Year in Review: 2002

I know right now that I am going to catch some flak for my top 10 list for this – especially for my choice of the year’s best, which to me is an admittedly flawed film, but one I love all the more for them. I’ll catch hell for leaving off some titles that were admittedly great films. But the bottom line is that 2002 is one of the best years in recent memory – eliminate these 10 films, and you could still make up another list of ten great ones (don’t believe me? check out the films that DIDN’T make the cut below, which just maybe the strongest group I have ever had). But I’ll stick to my choices – even my number one choice, and if you want to accuse me of making excuses for my favorite director go ahead. I don’t care.

10. The Pianist (Roman Polanski)
Unlike many Polish filmmakers of his generation, Roman Polanski had pretty much resisted delving into his people’s recent past – not making an explicit references to WWII, even though Polanski himself was a Holocaust survivor who hide out in the ghetto during the war as a child. But something in him must have known that at some point, he would address the issue in one of his films – and in The Pianist he finally did. Adrien Brody gives an incredible performance as a Jewish pianist who watches in horror as his country is invaded, and then his people are shunted away into ghettos, and eventually shipped off to concentration camps. He depends on others to help him hide – eventually riding out the war pretty much forgotten about and abandoned in an apartment, where much like the people in the camps, he starts to waste away into nothing. Polanski’s filmmaking here is impeccable – the early scenes establishing the time and place remarkably. But to me, it is the later scenes – particularly a nearly half hour stretch near the end that is practically wordless where Polanski shows his true mastery. Polanski has made better films in his career – but I wonder if any are as personal as this one.

9. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (Peter Jackson)
I know I am most likely in the minority on this one, but I actually think that The Two Towers is probably the best of The Lord Of the Rings movies. Unlike Fellowship, it doesn’t have to spend any time introducing us to all of the characters, and unlike Return of the King, it doesn’t have to end again and again and again. This movie is pure storytelling from the beginning of the movie until the end. The film contains some of the series best actions sequences and deepens our understanding of the characters. Middle movies in a trilogy are hard, because nothing really gets resolved – but Jackson and company have made a marvelous middle movie here – and for me, it remains the best single film of the trilogy.

8. Spirited Away (Hayao Miyzaki)
Hayao Miyazaki is one of the greatest animators in history, and Spirited Away may well be his masterpiece. This is the story of a little girl who enters a magical spa with her parents, whose greed and gluttony immediately turns them into pigs, leaving their daughter to try and fend for herself, and reverse things. The is beautifully well animated from start to finish – full of interesting characters like the witch with the giant head, the multi-armed man in the basement, and the polluted River God. Miyazaki mixes in his environmental agenda (which has been present in many of his films), but never lets the movie get bogged down or preachy. Easily one of the best animated films of the decade.

7. Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes)
Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven is a throwback to the Douglas Sirk films of the 1950s, where simmering erotic tension was just beneath the surface, and even if they were not explicit, you could tell that homosexuality and bi-racial romances were being implied. In a way, Haynes made the film that Sirk never could. Julianne Moore gives an excellent performance as a housewife you believes she has the perfect life, until she finds out her husband (Dennis Quaid) is gay, and it sends her into a tailspin. Dennis Haysbert plays her gardener, and despite their racial differences, the two start to fall in love. Patricia Clarkson is great in a small role as the nosy neighbor who sticks her nose in where it doesn’t belong. Haynes does a great job recreating Sirk’s dazzlingly Technicolor look, and the score by Elmer Bernstein brilliantly evokes the classic scores of the 1950s. This is not the 1950s as it really was – but how it was as filtered through the movies.

6. About Schmidt (Alexander Payne)
Alexander Payne has firmly established himself as one of America’s best filmmakers (now make another damn film Alex!), and About Schmidt is one of the big reasons why. The film stars Jack Nicholson in one of the best performances of his career as a recently widowed man who travels across country to be at his daughter’s wedding. About Schmidt is a subtle comedy, which mixes in healthy doses of tears along with the laughs. Schmidt is a guy who has never been all that open or loving with the people in his life, and he has become isolated and remote by the passing of his wife – a woman who he pretty much hated by the end. Kathy Bates gives a lively performance as his future in law, but this really is Nicholson’s show. He foregoes his usual tendency to simply play Jack, and instead gets inside the skin of a character unlike anything he has ever played before. A sly comedy that sticks with you long after it’s over.

5. Adaptation (Spike Jonze)
Writing is one of the least cinematic actives that you can do. How many ways are there to shot a man sitting at typewriter working through his book? But that is precisely what Spike Jonze’s Adaptation is about. Working off a brilliant screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, the film stars Nicolas Cage (in an amazing dual performance) as both Kaufman himself, and his twin brother Donald. Charlie works hard and diligently trying his damnedest to adapt Susan Orlean’s book, The Orchid Thief, a nearly impossible task he finds. He ends up injecting himself into the screenplay, as well as Susan Orlean herself (Meryl Streep) in her own story about The Orchid Thief (Chris Cooper). Meanwhile, Donald is carefree and easy, and has taken a screenwriting course from Robert McKee (Brian Cox), and has now decided that he too can be a screenwriter, and has come up with an idiotic screenplay entitled The Three (which strangely enough, seems to have been adapted in the horrible film Three). Kaufman has always been fascinated with how the human mind works, mainly his own mind, and in Adaptation he comes up with a brilliant screenplay about his mind and writing in general. And when he cannot come up with an ending, good old Donald is there to supply one.

4. Minority Report (Steven Spielberg)
Spielberg’s science fiction film, based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, is a brilliant Hitchcockian thriller set in a future world where people are arrested for crimes that they haven’t committed – yet. Tom Cruise stars as one of the cops who monitors the near future from murders that are about to take place, and then he and his team race in and stop them before they can happen. But when the machine tells him that he is going to kill someone, he goes on the run like many a Hitchcock hero – an innocent man wrongly accused. Or is he? This is the type of film that Spielberg does better than anyone else. The futuristic world he has created is full of details and wonderfully original creations (most notably, those creepy, crawly spider things). Cruise is excellent in the lead role, but I think Samantha Morton, as one of the three people who can see the future, is even better. Many think that Spielberg screwed up the ending – tacking on a happy one where it didn’t belong. But did he really, or did he just show us that like the Tim Blake Nelson says at one point, they are put where they can dream whatever they want forever.

3. 25th Hour (Spike Lee)
Spike Lee had an interesting decade as a filmmaker starting with the under seen and underrated Bamboozled and ending with the under seen and underrated Passing Strange. But to me, his best achievement of the decade was this 2002 film about a drug dealer (Edward Norton) on his last day of freedom before going to jail for years. The film, coming a year after 9/11 didn’t shy away from the new New York (it even features a lengthy conversation where outside the window we can see ground zero), and instead embraced it. The sequence where Norton pours out of all his rage in a lengthy monologue where he blames everyone else for what happened to him, before finally coming around back to himself is one of the best sequences that Lee has ever shot. Yet the whole movie is electrifying and alive. Norton, who had a troubling decade where he rarely delivered the type of performance that I know he is capable of, is simply amazing here, and he is supported by a great cast including Philip Seymour Hoffman, Barry Pepper, Brian Cox, Rosario Dawson and Anna Paquin. A tour de force for Lee that ranks right along his very best films.

2. Punch-Drunk Love (Paul Thomas Anderson)
After making two of the best films of the 1990s, Paul Thomas Anderson shocked people by making this movie with Adam Sandler. But the gambled paid off, as the film proved that only could Sandler actually act, but also that Anderson could pull off pretty much whatever he wanted to do. The film basically deconstructs Sandler’s screen image – his character here is just as anti-social and prone to violent rages as someone like Happy Gilmore, the difference here is that Anderson and Sandler see this character for who he really is, and do not make him into some kind of misfit hero. The movie spins around and around, as Sandler gets drawn in deeper – deeper into the phone sex scam he unwittingly became a part of, deeper into his obsessive collecting of points to build up air miles, deeper into his novelty business, deeper into his dysfunctional family relationship, and finally deeper into his romance with Emily Watson, who is outwardly normal, but there is something definitely wrong with her. Philip Seymour Hoffman gives a brilliant supporting performance as the mattress king, and the films creepy soundtrack is perfect. I think if you really want to know when Anderson truly announced himself as a singular talent, it was this film.

