Movie Roundup (But No Gay Cowboys)

Not that there's anything wrong with that. . . . I've been watching a lot of movies lately, here's some quick thoughts on them:

Match Point: Woody Allen's version of Dail "M" For Murder. It isn't a great movie, the characters are either too dull, annoying or reprehensible. And it's way too long, it would have been much better had Allen trimmed it down to his usual 90-100 minutes instead of letting it get to over two hours long. As it is, the thriller part of the story that we all know is coming takes way too long to get going. Still, relative to Allen's recent work, this is a masterpiece.

Melinda And Melinda: This is not. Woody Allen's other 2005 film features a pair of fine performances by Radha Mitchell and not much else of interest. One story is told twice, once as a drama, once as a comedy. The drama stars Chloë Sevigny, Jonny Lee Miller (Trainspotting) and Chiwetel Ejiofor (Serenity), who all give decent performances. The omedy stars Will Farrell and Amanda Peet, who range from mediocre to dreadful. The two plots are nothing more than rehashes of plot elements that have turned up in much better Woody Allen movies.

Memoirs Of A Geisha: Mediocre melodrama that is redeemed by the presence of some great actresses, including Michelle Yeoh, Gong Li and my current most favoritest actress Zhang Ziyi. The direction, by Rob marshall (Chicago) is pretty bad: the film is remarkable dull and uninteresting visually speaking. If nothing else, I expected at least some visual style. striking compositions, some hint that geishas and art are somehow linked. Instead, all I got was the narrator telling me about geishas and art. The plot is generic and largely absurd, you'd hope that in the absence of any interesting plot or visual style, there' at least be some interesting sociological observations about geisha rituals. But no, that most interesting subject is glossed over in a ten minute montage so we can get back t the silly melodrama. But that Zhang Ziyi, she's great.

Pickpocket: I'm trying to catch up and watch some directors I've yet to get around to watching, and I started with Robert Bresson and this film, a combination adaptation of Dostoyevsky's Crime And Punishment and documentary about the art of pickpocketing. I got the Criterion version from Netflix, and after the movie, I watched writer Paul Schrader's explanation for the ending. I don't want to spoil it on the off chance someone actually reads this and wants to see the movie, so suffice it to say that while I think the idea's cool in theory, it just didn't work for me.

Caché: Speaking of endings I didn't like. . . . I dug this movie a lot up until the end. Juliette Binoche, one of my favorite actresses, gives a terrific performance, as does Daniel Auteuil as a couple being harrassed with weird videotapes of their house. Again, I don't want to give anything away, but I just felt the ending was a cheap way someone with nothing interesting to say would chose to end his film so people would think he was "artistic". Sophomoric.

Tales Of Hoffman: My least favorite Powell and Pressburger film so far, but that isn't necessarily a ad thing as I've pretty much loved all their movies. This one, a full-on adaptation of an opera is pretty hard to get into, but does have some beautiful scenes. I'm mostly put off by the non-movie actor (and it shows) lead performance by Robert Rounseville. But Moira Shearer (from the Red Shoes) is outstanding in her all too brief appearances.

The Aristocrats: Very funny, and I love to hear comics talk about their work (does anyone besides me remember the TV show where Alan King would interview comics? It was like Inside The Actors Studio without the sycophantic pretension). The problem is that it's shot with multiple hand-held digital cameras which for some reason they insist on jump cutting between seemingly at random. Jump cuts in the hands of the ignorant are very annoying indeed. And I don't know if it was this particular DVD or just a by-product of the way it was made, but the sound was a little bit out of synch for the whole movie.

Movies Of The Year: 2003

Wow, this was a dreadful year for movies. I only saw 26 of them, and only 20 are any good, with only one great movie in the bunch. I hope there are a bunch of gems I haven't seen.

26. American Wedding
25. Matrix Revolutions
24. Daredevil
23. Intolerable Cruelty
22. A Mighty Wind
21. Underworld
20. Angels In America
19. Shattered Glass
18. Old School
17. Matrix Reloaded
16. A Decade Under The Influence

15. Masked And Anonymous - Bob Dylan stars in this weird film he co-wrote along with Larry Charles (Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Entourage) as a singer who gets released from prison to perform at a benefit concert. The movie doesn't make a whole lot of sense, there's a bunch of famous actors giving mostly interesting little performances in bit parts: Jeff bridges, Val Kilmer, Mickey Rourke, Jeff Bridges, Penelope Cruz, John Goodman, Luke Wilson, Angela Bassett, Bruce Dern, Ed Harris, Cheech Marin, Chris Penn (RIP), Giovanni Ribisi, Christian Slater, Fred Ward, and Jessica Lange. The whole film plays as one of dylan's old weird character-filled songs, like Desolation Row or Stuck Inside of Mobile. It's isn't nearly as good as those songs, of course, but it's generally fun to watch. The musical parts of the movie are the best part, the soundtracks mostly made up of Dylan covers from around the world, though he gets the band together to do a few numbers himself, including a great version of Dixie. For Dylan fans only, most likely.

14. The Animatrix - A series of short films that take place in-between thee Matrix and it's two sequels. Much like the animated shorts that accompanied the Star Wars prequels, they end up being better than the very expensive films they're supposed to supplement. Not all of the shorts are great, but most of them are pretty good.

13. Pirates Of The Carribean - Very overrated, yet still pretty fun movie based on a theme park ride. Johnny Depp and Geoffrey Rush have a lot of fun hamming it up as the Pirates, Keira Knightley does a good job of looking pretty and Orlando Bloom. . .well, he's pretty too I guess, not much of an actor though. This movie was a huge hit, largely because everything else that summer was even worse. Director Gore Verbinski is also responsible for The Ring, The Mexican and the classic Mousehunt.

12. X-Men 2 - Much the same as the first one, and the two Spider-Man movies, it's a good action movie that is nonetheless lacking in soul, or anything particularly memorable. Perhaps the whole anti-mutant frenzy as an analogy for racism or whatever would be more interesting if i hadn't already read it in the comic book 20 years ago. Still, it's a well-done and competent film, maybe a little better than the first one, though they tend to run together in my memory.

11. Gods And Generals - The second film of the big Civil War Trilogy that's actually the first third of the story, with Gettysburg (#22, 1993) being the middle part. It's not as good as Gettysburg, largely because it spends too much tme of the God part: trying to demonstrate who religious the Southern generals were, attempting to make the case that they really were good people, something I could almost believe if these same people hadn't done everything they could to kill thousands of people in the name of preserving their right to enslave black people. The film depicts Lee and Jackson and the other Generals as essentially good people who made a decision based on loyalty to their home state over their own sense of morality (Lee and Jackson both have black friends, IIRC), but it doesn't condemn them for it, the film seems to think that they made a reasonably moral decision, which is false. Aside from that, the historical recreations and battle scenes are all outstanding.

10. Lost In Translation - Seriously overrated movie, presumably by people who've never seen a movie about alienation before. Bill Murray continues his late career run of disaffected middle-aged man roles, except Sofia Coppola's nowhere near as interesting a director as Wes Anderson or Jim Jarmusch. The movie's actually pretty good until the last 20 minutes or so, when Coppola cops out and turns the movie into some kind of tragic romance. It's not so much that the romance is lame, as that it's the cheap way out of the movie. And there's the annoying "Sofia Coppola hates Cameron Diaz" character that's more axe-grinding than trying to make a good movie.

9. Down With Love - Renée Zellweger and Ewan McGregor star in this homage to/parody of the Doris Day sex comedies of the early 60s. McGregor plays the womanizing jouranlist trying to woo the author Zellweger in an attempt to disprove the thesis of her hit feminist abti-love advice book. Schemes and antics abound. It's shot with a lot of style, pastel technicolors, witty split screens and so on, and the cast (which also includes David Hyde Pierce and Rachel Dratch) is great at the screwball comedy dialogue.

8. The Fog Of War - Errol Morris is by far the best documentarian working today, even if he has only the smallest fraction of the hype Michael Moore gets. This isn't my favorite of his films, I prefer The Thin Blue Line (#16, 1988), A Brief History Of Time (#19, 1991), and Fast, Cheap And Out Of Control (#18, 1997), but it's that kind of year. The film essentially a long interview with Robert McNamera, as Morris pretty much lets him talk and talk in an attempt to justify himself and his actions throughout World War 2, the Cold War and Vietnam. It's the moments when Morris interrupts him and starts questioning him, and sounding pretty angry that are so striking. Morris usually just lets his subjects speak for themselves, so when he does speak up, you know it must be important. Still, the degree Morris allows McNamera to make his own case is what makes this a much better documentary than Eugene Jarecki's The Trials Of Henry Kissinger (#23, 2002), which exists only to indict its subject.

7. School Of Rock - One of the benefits of not paying attention to contemporary music for most of the late 90s and early 2000s was that I managed to not get burnt out on Jack Black before this movie came out. Black's terrifically funny, and his obvious love for classic rock music is infectious as he plays a very annoying, but very enthusiastic wannabe rock star who ends up teaching a class of prep school kids to appreciate the wonders of Led Zeppelin, Rush and AC/DC. The moviee also stars Joan Cusak, Mike White and the great Sarah Silverman. Director Richard Linklater's building an odd career for himself, much like Robert Rodriguez, he seems to be alternating art movies and family films, only with less success on both sides of the spectrum.

6. Hulk - Halfway between a regular Ang Lee movie (dysfunctional families, lots of slow drama) and a modern comic book movie (the Spider-Man and X-Men movies), most people hated this film. The Ang Lee fans hated the comic book elements, the comic book fans hated the complexity of character and slow pace. Few of us, though, like both Ang Lee and comic books. It's easily the best of the recent comic adaptations, and is potentially surpassed only by this year's Sin City in the inventiveness of it's translation of comic to film. Eric Bana is very good in the lead role, and Jennifer Connelly is, well, Jennifer Connelly. Nick Nolte's a bit too over the top as the evil father, though.

5. Once Upon A Time In Mexico - The third part of Robert Rodriguez's Mariachi Trilogy is a lot more Once Upon A Time In China than Once Upon A Time In America (or The West) in that is purely an action movie and not a Leone-esque epic statement about, well, anything. On that level, it works extremely well, though not as much as some of the great action movies of the decade or so, but again, this is a pretty bad year. This is easily the biggest of the Mariachi films (El Mariachi, #17, 1992; Desperado, #18, 1995) and is probably the best, though that's a real tough call. It's got a great, very funny supporting performance by Johnny Depp and good performances by Mickey Rourke and Ruben Blades, among others. There's far too little Salma Hayek though.

