Had the Scene’s movie reviewers been forced, six months ago, to compile a list of 10 rock-solid films from 2002, we’d have sat drumming our pencils on half-empty pads. And yet here we are, at year’s end, straining to limit ourselves to 15. Was the first part of the year that bad, and the second half that good?
Well, yeah. Thanks to calcified distribution patterns, which logjam prestige films into the winter months to compete for awards and year-end honors, the year in cinema is like a sporting event that doesn’t get started until the second half. 2002’s mix of penetrating documentaries, bold stylistic efforts and strong works by established veterans is still going in quadruple overtime. And film-festival favorites such as the Thai summer reverie Blissfully Yours, Claire Denis’ Paris-by-night romance Vendredi soir and Gaspar Noé’s hellish Irréversible won’t even arrive here until spring, maybe even fall—if at all.
Whether they show up depends on Nashville’s hard-to-predict arthouse audience. Viewers here will turn out in force for Godard’s Band of Outsiders but leave the monumental Decalogue playing to stony silence. And yet the makings of a scrappy, supportive film culture are here—as evinced by Steve and Debbie Taylor and Lipscomb students Benji Jones and Josh Harrison, who sat through all 10 hours of Kieslowski’s masterwork at the Belcourt. These people make us proud. These people give us hope. So do the movies, actors and trends below.
Movies that mattered
Femme Fatale Brian De Palma’s curse is to know more about movies, and movie history, than the hacks who keep calling him a Hitchcock scavenger. In the case of this exhilarating and deviously multifaceted thriller—a film-studies dissertation hidden in a bottomless box of chocolate-covered sin—accusing him of ripping off Hitchcock is like accusing Todd Haynes of ripping off Sirk. Not just a daredevil piece of cinematic storytelling, juggling multiple plots, paths and even destinies, this is a master class in how to visually organize a movie. When it comes out on DVD, spend an afternoon tracing its running-water motif—and watch open-mouthed as an uproariously trashy thriller suddenly yields a complex symbolic and spiritual order. I hear there’s nekkid women in it too.
J.R.
Gangs of New York This Martin Scorsese knockout gave a layered excavation of the moral compromise built into America’s foundation. Complaints about the “weakness” of its central narrative—which doesn’t look so weak on a second viewing—seem silly considering its visionary re-creation of bloody, corrupt old New York. Like the culture it celebrates, the movie is a glorious, sometimes snarling mongrel: part spaghetti Western, part pirate costumer, with traces of Hammer horror and Viking epics and Technicolor pageantry. And yeah, using real honest-to-God sets and extras instead of digitized forms and masses makes a difference. Scorsese’s past has the weight of a brick thrown through a window. And yet three hours in a movie theater seldom seemed so light.
N.M./J.R.
Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India Bollywood may well become the Next Big Thing, given that Indian epics are getting slicker and the full-blown musical is making a comeback in the States. If so, we couldn’t imagine a better inaugural hit than Lagaan, with the charisma of producer/star Aamir Khan oozing out of every frame, surrounded by a lovable bunch of ragtag villagers taking on arrogant British colonials in their first-ever cricket match. When a movie is this much fun, 224 minutes scarcely seems long enough.
D.B.
Punch-Drunk Love Just when Paul Thomas Anderson threatened to overwhelm us with misplaced ambition and auteurist quirks, he gave us this beautiful porcelain box of a movie. And just when Adam Sandler’s stock characters were sinking into ugliness and unintelligible accents, he revealed vulnerability, passion and perfect pitch. Who would have thought that Anderson, on track for bigger and more scattershot Altman-esque ensemble comedies, would choose to emulate Popeye instead of A Wedding? Instead of a massive, flashy rhinestone, he delivered a tiny gem.
D.B.
Spirited Away Hayao Miyazaki caps a rewarding, varied career in animation with his most imaginative and entertaining achievement: a funny, sad, exciting and elemental story of a girl lost between fantasy and reality, between the self-absorption of childhood and the demands of adolescence.
N.M.
