Weekend, 1-2 July 2000

NEWS BY THE NUMBERS

In honor of hitting the middle of the year and since this is a holiday weekend, I thought that this weekend's Top Ten would be a good place for a first-half look at my Top Ten (and a few other lists) for the year 2000.

THE BEST OF THE FIRST HALF OF 2000

10. You Can Count on Me - Screenwriter Kenneth Lonergan's Sundance co-winning directorial debut is a subtle, bittersweet story of family and the human urge to evolve emotionally. A small movie, but a great performance by Laura Linney and a major breakthrough for Mark Ruffalo, who owns every frame he walks into and is willing to give up the moments when he should. A terrific little movie.

9. U-571 - Classic Hollywood craftsmanship and storytelling. Yes, it's hokey. Yes, it's loud. Yes, it's got every cliché in the book. But what a fun ride it is. Jonathan Mostow is a writer-director who I will be happy to see in the credits anytime. I'm not going to get Kubrick, but I'm gonna get a good, gripping two hours of excitement every time.

8. Croupier - Thanks to The Shooting Gallery, I got to see this small wonder. It doesn't reach for a lot, but it is great filmmaking from back in the days when movies were about storytelling and not the marketing campaign. Mike Hodges gets this year's "Fast Eddie Felsen" award. At the end of this movie, you just have to think, "He's back!"

7. Dolphins - This is a 40-minute short that I saw at Slamdance in January. Masterful work. Director Farhad Yawari is going to do his first film here in America sometime soon. Expect to see the work of a young Spielberg. In a 40-minute, essentially silent film, you keep expecting him to lose your attention and then he brings you back in to a very simple plot with very powerful images and an intimate passion.

6. Waking The Dead - "From the novel Endless Love," is enough to send me running from a screening. But Keith Gordon at the helm got me into the theater and the great performances by Billy Crudup and Jennifer Connelly, as well as the intricate, but flexible fabric of time, got me excited. The film is a reverie. And my memories of it are warm and enduring.

5. The Perfect Storm - I really, really enjoyed this movie. And I would have enjoyed this movie without the effects. Wolfgang Petersen made an intimate story about men of the sea first. Then he made a huge effects movies that overwhelms their efforts, as they hang on to their humanity in the midst of the storm...and actually find some more. I find much of the carping about this film quite cynical and sad. But then again, I can be pretty cynical sometimes, too. Nonetheless, I think this storm is pretty near perfect.

4. Timecode - It's a stunt. And it's a work of true genius. Forget the technology. The sheer audacity of trying to pull this film off, shooting an incredibly complex story improvised by an enormous group of actors with four cameras with no stopping and no cuts...amazing. But it also happens to be a pretty good movie. While in a regular film, the editor tells you the "truth" that you are supposed to be feeling, Timecode has the truth running in four frames through the entire running time. Figgis edits with the sound, but that doesn't keep you, as an audience member, from finding out where everyone else is and what they are doing if you like. I feel blessed to have seen the film as intended, with digital projection, since that version didn't have to indulge the arbitrary cuts of image and sound that were necessary to get the film on celluloid reels. But a masterful piece of work, without a doubt.

3. High Fidelity - There were a lot of things wrong with this movie. And none of them mattered to me. The film's soul was stronger than any of its failing. Stephen Frears is an immaculate director, very underrated and underappreciated at this moment in his career. This film featured the emergence of Jack Black as a major film star of the supporting category. Frears and John Cusack had the audacity to hire Iben Hjejle, a non-American to play Cusack's All-American love interest. No doubt, this is a chick flick for guys. If you want to understand us, ladies, go see this film.

2. The Filth And The Fury - I loved this documentary about The Sex Pistols by Julien Temple. I came into it with a minimal interest in the band, its music or really, the whole scene. Temple may be biased about how the Pistols influenced the history of rock, but he made a great case for a great deal of groundbreaking. But more to the point, this was fun as hell. Great doc.

1. Erin Brockovich Nothing has really come close to laying a glove on this spot since I saw Erin B. for the first time in late February. If you are worrying about the cleavage, you aren't watching the movie. This is an intimate portrait of a woman fighting for her survival and ultimately, for the survival of others and winning. The truth is tear-jerking, but Steven Soderbergh's direction never is. In fact, there are some editing (Anne Coates) and photographic (Ed Lachman) tricks that are so brilliant and so subtle that almost no critics I read picked them up. This is the kind of small masterpiece that film groups would be rediscovering now and proclaiming the virtues of until the evening turned to morning. A director's movie with a great mega-star turn and some of the greatest supporting casting you will ever see in a film. And all so clean and simple for Soderbergh, who with Scorsese, stands at the apex of working American directors at this moment.

"The Worst..."