4. Ong Bak: Muay Thai Warrior - Now here's a great action movie. An homage/return/copy of the old, lower budget Hong Kong action movie of the late 80s and early 90s, Tony Jaa stars as the small town kid sent to the big city to recover his villages Buddha, which has been stolen by evil bad guys. Fortunately, Jaa also happens to be a badass Muay Thai expert (this appears to be a martial art that relies a lot on hitting people very hard with your elbows). he meets up with some exvillagers who help things out by functioning as comic relief and bystanders for Jaa to rescue, he takes on an increasingly large segment of the Thai underworld, and performs some spectacular stunts. One of the cool things about the movie (though not necessarily original) is that after he does something really cool, the film will instant replay it in slow motion and from various camera angles. Since spectacle is what these types of films are all about, from Buster Keaton to Jacques Tati to Jackie Chan, it's cool to see these stunts treated as the athletic feats they truly are.

3. Return Of The King - But for those lame hobbits bouncing on the bed in slow motion, this would be a great movie. Once again, I'm split between loving everything about the Aragorn storyline (the ghost army, the huge final battle scene, the resolution of the Liv Tyler issues) and getting really annoyed with the Frodo story (more Sean Astin speechifying, leaving the Shire untouched, the interminable ending). This is my least favorite of the three movie, though there's a whole lot to like about it. The trilogy taken as a whole is certainly the most significant work this decade thus far, as popular entertainment goes, it doesn't get a whole lot better.

2. Master And Commander - It was always going to be hard for me to like this film, since long before it was announced, I'd read all twenty of Patrick O'Brien's Master And Commander books and really loved them. Russelll Crowe is certainy not the Jack Aubrey I'd imagined, but nevertheless, he does a very good job. Paul Bettany makes a pretty good Stephen Maturin, though they made some annoying changes to his character: in the books, Maturin's a former Irish Revolutionary and works as a spy against Napoleon for the British government and for the Catalan Independence movement. He's certainly not the anti-violence audience surrogate the film makes him out to be. Sure, I understand the necessity of having someone the audience can identify with around to explain the alien world of the British Navy, but Maturin manages to perform that function quite well in the books without being a pacifist. I also would have preferred it if they had just made a film of the first book, instead of mixing up a whole bunch of them into something with such a ridiculously long title. My favorite Russell Crowe movie, and my favorite Peter Weir movie.

1. Kill Bill Vol. 1 - There's not a single year thus far that has a bigger gap between my #1 and #2 movies of the year. That's a reflection of both how good Kill Bill is and how bad a year 2003 was (and maybe of how few movies I've seen from this year). I wrote a long post about this movie early in the life of this blog, back when I occasionally got comments. You can read it here. My opinion hasn't changed in the last few months. Here's most of it "it's the economy of the script that really stands out to me. The way Tarantino can create wholly unique, interesting and memorable characters with just a few lines of dialogue is amazing. For a film with so little dialogue, there are a remarkable number of fascinating characters in Kill Bill: Hattori Hanzo, GoGo Yubari, O-Ren Ishii, Buck, The Sherriff, not to mention The Bride herself.
"And there's more: terrific acting by Uma Thurman, Lucy Liu, and, especially, Sonny Chiba, the best use of music of any Tarantino film, and any film at all since Boogie Nights, the great, long steadycam tracking shot setting the scene for the House of The Blue Leaves sequence, the absurd, yet beautiful, snowscape for the final battle between The Bride and O-Ren, the audacity of putting a long (violent) anime sequence right in the middle of the film, and on and on.
"There isn't a filmmaker alive who loves movies more than Quentin Tarantino, and that shows in every frame of this movie. It's a movie for people who love movies by people who love movies. It isn't surprising, then, that film geeks tend to like it a lot more than normal people."


Like I've been saying, there's a lot of movies that'd make this list that I just haven't seen from this year. Oldboy's near the top of my Netflix queue, and someday I intend to watch some Hou Hsao-hsien movies (like Café Lumière) (Jonathon Rosenbaum digs him, and he is my favorite film critic) and Coffee and Cigarettes is the only available Jarmusch movie I haven't seen.

Cafe Lumiere
Oldboy
The Dreamers
Festival Express
Coffee And Cigarettes
Open Water
Ju-on
American Splendor
Zatoichi
The Triplets Of Belleville
The Cooler
Holes
The Corporation
The Last Samurai
Finding Nemo
Terminator 3
Mystic River
21 Grams
Cold Mountain
Bad Boys 2
Monster
Bad Santa
Seabiscuit
Elf
Gigli
Elephant
Open Range
Capturing The Friedmans
Dogville
The Station Agent
The Italian Job
Anything Else
The Wild Parrots Of Telegraph Hill
The Missing
The Company

Movies Of The Year: 2002

Another mediocre movie year for the 2000s, as there's really only 4 classic movies I've seen from this year. Most of the movies on this list are decent, but almost all of them have real serious flaws, or just aren't anything special.

29. Red Dragon
28. Sweet Home Alabama
27. Austin Powers: Goldmember
26. Ice Age
25. I Am Trying To Break Your Heart
24. Resident Evil
23. The Trials Of Henry Kissinger
22. Frida
21. Spellbound
20. The Business Of Fancydancing
19. Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets
18. 28 Days Later
17. About Schmidt
16. The Bourne Identity

15. Attack Of The Clones - Some of the worst scenes in any Star Wars film are the "love" scenes between Natalie Portman and Hayden Christiansen in this film. They're truly abysmal. But everything else in the film is great. There's an exciting opening chase sequence, followed by an interesting detective mission by Ewan McGregor, and the last 45 minutes or so of the film are great action scenes. If not for those God awful attempts at romance, this would be a great movie.

14. 8 Mile - I'm not an Eminem fan at all, and don't really know much about him, beyond the broad generalizations you overhear in the media. So I came to this film largely ignorant of all that backstory that more up-to-date audiences would know. So to me, the movie is simply a coming-of-age story set in a world I'd not yet seen depicted in film. Good direction by the uneven Curtis Hansen, along with effective acting by Eminem, Mekhi Phifer and Brittany Murphy (not Kim Basinger) help make the setting interesting and the generic story successful.

13. Spider-Man - The best of the recent slew of comic book movies, if only it's sequel had actually been a sequel instead of a remake, but that's another year. Sam Raimi has always been an interesting director, but I can't say there's anything interesting about his style anymore. He seems to have moved into a Howard Hawks period in the wake of the negative reaction to The Quick And The Dead (#11, 1995), making conventional movies in a more invisible style. As such, his Spider-Man films are notable among comic book movies only for their competence in execution.

12. Gangs Of New York - Another film that might have been great. There are parts of this film that are outstanding: the opening battle scene, Daniel Day-Lewis's performance, the brilliant recreation of 19th century New York, the draft riot scenes. The problem is Cameron Diaz. Her character is annoying and pointless. If every scene with her, and every reference to her character had been cut out, this film would be great instead of the bloated mess it unfortunately is.

11. The 25th Hour - Is there ay director working today more uneven than Spike Lee? This is one of his better recent films, the good part of the pattern along with He Got Game (#21, 1998) and Summer Of Sam (#18, 1999). In this case, it's the great cast that makes it worthwhile. Edward Norton is typically great in the lead as a man spending his last day of freedom before going off to jail. Philip Seymour Hoffman, Barry Pepper, Brian Cox, Rosario Dawson, and Anna Paquin also star.

10. Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind - George Clooney's directorial debut is a fun, albeit flawed, film about a game show host who may or may not be a hitman for the CIA. Sam Rockwell is great as Chuck Barris, the guy with the delusions, and the rest of the all-star cast is, well, all-star: Drew Barrymore, Juliia Roberts, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, and George Clooney. The screenplay's by Charlie Kaufman, and this, while not as good as his other top 10 film this year, is certainly his most fun movie, the one that least made me want to hit something, or someone (usually Charlie Kaufman).

9. 24 Hour Party People - That's two straight films featuring virtuoso lead performances of 70s cultural icons by largely unknown actors. This time, Steve Coogan plays Tony Wilson, the impressario influential in the Manchester music scene in the late 70s and through the 80s. The film is about Wilson, and only incidentally about the music, which is fine because, despite the typical rise and fall structure of his story (drugs are bad!) he's just such an interesting character. The music is great, mostly feature Wilson's bands Joy Division, New Order and Happy Mondays, along with the requisite period appropriate music (ie, The Sex Pistols). Directed by Michael Winterbottom, who some think is great. I can't say if he is though, because this is the only one of his films I've seen.

8. Minority Report - Another great year for Steven Spielberg, as he's got 2 of the top 8 films of the year. This is the darker one of the two, though it's not as twisted as AI (#6, 2001), you can definitely see Spielberg slowly starting to mature in these two films, perhaps under the influence of Stanley Kubrick and Philip K. Dick (who wrote the short story this film is based on). This film, I think, is actually hurt by having Tom Cruise in the lead. While I like Cruise, and think he's a terrific movie star, he just doesn't have enough depth as an actor to bring a believable sense of despair and ultimately, desperation to the lead character in this film. Still, the movie is visually brilliant, some of Spielberg's most inventive work. And the other members of the cast are very good, especially a breakthrough performance from Colin Farrell and typical great work from Samantha Morton.

7. Adaptation - My favorite Charlie Kaufman film, depending on how much I allow myself to be annoyed by the ending. I get the idea, the joke. I get the idea in all of Kaufman's film. that's kind of the problem: he's not as smart as people seem to think he is, and it seems he tries to be clever to cover up for that. His films end up being both too cute and too pretentious, and perhaps unrelated, very misanthropic. Being John Malkovich (#30, 1999) is the worst offender in this regard. But this, Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind suffer from this flaw, Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind much less so. What redeems this film for me are the great performances: Nicholas Cage in the dual lead role, Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper, and Tilda Swinton. The cast also includes Brian Cox, Ron Livingston, Judy Greer, Steven Tobolowsky and Maggie Gyllenhaal.