Time Out/What Time Is It There? Two exquisite foreign films took us time-traveling in 2002. Laurent Cantet’s journey into unemployment, investment scams and familial deceit has its roots in the newly shortened French work week. And Taiwanese “master shot” cinema has never been as riveting as it is in Tsai Ming-liang’s inspired comparison of death with travel in a distant time zone. Time Out is pensive but accessible; What Time Is It There? demands the full attention, memory and patience of the viewer. Both fulfill the promise of their titles by immersing us in completely novel temporal experiences, changing our everyday perceptions.
D.B.
Bowling for Columbine By bracketing his most considered and accomplished work to date with Camper Van Beethoven and Joey Ramone, Michael Moore finally acknowledges his punk roots. It’s 1977 again, and the world’s on a fast track to oblivion; no time for such niceties as public debate or fact-checking. The director-provocateur didn’t invent the machine, but he’s more than willing to co-opt (and/or subvert) it. Squeamish leftists may aver, but what use is moral high ground on the eve of the Flood? Whether hanging with a thoughtful Marilyn Manson, lampooning a befuddled Charlton Heston or rewriting U.S. history in cartoon and montage, Moore excavates our “culture of fear” with wit, passion and genuine concern. Exiting the screening, I couldn’t help but feel vaguely Canadian. How punk.
S.M.
Far From Heaven After a second viewing, the film’s minor flaws become more apparent: A tasty jazz combo entertains an afternoon tavern gathering, hearty plants flower during a snow-less Connecticut winter. Yet such flaws are wholly consistent with Todd Haynes’ fully realized Sirkian reinvention. From the gentle caress of the opening camera dolly to the honeyed, golden delivery of the leads to the climactic side-yard farewell that seemingly encapsulates 50 years of race and gender struggle, Haynes creates a work of aching beauty. Closing with a rhyming upward sweep, the film, like Julianne Moore’s Cathy, ultimately surrenders to a world without color, without afternoon idylls, without winter flowers—a world much like our own.
S.M.
Documentaries At the movies this year, fiction was very nearly trumped by real life. Comedian explains why Jerry Seinfeld gets famous while other up-and-comers go crazy on the stand-up beat. In Daughter From Danang, an Amerasian girl raised in Tennessee finds a family—and a new set of anxieties—in Vietnam. Hell House looks at what drives naive youth and desperate middle-aged men to impersonate Satan’s minions in the name of the Lord. Theater was the basis for two impressive docs: The Komediant, with its glimpses of the lost world of Jewish theater, and Last Dance, a harrowing document of the artistic differences manifested when dance troupe Pilobolus collaborates with Maurice Sendak. No less moving is Lifetime Guarantee: Phranc’s Adventures in Plastic, a look at the rewards and disappointments of believing in minority empowerment through capitalism—focusing on a Jewish lesbian folksinger turned Tupperware lady. Sister Helen paints a bleak portrait of a community of recovering addicts and the stubborn woman who could almost control them, while the hilarious, revealing Tribute studies a much goofier subject: the internal struggles of rock-band impersonators.
D.B./N.M.
In Praise of Love Jean-Luc Godard’s latest masterpiece (and how many directors truly warrant that phrase?) may well serve as a more compelling thinkpiece, inspiring spirited discussion—if only because its deeply packed weave of ideas and arguments tends to expand and reverberate over time. On its own terms, the film certainly ranks among his most visually ravishing and sumptuous. And once you recognize that his deliberately bald anti-American pronouncements are matched by an equally jaundiced European slant, it may prove among his most tender and empathetic as well. As critic Manohla Dargis notes, the film, however guarded, has the feel of an embrace.
S.M. Editor’s note: Scott Manzler sits on the board of the Belcourt Theatre, which will be screening In Praise of Love later this month.
Actors
The eyes have it More than makeup, gesture or accent, the lead performers of 2003 relied on their eyes. Actor of the year Nicolas Cage played desperate screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and his more successful twin brother in Adaptation, distinguishing the former by his beady need and the latter by his carefree sparkle. Actress of the year Samantha Morton conveyed the fear and wonder of Morvern Callar’s wandering punk nihilist with her wide-open peepers. The year’s most captivating villain, Daniel Day-Lewis’ swaggering Bill the Butcher, tapped his glass eye with a blade in Gangs of New York and wielded his remaining gaze like a laser beam. And a whole new category should be invented for Adrien Brody, whose Holocaust survivor in The Pianist becomes thinner, hairier and increasingly unrecognizable, save for the faint glimmer of soul beneath his sagging lids.
