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December 27, 2002

THE BEST 10 FILMS OF 2002

10. Lilo & Stitch – The most refreshing Disney animated movie since Beauty and The Beast.  The film is made in the beautiful style of a children’s book, complete with watercolor backgrounds.  The family is modern, but harkens back to the most classic of fairy tale elements… the broken home.  And Stitch is the best Disney character creation since Baloo.  It’s always hard to define “best.”  But when I throw this DVD in the machine, I light up like a little kid just thinking about the fun to come.

9. Roger Dodger – A fast talking guy who thinks he knows it all.  No wonder I identify with this film!  But Roger Dodger has a lot more going on than just that.  By the end, an unexpected visit from his nephew will take Roger and the nephew to places neither one ever expected.  And you get solid performances by Elizabeth Berkley and Jennifer Beals to boot.  But it is Campbell Scott who gives what is really the performance of the year.  Scott brings life to an impossible character. 

8. Narc – Remember how Michael Bay always claimed to be Frankenheimer’s love child..   Well, Joe Carnahan may be the one director out there these days that Frankenheimer would indulge in that claim.  (Though it’s hard for the dead  to indulge in much of anything.) If Billy Freidkin and Frankenheimer could produce a child, it would be Joe.  And Narc is the lowest of low-budget studio-level efforts.  But keeping it afloat are two great actors who sometimes slum it, Ray Liotta and Jason Patric, who both hit it out of the park for Carno.  Another really good film that could have been made in 1973.

7. One Hour Photo – Mark Romanek created a masterpiece his first time out.  This is not your father’s stalker movie.  Romanek delivered a film as complicated as Kubrick and as accessible as Blake Edwards.  If you want to look closely, Romanek did a lot of interesting things that you’d never notice on first glance.  It’s easy to write this off as a Robin Williams vehicle, but Williams gives a complex, nuanced performance that is easily misunderstood.  He’s a kinder, gentler psycho.  And perhaps one of the three greatest bits of sexual violence ever… which shows just how disturbing rape can be, even if there is no physical contact at all. 

6. About a Boy – A delight.  The Weitz Brothers really stepped up as directors, creating perhaps the best Nick Hornby adaptation yet.  (High Fidelity is pretty damned good.)  The story of two boys really, About A Boy is smart and funny and cruel and gentle and oh so male and female.  About A Boy is like a piece of music that moves assuredly through its movements and always works at its highest intelligence. 

5. Bowling for Columbine – What took Michael Moore so long to do it again?  I guess it takes a decade to build up enough stuff that you need to spew out all at one time.  It’s about Columbine, but it’s really about gun control and it’s really really about Michael Moore and his politics and his obsessions.  He’s like the obnoxious cousin who you always invite to the party because even though he offends people, he is entertaining as hell.  And Moore has gathered some additional compatriots in his effort this time out, including Matt Stone, who does a great cartoon of the history of guns in America.  There are other films that make you think, but this is the only one that makes you think, then makes sure that you got it right, and then questions it again and then again and then again.

4. Talk to Her – Almodovar’s best film, this film blurs the line of male and female, life and death, truth and deceit completely.  This tale of two romances, neither of which fits quite right, takes you places you would never chose to go and yet you go, as much as not to honor your host, Pedro.  Like so many of my Top Ten choices, this is a film about love that challenges us to participate and accept the vulnerability that love brings. 

3. The Pianist – A powerful, nearly perfect film.  The best dramatic film about the Jewish Holocaust era ever.  In one man’s story, the truth of a generation.  It’s nice that it’s a true story, but it’s so intimate that even fiction would be enough.  What can the human heart endure?  Almost anything, it seems. Polanski shows that he’s not a horror film director, but a remarkable observer of the human condition… poor condition, more often than not. 

2. Solaris – Perhaps the film most likely to last forever from this year.  “We don’t want new worlds, we want mirrors.”  A treatise on the complexity of love and the selfish nature of humanity, Solaris reached beyond traditional filmmaking and into the kind of iconography that reaches through time.  How far would you go?  What do you really love about other human beings?  What lurks in our hearts…. on the sleeves that are our dreams?  A minimalist masterpiece that people didn’t know how to approach emotionally.

1. Adaptation – Perhaps the best screenplay ever written, this film has split viewers between those how revel in it and those who simply see it as a big old trick.  For me, the absolute genius of the film is that it manages to be a “structure movie” while more subtly being a heart movie at the same time.   It’s fairly hard to see how many things are going on in the film at the same time.  But it is there.  I’m not just a sucker for a great gimmick (that no one else could pull off, I might add.)  Chris Cooper is great.  Meryl Streep is deep and sexy.  Nic Cage is so good that he makes it look infinitely easier than it seem to be.  And the film embodies the most minor of steps in our lives… that still mean so much.  Spike Jonze understand both filmic language and Charlie Kaufman well enough to turn the ridiculous into the sublime.  A singular film in a sea of all the same.

E ME:  What are your favorites of 2002?