6. Catch Me If You Can - Speilberg's film about the hunting down of a con artist is told with a light and breezy touch that's very much a contrast to the darker sci-fi films that preceded it. Leonardo Di Caprio and Tom hanks are pretty good in the leads as the con man and the detective who spends years tracking him down. It's got one of the best credit sequences ever, and it's style nicely echos that 70s modern style of the film itself. The big problem, though, is that the film's sheer length counteracts the effect of that lightness. The film drags toward the end, and it never really gives us anything to make that 141 minute length worthwhile. And I like long movies, generally speaking.

5. Bowling For Columbine - Yes, another flawed film, another film whose ending prevents it from being great. Just one of those years, I guess. Up until that ending, this is easily Michael Moore's best, and most balanced (though I don't especially care about that) film. The film has been pigeonholed as an attack on guns by a left wing wacko, an opinion that can only be reached by not actually watching the film. Instead, Moore questions whether or not guns are the problem, examines it from a number of angles, and ultimately concludes that they aren't, that it's our news media and politicians and the "culture of fear" they've created that's the problem. This is why the attack on Charleton Heston at the end of the film is gratuitous and just plain mean-spirited. It does nothing to further the thesis of the film, or our understanding of the issue. All it does is make Heston look bad. But the cartoon's hilarious.

4. The Two Towers - This one os tough to rate, because half of this movie are some of my favorite parts of the whole LOTR trilogy, while the other half are some of my least favorite. Put succinctly: Aragorn good, Frodo boring. More specifically, as an enormous geek, I hate how they changed the Frodo storyline to make the Faramir character more like his brother and less awesome. If you don't know what I mean, you haven't read the book and probably should stop reading this and go read it right now. The extended version of this one is essential. The storyline involving (the fairly dreadful) Liv Tyler only makes sense in the long version, and actually approaches being interesting as the love triangle between Aragorn, Arwyn and Eowyn is fleshed out. In the theatrical release, it was just confusing and annoying. The big battle scene at the end is, of course, worth the cheesy Sean Astin speeches at the end of the film.

3. Punch-Drunk Love - Director Paul Thomas Anderson followed the amazing, yet depressing Magnolia (#3, 1999) with this bizarre film starring Adam Sandler and Emily Watson. Generically, it's almost impossible to place. It's a romantic comedy that doesn't try to be funny. A romantic drama that's totally absurd and unbelievable. An Adam Sandler film that doesn't have any jokes. The best I can do is call it a musical. It's the music and the colors that matter. There exists the basic necessities of a plot and really only one character, Sandler's, is developed in any kind of detail, albeit obliquely and never entirely satisfactorily. The film is all emotion, something that's better conveyed with music and color and tone than backstory and psychology and jokes. A beautiful film, I can't think of any I'd compare it to. . .maybe The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg, or a Powell and Pressburger masterpiece like The Red Shoes or Black Narcissus? Truffaut's "joy of making cinema" at it's finest.

2. City Of God - I avoided seeing this film for a long time, despite it playing my theatres in two separate runs and rave reviews from anyone who saw it. I had the mistaken impression that it would be another social commentary film about how tough it is to be a poor kid in the third world, a fact I empathize with but don't feel the need to see a depressing film about. Imagine my surprise when I finally got around to watching it and discovered the best pure crime movie since Menace II Society (#7, 1993) or even Goodfellas (#2, 1990). The Goodfellas comparison is more common as both films cover a long stretch of time (the same stretch IIRC) and track their subjects from childhood through a rise to criminal power and eventual disastrous fall. It does have the richness in setting, style and characters that Goodfellas has, but in mindset it seems much closer to Menace to me, in that it's more about escaping the senseless, chaotic violence of street gang life than it is a psuedo-glorification of the Mafia lifestyle. Seu Jorge's character Knockout Ned is the character those other two films really lacked: the decent guy who gets sucked into the gang lifestyle but tries, but never really succeeds, to assert a sense of honor into it. He's the opposite of Larenz Tate's O-Dogg, the nihilistic psychopath. Seu Jorge is also the Brazilian singer who did all the great David Bowie covers in The Life Aquatic.

1. Hero - I almost swapped this and City Of God for ideological reasons. I have a feeling that Hero is perceived in the PRC as a justification for totalitarianism. The problem is Tony Leung's rationale for renouncing his lifelong attempt to assassinate the evil Qin Emperor. He comes to the conclusion that "Our Land" needs to be unified, and that Qin is the only one who can unify it. Thus, an evil leader is to be tolerated because we need that powerful ruler to control us, otherwise, we have chaos. You can see how the present Chinese government might find that a comforting thought. Ultimately, though, I was convinced to let the film's aesthetic merits overcome my objection. And the film truly is beautiful, certainly the most visually stunning martial arts movie ever made, which is saying a lot given the recent competition of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (#1, 2000) and director Zhang Yimou's own follow-up to Hero, The House Of Flying Daggers. The cast is equally outstanding, with Jet Li finally getting the chance to star in an art movie, along with the great Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung, Donnie Yen and, of course, Zhang Ziyi. One of the higher priorities on my film to-do list is to watch Zhang Yimou's earlier films, none of which I have, to my shame, ever seen.


Another year where the Unseen outnumbers the Movies I've seen. Despite playing My Big Fat Greek Wedding at my theatre for a year, I'm proud to say I have never, and will never, see it:


Infernal Affairs
Far From Heaven
In America
Secretary
The Scorpion King
Whale Rider
The Transporter
Solaris
Talk To Her
Bend It Like Beckham
Changing Lanes
Gerry
Roger Dodger
Comedian
The Quiet American
Dirty Pretty Things
Bubba Ho-Tep
Igby Goes Down
Death To Smoochy
The Good Girl
The Hours
One Hour Photo
About A Boy
XXX
My Big Fat Greek Wedding
Insomnia
Panic Room
Road To Perdition
The Ring
The Pianist
Chicago
Signs
To Be And To Have
Unfaithful
The Powerpuff Girls Movie
Mr. Deeds
The Kid Stays In The Picture
Lost In La Mancha
The Four Feathers
The Truth About Charlie
Auto Focus
Jackass
Femme Fatale
Personal Velocity
Star trek: Nemesis

Super Sunday

The Seattle Seahawks are going to the Super Bowl.

YEE-HAWK!


In other news, I saw a couple movies this weekend. Terrence Malick's latest film, The New World, managed to just about live up to my immense expectations for it. It's very hard to describe if you haven't already seen it, or seen any other Malick movies. The plot revolves around the relationship between Pocahontas and the colonists John Smith and John Rolfe. But, as with every Malick film, plot is never really what the movie is about. It has everything you expect from one of his films: poetic, sometimes ridiculously so, voiceovers, long shots of nature being nature (or not), very little dialogue and a way of looking at a familiar subject that I, at least, had never quite thought of before. In this case, the film seems to be playing with the idea conveyed in the title: for the English, America is The New World, but for Pocahontas and the Indians, it's England that's new. The film only becomes truly extraordinary when Pocahontas and Rolfe travel back to England, and we see that world though her eyes. What results is the idea, contrary to the superficial view of Malick as a tree-hugging anti-modern freak that's the easy way out of interpreting The Thin Red Line, that there's magic in both chaotic and overgrown America and in urban, manicured England. That the Old World inevitable leads to the New, and that there isn't really much difference between them anyway.
At least that's my early, rather incoherent impression of the film.

We also watched Melinda and Melinda today. it was alright. Nothing all that interesting though. Will Farrell's Woody Allen impression was annoying. The rest of the film was basically just bits and pieces of other, better, Woody Allen films all chopped up and mixed together.

Brokeback Munich

I've still not seen many of the best, or most-hyped, movies of the year, but over the last couple of weeks I did manage to see both Brokeback Mountain and Munich. Both were very good, but I have a clear favorite between the two, and it's a leading contender for my #1 movie of 2005.

It isn't Brokeback Mountain. I liked the movie, it looks fantastic, like all Ang Lee films, and it's well-written and structured. But I had two problems with it, one minor, one major. The minor problem is that there isn't enough balance in the story of how the two marriages dissolve. One minute we see Jake Gyllenhaal finally triumph over his father-in-law, which prompts a loving smile from Anne Hathaway (not Shakespeare's wife, but the girl from The PrIncess Diaries), the next minute, the two can't hardly speak to each other and Gyllenhaal's hitting on both a rancher and the rancher's wife. It feels like something got cut out that we needed to see. The major problem is that I just didn't buy the love story. And that's really what the movie needs to deliver to rise above a simple message film, in order for it to do something more than just tell me things I already know. It's not necessarily the actors, bother Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger give excellent performances, it's that there's just a real lack of chemistry between the two. That, and the fact that I can't understand why either character likes the other. I can understand it from just a physical attraction standpoint, but physical attraction isn't enough to maintain a 20 year secret relationship. I didn't really like either of the characters (I didn't hate them either), but more importantly, I didn't understand what they liked about each other. That could be the actor's fault, it could be the script's fault, or it could be the theatre's fault, that I just couldn't get into the movie with such a large, and noisy, audience. I'll probably watch it again when it comes out on DVD though, we'll see if my mind changes.

Munich I liked a lot. It works very well as a thriller, including one scene that's textbook Hitchcockian suspense. But it also plays upon those thriller conventions to force the audience to think about violence and revenge and terrorism and war. It's surprisingly mature for a Spielberg film, one where he does not seem o know the answers to the questions his film poses, unlike, well, every single other Spielberg film. That's what makes it so different from a Saving Private Ryan. SPR tells you what to think and feel with every frame, Munich raises issues, allows both sides to argue reasonably and leaves the conclusion making to the audience. Eric Bana gives one of my very favorite performances of the year, and the rest of the cast (Geoffrey Rush, Daniel Craig, Ciarán Hinds (Julius Caesar on "Rome" and Mathieu Kassovitz (who was in Amélie) is very good as well.

This film is getting buried by the Brokeback Mountain hype. Which is what you'd expect. Spielberg's own Saving Private Ryan did the same thing to The Thin Red Line a few years ago. Hype machines like movies that don't make you think. The subtle Crouching Tiger lost to the noisy Gladiator. The subtle Thin Red Line lost to the noisy SPR. The subtle Munich will lose to the noisy BBM. Karma.

