FAVORITE FILMS OF 2001:
Excuse my tardiness. Instead of trying to catch up with all the contendas I missed (like I’ve frantically attempted to do in years before) such as Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Spy Kids, Boesman and Lena, Chunhyang, The Tailor of Panama, and Amores Perros, I got bogged down with a few things that I find essential to my success in the cruel, cruel world: homework and grades and such. And, of course, laziness. Furthermore, I thought that my favorite movies of last year deserved more than a cursory glance back, mainly because I haven’t officially reviewed sixty percent of them. I felt a need to say all that I had to say and relied on memory alone. The weird thing is that I have genuine love for the top eight (the rankings, I suppose, are interchangeable) and uncertain affection for the last two entries. Regardless, all ten were powerful and important experiences for me.
1. Moulin Rouge
The swoony and masochistic romance and sexuality we’ve always connected with France is the subject of this musical. Not only does Moulin Rouge borrow from the love triangle set-up in Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera and from the spectacle of the Broadway production, but there’s also a scene in which lovebirds Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor jump onto a cloud that seems to have floated out of Leroux’s dialogue: “Our love is too sad on earth so let’s take it into the sky!” The movie captures the paradox of pessimism and hopefulness for love, beauty, freedom, and art that lies within various French novels (Victor Hugo also comes to mind) and movies (Les Enfants du Paradis). Baz Luhrmann is no longer stifled by the Shakespearean language he couldn’t handle in Romeo + Juliet, but he incorporates the best thing he did for that movie, which is his great choice of movie music. He’s through with the cool seriousness of Des’ree and Radiohead and Nellee Hooper; Moulin Rouge is, instead, based on pure, kitschy pop music. The kick we get out of it is the equivalent of a great, uplifting pop ballad (the editing, however, fails to simulate the energy of the best dance records), and it begs to be adored (I am more than happy to submit and confess my love). The excessive, climactic cutting gives the film a dark tone, as if it were trying to bury the earnestness in every note of Luhrmann’s spectacular spectacular, the well-feigned candor in the droopy eyes of the actors. There’s a real sincerity beyond the dazzling visual tricks and Camille tragedy that cannot be faked.
2. Ghost World
Ghost World does a remarkable thing that seems to be an inherent part of why movies are ingrained in modern world culture and traditions: it embraces and connects its entire audience. All people, and perhaps especially adolescents, divide themselves up into cliques, but the film, which presents the American teenage experience with heartbreaking authenticity and understanding, can be felt from the various vantage points it offers, even when they are merely represented by bit parts. It largely depends on who you represent in the big scheme of these social conventions. Are you an abhorred stepmother? Are you a perky schoolgirl? Then you may not feel an iota of pity for Thora Birch’s Holden Caulfield syndrome. Yet, because of the gamut of emotions this movie elicits, it forces you to look at yourself and the characters with something deeper than sympathy, and that’s where our nervousness as an audience comes from when we encounter this raw humor. Birch, in a stunning performance, is so often the fun, annoyingly bitter blend of self-deprecation and nonconformist pride; I myself have a fear that I won’t succeed after high school and I’ll be a bum on the street, and the extent to which I related to the character was frightening. The cast is brilliant: Scarlett Johansson delivers on the promise she showed in The Horse Whisperer; Steve Buscemi avoids cuteness when he gives heart to the lonely loser archetype; and Illeana Douglas stands out in a number of side-splitting scenes as an art teacher with an addiction to provocative statements. The thing is, no matter how ugly these people get, we always know them as good people, even when a film as great as this helps us rediscover the limitations of “good,” “bad,” “ugly,” and “beautiful.”
3. Gosford Park
Having not seen M*A*S*H, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, The Player, or Short Cuts, am I too inadequate to comment? Gosford Park was a beacon at the end of a depressing line of Oscar competitors (including Ali and The Royal Tenenbaums); the Robert Altman film is a blessing in so many ways, even when the Rules of the Game tribute steps into imitation and loses my interest during the murder subplot. I wanted so much to wrap my arms around the cast mostly made up of Brits: Helen Mirren, the sly Maggie Smith, Jeremy Northam, Emily Watson, Kristin Scott Thomas, Kelly MacDonald, and even the American Ryan Philippe. Altman and his cinematographer Andrew Dunn are observant and musical as they breeze through the English mansion’s rooms and corridors. The various performances and scenarios are balanced exquisitely, and Altman achieves numerous tiny moments of movie ecstasy, particularly in a deeply romantic sequence built around Northam singing and playing the repertoire of his real-life character Ivor Novello.