1. Gangs of New York (Martin Scorsese)
I am better able to see the flaws in this film than I was in 2002 when I was enamored by the film. Yes, the storytelling is sloppy at times, and this is undoubtedly DiCaprio’s weakness performance in a Scorsese movie. And you could probably jettison Cameron Diaz and not lose much. I certainly understand the criticism that the film is a giant mess. But what a glorious, brilliant mess it is! There are scenes as brilliant as anything put to film before – the opening battle (in fact, the lead up to the opening battle is perhaps even better), the scene where DiCaprio wakes up to find Day-Lewis sitting there staring at him with the American flag draped over his shoulders. In fact, pretty much every scene with Day-Lewis who towers over the movie and everyone else in it, just like a character like Bill the Butcher should. The period detail, the amazing cinematography, the overall hugely ambitious, epic scope. So yeah, Gangs of New York is a flawed film. No doubt about that. But I absolutely love it just the same.

Just Missed The Top 10: Ararat (Atom Egoyan), Atanjuarat: The Fast Runner (Zacharis Kunuk), Auto Focus (Paul Schrader), Bloody Sunday (Paul Greengrass), Catch Me If You Can (Steven Spielberg), Femme Fatale (Brian DePalma), Insomnia (Christopher Nolan), The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke), Road to Perdition (Sam Mendes), Secretary (Steven Shainberg), Solaris (Steven Soderbergh), Spider (David Cronenberg), Storytelling (Todd Solondz), Talk to Her (Pedro Almodovar),Time Out (Laurent Cantet), Y Tu Mama Tambien (Alfonso Cuaron).

Oscar Winner – Best Picture: Chicago
The only explanation I can come up as to why Chicago won the top prize this year is that both The Hours and The Pianist were too depressing, Gangs of New York was too flawed and they were waiting until the following year to give the prize to The Lord of the Rings – meaning that of the films they nominated, they really didn’t have another choice. Don’t get me wrong – Chicago is a flashy entertaining musical as good as we have seen this decade, and is a hell of a lot better than some previous musical winners like Oliver, The Sound of Music and Gigi to name but three. But Chicago doesn’t come close to the tops this genre has offered us over the years. Yes, the performances by Renee Zellweger, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Queen Latifah and especially John C. Reilly are impressive (Richard Gere less so, but he doesn’t embarrass himself by any means) and the film is undeniably entertaining. But for an Oscar win? Although I often complain that the Academy rewards movies based on their “importance” more then their merits as a film, this time they should have done just that – and given the Oscar to The Pianist – a film they obviously loved.

Oscar Winner – Director: Roman Polanski, The Pianist
Before Roman Polanski made The Pianist, his career was in an obvious downturn. He hadn’t had a box office hit since 1988’s Frantic, and his last major success that garnered critical praise was 1980s Tess. He had made some interesting films (Death and the Maiden) and some out right stinkers (The Ninth Gate), but it seemed like most people had forgotten about him. But then The Pianist won the Palme D’Or at Cannes, and became a major Oscar player because of his sensitive direction, and the great work by Adrien Brody. The win was not without controversy, because almost immediately, people started to talk about how he was a wanted fugitive from justice, and even if he won the Oscar, he wouldn’t be able to accept it. But he did won anyway, and although I would have voted for Scorsese, I can’t say he didn’t deserve it. In recent months though I have started to wonder if Polanski didn’t win, and the controversy over his fugitive status didn’t get rehashed, would he have been arrested in Switzerland? America didn’t even issue a warrant for his arrest until AFTER he won this Oscar. I’m not defending Polanski – I think he is among the best directors in history, but facts are facts, and the fact is he drugged and raped a teenage girl, but you have to separate the artist from his art, and in this case, no matter what Polanski did, he crafted a brilliant movie.

Oscar Winner – Best Actor: Adrien Brody, The Pianist
I remember at the time I was the only person I knew who thought that Brody was going to win this award. Everyone else was predicting Day-Lewis or Nicholson, but I had a feeling that Brody would win. Brody carries the movie on his shoulders. He is practically every shot of the movie, and his sensitive, and intensely physical performance is a revelation – the best work done by Brody up until that time, and given what we’ve seen since, probably ever will do (although Brody claims his best work ended up on the cutting room floor of Terence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, where he had a lead role that was cut down to nothing, when Malick had to edit his original 6 hour version of the film, which to my knowledge has never been seen by anyone). I still do think that of the nominees, Nicholson, Day-Lewis and even Cage were better, and I would have been tempted to nominate Sandler and Norton as well, but Brody is great in The Pianist, so he was a worthy winner.

Oscar Winner – Best Actress: Nicole Kidman, The Hours
The Academy desperately wanted to reward Kidman. She had recently gotten all the good press resulting from her divorce from Tom Cruise, had reengerized her career the previous year with The Others and Moulin Rouge (for which she received her first Oscar nomination), and was looking like she was entering the prime of her career. And The Hours gave the Academy that chance, not only because as Virginia Woolf, Kidman was wonderful, but also because she fit three of the Academy’s prime factors in giving beautiful women Oscar 1) She played a real person, 2) she was suicidal in the movie with a dramatic death scene and 3) although beautiful, she hid her beauty underneath unflattering make-up – especially that nose! One of the reason I cheered a few years later when Reese Witherspoon won for Walk the Line is that they finally gave the Oscar to a beautiful woman, who actually looked beautiful in the film. Kidman was in the middle of a streak of wins with Halle Berry in Monsters Ball on one side and Charlize Theron one the other of drop dead gorgeous women who made themselves less attractive to win Oscars. Not saying that Kidman didn’t deserve to win (although I think Julianne Moore gave the truly great performance of the year in Far From Heaven, and also think that Diane Lane did a magnificent job in Unfaithful), but the facts are the facts.

Oscar Winner – Best Supporting Actor: Chris Cooper, Adaptation
Chris Cooper is one of those character actors who has a long and great career, but often goes completely unnoticed by the Academy. He has screen credits dating back to 1997, often working with quality directors like John Sayles, Irwin Winkler, Michael Caton-Jones, Joel Schumacher, Alfonso Cuaron and Robert Redford. But it was really Sam Mendes’ American Beauty, where Cooper played the sexually confused Army man next door, that really brought Cooper to the forefront, and when he started to get great roles. In Adaptation though, Cooper gives what is probably the best performance of his great career. He shares almost all of his scenes with Meryl Streep, and he not only holds his own against her, but steals several from her, as the eccentric “criminal”, who has the basis for the Streep’s characters book The Orchid Thief, which in the other half of the movie is giving Charlie Kaufman so much trouble as he tries to adapt it. Cooper is wonderful – and despite the strong competition from fellow nominees Paul Newman in Road to Perdition, Christopher Walken in Catch Me If You Can and John C. Reilly in Chicago (I wasn’t as impressed with Ed Harris in The Hours), he would have been my choice for the win – especially since the Academy didn’t nominate Dennis Quaid great performance in Far From Heaven, or Philip Seymour Hoffman’s hilarious mattress man from Punch-Drunk Love.

Oscar Winner – Best Supporting Actress: Catherine Zeta-Jones, Chicago
Catherine Zeta-Jones is all energy in her role in Chicago, singing and dancing around the screen with far more passion than the rest of the cast. With the possible exception of Queen Latifah, she is also the best singer in the cast, which perhaps explains why she is the only one to win an Oscar – that and the fact that her role is a quasi-lead, and often those win in the supporting categories. She is a lot of fun, just like the movie. But also like the movie, her performance is rather hollow – all flash, but little substance. I enjoyed her work in the film, but the Academy nominated three far better performances – Kathy Bates’ hilarious work in About Schmidt, Meryl Streep’s daring work in Adaptation and Julianne Moore’s tragic work in The Hours (for my money, the best performance in that movie). Of the three, I feel the worst for Moore – an actress of tremendous talent, and four Oscar nominations, who has yet to win the big prize – losing twice this year alone.

Year in Review: 1999

1999 ended the 1990s with a bang. This is one of the key years in recent movie history, as for the most part, this represented a moving away from the old school directors of the 1970s into a new direction. There was still room for the veterans – three of the films on this top ten list represent those – but new directors were finally really starting to step up and take their place. A great year in cinema history.