Holiday Hangover

Can't say I've been in much of a writing mood lately. I've pretty much felt more incoherent than usual over the last month. I blame the rain (27 straight days and counting as of yesterday!). Anyway, I finally finished 2001 and got that posted, and here's a quick post to show what I've been doing for the last month:

Sports: I won my fantasy football league, and two whatifsports World Series with the 2005 Mariners. And the Seahawks won a playoff game yesterday for what I'm pretty sure is the first time since 1988. They're no the favorites to get to and actually win the Super Bowl.

Books: I read Lonesome Dove, a book that had been repeatedly recommended to me for years and, of course, lived up to the hype. It's the only Western I've read, though I imagine I'l eventually get around to reading it's sequel and two prequels. My biggest complaint: no map. Even better than the TV miniseries, which I rated as the 22nd best film of 1989. I'm now in the middle of reading Three Kingdoms, the epic Chinese proto-novel that's kinda of the Chinese version of Illiad. I'm also playing the 10th version of the video game based on the book, Romance of The Three Kingdoms, the first version of which I played excessively on the original Nintendo many many years ago. It's terrific, I'm actually liking it better than the Illiad, which is saying a lot. It's ridiculously long (about 2000 pages all together) but the narrative moves along so quickly and the story is told with such economy that it's never slow or boring. It's like a serial that keeps going and going for decades.

Music: Got a lot more recent stuff: The White Stripes, Death Cab For Cutie, Modest Mouse, Sufjan Stevens, The Decemerists, The New Pornographers, Badly Drawn Boy, The Go! Team, Franz Ferdinand, The Killers, Silver Jews, The Shins, along with some more Johnny Cash and the Anthology of American Folk Music I mentioned in my review of Greil Marcus's book about The Basement Tapes. I'll have more on these eventually when I get around to making an Albums Of The Year post for 2005.

Video: I spent the last month buying a lot of DVDs, finally getting around to trying to build a collection. There's too many to list in detail here, some of the highlights are a great Woody Allen Collection, all 3 kung fu art movies (Crouching Tiger, Hero and House Of Flying Daggers), the extended Return of The King (completing my collection), the complete Alien collection, and the first two seasons of Newsradio. I also found a great site online that offers tremendous deals on Criterion Collection films (dvdplanet.com) and I've got Ran and The Red Shoes on the way from them for what I would have paid for just one of them at Barnes & Noble or Best Buy.

Movies Of The Year: 2001

A few more movies seen from this year, and a much better year overall than 2000. But still, nowhere close to as good as those mid 90s years. A good year for geek movies.

31. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
30. Hannibal
29. Spy Kids
28. Bridget Jones's Diary
27. Legally Blonde
26. American Pie 2
25. The Man Who Wasn't There
24. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
23. Not Another Teen Movie
22. Y Tu Mamá También
21. Gosford Park
20. Ghost World
19. Shrek
18. Pearl Harbor
17. A Beautiful Mind
16. Metropolis

15. Knockin' On Heaven's Door - Film versions of anime TV series don't have a particularly good history. The Escaflowne movie cut out everything good in the series and uglied up the animation to make a terrible film, #26 in 2000. The two Neon Genesis: Evangelion movies are utterly incomprehensible, even, or especially, after watching the series (though there's a new translation out there that might be more intelligible, but I haven't seen it). This, the Cowboy Bebop movie, manages to get everything right though. The series is better, of course, but this is still a fine action film, it just plays like an extra-long episode, though a little dumbed down for the mass audience. The Yoko Kanno soundtrack is as good as anything she did for the series, which is saying a lot.

14. 61* - This HBO film is just about the best thing Billy Crystal's done since When Harry Met Sally. It's the story of the 1961 home run race between teammates Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle, as they try to break Babe Ruth's single-season home run record. Barry Pepper and Tom Jane are very good as Maris and Mantle, respectively. Whether or not you already know the story of how everyone loved Mantle and hated Maris, and how the stress caused Maris to lose his hair and how Mantle was a big drunk while Maris really was the All-American hero-type that people thought Mantle was, you'll still dig this movie. It also stars Anthony Michael Hall as Whitey Ford. After Mr. Saturday Night and Forget Paris, Crystal finally managed to direct a good movie.

13. Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back - After the messy flop that was Dogma, Kevin Smith decided to remake a Crosby-Hope road movie (Laurel and Hardy? Abbot and Costello?) with the sophmoric mentality of Mallrats. The result is this often funny but almost never smart comedy.

12. Zoolander - Another dumb comedy that's nevertheless entertaining. Probably the best of the ben Stiller/Owen Wilson comedies, certainly better than Starsky and Hutch. Like most of the Stiller/Wilson/Farrell/Vaughn comedies of the last 5 years, it's very hit and miss. Walks a very narrow line between funny and annoying.

11. Wet Hot American Summer - The best American comedy of the year did nothing theatrically ( I think the three people I saw it with might have been it's total gross), but reached a kind of cult status on video. It's largely the product of veterans of the sketch comedy series The State, though the cast also features Janeane Garofolo, David Hyde Pierce, Molly Shannon, Paul Rudd, Bradley Cooper and Amy Poehler. It takes place on the last day of summer camp at some time in the early 80s, late 70s, wacky fun ensues.

10. Vanilla Sky - I actually prefer it to the original, Abre Los Ojos, directed by Alejandro Amenábar (#28, 1997), largely because Cameron Crowe's much better at establishing the romantic relationship between Tom Cruise and Penelope Cruz. Of course, as I've said before, I'm a huge sucker for Cameron Crowe movies. While I like parts of this movie quite a bit (the meet cute with Cruz and Cruise, the album cover recreation, the most interesting use of color of Crowe's career, it is, ultimately, just a trick movie. Albeit, like Memento and Fight Club, a trick movie that reflects the post-modern equivalence of simulation and reality that Chuck Klosterman, apparently ripping off one of my college Film Theory papers writes about in Sex, Drugs and Cocoa-Puffs. Thieving bastard.

9. Shaolin Soccer - Stephen Chow's breakthrough kung fu soccer comedy needs to be seen in the long Hong Kong version and not the chopped up Miramax release that cut out about 20 minutes of the original film for US theatrical release. It follows the same basic plot of any misfit sports movie, From The Longest Yard to The Bad News Bears to Victory, only this time with soccer and special effects type kung fu. Martial arts comedies have long been common in Hong Kong cinema, but hardly any of them have ever made it over here. Comedy's even an important part of most jackie Chan or Jet Li movies. But in those the comedy is very lowbrow, slapstick, and often annoying. Shaolin Soccer is similarly slapstick, but never seems as weird as say, the Stinky Tofu subplot of Michelle Yeoh's Wing Chun (#26, 1994, a great movie, by the way, directed by Yuen Wo Ping and also starring Donnie Yen). Chow topped it this year with Kung Fu Hustle.

8. The Royal Tenenbaums - I've only seen it once, and thought it was alright, but I can't say I like it as much as other Wes Anderson films (Bottle Rocket: #14, 1996; Rushmore: #2, 1998). There's always a lot of melancholy in Anderson's films, but this one seemed to cross the line into just plain depressing. And, as you know if you've been reading this, I'm not a big fan of depressing movies. Still, there's a lot to like here: the soundtrack, the performances, especially Gwynneth Paltrow and Luke Wilson. The comment on IMDB, which appears to have been written by Wes Anderson's mom, uses words like "jubilant", "soul-lifting", "hilarious", and "bouquet of priceless cinema" to describe it, so maybe I should watch it again.

7. Black Hawk Down - Vastly superior to his multi-Oscar winning Gladiator, is this war film by Ridley Scott. What makes it his best film since Alien is how understated it is. Unlike Gladiator or Kingdom Of Heaven or GI Jane, it's a war movie without any pretension of any kind of larger meaning. Or rather, it's a war movie that lets the war speak for itself instead of having the director making speeches about whatever point he wants to make about war or life or androids. The cast is oputstanding: Ewan McGregor, Josh Hartnett, Tom Sizemore, Sam Shepard, Ron Eldard, William Fichtner, Jasson Isaacs, Jeremy Piven, Orlando Bloom, Ewen Bremner, and Eric Bana.

6. AI - A Spielberg movie that a whole lot of people seem to hate, and I've never understood why. Haley Joel Osment plays an android child that gets adopted and then abandoned by a yuppie couple. He then goes on a quest to prove himself worthy of his "mother's" love. It gets a lot of hack criticism because Spielberg's version of the story is supposedly very different from what people think Kubrick's would have been (Kubrick originally worked on the idea for the film for years before handing it over to Spielberg). That is, of course, pure snobbishness. The film is definitely one of Spielberg's most perverse, but the influence is not Kubrick but Hitchcock: the whole film plays out as a kind of Freudian joke, one that Hitchcock would have found hilarious. It's the fairy tale mentality that Spielberg brought to it that Kubrick never could have pulled off that makes the story so compelling, and the movie so much fun. A dense, complex film that deserves more attention than it gets.

5. The Others - Alejandro Amenábar , the director of the previously mentioned Abre Los Ojos, directs this outstanding ghost story starring Nicole Kidman as a woman taking care of her two children in a new house while her husband is away. The children are allergic to light and slowly they all become convinced that their house is haunted. The best ghost movie I've seen since, um, Ugetsu? Much better than The Sixth Sense. While both are, in the end, trick movies, The Others is so well-made, and Kidman's performance is so good, that I'd actually watch The Others a second time. I feel no need to ever watch the Sixth Sense again.

4. Amélie - Jean-Pierre Jeunet had a nice little career going making weird French fairy tale movies Delicatessen (#34, 1991) and The City Of Lost Children (#17, 1995). Then, he made Alien: Resurrection (#63, 1997), a disaster of a film if ever there was one. His big comeback came with Amélie, a film that kept the weird fairy tale style of those first two films, but turned the cuteness up to 11. Audrey Tautou stars as the title character, a weird amalgam of Juliette Binoche, Audrey Hepburn and magic elves. I remember when we played it (it played in our theatres for 10 months or so), I had to come up with a plot description for our recording, which wasn't easy without having seen the film. It isn't any easier now, after watching it and reading the plot descriptions on IMDB. Basically, Amélie is a waitress from an odd family and sets out to make people's lives a little better by adding a bit of magic to them. I may have overplayed the cute magic angle here, while the film is those things, it certainly isn't so much as to make you nauseous. It's all very smart and well-done.