I thank you, Mr. Altman.
4. The Wind Will Carry Us
I don’t know what the feeling was after I saw The Wind Will Carry Us; I was either moved and amazed, or I was on the verge of falling asleep. Admittedly, I did not get a chance to go back and see the Abbas Kiarostami movie a second (and third and fourth) time, like I had planned, but this is the first of his esoteric films I have been beguiled by, and the first one I felt I understood on my own emotional and mental terms. Kiarostami is not the most sentimental filmmaker I’ve come across, but the film ends with a beautiful sentimental image that I needed: a bone is thrown into water and floats downstream – past, present, and future merging and floating into eternity. The archetype may be cheesy, but it is what stirred me. The director doesn’t show you the door by which to enter and access his emotions and ideas and thoughts. I don’t remember specifics about the movie, but this one shot, and my overwhelmed response, still stays with me. In my shakiness to talk about the beauty of the film simply because I have not fully grasped it, I begin to wonder about this possibly accidental love (not without flaws, the movie is tiresomely burdened by forced humor). The movie creates a fully realized world that we will never fully know and is about the inability to capture moments of time, the impossibility of pinning down meaning. The protagonist – with his camera and his cell phone – finally understands this, his comprehension coinciding with my epiphany (I am excited to see it again soon to connect the pieces, but will I ever fully understand a film that seems so influenced by Iranian society?). As a film critic, I have begun to discover more about my limitations as an observer and thinker and writer, but also the glories of seeing through my own personal lens, turning beautiful poetry of seemingly foreign style and meaning into something valuable to me.
5. Memento
Vanilla Sky is a nauseating, inferior take on the current twist-ending trend, tripping on its science-fiction mumbo-jumbo, It’s a Wonderful Life rip-offs, and endless woven-in moral catchphrases. Memento is as reliant on its own device – a story told backwards – but I appreciate Christopher Nolan’s film so much more after having seen Cameron Crowe’s grandiose work tied to a brick of a script. In a story about a man haunted by the death of his wife and his inability to form new memories, Guy Pearce’s urgency, caused by the limitations embodied by the structure, is complemented by the humor of the editing. Nolan’s rhythmic suspense and elegant direction never falter, and they peak not only at the climax but also in one of the year’s most heart-stopping scenes, centered around Carrie Ann Moss’s sexy resurrection of the vintage femme fatale. The movie relies on the curiosity generated by origin, rather than outcome, like any good mystery does. After the novelty of the device withers, we still have a great story that derives much of its power and meaning from the way it is presented.
6. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
While the Harry Potter movie morphed the considerable merits of the book into insufferably dull merchandise, Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring turns J.R.R. Tolkien’s textbook prose into a tsunami of unbeatable Hollywood entertainment and spectacle. This may have been the one true gem in the dismal holiday season; after squirming through the Ordinary People rehash In the Bedroom, I thanked God for this mercilessly visual celebration of a genre I have never been particularly fond of. I left with a profound sense of fulfillment.
7. Mulholland Drive
This David Lynch masterpiece could be at the top of the list. It’s visually and emotionally perverse; Lynch keeps winking from behind the camera, fiddling with tenses, pushing exploitation beyond solid lines, and jerking characters into seedy territory. There’s a strong sense that the movie was made for the director’s own pleasure; he wants to see the subject of Hollywood muddied, and his cast is constantly, unpredictably veering from a cutely quirky stick-figure condition to a three-dimensional, human state. And that’s why I was rolling my eyes occasionally at the beginning, because the satire is sometimes too convenient. The magic of the film is in how Lynch and the audience find the emotional notes in what seem to be props and asides, like the song “Crying” performed in Spanish and the use of Ann Miller in her black, weedy gown. Lynch’s finale squirms and pulsates – harmonically moving and completely logical.