N.M./J.R.
Eight women After years of rote repetition, it’s become something of an axiom that there are no good roles for women. Bullshit. Not even the mainstream media could deny left-of-center triumphs from Julianne Moore (Far From Heaven) and Isabelle Huppert (The Piano Teacher), but several others proved just as strong. Sandrine Kiberlain’s maternal ache grounded Alias Betty’s twisted labyrinth of jealousy, betrayal and murder, while Summer Phoenix’s voracious 19th century stage diva Esther Kahn literally ate glass for her craft. Martina Gedeck rescued romantic comedy from a lingering Meg Ryan hangover in Mostly Martha; at the opposite end of the emotional spectrum, Murderous Maid Sylvie Testud enacted a wholly unnerving descent into dementia. Edie Falco’s soulful gaze provided a stirring testament to life interrupted and the enduring inner mermaid in John Sayles’ Sunshine State. And in Y Tu Mamá También, Maribel Verdú rendered an adolescent wet dream as all-too-human flesh and blood.
S.M.
Fanny Ardant Her sly, dimpled smile and drop-dead red dress were the lifeblood of François Ozon’s Sirkian circus 8 Women—where she performed the kiss of the year with Catherine Deneuve.
D.B.
Steve Coogan/Leonardo DiCaprio/James Nesbitt These three charismatic leads portrayed famous people in movies that approached their subjects in wildly different styles: the postmodern biopic of 24 Hour Party People, where Coogan was a hoot as Factory Records impresario Tony Wilson; the flashy caper of Catch Me If You Can, with DiCaprio exuding confident charm as great pretender Frank Abagnale Jr.; and the pseudo-doc Bloody Sunday, in which Nesbitt’s embattled MP tries to keep the unkeepable peace between British soldiers and IRA insurgents.
D.B.
Brian Cox/Dennis Quaid/Emily Watson Some of the best performances of the year came from actors who moonlighted in multiple films. Cox played a well-meaning criminal enabler in 25th Hour and a harsh screenwriting guru in Adaptation. Quaid anchored the true-life baseball drama The Rookie and played the embodiment of ’50s suburban frustration in Far From Heaven. And the remarkable Watson soothed Adam Sandler’s seethe in Punch-Drunk Love and completely ran away with the mediocre Red Dragon as a sweet, sexually needy blind woman.
N.M.
Willem Dafoe & Greg Kinnear Paul Schrader’s Auto-Focus wasn’t seen as widely as it should’ve been, which means that most folks missed the dynamic duo of the movie year: Kinnear as sex-obsessed semi-celebrity Bob Crane and Dafoe as his bad-influence buddy John Carpenter, both so consumed by porn and perversity that they make swinging a joyless grind.
N.M.
Campbell Scott Scott, in the criminally overlooked comedy Roger Dodger, isn’t one of those twinkly About a Boy cads with a marshmallow center. His ad-man lady-killer remains cynical and self-impressed right up to the closing credits, and funnier for it. The amusingly arrogant Roger makes such engaging company, though, that critics bashed writer-director Dylan Kidd for making the jerk so likable. But that has everything to do with Scott’s dynamic assurance and little to do with Kidd’s keen portrait of a stunted narcissist losing his bloom. Catch the movie when it plays the Belcourt next week—not just for Scott, but for an unlikely pair of enchanting barflies: Jennifer Beals and Elizabeth Berkley.
J.R.
Recurring motifs
Bare necessities 2002’s many memorable nude scenes were revealing on many levels. Scarlet Diva auteur Asia Argento stands starkers before her bathroom mirror and shaves her pits, raising the movie’s often silly exhibitionism to the sublime. Frida star Salma Hayek loses her full-body cast like a butterfly shedding its cocoon, unveiling soft, full breasts covered in plaster dust. The sexually charged Secretary displays surprising tenderness when Maggie Gyllenhaal removes her clothes and shows her self-inflicted scars to sadistic boss James Spader. Most remarkable was Emily Mortimer’s climactic scene in Lovely and Amazing, in which her insecure actress boldly asks colleague Dermot Mulroney to critique her naked body—something all these performers had the guts to risk.