3. Harry Potter And The Sorcerer's Stone - I saw this without having read any of the books or knowing anything about the story, other than the very basics of boy goes to wizard school. In that state of ignorance I was able to be totally charmed by this near-perfect kid's movie. All the child actors are pretty good, unlike in say, The Chronicles of Narnia, and while the story is pretty simple, the depth of the world Rowling created is ridiculously impressive. The film's great achievement is visual, the way it recreates so tone-perfectly the world of the Harry Potter books. From a pure cinematic stand-point, it isn't the best Potter film, that would be Alfonso Cuarón's Prisoner of Azkaban, but it's easily the one I've enjoyed the most.

2. Moulin Rouge! - I've mentioned before my irrational love of Baz Luhrmann movies, well, this is the ultimate Baz Luhrmann movie. It's an inversion of his Romeo and Juliet (#11, 1996) which took a historical love story and transposed it into a modern setting, this time, he transposes modern music onto a historical love story and setting. The point is to expose the raw emotional core at the heart of all love stories and pop music Ewan McGregor plays a songwriter who falls hopelessly in love with Nicole Kidman's dancer/prostitute. This being the tragic variety of love story, not only is Kidman's heroine a prostitute, she's also being forced to marry and evil rich guy and she's dying of tuberculosis. All McGregor can do is write songs and pine for his girl, and, with the help of John Lguizamo's Toulouse-Lautrec, put on a really great show. The conceit for this musical, of course, is that all the songs are contemporary pop songs: The theme from The Sound Of Music, Queen's The Show Must Go On, The Police's Roxanne, and Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit.

1. The Fellowship Of The Ring - It's hard to rate the Lord Of The Rings films separately, because they were made at the same time and are meant to be seen together and are really three parts of one great movie that's probably the most impressive film achievement of this century so far, if not the best. That said, I think this is the best of the three films. It's the most individually cohesive, the one best able to stand alone as a film. That's largely because it's the only one without a bifurcated plot: in the latter two films, the Sam and Frodo plotline just isn't as much fun, or as interesting, as the Aragorn and Gandalf storyline. This film also features the best acting of the series, with a great, too short, performance by Cate Blanchett and an outstanding performance from Ian McKellen. It's McKellen's Gandalf that sets up the whole series, that makes the whole thing believable and gives it the weight it needs to sustain your interest for 12 hours. Speaking of which, when referring to the LOTR films, I mean the extended edition versions, not the theatrical ones. The long versions are uniformly superior and a definite must-see if you liked the original versions.


Quite a few Unseen movies again this year, although I've had Musa here from Netflix for a week or so. maybe I'll get to watch it tonight.

Musa
Spirited Away
Mulholland Drive
Ocean's Eleven
Donnie Darko
Millenium Actress
Band Of Brothers
The Tailor Of Panama
Waking Life
Kiss Of The Dragon
Ali
In The Bedroom
Serendipity
Spy Game
From Hell
Blow
The Fast And The Furious
Training Day
The Mummy Returns
Monster's Ball
Lagaan
Enigma
Scotland, PA
Monkeybone
See Spot Run
Say It Isn't So
Driven
Sidewalks Of New York
Crazy/Beautiful
Made
The Princess Diaries
The Devil's Backbone
Rock Star
Glitter
Storytelling
Shallow Hal
Birthday Girl
Monsoon Wedding
The Cat's Meow
Chelsea Walls
Atanarjuat
The Princess Blade

Holiday Hiatus

I've been real busy with work and holidays and enjoying all my Christmas loot, so I haven't had much time to devote to this here blog. Over the next few weeks though, I plan to finish up the Movies Of The Year countdown, though I probably won't bother starting a 2005 countdown for 6 months or so, since there are too many movies I just haven't been able to see (I haven't seen any new movie since Narnia opened, despite the half dozen at least that are out right now that I want to see.) Also in the next couple of days I plan to have a rundown of some books music and videos I've been consuming over the past month or so.

So, to my one or two readers: happy holidays and congratulations on yet another successful battle in the war on Christmas.

Movies Of The Year: 2000

You'd have to go all the way back to 1983 to find a year where I saw as few films as I've seen from the year 2000. This was the year I started dating my eventual wife, graduated college, started working full-time and moved away from all the cool movie theatres. Plus, it wasn't a very good year for movies, with only one true classic.

28. Loser
27. Mission: Impossible 2
26. Escaflowne: The Movie
25. The Perfect Storm
24. Dancer In The Dark
23. Erin Brockovich
22. American Psycho
21. Charlie's Angels
20. Gladiator
19. Where The Heart Is
18. Chunhyang
17. Romeo Must Die
16. Traffic

15. Memento - As I mentioned in the 1999 list, I'm not a big fan of trick movies, and this one is a prime example of that genre. It's very well-made, with good performances from Guy Pearce and Joe Pantoliano. The backwards running narrative thing is pretty cool, but I've never seen the reason to watch this a second time. I was annoyed that when it came out nobody seemed to mention that it was essentially a noir remake of the classic Dana Carvey comedy Clean Slate (#40 in 1994), only without Valeria Golino and the one-eyed dog.

14. Jeff Buckley: Live In Chicago - This concert film looks like it was shot on video for a local PBS station. There's nothing interesting about it cinematically, what makes it worthwhile is Buckley himself. It's a long and great show, really demonstrating what made Buckley such a great singer. If you're already a Buckley fan, you'll love it. If you've never heard him, you'll still love it. The concert isn't as good as the one on the Live At Sin-é album, but it's still great.

13. X-Men - Like most of the superhero movies of the 90s, this is very slick but lacks soul., it's like candy. I was a huge fan of the comic book as a kid, so it'd probably be impossible to make an X-Men film that'd make me happy, but this does a decent job. Hugh Jackman is a pretty good Wolverine, Famke Janssen is a great Jean Grey, Patrick Stewart Rebecca Romijn and Ian McKellen are great and James Marsden is just as annoying as the Cyclops character was in the books. I like Anna Paquin a lot, but her Rogue really annoyed me, but that's the fan in me, her character is totally different than in the books. Overrated, but still good.

12. Battle Royale - I admit I was a little disappointed in this Japanese action film. It's set in a vague future where problem high school students are exported to a wilderness where they are made to fight to the death until there's only one left. I was looking forward to seeing Chiaki Kuriyama, who was great as Go-Go Yubari in Kill Bill, and she is very good, but not a big enough part of the movie. It also stars Takeshi Kitano, whose very different film Fireworks I liked a lot and rated #19 in 1997. Pretty good, but ultimately really depressing.

11. Bring It On - Without a doubt the best movie about cheerleaders ever made. The rich white cheerleaders, led by the very perky Kirsten Dunst, learn that all their best moves were stolen from the black inner-city cheerleaders. Dunst must scramble to come up with some moves of her own, with help from the new girl Eliza Dushku, as the rich kids new competition is that same inner-city black high school. It's the Karate Kid with really short skirts. What's not to love?

10. Chicken Run - The Great Escape reenacted by a flock of claymation chickens: pure genius. It's the same guys that made all the Wallace And Gromit movies which unfortunately were too short for me to include in my Movies Of The Year lists. Not just The Great Escape, but the movies chock full of movie references like the Indiana Jones movie and Braveheart. The movie stars the voices of Mel Gibson, Miranda Richardson, Timothy Spall, Imelda Staunton and Jane Horrocks.

9. The Beach - A Danny Boyle movie that people hated even more than A Life Less Ordinary, this film was killed in the public imagination by two things. First, the rumors that the production caused an environment catastrophe on its location in Thailand, which convinced all the lefties to hate it. Second was the massive success of Titanic (#11, 1997) and the cooptation of Leonardo DiCaprio by the teenage girl marketing machine. With 5 years of hindsight and Martin Scorsese's concerted effort to make him into his 21st century DeNiro, we can see that it was Titanic that was the anomaly in an otherwise extremely respectable acting career. In another five or ten years, he might even be able to shed his teen idol image, like Johnny Depp managed to do eventually. Judged on it's own merits, The Beach is a flawed film. A rather incoherent mess of interesting ideas and good performances. Leo plays a hipster burnout how finds a map to a beach where other freaks have established their own little society outside the rest of the world, with Tilda Swinton as their leader. There's the inevitable romantic entanglements between Leo and every girl he meets, and some perfect-society-gone horribly-wrong craziness as Leo goes nuts and imagines himself as a video game character. An interesting mess.

8. High Fidelity - Well, it's not as good as the book, that's for sure. But that may be overly harsh. John Cusak is perfect for the part of the music obsessed romantic loser, as is Jack Black as his even more music obsessed friend/employee. It's directed by Stephen Frears, who did Dangerous Liaisons (#1, 1988), The Grifters (#26, 1990), and Mary Reilly (Unseen). The rest of the cats includes Tim Robbins, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Joan Cusak, Lisa Bonet, Natasha Gregson-Wagner and Lili Taylor. Frankly, while I enjoyed the movie, I would have liked it a lot more if I hadn't read the book first. I don't think I can really judge it on it's own merits. I really should see it again.

7. Best In Show - Not as good as Waiting For Guffman (#21, 1996) but this was a bad year for movies, so it sneaks into the top ten. The Christopher Guest led improv crew makes a movie about the crazy people who compete in dog shows. I'd put this squarely in the middle of the three Guest movies (Guffman and A Mighty Wind are the other two), and my opinion of them is directly proportional to how mean they are to their characters. Guffman is hilarious and great in that it not only mercilessly mocks the losers who make up the play, but it also clearly has a lot of affection for a bunch of weird folks who just want to put on a show. A Mighty Wind has none of that human feeling, it just wants to depict some silly characters for us to laugh at. Best In Show is somewhere in between. A few of the characters are sympathetic (Christopher Guest and the gay couple being the main ones) but the rest are just savaged. It's funny for awhile, say, a sketch, but over the course of a feature length film, it gets tedious.

