Wednesday, 27 December 2000

2000 MOVIES THAT I JUST DIDN'T GET

Welcome to the first of the annual raft of year-end columns. In the last ten days, I have survived both Havana and Las Vegas, and now it’s time to reflect on an unusual year’s worth of movies... though mostly, I feel like sleeping.

This is the fourth year of these year-enders in The Hot Button. I started this particular column -- which focuses on my sense of ignorance -- because every year, besides the great and the grotesque, there are movies that I just can’t seem to connect with while others embrace them in a bear hug. There are many forms of said embrace, but in these cases, they just leave me scratching my head.

Perhaps it is merely a reflection of a movie year that has been light on passion in the commercial film beat that I feel as though some of these selections are a bit of a reach. But such is life. The "Best of" and "Worst of" lists struck me as much more interesting... especially the "Best of" list... but you’ll have to wait a couple of days to see them.

Before we start, another tradition. Here is a link to the list from last year. And now…

10. TITAN A.E.

Fox Animation made a pretty good movie here. It’s not the greatest animated movie of all time; it’s probably a step behind The Emperor’s New Groove and a city block behind Chicken Run in the competition for Best Animated Film of 2000. But it certainly didn’t suck. And yet, for the second summer in a row, a good animated film (The Iron Giant was better than that, but you get the point) has failed. The Iron Giant didn’t mark the end of Warner Bros. Animation. In fact, I think that Osmosis Jones may be a major break-out hit. But Titan A.E. marked the end of both Bill Mechanic and the animation division at Fox.

So what happened? Well, it seemed to me that the film tried to serve too many masters and ended up failing as a clear option for any of its possible audiences. In a crowded, murky summer movie season, it was another murky summer flop.

9. THE VIRGIN SUICIDES

I tried... oh, how I tried. I find Kirsten Dunst endlessly charming and fresh. James Woods and Kathleen Turner turned their images inside out to give great, intimate performances. Francis Coppola’s daughter... what a great story!

I got it, but I didn’t get it. I knew that it was about the mystery of the female species and the almost-too-subtle complications of life, but why was the frame so off center so often and why was a cinematographer as skilled as Ed Lachman letting his first-time director mess up? And why did this movie, with all this great acting and all these pretty images, fail to ever get to its point?

I was so frustrated that I picked up Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel, from which Ms. Coppola wrote the screenplay, and read it on the way to Sundance where the film would premiere... and loved it! Everything that I didn’t get from the movie... all the intentional and unintentional mystery... all the edge that the movie seems to have softened… all the deep, rich darkness of boys and girls and the evolution of the species.

Then the film hit and got critical rave after critical rave. And I read every one, searching for some clue about what I was missing, where I went wrong. No luck. I understood what they wanted to see in the movie. It was the same thing I wanted to see. But it just wasn’t there.

8. THE WAY OF THE GUN

I was surprised how much I liked this film and how well first-time director and multiple-time screenwriter Chris McQuarrie managed to balance a well-worn genre idea with quirky, kinky originality.

And then, no one saw it.

Well, almost a million people saw it, but they had to work pretty hard to do it. The film opened fairly wide for an arty movie with no names to sell it, starting on 1,515 screens. But after two weeks, that count dropped almost by half. And the weekend after that, to just 405 screens. Four weekends later, it was gone. I don’t know how USA Films expected the film to survive, but the strategy failed to take full advantage of strong critical response, the Gen-X boy-hotties Ryan Phillippe, Taye Diggs, and Nicky Katt, or a sensational performance by James Caan.

Maybe Artisan just had too much on their plate. With the new Darren Aronofsky (their boy!), a new Altman, and the Blair Witch sequel all slated for October, The Way of the Gun became just another piece of product to get out before the "real" movies took over the fall. Ellen Burstyn may well get an Oscar nod for Requiem for a Dream, but I’d have given James Caan a real shot at an Oscar nod had the studio actually tried to make that happen. But they didn’t even send out a tape of Way of the Gun to awards voters. And that’s too bad. This is a film that should be well watched and well loved when it hits cable outlets in the spring... maybe even a cult classic. But right now, it’s just a lost piece of product hoping that a Benecio Del Toro Oscar run will increase its video sales.

7. CHARLIE’S ANGELS

There is no greater absurdity in 2000 than the idea of Charlie’s Angels as a feminist film.

Yes, it underperformed based on its massive opening-weekend number. Yes, it was less a film than a plea from a troubled Columbia production team, hoping to have a big enough success -- or equally as good, the perception of a big success -- to keep Sony from having a firing party. Yes, all those on-set horror stories were true, no matter how much on-camera hand-holding the girls did.

But none of that really matters. The film will do $125 million domestically and a lot of people took the bait. People talked about the film as though it were all about girl power, though the only girl power involved was the power of Cameron Diaz and Drew Barrymore to draw audiences with performances that had the lighthearted charisma of 90 minutes of outtakes.

The feminist message of Charlie’s Angels was that three sexy women, sponsored by a mysterious man who has an endless supply of money, can shake their rears, expose their breasts, and twirl their hair as a way of getting almost anything and are so comfortable exploiting themselves that they’ve forgotten that that’s what they’re doing. Wow, just how I want my ten-year-old niece to see her femininity.

There is nothing wrong with the frivolity of Charlie’s Angels. But the movie was every bit the T&A show that the TV show was, not a true embrace of what women can do when challenged. If you want that, you need to check out an episode or ten of The Powerpuff Girls.

6. THE PATRIOT

How did they do it? A great story, a great part for Mel Gibson, and a great performance in it, and the time and money to re-create faithfully the War of American Independence... yet it was a miss. It seemed almost impossible. But Roland Emmerich was hung out to dry not by his arrogance or lack of talent but, it seems to me, by his fear that a tougher, smarter version of this movie wouldn’t appeal enough to audiences. It was exactly the opposite. A shorter, less histrionic version might have been the great film that The Patriot had to be ever to get the respect that the filmmakers clearly were after.

PAGE TWO: The Whatever Five