N.M.
Crises of faith Only The Believer rode its bucking-horse of a premise—a Jew (Ryan Gosling) who becomes an equally fervent neo-Nazi—all the way to the end without a cop-out. But Frailty and Signs, despite unfortunate conclusions, also asked tough questions about faith, God, holiness and religious experience. In an age when Christian organizations are bankrolling entire slates of movies with the answers already inked in, movies that reveal the difficulty of knowing what to believe are priceless treasures.
D.B.
Double plays Two Stevens—Spielberg and Soderbergh—are even in the two-films-a-year sweepstakes, an ambitious pace that encourages risk on individual projects. (It paid off better for Spielberg than Soderbergh, though history may disagree.) But what’s with the remarkable debut of newcomer Charles Stone III, who announced himself with two assured films—the underrated drug lord epic Paid in Full and the delightful college musical Drumline—in two months? And then there’s screenwriter-auteur Charlie Kaufman, represented by three inimitable films: Human Nature, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Adaptation. Of course, he cheated somewhat: His twin brother helped.
J.R.
Going for broke Filmmakers risked stopping their movies dead in their tracks to reach for something grand—a dazzling set piece, a daring aside. In 25th Hour, director Spike Lee pauses to let Edward Norton deliver an electrifying rant about everything he hates and loves about New York. Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman trace the roots of Adaptation way, way back in a detour to the dawn of time. And Y Tu Mamá También comes with its own DVD commentary and extras: omniscient narration that repeatedly connects the movie’s erotic road trip to the background comedies and tragedies of modern Mexico, providing glimpses of other stories the teen heroes can’t see through their hormones.
N.M./J.R.
Graying at the temple For all the talk about the movies’ persistent selling to (and of) teens, youth culture did not make My Big Fat Greek Wedding a nine-figure blockbuster. Nor did it produce performances as autumnal and affecting as Jack Nicholson’s in About Schmidt, Michael Caine’s in the superb Last Orders or Michel Piccoli’s in I’m Going Home. The effects of aging reverberated throughout the year’s films, from Clint Eastwood’s affectingly haggard mystery Blood Work to deposed mogul Robert Evans’ old-school panache in the documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture. Perhaps it’s a reaction to the new century, or to the uncertain future of film in the digital age. Whatever the case, it gave these movies a pleasing sense of gravity. I’m Going Home, a jewel directed by 93-year-old Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira, seemed to pack a lifetime of gentle reflection, wonder and loss into its brief running time. We should all live to be so young.
J.R.
Incomplete grades Two films this year effectively thwarted my efforts at being a movie critic. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers can’t be evaluated as a stand-alone feature because it cannot stand alone: This transitional spectacle is clearly the middle three hours of a single massive film and awaits its conclusion. And while Adaptation’s crummy third act dooms it as a movie, it’s integral to the film’s success as a cry of despair about the possibility of making a movie out of its source material. These are complexities no number, grade or thumb can convey.
D.B.
That ’70s showing Polanski, Spielberg, De Palma, Scorsese, Lucas, Bogdanovich, Paul Schrader—is this 2003 or 1973? While the early ’70s are being canonized as Hollywood’s last golden age (do these people remember Earthquake?), its lions roared in ageless near-unison this year with the kind of risky, auteur-driven, yet commercially viable films not seen since—what? Chinatown? The Last Picture Show? Is it a sign of strength or weakness that these names are still providing much of the best the studios have to offer? More importantly, can we expect showings as strong from P.T. Anderson, Richard Linklater, Wes Anderson and other indie-wave rule-breakers 30 years from now? Here’s hoping the kids stay in the picture.
J.R.
Wanderlust Characters took to the road in 2002, looking for answers, pleasures and spiritual meaning lacking at home. In About Schmidt, Jack Nicholson’s retired insurance salesman tours the kitschy rest areas and barren stretches of road that connect the strip malls of Middle America. The hero of Time Out, an unemployed investment banker, prefers the aimless commute to the job itself. And in Morvern Callar, a sullen Scottish shopgirl comes into some money, puts on a Walkman and reinvents herself as a globe-trotting writer—courtesy of a conveniently dead boyfriend.
N.M.