6. State And Main - A showbiz meets small town America comedy written and directed by David Mamet. William H. Macy is the director who's trying to convince Sarah Jessica Parker to do a nude scene, Alec Baldwin's the star who seduces local teenager Julia Stiles, and Philip Seymour Hoffman is the screenwriter who falls for local guru Rebecca Pidgeon. It's a smart, funny, entertaining film, but not a great one. Again, this ain't a great year for movies.

5. Wonder Boys - Michael Douglas plays a pot-smoking writing professor and novelist who's stuck in a rut. Frances MacDormand plays the married chancellor of his college, who's he's having an affair with and is now pregnant. Katie Holmes is the adoring student who rents a room in his house, Robert Downey Jr is his agent, in town for a writing festival and to get him to finally finish the book he's been working on for a very long time, and Tobey Maguire plays his very weird yet promising student. Based on the book by Michael Chabon, which I haven't read, but I've read two of his other books, Summerland and The Adventures Of Kavalier And Clay, which are both very good. The soundtrack is a whole lot of Dylan, and Bob even won an Oscar for the song "Things Have Changed". A weird, dark, fun film.

4. In The Mood For Love - Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung star in Wong Kar Wai's film about neighbors in 1962 Hong Kong who discover their spouses are having an affair. Even though the two of them are seemingly perfect for each other, they resolve not to become like their spouses. Like every Wong Kar Wai movie, it's beautiful and slow and thoughtful. But like all of his films other than Chungking Express, it's a bit too cool and humorless. 2046 makes a heck of a lot more sense if you've seen this one first, by the way.

3. O Brother, Where Art Thou? - A letdown coming off of The Big Lebowski, but still a pretty good movie. A loose adaptation of The Odyssey with George Clooney escaping a chain gang and trying to get back to his wife and rid her of her suitors. It's set during the depression and works as a survey of old weird America as well as a Homer adaptation. John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson are Clooney's fellow escapees. Along their way they meet John Goodman as a cyclops, the KKK, some corrupt politicians, Babyface Nelson, some sirens and Tommy Johnson, waiting for the devil at a crossroads. I hear the soundtrack was pretty popular.

2. Almost Famous - Cameron Crowe's autobiographical film about a teenage rock critic on the road with a mediocre band is flawed but ridiculously watchable. A couple months ago, in fact, I watched it twice in one day, and I haven't done that with any movie for years. The soundtrack is great, as Crowe's soundtracks always are, Kate Hudson, Frances McDormand, Jason Lee and Billy Crudup are all very good. It's got Philip Seymour Hoffman, Zooey Deschanel, Anna Paguin, Jimmy Fallon, Fairuza Balk and Noah Taylor in supporting roles. It's not my favorite of Crowe's films largely because I just don't like Patrick Fugit's performance in the lead role, I just think he's annoying.

1. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon - The only truly great film of the year still managed to be overrated by American film critics who somehow managed to remain ignorant of the Hong Kong movie scene throughout the 90s. They generally praised the originality of the film, especially in its work with wire stunts (see David Denby's review in the New Yorker: The characters can fly! I've never seen that before!). This act of collective critical ignorance would be roughly analagous to crediting Touch Of Evil for inventing the chiaroscuro lighting for film noir genre films. Anyway, despite the dfumb Americans, this is a great movie. Yuen Wo Ping's action choreography is pretty much perfect: alternately fun and fast and slow and beautiful. The cast is excellent, though I think director Ang Lee fell into the trap that so many directors have in the last decade, that of not allowing Chow Yun-Fat to smile. Michelle Yeoh and epecially Zhang ZiYi are tremendous and Chang Chen, who you might recognize from Wong Kar Wai's Happy Together (#4 1997) or 2046, is pretty good. Speaking of Wong Kar-Wai, it should be noted that another act of critical ignorance was crediting Ang Lee with legitimizing the martial arts film with a serious and artistic presentation. Of course, Wong Kar-Wai did that with Ashes Of Time back in 1994. Still, Crouching Tiger is the better film, and it's better than Zhang Yimou's two great martial arts art films, House Of Flying Daggers and Hero, largely because among those film it has the best balance between image and story, between genre film and art film.


Quite a few Unseen movies this year, a lot of them are probably pretty good too:

The Tao Of Steve
You Can Count On Me
Amores Perros
Chopper
Shadow Of The Vampire
Unbreakable
Snatch
Requiem For A Dream
George Washington
The Contender
The Legend Of Bagger Vance
Sexy Beast
The Way Of The Gun
Boiler Room
The Emperor's New Groove
Quills
Nurse Betty
Thirteen Days
Space Cowboys
Shanghai Noon
Coyote Ugly
Shaft
Dude, Where's My Car?
Scream 3
U-571
Pitch Black
Chocolat
Scary Movie
Meet The Parents
Cast Away
Pollack
Before Night Falls
Nine Queens
The Princess And The Warrior

Snake Oil Indeed

Well, I finally got myself mentioned on Cinecast. I was one of many people who mentioned, in response to their review of Shopgirl, that they should see LA Story, which was my #1 film of 1991. That's also my analogy they cite describing it as Steve Martin's version of Woody Allen's Manhattan, though it got a bit garbled in the translation.

The episode where I got mentioned is also the one where they gave rave reviews to Syriana, written and directed by Stephen Gaghan, the guy who wrote Traffic (which looks to be about #16 in 2000). I just watched Syriana Monday night, and since I haven't mentioned it here yet, I thought I'd copy the response I posted on the Cinecast website. As you can tell, I wasn't a big fan of the film.

I have to disagree with you both on Syriana. While you're right that the film is totally cold and unemotional, you're giving it too much credit by calling it "intellectual" or "an intellectual exercise". It's hard to be intellectual when your one big insight is that governments at home and abroad are corruptly intertwined with the oil industry. As Prince Nasir says in one of the few good scenes in the film: tell me something I don't know.

I could enjoy a movie that didn't have anything new or insightful to tell me if it was at least interesting emotionally or viscerally; I could enjoy a movie that was emotionally stiff or stylistically dull if it had something exciting to say. Syriana fails on all three levels.

Beyond that, Gaghan seems to confuse obfuscation for complexity. Jeffery Wright's character isn't a mystery because he's a complex character who we've never seen before, he's a mystery because the writer has withheld information from us, or rather has misled us into thinking he's a different generic type. By removing the backstory and context from his scenes, Gaghan creates the illusion of complexity without having to do the work necessary to make a truly intelligent film.

I'm not a big fan of Traffic, I thought a third of it was an after-school special, a third of it was mediocre and the third of it with Benicio Del Toro was outstanding. But Syriana doesn't even have that kind of interesting character or performance to redeem it.

Movies Of The Year: 1999

This was a pretty good year for movies. Very tough to decide between the top 3 films this year. The total number of films I've seen went down again, but almost every movie from this year is worth seeing. Really only the last place one is truly awful.

54. Payback
53. Audition
52. Sleepy Hollow
51. The Woman Chaser
50. But I'm A Cheerleader
49. Meeting People Is Easy
48. Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me
47. Teaching Mrs. Tingle
46. Beyond The Mat
45. 200 Cigarettes
44. Any Given Sunday
43. The Limey
42. The Ninth Gate
41. Big Daddy
40. Anna And The King
39. Anywhere But Here
38. She's All That
37. Dick
36. Bringing Out The Dead
35. Dogma
34. Varsity Blues
33. 10 Things I Hate About You
32. The Mummy
31. Mystery Men
30. Being John Malkovich
29. The 13th Warrior
28. Time Regained
27. Man On The Moon
26. American Beauty
25. The Phantom Menace
24. Bowfinger
23. The Sixth Sense
22. Topsy-Turvey
21. Galaxy Quest
20. Cruel Intentions
19. The Talented Mr. Ripley
18. Summer Of Sam
17. The Messenger
16. The Blair Witch Project

15. Go - Doug Liman's follow-up to Swingers was this often overlooked little exercise in non-linear storytelling. It's three different and, of course, ultimately interconnected stories about some kids who work together at a grocery star. Sarah Polley and Katie Holmes are the very attractive leads, and it also features Scott Wolf, Jay Mohr, William Fichtner, Breckin Meyer and Taye Diggs.

14. Cradle Will Rock - Hoosiers for lefty theatre geeks? Tim Robbins's film is a big mess of an epic about a bunch of famous people who just want to put on a show and the famous people who want to shut them down for the good of capitalism and democracy and apple pie and all that. The enormous cast features: Hank Azaria, Joan and John Cusak, Cary Elwes, Philip Baker Hall, Bill Murray, Vanessa Redgrave, Susan Sarandon, John Turturro, Emily Watson, jack Black, Bob Balaban, Gretchen Mol, Ruben Blades and Paul Giamatti.

13. Existenz - I'm not especially familiar with David Cronenberg, as I've only seen this, The Fly and A History Of Violence, but I liked this one a lot. Jennifer Jason Leigh invents a really realistic virtual reality game that she plays with Jude Law. The game's so good that they can't tell the virtual from the actual reality. A popular theme in 1999 as a couple films higher up on the list explore the same subject. Also stars Ian Holm, Willem Dafoe, Christopher Eccleston and Sarah Polley.

12. Eyes Wide Shut - Stanley Kubrick's last film is a fairly incoherent mess that looks really great and maybe doesn't make that much sense. Tom Cruise is so upset after his wife tells him she once thought about cheating on him that he runs off into the night into one bizarre group of sexual weirdos after another, all told in Kubricks slow-moving, ultra-clinical style. Nicole Kidman's performance is great, Cruise is decent enough. I have no idea what to think about the whole rich-people cult-orgy thing.

11. The Insider - I avoided this Michael Mann film for quite awhile, chalking it up to another generic bit of anti-smoking propaganda. When I finally saw it, I was pleasantly surprised to find it was about journalism and whistle-blowing in general and had very little to do with cigarettes. Russell Crowe stars as the tobacco scientist who, more or less, wants to expose the industry evil despite his non-disclosure agreement and his family's objections. Al Pacino is the 60 Minutes producer who prods him along. Both are excellent. It could have been just another issue movie of the week, but thankfully it's much much better than that.