10. The Straight Story (David Lynch)
I have no idea what inspired David Lynch – master of the absurd – to make this simple, yet touching and brilliantly made movie. It is about an old man named Alvin (Richard Farnsworth in an amazing performance) who now needs to walk with two canes (because using a walker would make him look silly) who finds out that the brother he hasn’t seen in decades (Harry Dean Stanton – great with his one line) has taken ill and doesn’t have long to live. Alvin has lost his driver’s license, and his daughter (Sissy Spacek) is a little slow and doesn’t have one. His brother is hundreds of miles away, but Alvin is determined to see him. So, he sets out on his riding lawnmower to make the long journey to see him – meeting all sorts of people along the way. I wonder if Lynch came up with the title of this movie – because it’s an appropriate one – he plays the material straight from start to finish. For Lynch, that the strangest thing of all.

9. American Beauty (Sam Mendes)
Sam Mendes’ American Beauty remains a incisive, funny dissection of American suburbia in all its dark glory. Kevin Spacey is excellent in the lead role as Lester Burnham, a mild mannered businessman who is sick and tired of his life, his job and just wants to go back and be a teenager again. His wife, Annette Bening, is trying to maintain the American dream, and is sick of Lester and his whining. Meanwhile their teenage daughter (Thora Birch) feels like an outcast and has fallen for the new boy next door (Wes Bentley), as her dad lusts after her best friend (Mena Suvari). American Beauty does not quite have the same impact on me now as it did when I first saw it as a teenager. Having said that, it is a powerful film – expertly acted, written and directed (in Mendes first film behind the camera no less) and I cannot possibly have a best of 1999 list without it.

8. South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (Trey Parker)
I have easily seen this movie somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 times by now. Yes, I am a huge fan of the TV show – and still think it can be among the best written, most intelligent comedies on TV (unless they do an episode about Bono’s shit), but with this movie Trey Parker and Matt Stone have made their one work on unadultered genius. This is the most profane film of the year – perhaps the decade – with constant swearing littered throughout, mixed together with a lot of toilet humor. But the film is also an intelligent satire of itself – depicting the insane reaction that would come about because of the show. It is also a brilliant musical – effortlessly sending up the Disney animated movies of the 1990s with wit and style. Yes, South Park has been, and always will be, about four foul mouthed fourth graders – but it is a work of genius on TV, and in this movie.

7. Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze)
Spike Jonze made an excellent directorial debut with this tremendously weird film from the mind of Charlie Kaufman. John Cusack is excellent as a struggling puppeteer (as if there is any other kind) who stumbles upon a portal into the mind of John Malkovich for fifteen minutes at a stretch – before being spit out onto the New Jersey turnpike. His wife (Cameron Diaz) is getting on his nerves with all of her animals, and slowly he comes to realize that he can use his puppeteering skills to control Malkovich – which turns on the girl he really wants – Catherine Keener. The four leads are great in the movie – it took guts for Malkovich to play himself in this way – and Jonze’s direction helps to make this seemingly outlandish movie seem believable. Charlie Kaufman’s first screenplay gave us a glimpse into the special talent that he really is, and what was to come. A truly one of a kind film.

6. The War Zone (Tim Roth)
Actor Tim Roth made one of the most remarkable debut films of the 1990s with this intense, nearly impossible to watch film. Freddie Cunliffe has the key role as a 15 year old boy who moves with his family from London to a more rundown, rural village. He basically observes his family, which is full of deep, dark secrets. His father (Ray Winstone) is vocally abusive, his mother (Tilda Swinton) is pregnant and has buried her head in the sand about the truth of the family. His older sister (Lara Belmont, in a phenomenal performance) is sexually promiscuous and he suspects has been raped by their father. Roth’s film has echoes of Ingmar Bergman in it – both in its visual look and subject matter – and he does an amazing job of capturing this phenomenally dysfunctional family – warts and all. Please Tim, make another movie already!

5. The Insider (Michael Mann)
Michael Mann’s The Insider seems like a little bit of a departure for him as it is not a hardboiled action film. And yet, the film does fit in alongside the rest of his films quite nicely. It is another film about men who are defined by their jobs – their actions. Al Pacino gives an excellent performance as a 60 Minutes producer who finds Russell Crowe – an ex-tobacco executive who is willing to go on the record and tell him the truth. But this causes no end of trouble and legal maneuverings. Crowe gives one of the best performances of the year – this is the film he should have won his Oscar for – as the man who fights to get his story – and the lies of the tobacco companies – exposed for the world to see. Christopher Plummer gives one of his best performances as well – as Mike Wallace, who backs down in the face of legal pressure. Mann’s direction of the movie is assured, and the movie plays like a thriller. This is one of the best films ever made about journalism.

4. Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick)
Stanley Kubrick’s final film plays like a dream. Tom Cruise is a successful doctor who gets into a fight with his wife (Nicole Kidman), imagines her sleeping with other men, and then heads out into the New York night – where each and every person he meets responds to him in some sort of sexual way. I do not believe that Kubrick meant for the film to be taken literally – it takes place in a sort of dream world version of New York, not the real city. Cruise is excellent in the lead role, as he slowly descends deeper and deeper into the sexual underworld, eventually coming up at an orgy behind a mask. But he remains an observer more than anything else. Eyes Wide Shut is not a movie about a plot – nor its thriller elements – but rather about a mood, and is essentially about the dark fantasy world in which it takes place. The final scene in the film – between Cruise and Kidman again – is just about perfect and ends with one of the best final lines in cinema history. A fitting way to go out for a cinematic giant.

3. Election (Alexander Payne)
Alexander Payne’s Election is the best comedy of 1999 – and one of the best political satires of all time. The entire American election system is seen through the microcosm of a high school election – where the grade grubbing, brown nosing, constant annoyance Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon, in perhaps the best performance any gave this year) goes up against the lunk headed, but sweet injured football star Chris Klein. But while the election is the backdrop for the film, the film itself is really about Mr. McAllister (Matthew Broderick) the teacher who has to oversee the election and truly hates Tracy Flick. It isn’t just because she’s annoying, or that her affair with his best friend got him fired but all of those things combined with his own frustration with his own marriage – and his sexual attraction to Tracy. In many ways, Election resembles American Beauty in its depiction of a mid life crisis, but this movie is far more thoughtful – better written and directed, and even better acted. In the decade since this film has been made, it simply continues to grow in my mind.

2. Fight Club (David Fincher)
David Fincher’s Fight Club has pretty much come to define an entire generation of men. Edward Norton is the main character – a mild mannered risk assessment guy for an insurance company, who is sick and tired of his life. When he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), and together they start Fight Club – where essentially a group of men get together to pummel each other into submission – he is freed by the structure of society. Fight Club is brilliantly directed by David Fincher, and features three amazing performances in the leads (Helena Bonham Carter, as the woman who Pitt fucks, and Norton hates is the third one). It is a complex film, with a twist ending that at first seems absurd, but then makes complete and total sense. Fight Club is one of those movies that gets better and better each time you watch it. It has become one of the most influential films of the 1990s.

1. Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson)
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia is an epic movie about lives intersecting in and around Los Angeles. It is essentially a movie about fathers and their children – how those relationships shape the characters for good or bad for the rest of their lives. The cast is huge including Tom Cruise as an egomanical self help guru, Jason Robards as a dying old man, Julianne Moore as his younger wife, Philip Seymour Hoffman as his nurse, William H. Macy as a former child game show prodigy, Philip Baker Hall as the host of the same show which now has another contender, Melora Walters as a damaged woman, John C. Reilly as the cop who falls for her along with many more. Anderson’s main influence here is obviously Robert Altman – who made similar films with Nashville and Short Cuts to name but two – but Anderson outdoes even that cinema giant. Magnolia is an endlessly inventive film, brilliantly written and directed by Anderson, and acted by his phenomenal cast. After his deliriously entertaining Boogie Nights, he upped the ante here making a wildly ambitious film – that he pulled off brilliantly. This is a masterpiece.

Just Missed The Top 10: All About My Mother (Pedro Almodovar), Boys Don’t Cry (Kimberly Pierce), Bringing Out the Dead (Martin Scoresese), Dick (Andrew Flemyng), Dogma (Kevin Smith), eXistenZ (David Cronenberg), Felicia’s Journey (Atom Egoyan), The Iron Giant (Brad Bird), The Limey (Steven Soderbergh), The Matrix (Andy & Larry Wachowski), Mr. Death (Errol Morris) ,Princess Mononoke (Hayao Miyazaki), Rosetta (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne), Sleepy Hollow (Tim Burton), Summer of Sam (Spike Lee), Sweet and Lowdown (Woody Allen), The Talented Mr. Ripley (Anthony Minghella), Three Kings (David O. Russell), Titus (Julie Taymor), Topsy-Turvy (Mike Leigh), Toy Story 2 (Andrew Stanton).