Wedding bell blues Unbearable, peek-through-your-fingers suspense resulted from the year’s two most harrowing cinematic wedding receptions. (No, not that big fat predictable Greek one.) About Schmidt climaxes with its self-centered hero considering his one chance to tell the truth, as his daughter’s wedding party looks on nervously. And in the startling Israeli comedy Late Marriage, the coddled hero lays bare the negotiations of his arranged marriage. In both films, supposed celebrations of true love are revealed as fragile bundles of social conventions, primed to shatter if anyone doesn’t follow the forms.
D.B.
What the hell? I was fascinated by the Inuit epic Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, the French sex-as-cannibalism reverie Trouble Every Day, and the orgasmic Japanese sex comedy Warm Water Under a Red Bridge—despite not knowing half the time what was going on.
D.B.
Wind from the East No doubt it’s critically irresponsible, not to mention culturally insensitive, to lump a vast, varied outpouring of quality cinema under the reductive catchall “Asian Cinema.” But I’m simply overwhelmed—by Japan’s rapidly evolving and expanding New Wave, by Hong Kong’s post-repatriation resurgence, by China’s fascinating ghost dance with history and Taiwan’s bountiful auteurist hothouse. And there’s much, much more out there. Hollywood’s reaction: Buy up the record-setting genre workouts and retrofit them as deracinated U.S. knockoffs. Nashville’s reaction: Virtually nonexistent—only 119 people braved Tsai Ming-liang’s What Time Is It There?, one of the year’s very best, during its week-long run. What fate, if any, awaits films as entertaining and provocative as Devils on the Doorstep, Pistol Opera, Springtime in a Small Town, Turning Gate and Unknown Pleasures? Consider this a call-up.
S.M.
Better than you’ve heard, worse than you could imagine
The Adventures of Pluto Nash How obscene is this waste of resources? Take a year’s worth of humanitarian aid funding, then blow it all on Chuck E. Cheese tokens. Then spill them down a sewer grate. Watch this and feel your brain cells pop like zits. The year’s other lousy movies had reviews built right into the titles: Bad Company, Half Past Dead, Enough. The worst movie by a director of note: Woody Allen’s Hollywood Ending. The title’s missing a hyphen.
J.R.
Blade II/Resident Evil Here’s how movies will look when your GameCube-addicted nephew nets $60 million and a three-picture deal—and how they’ll look is cool. Yes, they’ll have one-dimensional heroes and zombies aplenty, and every 45 seconds they’ll heave another bucket of guts at the screen. They’ll also be so thoroughly steeped in video-game conventions—repetition, resurrection, the nihilistic rush of rechargeable apocalypse—that they’ll emerge as a new mutant art form. The acid-jazz cutting will give Michael Bay seizures. Your eyes will either adjust or explode. And that’s without Milla Jovovich in a miniskirt, kicking zombie ass.
J.R.
Changing Lanes This tale of two frustrated New Yorkers—working-class rageaholic Samuel L. Jackson and upscale amoral jerk Ben Affleck—pushed their respective crises too far into the red, but the movie works better than it should, thanks to a multidimensional performance by Jackson, taut, visually dynamic direction by Roger Michell, and a subtle commentary about the meaning of Christian redemption.
N.M.
Showtime/We Were Soldiers The former was a dopey buddy package for Eddie Murphy and Robert DeNiro, neither of whom could provide enough charisma to overcome the moronic plot—which exemplified the cop-movie clichés it meant to satirize. The latter was a culturally conflicted prestige project for Mel Gibson, who played a ridiculously sensitive Vietnam commander while spouting writer-director Randall Wallace’s overcooked retro-ironic dialogue.
N.M.
Star Wars: Episode II—Attack of the Clones Not the worst film of the year, but definitely the lamest high-profile entry I saw. Much like Jimmy James’ Macho Business Monkey Wrestler (of NewsRadio fame), the script was seemingly cribbed from a middling Flash Gordon episode, translated into Japanese and then back again into English. It’s telling that subtitled extraterrestrials delivered the most convincing line readings. Not to mention performances. Dishonorable mentions: Full Frontal’s naked self-indulgence and The Importance of Being Earnest’s terminal case of the whimsies.
S.M.
XXX ZZZ.
J.R.