10. Three Kings - Another movie that thankfully exceeded my expectations. I was sure it'd be a bland war is bad issue movie. Instead, this is an old school action adventure movie, more in the mold of Gunga Din than Courage Under Fire. George Clooeny, Marky Mark, Ice Cube and Spike Jonze set off in a Quest For Saddam's Gold in the last days of the first Gulf War, but end up actually fighting bad guys and becoming heros. Also stars Nora Dunn, Mykelti Williamson, Jamie Kennedy, Alia Shawkat and Judy Greer (the last two are on Arrested Development). Directed by David O. Russell, who did Spanking the Monkey, which was alright, I Heart Huckabees, which I liked and Flirting With Disaster, which I haven't seen but really should.

9. Ghost Dog: The Way Of The Samurai - Forrest Whitaker is great as a quiet mob hitman who tries to be a samurai, inspired by the book Rashoman. When one of his hits is witnessed by a girl, the mob decides to kill him. So, he tries to kill all the bad mob guys without hurting the girl or his master, the mob guy who saved his life when he was a kid. In the meantime, he hangs out with his best friend, an ice cream vendor who only speaks French (Ghost Dog only speaks English). Probably Jim Jarmusch's most commercial film, but that isn't saying much.

8. Sweet And Lowdown - I just bought a Best of Django Reinhardt album yesterday, it's pretty great so far. This is the last good Woody Allen movie (though I hear Melinda and Melinda and Match Point from 2005 are pretty good, I haven't seen them yet.) It's a fictional biopic of a jazz guitar player (Sean Penn) who likes to get drunk, shoot rats and hang around with a mute Samantha Morton. As you'd expect in a Woody Allen movie, it's funny, smart has great music and great acting by Penn and Morton.

7. American Pie - By far the best of the late-90s teen comedies. There were a lot of attempts to imitate it's success, including two pretty bad sequels, but none managed to do it. The reason is that what they tried to imitate was the grandma-scaring sex jokes instead of the intelligent screenplay about realistic high school kids. It's almost enough to make you think the good parts of the movie were just an accident. That they were actually just trying to make another Road Trip. Maybe writer Adam Herz was, and that's why he's written nothing but American Pie related films. But director Paul Weitz went on to direct In Good Company, which was pretty good, and About A Boy, which I haven't seen.

6. Election - Alexander Payne's vicious satire of high school, politics and Middle America. Matthew Broderick plays a schlub of a social studies teacher who tries and fails to cheat on his wife, and rigs the high school student body president election he's in charge of so the obnoxiously perky Reese Witherspoon won't win it. Chris Klein, from American Pie, plays the brain-dead jock he gets to run against Witherspoon. Might be the best movie about high school ever.

5. South Park - The best musical in a very long time. Upset by the language in a movie all their kids are seeing, the parents of a small Colorado town organize and instigate a war with Canada. Meanwhile, Satan and his boyfriend, Saddam Hussein, eagerly await their return to Earth. Our only hope are four grade school kids, one of whom surprisingly dies in the early going (I won't give away which one). best song: the inspirational "What Would Brian Boitano Do?"

4. Office Space - Now recognized as a true classic, this film bombed on it's initial theatrical release. I'm prou to say I saw it on opening night and loved it from the start. Ron Livingston stars as a corporate drone who gets hypnotized into a state of total relaxation and starts blowing off work and gets promoted for it. Along the way, he romances a local waitress, Jennifer Aniston, and plots a robbery like the one in Superman III with his computer programmer buddies Samir and Michael Bolton. Written and directed by Mike Judge, the man responsible for Beavis And Butt-Head and King Of the Hill. Also stars Gary Cole, Diedrich Bader, John C. McGinley and Stephen Root. A favorite line is tough to pick, but I'll go with: "You know the Nazis had pieces of flair, that they made the Jews wear."

3. Magnolia - Paul Thomas Anderson does the Short Cuts thing a heck of a lot better than Robert Altman did. This sprawling film about many many different screwed up people in Los Angeles connected by a game show and a very strange rainstorm. It's about randomness and coincidence and fate and post-modern life and bad fathers and screwed up kids. befitting a massivve film is the massive cast: Tom Cruise (in a very good performance), Julianne Moore, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Phillip Baker Hall, Melora Walters, John C. Reilly, William H. Macy, Patton Oswalt, Alfred Molina, Tom Jane, Jason Robards, Orlando Jones, Felicity Huffman, Luis Guzman, Ricky Jay and Henry Gibson. For some reason, my wife hates this movie. She liked Punch-Drunk Love though.

2. Fight Club - It was very tough to decide between these top three as the best of the year. They're all great films. Magnolia I put at #3 because it's a bit too much, too depressing, too long. Fight Club I ranked second because it's a trick movie. A movie where, once you know the secret, however great that secret is, the movie loses something. It just isn't as good the next time you see it. Generally, I'm not a fan of trick movies for this reason. The Usual Suspects, Memento, and The Sixth Sense are all movies I think are overrated for their tricks. The Others, Vanilla Sky and Fight Club I like in spite of their tricks. Still, I've only seen Fight Club two or three times. Unlike those first three, there's enough to love in it: Fincher's direction, Brad Pitt and Edward Norton's off the wall performances, Helena Bonham Carter trying to get as far away from Merchant-Ivory as she can, the sheer silliness of the satire, and the crazy fact that people started actually forming fight clubs in the wake of the movie (ah, to live without irony). And of course, thematically it has a whole lot in common with this year's number one film.

1. The Matrix - What to think of a film where the lead actor's best line is "Whoa," yet manages to also reference Jean Beaudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation as a guide to it's reality twisting convolutions? It's a comic book action hero movie that inverts the trajectory of the heroic epic that has been standard since the Arthurian Romances of a thousand years ago (The hero's world has been laid waste by the evil whatever, the hero must quest to restore the world to it's paradisical beginning. In The Matrix, the hero's world has been made a paradise by the evil whatever, and the hero must quest to restore it to it's initial wasteland. What do you think that says about us?). It's the movie that changed the action movie genre for the next decade, much like Die Hard did at the end of the 80s. Not just in it's use of special effects, which is interesting and very cool, but in introducing Hong Kong choreographer Yuen Wo Ping to the US, where he's gone on to be responsible for just about every interesting action sequence for the last six years. It's a great action movie with fascinating cultural and philosophical relevance. They never should have made sequels though.


Nothing I'm too upset about missing this year, though I've heard great things about Iron Giant and, yes dear, Boys Don't Cry:

The Hurricane
Runaway Bride
All About My Mother
Boys Don't Cry
The Straight Story
The Iron Giant
Girl, Interrupted
Titus
Idle Hands
Forces Of Nature
Drop Dead Gorgeous
The Astronaut's Wife
Pushing Tin
Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo
The Thomas Crown Affair
The Virgin Suicides
The Cider House Rules
Analyze This


Notting Hill
Toy Story 2
The Green Mile
My Best Fiend
Kikujiro
American Movie
The End Of The Affair
Snow Falling On Cedars
Angela's Ashes
Buena Vista Social Club
One Day In September
Jawbreaker
The Winslow Boy
The Girl On The Bridge
Mr. Death
Gen-X Cops
Jesus's Son
Pola X

Chronicles Of Gonzaga

Watched Narnia the other night and was pretty disappointed. The effects were pretty mediocre, the child actors were uniformly awful and the script was way too simplistic, with a total lack of subtlety. It's like all the worst moments of the Harry Potter and LOTR movies, with none of the great parts. Tilda Swinton is really great though. It's really worth seeing just for her.

As for the much balleyhooed Christian allegory: bleh. Aslan the Lion King sacrifices himself to save the kids. That's all well and good, but then he comes back to life and explains that he knew all along if he allowed himself to be sacrificed that he'd be resurrected in the morning. So what's so great about the sacrifice? He knew he wasn't really going to die. Compared to the death and rebirth of Gandalf in LOTR, this is just silly.

In happier news, I've been watching as many Gonzaga basketball games as I can get on the tivo, which is surprisingly quite a few. I've seen every game since their triple overtime thriller in Maui against Michigan St. Today's game against Oklahoma St. at Key Arena was another great one. Junior Adam Morrison (from my alma mater Mead High School), who's leading the nation in scoring, was seemingly held in check by some very good defense, yet still managed to score 25 points including the game winning 3 pointer with 2 seconds left in the game. Gonzaga's been struggling, losing to UW last weekend and trailing OSU for most of today's game, but they are playing with their starting back court out with injuries. As the game ended today, one of the announcers from CBS called Morrison the best player in college basketball. It's hard to argue with that.

Movies Of The Year: 1998

Back to the countdown after a couple weeks off. The total number of films seen continues to drop. This was a pretty good year for movies, despite the grossly overrated oscar winners.

60. 54
59. Your Friends & Neighbors
58. Snake Eyes
57. Godzilla
56. Psycho
55. Star Trek: Insurrection
54. Lethal Weapon 4
53. Celebrity
52. Disturbing Behavior
51. Permanent Midnight
50. Pecker
49. Mulan
48. American History X
47. No Looking Back
46. Next Stop Wonderland
45. The X-Files
44. Small Soldiers
43. Without Limits
42. Sliding Doors
41. The Replacement Killers
40. The Faculty
39. The Last Days Of Disco
38. Armageddon
37. The Truman Show
36. Enemy Of The State
35. Shakespeare In Love
34. Little Voice
33. Slums Of Beverly Hills
32. Saving Private Ryan
31. The Mask Of Zorro
30. The Waterboy
29. The Opposite Of Sex
28. Can't Hardly Wait
27. The Seige
26. What Dreams May Come
25. Croupier
24. Wild Things
23. A Simple Plan
22. Smoke Signals
21. He Got Game
20. Bulworth
19. A Civil Action
18. Dark City
17. The Wedding Singer
16. Buffalo '66

15. Ronin - Low-key spy/action movie starring Robert DeNiro and Jean Reno. Directed by John Frankenheimer, and possibly his best movie that isn't The Manchurian Candidate. It's similarly styled, but smarter, than Doug Liman's The Bourne Identity. Also stars Stellan Skarsgard, Jonathon Pryce, Natascha McElhone, Sean Bean and my all-time favorite figure skater, Katarina Witt.

14. Primary Colors - It's not a great film, but I rate it this high because it has a lot of nostalgia value for me, as I followed the Clinton campaign pretty closely in 1992. John Travolta and Emma Thompson are alright as the Bill and Hillary characters, but Billy Bob Thornton is great as the James Carville character. Kathy Bates' character is really annoying. Adrian Lester is good as the audience surrogate campaign worker and Maura Tierney is outstanding, as always.

