March 22, 2002 Continued...

Before I get to the Big List, let me take a moment to mention A.I.  Ouch.  The film was easily the greatest disappointment of 2001, but despite a world of flaws, the good intentions have kept it off of my Worst list.  In retrospect, I still believe that the film appeals to people with a very specific kind of relationship with their mothers.  I don’t even know how to define what that is.  Personally, I certainly have a craving for and limited amount of motherlove.  Beyond my own mother’s parenting limitations, I am an adopted child.  So, you would think that I would be willing to live under Manhattan for centuries to have a moment of perfect love from the parent that abandoned me.  Nope.  And the mélange of ideas, like the sex robot and the use of beings as disposable entertainment… really cool.  But hamfisted and, again, failed.  A damned shame.

Now on to the best…

Of the 12 films on my list, only 4 are films that I didn’t see first at a festival.  Only two were foreign language films.  It’s funny.  I selected films from 16 different countries in the Miami Film Festival, but I did not think it was a very good year for non-English film.  A few foreign-language films that I might have included (How I Killed My Father, Sur Mes Levres, Vidas Privadas, A Song For Martin) were not in release in America this year.  Of course, the English-language stuff was pretty soft this year as well.  And there was no great screwed documentary this year, even though I liked Startup.com quite a bit… not enough to complain about.

TOP TWELVE

In 1999, the best films seemed to be about the desperate need to find a way out of the consumer universe that we have all built ourselves into.  Fight Club, American Beauty, etc. etc. etc.  Last year, irony died and while the morally complex Traffic squeezed in amongst the high iconography of films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Gladiator, Erin Brockovich, etc., etc., etc.  This year, I see a trend towards personal responsibility in the best films of the year.  The heroism seems to be based in the human condition of weakness that leads to a realization that only we, as individuals, can change our lives and by extension, our worlds. 

Heist – I expected almost nothing from this film and have found it lingering with me for the last six months since I saw it.  I watched it again on tape a couple of times and have liked it more and more each time.  Mamet is always interesting… the language is a barrier to relaxing into his films when you first see them, but over time, in the best ones, the language ends up becoming the thing with which you become most comfortable, much like in the work of the Coens, though their complexity tends to come out of visual and conceptual intensity.  I still believe that there are at least a dozen lines in this film that will become classics.  And the performances by Hackman, Lindo and DeVito are glorious, through and through.

The Anniversary Party – Another great surprise.  I was curious about what Alan Cumming and Jennifer Jason Leigh would do as writer/directors and they did very much what I suggest any young artist do… they played in a field that they could control.  They made a movie about the world they live in, with friends by their sides, with a highly experienced DP (John Bailey) and they made it all about the acting.  Of course, a friend I took to see a second screening, which I felt I had to do to make sure that I wasn’t insane to like the film as much as I did, hated every second.  Why?  Because it is about Hollywood and the vacuous lives we tend to lead out here.  I don’t think my connection to this film is vain.  I’m not a guy who gets invited to spend time with these people.  But I will take truth in film wherever I can get it.

Joy Ride – I guess this entire list is made up of surprises, so I’ll stop saying it each time.  “Candy Cane… Caaaaaannndy Cane!!!”  Creepy.  John Dahl took the rawest of genres and made a minor classic.  It’s not quite as good as The Hitcher or Duel or Breakdown but it takes the four stop on the list of great “truck stop thrillers.”   Screenwriters Tarver & Abrams, in tandem with Dahl and the great Steve Zahn, bring something to this film that the others don’t really have… black, black, black comedy.

Series 7: The Contenders – Dan Minahan wrote and directed this underrated satire that not only takes on reality TV, but manages to be, like any great film must be, about the human condition.  Yes, the film is a rip-off of the rarely seen Japanese film, Battle Royale.  But besides the fact that Battle Royale has never gotten an American release and whatever shot it had of that has been destroyed by the box office failure of Series 7 and the demands of the film’s distributor (he wanted $10,000 for me to show the film at the Miami Film Festival), good ideas are remade and remade and remade and remade.  Five real people are selected to kill or be killed… only one can survive.  That’s the premise.  One more thing… seeing the DVD extras, including the alternative ending, I am happy that Minahan decided to make the audience work to figure out what happened in the end, rather than spelling it out, as he did in the original ending. 