Notable Films Missed: The Wind Will Carry Us (Abbas Kiarostami)

Oscar Winner – Best Picture & Director: American Beauty (Sam Mendes)
There seems to be some revisionist history going on in regards to American Beauty. In 1999, despite the critical acclaim for some of the other films of the new school – Magnolia, Being John Malkovich, Election, and Fight Club among them – American Beauty was THE critical favorite of the year – and it was also an audience hit. But as often happens when a film becomes this successful – as the Oscar win indicates – people start to bash the film. It’s the same type of reaction that people have when their favorite indie band signs a major label deal and all of sudden are popular – American Beauty was great when it was YOUR film, but when it became EVERYONES film, then the shine wore off. I will admit that I am not as enamored with the film now as I was in 1999 – but it is still a great movie, full of wonderful dialogue, intelligent direction, great cinematography and most all amazing acting. This is certainly a worthy winner of the Best Picture Oscar.

Oscar Winner – Best Actor: Kevin Spacey, American Beauty
In 1999, it seemed like Kevin Spacey was posed to take over the mantel of great actors from the likes of Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino (among others) who had dominated the acting scene for nearly 3 decades and won a host of Oscars. But after American Beauty, Spacey’s direction finder seemed to go haywire, and in the decade since, you’re hard pressed to find a truly great film on his resume (sadly, the closest he comes is Superman Returns, where he did make a good Lex Luthor). Yet Spacey’s post Oscar career has nothing to do with his performance in this movie – in which he is excellent, giving a voice to those countless, pathetic middle aged men who feel trapped by their domestic lives, their wives, their kids and their jobs when all they really want to do is fuck the cheerleader who rejected them in high school. Even though his character is somewhat creepy and immature, you cannot help but love the guy. Personally, I think that Russell Crowe deserved the Oscar for his great work in The Insider (and had he won, we might have been spared the indignity of him winning the following year for Gladiator), but I have no problem with Spacey winning.

Oscar Winner – Best Actress: Hilary Swank, Boys Don’t Cry
Hilary Swank basically came out of nowhere to pull off this victory – essentially crashing the American Beauty bid to become the fourth film in history to win Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Screenplay – which without Swank, would have been easy to do. Swank’s performance in Boys Don’t Cry though earned all the accolades it received. This is not just a stunt performance – featuring an actress playing a character who disguises herself as a man – nor did she win just because the film was based on a real life tragedy – although, both of those certainly helped her to win. But Swank’s performance in the movie is touching and honest – not exploitive at all, and gets to the heart of the character. Watching this performance, you would have thought it would have been the start of a great career, yet despite her other Oscar win, this really hasn’t been the case (seriously, she has only been good in 2 films, and won Oscars for both). But she deserved this one – especially since my choice, Reese Witherspoon in Election, was shamefully snubbed.

Oscar Winner – Best Supporting Actor: Michael Caine, The Cider House Rules
Michael Caine is one of those actors who I am constantly amazed at. Despite the fact that he keeps the same accent for each film, no more where his character is supposed to be from, he has been able to take on a huge variety of roles – from the kind hearted to the naïve to the outright cruel – and make them all believable. I think Caine is the best thing about The Cider House Rules – a mediocre film that took John Irving’s great book and cut the guts out of it (I know Irving wrote the screenplay himself, but that doesn’t change the facts). The one character who comes out unscathed is Caine’s kindly abortionist Dr. Larch, who simultaneously loves and cares for the orphans left with him, and still has no qualms about performing abortions for women – a seeming contradictory character that Caine pulls off wonderfully. Mind you, I don’t think Caine deserved to win for this performance – or even be nominated truth be told – but it is a fine performance just the same.

Oscar Winner – Best Supporting Actress: Angelina Jolie, Girl Interrupted
Girl Interrupted is a wonderfully acted mediocre movie. Winona Ryder is quite good in the lead, and in addition to Angelina Jolie’s creepy, intense performance as a psychopath, Brittany Murphy is excellent as one of her fellow patients in a psych ward. The movie tries hard to recreate the success of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but comes up short. Having said that, Jolie is excellent her. Of the nominees, I would have gone with either Chloe Sevigny for Boys Don’t Cry or Samantha Morton for Sweet and Lowdown (two great actresses, who still do not have an Oscar between them) and think that Kidman was robbed of at least a nomination for Eyes Wide Shut, but I don’t mind this win too much. I just wish the movie itself was a little better.

Year in Review: 1979

1979 contains my favorite film of all time – and yet that is still just a taste of what this last year of the 1970s has in store as far as cinematic treasures go. The tide had already well started to turn at this point – away from the more personal films of the 1970s, into the blockbusters of the 1980s and beyond – but this year still contains some great films by maverick filmmakers. In fact, I think that many of the films on the list represent the best work of some of the best directors of the era.

10. Hardcore (Paul Schrader)
For reasons that I have never understood, Paul Schrader’s Hardcore doesn’t seem to enjoy that much of a reputation among film critics. Dismissed when it was released, critics have yet to rediscover the film, which is a brilliant piece of filmmaking by Schrader and has connections to some of the other films he has been involved in – most notably Taxi Driver and Rolling Thunder. In the film George C. Scott gives an excellent performance as a strict, Christian Reform father, who goes looking for her daughter when she runs away. His investigation leads him into the world of underground porn films in LA, where his daughter has become involved with. This film is one of Schrader’s most personal films – raised by strict Christian Reform parents; he wasn’t even allowed to see a movie until he was in University. Schrader’s film – like Taxi Driver and The Searchers – is really about a man obsessive quest to save a woman who does not want to be saved. True, the end devolves a little bit into a series of car chases – but overall Hardcore is one of the best films Schrader has ever made as a director – and I hope that people soon realize this.

9. Wise Blood (John Huston)
John Huston’s Wise Blood is based on the very strange novel by Flannery O’Connor, and it makes for a very strange film as well. Brad Dourif plays a man who has just come out of the army, goes home to find it empty, and decides to head to “the city”. People their mistake him for a preacher – but he corrects them – “I ain’t no preacher”. But he is. He starts his own church – the Church Without Christ – where he preaches, well nothing really. There is no God, Jesus didn’t die for our sins, and everything is meaningless. Like the novel, the film can be read in any number of different ways – a story of loss and redemption, a portrait of the American south in spiritual crisis, or perhaps just a story of this man in crisis. Huston wisely never really comes down on one side or the other. Brad Dourif is a great actor – but a strange one, which is why he so often plays weird characters. In Hazel Motes he has found a character he is perfect for, and delivers the performance of his career. John Huston is one of those rare directors who seemed to never lose his ambition – and Wise Blood in one of his best late efforts.

8. Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky)
As with all of the director’s film, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker should not be watched unless you are ready for a long, slow meditation on life and death. The film is a science fiction film, but it delves into deep human meaning in its story of a “Stalker” who brings a writer and a professor into the “zone” a mysterious area in Russian when some crashes two decade before, and is now off limits. There is a room in the zone where apparently your wildest dreams will come true if you enter it. The stark black and white photography in the beginning sequence gives way to bright color once inside the zone. The three men talk a lot throughout the film about what brought them to this place, and why. All this is fascinating, but I think it’s the ending sequence – once they return from the zone – that is truly fascinating, and delves into deeper territory. Tarkovsky is a master filmmaker, but one that I admire more than I love. Having said that, Stalker is one of his best films – a thoughtful, intelligent movie who meanings I can only begin to grasp.

7. Vengeance is Mine (Shohei Immamura)
Shohei Immamura’s Vengeance is Mine belongs in that rare category of true crime films that are not exploitative, but mesmerizing. It offers a portrait of pure evil with Ken Ogata’s brilliant performance as a serial killer. The film doesn’t try to explain away why this man feels the need to kill as much as he does. It just presents us with the man and his actions – and leaves us to try and decipher what it is we have seen. Ogata’s face in the movie is a marvel – he is capable of being so calm, so passive and yet at times charming as he lies his way out of his crimes, and then fills with rage when he is committing them. His face is a mask hiding his true self – and yet, what is his true self? Immamura doesn’t seem to know, and I think that even the character himself doesn’t know. He does what he does because he does it. Vengeance is Mine is a chilling film from beginning to end.