8. A.I. Artificial Intelligence
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, probably the greatest Steven Spielberg film, will be re-released in March with bonus footage and, I hear, without some dirty words that were in the original. This tidying up signifies the negative side of Spielberg’s adult consciousness and proves he really can’t see through the eyes of children anymore. A.I. is a self-comment – the most mature movie the man has ever made. It’s beautiful and depressing, with disturbing, prophetic images (such as New York submerged in water), but, for the most part, it doesn’t feel like Spielberg is straining for seriousness and respectability like he used to. The Christian theme of free will sounds better through his voice than it did in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange because the characters are humanized rather than robotized – and the protagonist here is a machine. The movie is an allegory with a number of different layers, perhaps most movingly as an elegy for the images and sentiments of Spielberg’s past.
9. Yi Yi
Wrapped inside this fine three hour symphony is one sequence that keeps invading my mind: a father’s reunion with the woman he loved many years ago intercut with his daughter’s tender first date. The editing is melodramatic and obvious but the effect is resounding. Like the rest of the film, the heart and soul and sap are worn on its sleeve, but the feeling transmitted to the audience is entirely unlike anything I’ve seen in any melodrama. Yi Yi contains the best cinematography I saw from a recent film in 2001; the forlorn windows of skyscrapers become murals and the indescribable mood of city life in flats and schools and offices saturates the picture without ever feeling speciously stylized. The imagery provides the best of what the movie has to offer – that strange, elusive feeling of excess, hollowness, sorrow, present tense, nostalgia, joy, and silence… the feeling of life.
10. George Washington
Where Terrence Malick frantically searched for emotion and intellect with repetitive monologues in The Thin Red Line, writer-director David Gordon Green and cinematographer Tim Orr achieve a ruminative cinematic poetry that feels improvised and very real. The voice-over is never cloying; it is spoken by a teenage girl and the words sound silly at times, and then observant. George Washington balances the eerie and the beautiful; even though the film’s subjects – childhood, poverty, and coming-of-age – are no more original or untouched than Malick’s World War II, it made me feel emotions that have no names yet. Green and the talented cast present a series of accidents and coincidences, but not in the shrill tone of The Royal Tenenbaums; like in the Wes Anderson movie, there are interracial relationships, but race and class are handled impassively while still remaining important presences. The film gives us realistic moments (it makes its most noticeable stumbles when it goes for plot-driven storytelling), but we are always aware that they are being filtered through the open eyes and heart of the director and camera; at the end, we’re confused about how we feel, and left hungry by Green’s various mistakes, but we leave with something special.
BEST ACTORS:
I think critics have a prejudice against performances in roles of disabled characters. But Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind (the fourth in a series of great performances that began with his 1997 U.S. breakthrough L.A. Confidential) should not be compared to the soulless shtick of Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man; Crowe takes from his character’s paranoia in The Insider and, yet again, gives us a portrait of a person beyond the nervous tics and emotional explosions. The thing is, in the earlier film, Michael Mann matched the nervous energy with his own grand gestures, but in this one, Ron Howard is lazy (we recognize the genius as the college antisocial) so Crowe’s responsible for generating most of the anxiety. And he does it brilliantly. By working off of solid work from supporting players – including Adam Goldberg, Paul Bettany, Anthony Rapp, and the wonderful Jennifer Connelly – he informs us, above all, on how loved John Nash was.
In two other great performances, Tony Leung and Ewan McGregor evoke similar emotions and longings but from completely different angles. McGregor, in the whirling, vigorous Moulin Rouge, is the naïve twenty-something who moves to Paris because he has some schoolboy fantasy about love. Baz Luhrmann allows us a few moments to giggle at his ingenuousness, but anyone who thinks the film is solely the work of a bigheaded auteur obviously didn’t feel the energy of the actors. McGregor throws himself into the role with youthful abandon, and his sincerity is surprising. Do people really feel love, or infatuation, like this anymore? He sings with yearning instead of bravado, with sensitivity instead of sophistication. He helps root the film in Hollywood movie romance, which has always been about the infatuation with love. Leung, in In the Mood for Love, plays an older version of the McGregor character. Since adolescence he has learned not to act on his gushy impulses, and the weariness is all over his face, in the way he smokes his cigarette. His work is intensely intimate, complemented by the extraordinarily glamorous cinematography, and it’s too bad director Wong Kar-Wai fails to be as consistent.