Lantana – Ray Lawrence’s drama has grown on me over time.  The film unfolds like a flower, starting with a tiny bud and growing into something complex and richly beautiful.  The performances are superior, form top to bottom, giving some familiar actors familiar roles, but then turning them on their heads.  Lion’s Gate didn’t have the money to make a serious Oscar run, but in the hands of Miramax or Sony Classics, this could have been a major contender.

The Devil’s Backbone – I wrote about this a bit yesterday.  The best ghost story of 2001, a step ahead of The Others for getting out of the haunted house and being about something more than thrills.  Guillermo del Toro’s best film yet, he’s finally figured out how to challenge the audience, then to feed them, then challenge them… he’s always known how he wants the roller coaster to feel, but he finally has the tools to build it. 

The Deep End – Why, oh why, wasn’t Tilda Swinton nominated for an Oscar for this film?  A day after writing about the Oscars, I am convinced… she gave the best performance of the year by an actress.  And Goran Visnic proves that he can be a movie star.  Raymond J. Berry has never been better.  And Peter Donat was terrific too.   But The Deep End is more than that.  This film understands parental passion in a way that A.I. barely imagines.  It takes the classic noir elements of intrigue and misunderstanding and twists them with a heroine as fierce and more honorable than any Gladiator.

Ghost World – I don’t want to try to explain Ghost World.  I am sure to be wrong for many of you.  This intimate exploration of a young woman’s life as she escapes high school into a world that is far more scary than she imagined is like a haunting melody.  It sinks a little further in with each viewing.  The brush strokes, both in the direction and the design, are just glorious.  The film feels like a pair of old school Adidas that fit better and better the more you wear them.

No Man’s Land – Danis Tanovic is here.  He wrote it, he directed it, he scored it.  A great, great film at a time that screams for films of substance.  No Man’s Land could not be simpler in premise.  Two men on opposite sides of a war are stuck together in a trench and need to find a way to survive the experience.  Tanovic captures all of the nuances of fear, hate and desperation between the men.  But then he manages to bring in the entire parade that surrounds these small lives, allowing for humanity and horror at every turn.  The film hasn’t been hugely successful at the box office, probably because the Serbian/Croatian conflict is “old news” in America’s mind and the foreign language scares people away.  But this movie could be about any war, in any language, at any time.  Much as Dr. Strangelove and Paths of Glory are timeless reflections of, respectively, disconnected and intimate warfare, despite very specific references to the Cold War and WW I, No Man’s Land is too human to ever become dated.  And yes, I am comparing Tanovic to Kubrick… whether the comparison continues to fit is up to him.

In The Bedroom – Todd Field’s intimate epic blew me away at Sundance at its full length.  Some people are happy that Miramax cut the film and others wish they cut it more, but what Field really gets is the mundane nature of life and pain.  Taking his time getting there is how he gets there.  The performances are played in perfect pitch, led by Tom Wilkinson’s sublime work. 

Moulin Rouge – Can you can can?  You know, if they released Singin’ In The Rain now, some people would complain about the Broadway Melody Ballet sequence as not real enough.  And people who don’t know the history of the movie musical like to think that they weren’t musically derivative.  The music business has changed.  There are no standards anymore.  But that didn’t stop Baz Luhrmann from making an all-singing, all-dancing melodramatic musical of truly epic proportions.  Someone wrote in say that the film wasn’t really about anything.  But the movie SCREAMS it at you, over an over.  “Above all, love.”  Love, the subject of most music and the majority of all other art.  Love.  Get it?  Luhrmann opens the film by telling you about the tragic ending and still drives you through the story with passion and insanity and a visual intensity is rich and sweet and places Nicole Kidman on top, like the ultimate cherry.

Amelie – The best “movie movie” since Cinema Paradiso.  And while it is as whimsical and frothy as one can imagine, it goes back to the year’s theme of personal responsibility.  Amelie is raised as a freak.  She lives as a freak.  She’s tried to taste life, but nothing has pierced the veil…. until she decides to dedicate herself to helping others.  And suddenly, out of that effort, her own freedom arrives.  This is a love letter to Paris, to movies and to anyone who ever felt like an outsider.  Perhaps the perfect antidote to A.I., Amelie is not about waiting for life to come to you, but about living your life and how that choice to live brings the world to you. 

E ME:  What are your best and worst of 2001?