6. Alien (Ridley Scott)
Ridley Scott’s Alien is one of the best low budget horror movies ever made. Working with little money, Scott was still able to create one of the most terrifying creatures in screen history in his monstrous Alien who stalks the crew of a spaceship, and tries to knock them off one by one. The film is full of iconic moments – none more so than when the little Alien pops out of John Hurt’s chest and scampers off – a moment that still has the power to shock. Alien remains one of the scariest movies of all time – a masterpiece of film construction – editing, cinematography and art direction – that all goes to make it one of the most intense films ever made – and one of the best of Scott’s career.

5. Dawn of the Dead (George A. Romero)
George A. Romero has now made six zombies films, starting with 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, and the most recent being the upcoming Survival of the Dead. But of them all – and they are all worthwhile films – none of them is better than Dawn of the Dead, which will go down as his masterpiece. A zombie outbreak has the entire country in a panic – a group of people end up at a shopping mall, where they dispose of the zombies inside, and lock it, allowing no one – living or undead – inside. While in the mall, they live like kings – they have everything they could have every wanted in there. But when a group of bikers show up, the two factions go to war with each other, which allows the zombies inside as well. The film is about consumerism (the brilliant, hilarious shot of zombies trying to up the down escalator makes the point clear), but also how the real monsters in the film are the humans. You cannot blame the zombies for being who they are – they are zombies through no fault of their own – but you can blame the humans. The nihilistic ending – which is still cheerier than what Romero envisioned – is chilling, but brilliant. The best zombie movie ever made.

4. All That Jazz (Bob Fosse)
Bob Fosse only directed a handful of films in his career – and none of them were greater than All That Jazz – which can really be seen as his own personal version of Fellini’s 8 ½. Roy Scheider gives a great performance as a thinly veiled Fosse surrogate – an egomaniacal theater director and choreographer who drinks too much, smokes too much and fucks too much – alienating the only people in his life that truly matter to him. The entire film is brilliant, but the finale is one of the all time great show stopping musical numbers – a dizzying, brilliant executed number that ends with Scheider being zipped into a body bag. Say what you want about Caberet, but All That Jazz is a much better, much more complex film. It could just be my favorite musical of all time.

3. Being There (Hal Ashby)
Hal Ashby’s Being There is one of the all time great political satires. A simple man named Chance (Peter Sellers) has spent his entire life being sheltered from the outside world, working as a gardener for a rich man and tending to his garden. When the man dies, Chance is put out on the street, and through a series of strange coincidences, becomes the toast of the town, and is hailed a political genius. His simple talks about how to tend to the garden are mistaken for complex political allegories. He is taken in by a powerful man (Melvyn Douglas) who wants Chance to run for office. Being There is a brilliant movie about our times – and it has not become less relevant in the years since its release, but more so – our television obsessed culture reducing everything to sound bites, and people becoming more and more stupid. Sellers is brilliant in the lead role – but then again everyone is brilliant in this movie. Ashby is one of those directors who only got a chance to make a handful of films – and in Being There he made the film he will always be remembered for.

2. Manhattan (Woody Allen)
Manhattan is my favorite Woody Allen movie of all time. It is the perfect combination of his funny side, and his more serious, introspective side. It doesn’t hurt to have Gordon Willis’ gorgeous black and white photography – which makes New York look more romantic than any film in history – on your side either. Allen is terrific in the lead role as a man who has lost his wife (Meryl Streep) to another woman. He is currently dating a teenager (the beautiful and great Muriel Hemingway), but then he falls for his best friends mistress (Diane Keaton). The film is brilliant in its exploration of Allen’s character. He feels Hemingway is too young for him, and throws himself whole heartedly at the other relationship – but when that goes wrong, all he wants is Hemingway back again. The last line in the movie “You’ve got to have faith in people” is a brilliant ending note – can Allen really have faith in people after everything that has happened? This is not a story of a dirty old man and young girl – but a more exploration of that relationship – even when the film is as hilarious as this one is.

1. Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola)
I have seen thousands of films in my life, but Apocalypse Now remains my favorite of all time. How Coppola got away with making this violent, surrealistic epic set in the Vietnam war still boggles my mind. Given all the problems he had making the film, it amazes me that it came out as brilliant as it did – but he somehow pulled it off. The film stars Martin Sheen – in the best performance of his career – as a soldier sent up river into Cambodia during the war to confront and eliminate the mythical Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), who has gone mad with power, and has turned his compound into his own personal kingdom. For two hours, we are drawn up river with Sheen, seeing horror after horror, and right alongside him, we become fascinated by Kurtz. When we do finally meet him, Brando does not disappoint – giving one of the best performances of his career as the rambling madman Kurtz. The entire cast is brilliant – Robert Duvall is especially memorable as a surf obsessed Officer early in the film who says the films most iconic line “I love the smell of napalm in the morning”. Apocalypse Now is about the Vietnam war, but just barely. It is about the darkness, the horror, in men’s souls. And it is the best film I have ever seen in my life.

Just Missed The Top 10: Breaking Away (Peter Yates), The Brood (David Cronenberg), The China Syndrome (James Bridges), Escape for Alcatraz (Don Siegal), Monty Python’s Life of Brian (Terry Jones & Terry Gilliam), Nosferatu: The Vampyre (Werner Herzog), The Onion Field (Harold Becker), Quintet (Robert Altman), Woyzeck (Werner Herzog).

Notable Films Missed: The Marriage of Maria Braun (Rainer Werner Fassbinder), Tale of Tales (Yuri Norstein), The Tin Drum (Volker Schlöndorff).

Oscar Winner – Picture & Director: Kramer vs. Kramer (Robert Benton).
Do anyone else find it odd that Hollywood made a film about a custody battle, and made the bad guy the father? I mean, I’m sure there were other films that focuses on a child custody case before this – but I cannot think of one. And considering most of the time it seems to the be the father abandoning their children, you’d think that when they decided to tackle the subject they’d do it that way. It kind of reminds me of Disclosure (a far inferior film by the way), where Hollywood finally made a film about sexual harassment – and had it be poor Michael Douglas being harassed by Demi Moore. Anyhow, I don’t think the Academy was ready for Apocalypse Now, or even All That Jazz, in 1979, so you have to be glad they were nominated. And Kramer vs. Kramer is a superior film to Norma Rae – but I would have preferred Breaking Away as a better “safe” choice. Kramer vs. Kramer is by no means a bad film – it is intelligently written, directed and acted, but it’s a classic example of the Academy awarding something that must have seemed important at the time, but hasn’t aged all that well. A respectable choice, but hardly a stellar one.

Oscar Winner – Actor: Dustin Hoffman, Kramer vs. Kramer
Even though Dustin Hoffman had sounded off about his disdain for the Academy awards several times by this point in time, they pretty much had to give him an Oscar. After being nominated for The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy and Lenny, as well as being in several more truly great movies in the 1970s, he had become one of the best actors around without an Oscar. Hoffman certainly deserved to win at some point – hell he even deserves the two he has – but not for the roles he won them for. Is his work here the equal of The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy, Lenny, Straw Dogs, Little Big Man, All the President’s Men or Straight Time (to name only the film that came out before this one)? I don’t think so. Hoffman is good in Kramer vs. Kramer, but like the film itself he isn’t great. Compared to nominees like Peter Sellers and Roy Scheider, this performance just isn’t in the same league.

Oscar Winner – Actress: Sally Field, Norma Rae
Sally Field’s performance in Norma Rae is the exactly the type of performance that always wins Oscar. She plays a cute union organizer, who makes a lot of speeches, and fights for the little man in a movie that seems inspiring at the time, but fades the further away from the time it was made. Don’t get me wrong – Norma Rae is a good movie, and Sally Field is quite good in the lead role. But this is the type of film you see once and forget. Having said that, this wasn’t a really strong year for this category. I would have voted for Jane Fonda in The China Syndrome, but that’s a similar type role in a similar type movie, that I think is just a little bit better – and is far from Fonda’s best. When you don’t have a strong alternate selection, it’s tough to get too mad about the win.