BEST ACTRESSES:
Lena Endre echoes earlier Ingmar Bergman favorites: her performance is a potent mixture of Eva Dahlbeck’s wit, Ingrid Thulin’s authority, and director Liv Ullman’s girlish fragility. But, perhaps because Faithless is a Bergman-scripted film directed by a woman, Endre moves forward and away from the one-noted feminine ideals (which, in Cries and Whispers and Persona, were seemingly meant to add up to the totality of Woman). Like her predecessors, she has the presence of a movie star, but she may also be the realest woman from a Bergman film in many decades.
I remember Thora Birch as a child actress in Hocus Pocus and one of the Tom Clancy movies. She’s retained her attitude after all these years and become another one of those Christina Ricci types. But Ricci is still the reigning queen of the defiant-young-adult shtick; Birch falls apart and gets emotional. She improves on her performance in American Beauty in a far deeper and more moving portrayal of teenage wasteland: Ghost World. It’s an incredible performance; we get to feel the dazed and hopeless angst that never rose to the surface in Kirsten Dunst’s notable turn in Crazy/Beautiful.
BEST SUPPORTING ACTORS:
Illeana Douglas in Ghost World, Taraji P. Henson in Baby Boy, Maggie Smith in Gosford Park, James Gandolfini in The Mexican, Steve Buscemi in Ghost World, Su-Yun Ko in Yi Yi, Clive Owen in Gosford Park, Jamie Foxx in Ali
FAVORITE NEW DISCOVERIES:
1. The Palm Beach Story (1942)
This is the most elegant I’ve seen Preston Sturges. While The Lady Eve and The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek were busting at the seams, The Palm Beach Story achieves a sexy poignancy with the great Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea, and there’s enough space to laugh at the comic gems the genius writer-director offers up. It’s one of the most gorgeously sustained and completely satisfying comedies I’ve ever seen. I really can’t wait to see Sullivan’s Travels.
2. Jungle Fever (1991)
What is Spike Lee really saying? That interracial relationships can’t work? That they’re always driven by curiosity and spite? Lee’s tone is so tragic and operatic that it feels like he’s trying to represent the entire scope of the issue. But the main reason the Wesley Snipes-Annabella Sciorra, black-Italian romance malfunctions is that there was no love there to begin with. As in Romeo and Juliet, the real sadness comes from the fact that these two characters weren’t allowed to make their mistake, to have their crush. The scene with “Livin’ for the City” in the soundtrack is incredibly moving, and Snipes’ scream is no less apt than Marvin Gaye’s in “Inner City Blues” – instead of an answer, we’re given a very apt outpour of anger and frustration.
3. The Clock (1945)
Vincente Minnelli’s melodrama reeks first of creepy romantic idealism, then of creepy unblinking truth. Robert Walker is so insecure beneath the Boy Scout surface that he can’t prop Judy Garland up like we want him to. They both shine in their vulnerability as lonely strangers who bump into each other in New York City. The ending does real damage; as the two stars’ excitement from being married wears off, the realization sets in that the feeling of infatuation can be as real and palpable as love itself, and mistakes can happen. Even the attempt at a happy ending is half-hearted.
4. I’m No Angel (1933)
Mae West is a plump, wonderful presence in this brash masterpiece that advertises her as the Goddess of One-Liners. For some reason, it’s twenty times funnier and sexier than She Done Him Wrong; perhaps it’s the gaudiness. (It’s certainly not the uncomfortable black mammy stereotype that stains this lusty comedy.) Like W.C. Fields, West creates a comedian’s accent; she turns her deliveries into the music of self-satisfied innuendo.
5. 8 ½ (1963)
I didn’t enjoy the sogginess of La Strada or the loopy nostalgia of Amarcord. As if they were sleepwalking through life, director Federico Fellini and star Marcello Mastroianni nail the narcissism behind the creative process in 8½ with the emotionally cohesive punch of Nights of Cabiria. All this is captured by Gianni Di Venanzo’s stunning black-and-white photography, one of the best things I experienced in the movies this year.
