brilliant performance is embedded in one of the most pretentious and most patronizing directorial vanity projects ever filmed. It is high praise, indeed, that his performance makes hands-down the year's worst film worth sitting through once. So. There we go. A Top 10, the next 15, and a Bottom 5. I like to hear myself type! And now I can safely go back into hiding for another five months, guilt-free.  |
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