Oscar Winner – Supporting Actor: Melvyn Douglas, Being There
Melvyn Douglas’ win for Being There surprises me a little. Don’t get me wrong – I think Douglas is great as the old time political hand who takes in Peter Sellers’ dimwitted gardener and ends up turning him into a star politico. He certainly deserved to be nominated for his work in the movie. But Douglas had already won a supporting actor Oscar 16 years earlier in Hud – for another “old man” role no less, albeit a far different one. Considering that his competition included Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now, who is extremely memorable in his brief scenes, and was an actor who had been nominated in the past and not won – not to mention Frederic Forrest who had not one but two acclaimed performances in 1979 (he was nominated for The Rose, but was also great in Apocalypse Now), a kid in Justin Henry for Kramer vs. Kramer and most tellingly a real old timer – Mickey Rooney for The Black Stallion, who is a Hollywood legend and never won an Oscar. I’m not complaining mind you, as I feel Douglas is better than everyone nominated other than Duvall – but we know what the best supporting performance of the year was. Marlon Brando, whose turn as Colonel Kurtz is iconic.

Oscar Winner – Supporting Actress: Meryl Streep, Kramer vs. Kramer
Doesn’t it always seem to work out that the best actors and actresses win Oscars for roles that don’t show off anywhere near as much talent as their best work? Don’t get me wrong – Streep is in fine form as Hoffman’s selfish wife, who takes off on him and leaves their son, only to show up months later and want the kid back. But if you were to make a list of Streep’s best performances would this make the top 10? 20? Part of the win is because of the momentum of a best picture win – we’ve seen it happen quite often, especially in this category. And part of it is because Streep had shown off her talent quite a bit over the last two years – starting with her Oscar nomination for The Deer Hunter in 1978, and then following over in 1979 with great work in Manhattan and The Seduction of Joe Tynan along with this one. But really, don’t we all wish that Streep had won her first Oscar for one of her great performances? Streep’s Manhattan co-star Muriel Hemingway should have been the winner.

Movie Review: Please Give

Please Give *** ½
Directed by: Nicole Holofcener.
Written By: Nicole Holofcener.
Starring: Catherine Keener (Kate), Rebecca Hall (Rebecca), Oliver Platt (Alex), Amanda Peet (Mary), Ann Guilbert (Andra), Sarah Steele (Abby), Lois Smith (Mrs. Portman), Thomas Ian Nicholas (Eugene).

The films of Nicole Holofcener are surprisingly, daringly honest. In a movie environment that often paints women either as little more than wives, mothers and pictures of perfection for idiot man children, or else empty, shallow nitwits (cough, Sex and the city, cough), Holofcener’s films are like a breath of fresh air. The people in her movies – most of them women, although she doesn’t spare men either – are confused, funny, messed up, smart, kind and sometimes downright cruel. They are, in short, much like women in real life.

Please Give is Holofcener’s latest, and perhaps best, film. The movie characters include Kate (Catherine Keener), who along with her husband Alex (Oliver Platt) operates one of those trendy stores in New York which sells “antique” furniture at high prices. They are constantly asked by their customers where they get their things, but they brush off the question. In reality, they buy it off of the next of kin of the recently deceased, who do not know the value of their loved ones possessions. But that would sound bad, so they don’t say it. Kate is starting to feel guilty – not just because of what they do, but because they are very good at it. They are rich beyond what they thought, and she tries to get rid of this guilt by giving more than normal to homeless people. When that doesn’t help anymore, she tries to find different places to volunteer – but just ends up making everyone feel worse, not better. All this infuriates her teenage daughter Abby (Sarah Steele), who has bad skin, and wants expensive jeans, and feels ignored by her mother.

Kate and Alex are also waiting for their neighbor Andra (Ann Guilbert) to die. They have purchased her apartment, right next to theirs, and when she kicks the bucket, they are tearing down the wall and expanding. This doesn’t seem to bother Andra any – who is a thoroughly unpleasant old lady who bitches about everyone and everything. She has two granddaughters, and Mary (Amanda Peet) doesn’t care either. She is a bitch, knows it, hates her grandmother and sees nothing wrong with what Kate and Alex are doing. The other granddaughter, Rebecca (Rebecca Hall), loves her grandmother, but that may only be because she has no one else to love. She is lonely, and works gives women mammograms all day.

In the past few years, I have grown tired of all the “liberal guilt” movies out there – the ones that congratulate the viewer for believing the right things, and mindlessly insult conservatives for being heartless monsters (which is odd, because I am very liberal). The movies seem so one dimensional to me. But Please Give is different because it sees how often giving to charity, or homeless people, or doing volunteer work isn’t always about being selfless and kindhearted and helping others – it is often about helping yourself. Keener doesn’t do what she does out of great humanitarian concern, but does it to make herself feel better. She feels bad because she has things so good, while others have them so bad. Her two attempts at volunteer work go horribly wrong because she starts to feel sorry for people (seniors and the mentally challenged) who do not feel sorry for themselves. In all her concern for others, she doesn’t see what’s right in front of her face with her own husband and daughter, both of whom turn to Amanda Peet’s Mary –albeit for different reasons.

It takes someone as self involved, bitchy and immature (she constantly watches her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend, and then insults her to Rebecca) as Mary to understand what Abby is going through in terms of her own body image. Mary works at a high end spa giving facials, and she immediately picks up on Abby’s self consciousness in a way her mother, who simply dismisses it as frivolous, never does. You can almost understand Abby’s most selfish moment in the film – when she grabs a $20 bill from her mother that she was about to give to a homeless person – she has to do something to get her mother’s attention. As for Platt’s Alex, he sleeps with Mary, I think, because he knows that she is a bitch – and so there will be no actual feelings involved when it ends. He loves his wife, but is being worn down by her guilt trips. Alex is always trying to say the right things – be polite and proper, even though he is in private more self involved than even Kate.

The one person in the movie that I think is really quite good is Rebecca Hall’s Rebecca. She goes over to help her grandmother every day because she wants, not because she has to. But Rebecca is letting herself be taken advantage of. Mary is a bitch who hates her grandmother – and her grandmother hates her right back. She sees too much of herself in Mary, and Andra is just as self involved as Mary is, and Mary is the only one who will call her on it. But Rebecca is most likely more like their mother – who is not in the movie – and Andra can taken advantage of that. Mary does similar things, as Rebecca somehow needs these to take care of these people, even if they don’t deserve it. When she meets a nice guy (Thomas Ian Nicholas), Andra insults her – saying he’s too short, but that’s okay because if he was taller, he never would have gone for her anyway. We feel that Rebecca may just have a chance to escape this cycle by the end of the movie, while the other characters maybe doomed to repeat theirs.

I grow tired of movies where the characters are either one dimensional or feel like they are just pawns in a screen writer’s game. That’s why I admire the films of Holofcener so much – the people in them, whether they are good, bad or ugly – and they are often all three – feel real. She presents them, flaws and all, for the world to see. And that is so much more satisfying that watching a bunch of shallow, empty characters bitch about their sex lives and shoes.

Movie Review: Iron Man 2

Iron Man 2 ***
Directed by: Jon Favreau.
Written By: Justin Theroux based on the comic book by Stan Lee and Don Heck and Larry Lieber and
Jack Kirby.
Starring: Robert Downey Jr. (Tony Stark), Gwyneth Paltrow (Pepper Potts), Don Cheadle (Lt. Col. James 'Rhodey' Rhodes / War Machine), Scarlett Johansson (Natalie Rushman / Natasha Romanoff), Sam Rockwell (Justin Hammer), Mickey Rourke (Ivan Vanko), Samuel L. Jackson (Nick Fury), Clark Gregg (Agent Coulson), John Slattery (Howard Stark), Jon Favreau (Happy Hogan), Paul Bettany (Jarvis), Garry Shandling (Senator Stern).

The first Iron Man movie is about as good as superhero origin movies can get. The film took its time to setup Tony Stark as a narcissistic playboy arms dealer, who is forced into a corner and ends up creating a suit that transforms him into a superhero. Anchored by an incredibly performance by Robert Downey Jr., who is the most perfectly cast actor to play an superhero perhaps ever, and a fine supporting cast – especially Gwyneth Paltrow having fun for once and Jeff Bridges who made a good bad guy. The film pretty much avoided the trap of spending so much time on the origin, that there was no other story left to tell, and yet at the same time, established its characters in a great way. The stage was set for Iron Man to really take off in the second installment – much like the recent Batman and Spider-Man franchises did. But while Iron Man 2 is certainly top notch entertainment, it falls short of the mark left by its predecessor. It tries to jam so much into one movie, and as a result, some things feel rushed.