6. It’s a Gift (1934)
And like West, W.C. Fields knows the humor not only in words but, most importantly, in the way they’re spoken. This sluggish, twitchy, and mannered film paints no rosy pictures; often hilarious, it never lets up on its brilliant illustration of Hell on Earth, complete with a nagging wife, everyday bad luck, and Fields’s own absent-mindedness.
7. Ran (1985)
Akira Kurosawa, in what is supposedly his last masterpiece, demonstrates such a command for cinematic color, even after decades of using black-and-white to full effect. The emotion seems to spring out from the cinematography, even though the images have the otherworldliness of paintings. Not as thrilling as his other Shakespeare adaptation (Throne of Blood), this interpretation of King Lear was, nevertheless, a joy to behold on the big screen, on which Kurosawa’s battle sequences are undeniably magnificent and his scenes of ponderous solitude breathtaking. In a movie populated by men and their futile wars, Mieko Harada’s absent eyebrows have shocking presence, and the final, haunting shot of a blind man abandoned on a cliff appropriately eliminates any thought of easy triumph.
8. Fallen Angels (1995)
Wong Kar-Wai’s ‘90s-Hong-Kong film noir/gangster movie is more sentimental than his In the Mood for Love; it earns its Bogartian, hardened romanticism. Wong’s twisted vision of loveless city life is beautifully photographed – the colors are runny and saturated from all the characters’ suppressed tears. Initially a freak show, the film charitably gives a poetic moment of redemption to its femme fatale, though surely only for a fleeting moment in the hustle of the city.
9. Apocalypse Now (1979)
I love the sheer filth of the film, oozing out from its pores, contrasted by the technical beauty of Vittorio Storaro’s cinematography. More than anything, Storaro’s work here (one of his several great contributions to film as my favorite DP of all-time) is essential to the expression of “the horror” of the Vietnam War, the ugliness and the brainlessness. Francis Ford Coppola’s decision to lengthen the film and release Apocalypse Now Redux was a blessing because it allowed us to see the film in theaters, where the horror is magnified. But the added sequences were completely unnecessary and detract from the deathly float down the River of Doom, which keeps the film in a shell-shocked aimlessness.
10. The Fortune Cookie (1966)
As simplistic as Billy Wilder’s theme of American corruption may be, The Fortune Cookie has a strange emotional ache that its categorization as a comedy did not prepare me for. Obviously, I expected Some Like It Hot instead of an Apartment revival. Joseph LaShelle’s ‘Scope cinematography is heartbreaking and creates a poignant atmosphere that brings the primitive mechanics of the script to life.
2001 was not the most exciting movie year I’ve experienced. I was waiting for a lavish re-release of that Kubrick sci-fi flick of the same name, but it never materialized. Throughout the year, I kept losing and regaining my movie love; each time I fell back in a slump, I was lifted up by one of the films on these lists. The problem was sheer forgetfulness and disconnection. Over the last year, I think my two passions – film and music – have coalesced, and I see movies more and more as music, as complete entities with their own harmonies and rhythm and atmosphere; the conductor is nothing without the orchestra. I am hoping for a great, growing movie culture in the next millennium, but there’s been talk that the horrific events of September 11 will turn filmmakers into glum-faced prudes. I hope not; we need our creativity – undiluted – and we need a greater understanding – not soft-spoken propaganda. We need the excitement back in American filmmaking. I’m also hungry for more from the past and to share the communal experience in a theater. I had a nightmare a few weeks ago in which I went down to the only art house in my city to see a favorite film of mine, Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire. When I got there, the film had been scratched and brutalized. I woke with a start when I saw English words coming from Fernando Rey’s mouth.
“Our emotions rise to meet the force coming from the screen, and they go on rising throughout our movie-going lives. When this happens in a popular art—when it’s an art experience that we discover for ourselves—it is sometimes disparaged as fannishness. But there’s something there that goes deeper than connoisseurship or taste. It’s a fusion of art and love.”
- Pauline Kael, from the Author’s Note, Movie Love (1991)
[JANUARY 25, 2002]