13. The Zero Effect - Odd little film in which Bill Pullman plays a brilliant detective who has problems interacting with actual human beings. Ben Stiller plays his frazzled assistant and Kim Dickens is his client/love interest. Written and directed by Jake Kasdan, the son of director Lawrence Kasdan. A quirky, very likable movie, in fact, I've yet to hear of anyone who saw it and didn't like it.

12. Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas - Not as good as the book, of course, but still pretty good. Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro are great in the lead roles. Terry Gilliam's film works because he walks the same fine line Hunter S. Thompson did between madcap drug-induced hilarity and biting social satire and poignant nostalgia: "a savage journey to the heart of the American dream". The best parts in the movie are the slow ones: Thompson writing about the crashing of the 60s wave, the diner scene. the movie, and book are about a lot of things, drugs are not one of them.

11. Out Of Sight - The overrated Steven Soderbergh;s best movie, by far. Also probably the best of the Tarantino-imitation films of the 90s. It helps that it's an adaptation of a story by Elmore Leonard, Tarantino's favorite author. George Clooney plays an escaped bank robber, Jennifer Lopez is the US Marshal who hunts him down. Of course, there's a romance along the way. Great supporting performances from Don Cheadle, Albert Brooks, Dennis Farina, Ving Rhames, Luis Guzman, Steve Zahn, and Michael Keaton. It's told in a non-linear style (a la Tarantino) and is a really great-looking movie with a very cool use of color. I haven't seen his Oceans 11 films, but this is very slick for Soderbergh.

10. Elizabeth - Speaking of slick, this is an MTV version of the historical costume drama. Director Shekhar Kapur uses a great sense of color, and a modern visual style to make a Queen Elizabeth biopic that is never boring. Actually, compared to recent highly acclaimed biopics like A Beautiful Mind, Ray and Walk The Line, this is a masterpiece. Cate Blanchett is remarkable in the lead role, unfortunately, the other actors aren't so good. Geoffry Rush and Richard Attenborough chew scenery as the Queen's top advisors, Fanny Ardant, Christopher Eccleston are alright, and John Gielgud is really old. Joseph Fiennes though, he's really bad as Elizabeth's whiny, incompetent boyfriend. He really drags the movie down.

9. Meet Joe Black - Three great looking movies in a row. This is a guilty pleasure of mine, as I've yet to hear of anyone else who actually likes this movie. I love it though, and I've seen it a lot. Anthony Hopkins is a wealthy old businessman with a couple of daughters. Instead of dying like he's supposed to, Death decides he's curious about life and gets Hopkins to show him around. To help with this endeavor, Death kills Brad Pitt and takes over his body. Of course, Death promptly falls in love with Hopkins's youngest daughter, Claire Forlani. It's all very melodramatic and romantic and tend s to make the room a little dusty but I dig it nonetheless. Director Martin Brest has had an up and down career (Beverly Hills Cop, Midnight Run, Scent Of A Woman, Gigli), but this is my favorite of his films. It's the cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki that really gets me: very lush, deep browns and yellows, everything looks so rich. Looking him up, he's a pretty accomplished DP. In addition to this and the upcoming Terrence Malick film The New World, he also did Y Tu Mama Tambien, Ali, Reality Bites, A Walk In The Clouds, The Birdcage, Sleepy Hollow The Cat In The Hat and Lemony Snicket.

8. Pi - What a year for great-looking movies, though this is about as opposite to Meet Joe Black as you can get. Darren Aronofsky's debut film is about a schizophrenic mathematician who believes he's close to cracking a code that will explain the meaning of life, or something like that. Soon, he's under attack by corporate goons, the NSA and crazy cabalistic Jews. It's shot in an ultra-low budget handheld black and white, rapid cut style (and a punding techno soundtrack) that gets more and more frantic as the film moves along. The film is structured like a black hole: the main character spirals around, faster and faster until he reaches the center, where all the laws of physics breakdown. A great great film. But I'll still never watch Requiem For A Dream.

7. Run Lola Run - Another very inventive indie film with a loud electronic soundtrack. You probably already know the gimmick here: Lola has to find a bunch of money that her boyfriend lost before he robs a grocery store and gets himself killed. The film explores three different scenarios in a clever game of What If? Franka Potente is great as Lola. A very fun, stylish movie, quite possibly my favorite German film. It's certainly up there with M and Aguirre: The Wrath Of God.

6. There's Something About Mary - Not so much the cause of the dumb character/gross-out comedies of the late 90s/early 2000s as it is the best of them. The reason it succeeds where so so many others failed is that it actually does have a heart. Not an ironic heart, but an actual sappy corny melodramatic heart. Ben Stiller gives one of his best performances, and one of the few where he isn't playing the angry guy from Mystery Men. Cameron Diaz is great as the object of everyone's desire and Matt Dillon and Chris Elliot are terrific in their supporting roles. Also stars Jeffery Tambor, Markie Post, Keith David, W. Earl Brown (from Deadwood, unrecognizable as Mary's brother), Khandi Alexander and Sarah Silverman.

5. Pleasantville - A great cast highlights this inventive coming of age movie. Tobey Maguire, Reese Witherspoon, William H. Macy, Joan Allen, Jeff Daniels Don Knotts and JT Walsh star. Witherspoon and Maguire were largely unknown at the time (though not to film geeks like me) and they give their typical great performances. Joan Allen is outstanding as the slowly-becoming-unrepressed housewife (she even makes an appearance as a sound clip in each episode of The Rachel Maddow Show). One of those movies that suffers because people focus way too much on it's political content (which isn't all that interesting) to the detriment of it's inventiveness as a film. The mixed black and white/full color scenes are really beautiful and the coming of age stories are very well-told and believable. One of those movies the Academy inexplicably passed over: it got great reviews, did very good business, had great performances, but got nothing come Oscartime. It's ten times the film that Shakespeare In Love is. Writer-director Gary Ross also wrote Big, Mr. Baseball and Dave, and wrote and directed Seabiscuit.

4. Rounders - A great little movie that was largely ignored theatrically but found a great following on video as it got caught up in, and helped fuel, the great poker revival of the early 2000s. Directed by John Dahl, who did Red Rock West and The Last Seduction, this film stars Matt damon as a former poker hustler trying to go straight by going to law school after he lost all his money to John Malkovich. But when his amoral old buddy Edward Norton gets out of jail, Damon gets sucked back into the poker lifestyle, to the detriment of his relation ship with the cute wet blanket girlfriend Gretchen Moll. Norton predictably gets them both into big financial trouble and the only way to save them is for Damon to beat Malkovich in the big game. Along the way he gets some help from his law professor Martin Landau and Famke Janssen. Oh, and John Turturro shows up somewhere in there too. It's the Karate Kid of the 90s. A truly classic sports film.

3. The Thin Red Line - By far the best World War II film of the year. Way better than that Tom Hanks propaganda cheesefest that won all those awards and so many people still inexplicably drool over. This film, Terrence Malick's first since Days Of Heaven, which I rated #2 in 1978, is an adaptation of the novel by James Jones, who also wrote From Here To Eternity, the film of which is also better than Saving Private Ryan. Sean Penn, Ben Chaplin, and Jim Caviezel are the three main characters, though theres a cast of dozens, including Woody Harrelson, John Cusak, George Clooney, Nick Nolte (a terrific performance), Elias Koteas, Adrian Brody, Jared Leto, John C. Reilly, John Savage, Tim Blake Nelson, and John Travolta. the films is basically three action set pieces divided by some long, slow reflective scenes with the characters narrating various ruminations on life and war and nature. The action scenes are as good as anything in SPR, and the slow parts, while sometimes kind of annoying, are at least more thoughtful than waving a flag and shouting "Earn this!"

2. Rushmore - Wes Anderson's best movie is about a very strange kid, the school he loves, his rich midlife crisis-ridden friend and the teacher they're both hot for. Jason Schwartzman, whose band does the theme song for The OC, is great in the lead role. Bill Murray revived his career with this role, and doesn't seem to have stopped playing this character yet (this is much, much better than Lost In Translation). Olivia Williams plays the teacher, you might remember her as the bridesmaid Joey hooked up with during the wedding in London episodes of Friends. It's Anderson's best because it isn't nearly as silly as The Life Aquatic or Bottle Rocket, but still has the sense of fun and play that is sorely missing from the depressing The Royal Tenenbaums.



1. The Big Lebowski - If you don't know why this movie is the best of the year, then you simply haven't seen it often enough. It is, without a doubt, the best film noir musical western bowling comedy ever made. One of the most quotable movies ever. For those who don't know, it stars: Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, John Turturro, Julianne Moore, Tara Reid, Ben Gazzera, Sam Elliot, Peter Storemare, David Thewlis and Flea. After mistakenly having his rug soiled by loan collectors, The Dude becomes caught up in a blackmail and kidnapping scheme involving the rich Big Lebowski, his trophy wife and former porn star Bunny, his artist daughter Maude, a trio of former German electronic pop nihilists all while trying to get ready for the big bowling match against convicted sex offender Jesus. It's big, weird, totally unique and absolutely brilliant. Watch it enough times, and you'll see that the entire universe can be understood in its terms. The Out Of The Past podcast guys did a big podcast a couple weeks ago comparing and contrasting this with Howard Hawks's the Big Sleep that I highly recommend. They clearly preferred Lebowski, as do I, though I liked The Big Sleep more than they did. Sometimes, there's a man.


A decent number of Unseen Movies this year, but nothing I'm in a big rush to watch:

Blade
Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels
After Life
Affliction
Hilary And Jackie
Beloved
Babe: Pig In The City
Six-String Samurai
Clay Pigeons
The General
Flowers Of Shanghai
Velvet Goldmine
Half Baked
Apt Pupil
The Horse Whisperer
The Red Violin
BASEketball
Great Expectations
Ringu
Central Station
Gods And Monsters
The Avengers
Happiness
Patch Adams
The Celebration
City Of Angels
Antz
Rush Hour
You've Got Mail
Deep Impact
A Bug's Life
High Art
Kurt & Courtney
Twilight
Chairman Of The Board
The Newton Boys
My Giant
How Stella Got Her Groove back
Safe Men
Gadjo Dilo
Kiki's Delivery Service