Now that everyone knows that Tony Stark is Iron Man, he is being hassled by the government (here represented by a hilarious small role by Garry Shandling as a US Senator) who want him to turn over the suit to them. Not only that, but his competitors, including Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell), want to create their own version of Iron Man, as they rightly see it as a cash cow. As well, the artificial power source that is both keeping Stark alive, and powers the suit, is slowly killing him by poisoning his blood. In short, things are a mess for Stark even before Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke), the disgruntled son on a Russian scientist who worked with Stark’s father shows up with his own weapons that push Iron Man to the limit.

Iron Man 2 is a lot of fun, mostly because of Downey who has really found the perfect role for himself as Stark. He is whip smart and hilarious as the egomaniacal Stark, and he gets a lot of mileage out of the screen persona he invented for the first film. He is surrounded by a wonderful cast – Paltorw again is smart, funny and sexy as the only woman who will actually stand up to Stark and Don Cheadle is fine as Terence Howard’s replacement as Jim Rhodes, Stark’s Army friend who will become his ally War Machine. The new additions to the cast function well in their roles. Sam Rockwell appears a little overwhelmed at first in the role of Hammer, but he quickly finds the right note. He isn’t evil per se, but greedy to a fault, and jealous that Stark has become a celebrity, while his arms company is faltering. Rourke fares better in his limited role as Vanko – the true villain of the piece. They seem to have cast Rourke more for his intimidating physical presence (and the man is stacked, with tattoos littering his body and metal teeth) than his acting ability, but Rourke still finds the right notes to play. Less successful is Scarlett Johansson as Stark’s new assistant Natalie Rushman – but that’s mainly because the film doesn’t give her much too do, until that is, revelations (that surprise no one) come out, and then they give her too much. They never give her time to settle into the character – like Rourke, she seems to be cast for her impressive, although entirely different, physical attributes.

But herein lies the problem with Iron Man 2 – the one that makes it merely a good movie instead of a great one. The filmmakers try to cram so much into one movie, that at times it feels like it’s cheating – or at the very least, simply setting up other movies rather than just being a movie on its own. The story of Hammer and Vanko, as well as Stark’s illness is good enough, but then the filmmakers throw in flashbacks to Stark’s troubled relationship with his father (although, it was a stroke of casting genius to get John Slattery, a Mad Man himself, to play Stark’s father seen only in a video out of the 1960s). As well, the film spends a little too much time setting up the upcoming Avengers movie – a move that means that Samuel L. Jackson’s surprise cameo in the first film is expanded here, and is the whole reason to bring in Johansson as well (and most glaringly, an awkward conversation between Downey and Clark Gregg, about the later going to New Mexico – land of enchantment – something that only pays off if you watch until the end of the credits). The main thrust of the story is too often shunted off to the side to go on these tangents.

Iron Man 2 is still superior entertainment – don’t get me wrong about that, I enjoyed the movie a lot. The action sequences are well done, and it’s always a treat to see Downey at the top of his game. But Iron Man 2 at times feel more like a Coming Attractions segment stretched into two hours – giving us a sneak peek at what’s coming, rather than concentrating on what’s here. Iron Man 2 is a good movie – but with these ingredients, it should have been a great one.

Year in Review: 2003

2003 was a very strong year for movies – so much so that I could probably make a decent top ten list out of the films that did not make this list at all. But, after a lot of second guessing, I choose these ten films for the list. I think it’s one of the best this decade.

10. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (Peter Weir)
It saddens me somewhat that Peter Weir’s Master and Commander didn’t make enough money to warrant the studio green lighting a sequel. This is grand, old fashioned entertainment of the highest order. Set in the British Navy in the early 1800s, Master and Commander is big, bold entertainment with magnificent action set pieces that are more about excitement, and yes story and character development, then they are about CGI. The film centers on two men – the ship’s Captain (Russell Crowe) and the doctor (Paul Bettany). They are good friends, but complete opposites – Crowe the man of action, Bettany the man of intelligence. The crucial difference between this film and many other action films is that director Peter Weir actually shot this on a real boat – in real water. That gives the movie a much more authentic feel to it than CGI ever could have. They do not make movies like Master and Commander much anymore – and that’s a shame, because Weir is a master at them. I would have loved to see more of these adventures brought to the screen.

9. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Peter Jackson)
In the final installment of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Peter Jackson has finished the biggest cinematic epic of our lifetimes. Yes, the film “ends” too many times, but that’s a minor complaint. After three years, and over 10 hours of movie, Jackson gave us a grand cinematic send off for the characters that he brought to life. Once again the special effects and marvelous and groundbreaking. Once again, the battle sequence are on a massive scale, and yet somehow seem intimate. Once again, the characters and the story take precedence over those special effects and action sequences. The Return of the King maybe my least favorite individual installment of the series, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a great movie. Taken by itself, it is wonderful. Taken as part of the trilogy – one of the most ambitious projects in cinema history – it is masterful.

8. 21 Grams (Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu)
Out of the three films of his career so far, 21 Grams is easily the best of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s work. It is about three seemingly unconnected people who are forced together by a car accident. Sean Penn plays a man in need of a heart transplant and gets one when a man is killed in the accident. Naomi Watts is the former junkie who has remade her life with the help of her husband – the man killed – who starts spiraling out of control again. Benicio Del Toro is the ex-con who has embraced religion and who caused the accident. But the film is not nearly that simple. Told in a complex structure which only allows us to see the story a piece at a time, 21 Grams unfolds with a breathless intensity. The three leads are all amazing, and the supporting cast is just as good as well. Written by Guillermo Arriaga, 21 Grams in the most ambitious of the three films that he and Gonzalez Inarritu made together – and also easily the best.

7.The Triplets of Belleville (Sylvain Chomet)
How does one describe the delightful animated film The Triplets of Belleville to someone who has not seen the film? Surely a plot description wouldn’t work, but let’s try that anyway. Madame Souza is raising her grandson Champion, who goes onto to become Tour de France racer. But then the French Mafia kidnaps him, and two other riders, drags him to North America and forces him and the others to compete against each other in a virtual Tour de France for the purposes of gambling. Souza, and her obese dog Bruno make their way to America to track him down, but lose him, and then meet the title trio – a group of female singers from the 1930s, now old women, but still playing music. With their help, she will track down her grandson. I’m sure that all sounds rather silly – but it doesn’t for a second describe what it is like to actually watch the film, which is a visual delight with its more classical, yet strange animated look. The story is told almost entirely through the images, as there is little dialogue of importance, but it does use music and sound effects as well – brining to mind the films of the great Jacques Tati. The animated characters do not appear realistic in anyway, and all have exaggerated features (the most obvious being the decidedly square mobsters). This was, amazingly, Chomet’s first feature film – although her newest film, The Illusionist debuted at a film festival earlier this year and is said to be amazing. I for one, cannot wait.

6. American Splendor (Robert Pulcini & Shari Springer Berman)
American Splendor is the truly inventive and hilarious adaptation of the comics of Harvey Pekar. Pekar, like Robert Crumb – who did many of the illustrations for Pekar’s books - doesn’t draw comics about superheroes but instead about his own. Paul Giamatti plays him in one of his very best performances to date. The movie details Harvey’s life with his wife Joyce (Hope Davis). The film is visually inventive throughout – mixing in the comics, the actors and the real people into the film to tells its story. Pekar is miserable in his life as file clerk in Cleveland – prone to fits of rage at his daily existence. But somehow, for Harvey anyway, he needs to miserable to be happy. He has a good life even if he doesn’t quite see it that way. Directors Robert Pulcini and Shari Spring Berman do a wonderful job bringing the comics to life, mixing together all sorts of visual strategies in perhaps the only way to tell this story. I just wish they would follow this up with something equally daring – not a film like The Nanny Diaries.

5. Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola)
This was a critical favorite back in 2003, but for some reason it has lost some its praise over the years. This mystifies me, as I still find Sofia Coppola’s drama of isolation and alienation to be both touching and funny. Bill Murray gives a great performance as an aging movie star who goes to Japan to make a lot of money shooting a whiskey commercial, and while there he meets Scarlett Johansson’s bored wife or a famed photographer. The two of them bond, and spend more and more time together, yet the relationship never becomes sexual like we think it’s going to. Instead, the movie just observes these characters in a foreign land with no one else to hang onto. I know that Johansson really has not delivered on her early promise, but she is fantastic in this movie, and Murray’s performance is still one of the best of the decade. Go back and watch the film again, and I think you’ll fall in love with it all over again.

4. Elephant (Gus Van Sant)
Gus Van Sant’s Elephant does something incredibly daring for a movie about a school shooting – it doesn’t even attempt to answer why it happened. The entire movie is shot pretty much is long, flat tracking shots through the school. It starts by simply observing the students as they go about their day. Then it flashes to the killers – where Van Sant dutifully checks off all the reasons “why” that the experts have given for school shootings – violent video games, sexual confusion, fascinating with Nazis – but finds no hidden meaning in any of them. When the shooting begins, Van Sant doesn’t even change his shooting style – he observes it with the same sort of detachment as the rest of the scenes. A film like Elephant challenges the audience because it doesn’t provide us with the typical narrative payoffs we expect to see – it doesn’t even have the normal film grammar we are accustomed to seeing. Instead it just asks us to watch as both the monogamy and horror unfold. Van Sant simply shows us death without a purpose, a reason, a cause or a cure. And that is truly daring.

3. Mystic River (Clint Eastwood)
Clint Eastwood even more firmly established himself as more than a movie star, but a legitimately great filmmaker this decade, and for me Mystic River is the best film of his career aside from his masterpiece Unforgiven. Set in Boston, the movie tells the story of three childhood friends who have gone off in wildly different directions. Sean Penn has become a husband and father, but still has crime connections that can get dirty work done when he needs it. Kevin Bacon has become a cop, and is determined to solve the crime in front of him, no matter where it leaves. And most tragically, Tim Robbins has also grown up to become a father, but because of an incident in his childhood, has become damaged goods – there is something not quite right about him. When Penn’s daughter is murdered, Bacon is assigned the case, and Robbins becomes the chief suspect. But not everything is as it appears. Like Eastwood’s masterpiece, Unforgiven, Mystic River is a film about the causes and effects of violence – how one act can irrevocably affect someone’s life forever. This is Eastwood at the height of his filmmaking powers.

2. Kill Bill: Volume 1 (Quentin Tarantino)
With the first part of his epic Kill Bill, Quentin Tarantino has created an action movie masterpiece. This film starts out with a bang, and is pretty much non-stop kinetic energy for its entire running time. Uma Thurman grounds the movie with her intense, believable performance as The Bride, out for vengeance. The fight scene with Vivica A. Fox is excellent, but it is the final sequence – which is pretty much the entire last act of the movie – where The Bride takes on dozens of masked men, a dangerous school girl and finally Lucy Liu that truly makes this film special. The film also has other great moments – the anime sequence, the escape for the hospital, etc. and finds a little time for Tarantino’s trademark dialogue – but if that’s what you want, see Volume II. This volume is a masterpiece of action filmmaking.

1. City of God (Fernardo Meirelles)
Fernando Meirelles’ City of God is the type of film Scorsese would have made had he been from Brazil, not New York. The film is epic in scope, as it details the rise of organized crime in the City of God slum of Rio de Janerio over the course of the a decade – from the late 1960s until the early 1980s. The criminals here are not your typical American style gangster, but really little more than children who have been abandoned and left to fight for themselves. The two main characters are Rocket, a kid from the slum who wants out, and sees his interest in photography as perhaps his ticket. He wants to capture life in his slum the way it really is, and get the word out about it. The other character is Lil’Ze, who we see early in the film as a boy no more than 10 who commits a massacre at a hotel gunning down countless people. Through the year, Lil’ Ze only becomes more ruthless and violent. The film ends, as we know it must, in a huge gang war between two warring factions, neither of whom will make it clean. The end of the film ensures us that the cycle of violence will continue – a younger generation has taken over the reins. City of God is electrifying filmmaking at its best, and put Meirelles on the map as a world class filmmaker (his two films since this one, The Constant Gardener and Blindness were both quite good, but he has yet to rise to these heights again). Let’s hope he makes another film this great again soon.

Just Missed The Top 10: All the Real Girls (David Gordon Green), Bad Santa (Terry Zwigoff), The Barbarian Invasions (Denys Arcand), Better Luck Tomorrow (Justin Lin), Capturing the Friedmans (Andrew Jarecki), The Dancer Upstairs (John Malkovich), Dirty Pretty Things (Stephen Frears), Finding Nemo (Andrew Stanton), The Fog of War (Errol Morris), House of Sand and Fog (Vadim Perelman), A Mighty Wind (Christopher Guest), Open Range (Kevin Costner), Owning Mahowny, School of Rock (Richard Linklater),The Son (Jean-Luc & Pierre Dardenne), Thirteen (Catherine Harwicke).

Oscar Winner – Best Picture & Director: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Peter Jackson)
As individual films, all three The Lord of the Rings movies made my top ten list in their respective years, but none were in the top five. Having said that, when taken as one complete work, The Lord of the Rings represents one of the best, most ambitious epic blockbusters of the modern era, so I’m not going to say that the film, or Jackson, didn’t deserve the win here. Personally, The Return of the King is probably my least favorite of the three films – with its seemingly never ending finale being a weak spot, but the Academy was rewarding the series as a whole with these wins. Personally, I would have preferred them giving it to The Fellowship of the Ring instead, if for no other reason than to spare us from A Beautiful Mind being a Best Picture winner, but hell, that’s just me.

Oscar Winner – Best Actor: Sean Penn, Mystic River
By this point in his career, the Academy pretty much had to give Sean Penn an Oscar. He had been one of the best American actors for two decades at this point, and was on his fourth nomination (the other three being for Dead Man Walking, Sweet and Lowdown and god only knows why for the horrid I Am Sam). But unlike many times when the Academy seemingly gives out a “lifetime achievement award” in a competitive category, this time they actually gave it to a worthy performance – in fact Mystic River may just be Penn’s finest work. His grandiose performance helps to elevate Eastwood’s movie about child abuse and murder into an almost Shakespearian like tragedy (a fact underlined by Laura Linney’s Lady MacBeth-esque speech near the end of the film). Penn is magnetic in the lead role. At the time I was torn between Penn and Murray – and I still am, perhaps even leading a little towards Murray if for no other reason than Penn would win for another great performance, in Gus Van Sant’s Milk, just five years later – but for once, I have no complaints with this win.

Oscar Winner – Best Actress: Charlize Theron, Monster
The Academy absolutely loves giving Oscars to gorgeous women, but seemingly only when they are not gorgeous in the film itself. Following Halle Berry’s dirty waitress in Monster’s Ball and Nicole Kidman’s huge nose in The Hours (and arguably Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich, who was portrayed as sexy, but trailer trash sexy, not Hollywood sexy in that film), Theron won an Oscar by being “brave” enough to look horrible in her movie. That’s not to say that her performance as serial killer Aileen Wuornos was not deserving of an Oscar win – she is magnetic in the film, and turns what could have been a one dimensional monster, into a flawed, violent, at times oddly sympathetic human being. She is the only reason to really watch the movie – which is a little simplistic, but she makes it near great almost single handedly. Personally, I would have given the award to another gorgeous woman looking bad – Naomi Watts’ drug addict in 21 Grams – but in this case, I won’t complain too much.

Oscar Winner – Best Supporting Actor: Tim Robbins, Mystic River
If you can believe it, even though Robbins had had a solid career for almost two decades to this point, this was his first nomination for acting (he had been nominated for Writing and Directing Dead Man Walking, but lost both awards). But, like Penn, I am happy to report that they gave a worthy actor an Oscar for a great performance – perhaps not Robbins best, but damn close to it. Robbins is wonderful as the man who was abused as a child, and seems to have shut himself down emotionally – which of course draws the suspicion of the police, his friends and even his wife. This is actually the only performance to win this year that I can whole heartedly say I would have voted for – yes Benicio Del Toro is good in 21 Grams, but Robbins is better here.

Oscar Winner – Best Supporting Actress: Renee Zellweger, Cold Mountain
All the major awards from 2003 went to worthy people, except for this one. The Academy obviously gave Zellweger this award because it was her third nomination in a row – following Bridget Jones’s Diary and Chicago – and they felt bad. How else can you explain her downright awful performance as a hillbilly winning this award? I actually like Cold Mountain – in particular, I find the Jude Law segments to be near brilliant – but every time Zellweger opened her mouth, and let the horrid mountain twang accent she donned for this movie out, I hated it. This is quite possibly the worst acting Oscar win of the entire decade, especially when you consider how great fellow nominees Shoreh Aghdashloo in House of Sand and Fog, Holly Hunter in Thirteen and Marcia Gay Harden in Mystic River were.