|
Movies are our conduit into many milieus and microcosms we've never imagined, let alone experienced. In 2002, aided by Russian Ark, we visited the Hermitage, the museum that is the pride of St. Petersburg and the repository of Russian history and culture; we celebrated marriage in Monsoon Wedding; through David Cronenberg's Spider and the dazzling The Hours, we entered the minds of a schizophrenic and a despairing Virginia Woolf; we saw Frida Kahlo's paintings spring magically to life; we took road trips to Mexico in Y tu mama tambien and to the American heartland in About Schmidt; Martin Scorsese guided us on journeys through Italian Cinema and mid-19th century Manhattan; through documentaries we got up close and personal with musician Ravi Shankar, politico statesman Henry Kissinger, linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky, earthworks artist Andy Goldsworthy, and, the father of deconstruction, Jacques Derrida. Like children we were Spirited Away in a pinnacle of animated fantasy to a giant ghost-infested Shinto bathhouse and for three hours-plus in The Fast Runner, we inhabited an ancient Inuit folk epic.
| |
Last year was a stellar one for fresh, inventive, memorable movie-going experiences. When I began thinking about my favorite movies of the year, over 70 titles came to mind. That's far too many to whittle down to 10. In fact, I couldn't even keep it to 20. So I've doubled the Top "10," included an additional 20 for Honorable Mention, and another 15 in the Documentary category. As I note in the descriptions, each pairing has specific correlations. My steadfast criteria for selecting the "best" is that a film emotionally arouse, perhaps even provoke, me in some way and remain in my thoughts for days afterward or for weeks or forever.
| |
THE 10 (+) BEST MOVIES OF 2002
| |
1. The Pianist and Ararat
| |
Two cultural genocides: Jews by the Nazis and Armenians by the Turks. With no hint of sentimentality, The Pianist, directed by Roman Polanski (who himself survived the Nazi occupation), tells the survival story of a concert pianist living in the hell that was the Warsaw ghetto. Watching the inspired acting of Adrien
Brody and Polanski's seamless directing, there were moments when the drama became so real I almost forgot I was watching a film. In Ararat the Canadian-Armenian director Atom Egoyan tells the story of Turkey's elimination (which Turkey officially continues to deny) through massacre and forced deportation of more than a million of its Armenian citizens in 1915. In a film within a film we watch the parallel experiences of the actors in their own lives and in the parts they play. In the unfolding historical tragedy we see its affects on Armenians living in present-day Toronto.
| |
2. Time Out and About Schmidt
| |
One man loses his job and himself, the other retires and finds himself. The Hitchcock-influenced Time Out is an unrelenting and incisive social commentary on unemployment and how our identity and self-worth are unavoidably linked to what we do. This riveting French film is indirectly based on a true story of a man who pretends to work at the United Nations, but instead sits in his car and tries to cope in a corporatized culture. Time Out should not be missed. About Schmidt looks at the myth of retirement, the hardship of making up for time lost, and the human need for connection. I am not a fan of Jack Nicholson, but as Schmidt, Nicholson taps into the collective existential dread of meaninglessness, the fear of a life wasted, and expresses something beyond his usual sardonic mannerisms. In Omaha the 60-year-old Schmidt retires from his job with an insurance company, loses his wife, "adopts" a Nigerian child, Ndugu, tries to make amends to his resentful daughter, and takes off on a Winnebago vision quest. Through the bleak sadness in About Schmidt shines a spark of hope: the ability to touch another and to be touched in return.
| |
3. The Hours and Lovely and Amazing
| |
Here are two distinct takes on women's lives, one from Hollywood, the other an independent production. The Hours is a complex, multidimensional screen adaptation of a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Michael Cunningham. The script and acting are flawless. Nicole Kidman is a depressive Virginia Woolf who is writing Mrs. Dalloway. Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore are women of subsequent generations (1950s and the present) who mystifyingly seem to actualize the story. Lovely and Amazing is a humorous but sobering 21st century look at a woman with three daughters--how their lives mesh, and don't, the pitfalls of delusion, the cruelty of racism, sexism, and the terrible loathing women feel for their own bodies. Tough topics temperd by an omnipresent humanism.
| |
4. The Piano Teacher and Talk to Her (Hable con ella)
| |
Two films about the inherent difficulty in loving--and being loved by--another human being and the defenses we create against it. In The Piano Teacher Isabel Huppert gives an intrepid performance as an emotionally crippled and crippling pianist and teacher who yearns for love. This is a difficult film, not for everyone, but it bears an astonishing psychological depth. There are scenes so emotionally piercing and raw, embarrassing, even, that, as a means to relieve tension, several viewers in the audience couldn't contain nervous laughter. In the exuberant Talk to Her, two men meet under extreme circumstances: Each one loves a woman who is in a coma. One woman was a dancer, the other a bullfighter. The men learn about hope, unconditional love, and how to cope with the vicissitudes of life. With Talk to Her Pedro Almodovar has reached his maturity as a director and exchanges the camp and melodrama of his previous films (Women On the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, All About My Mother) for a new wisdom and compassion.
| |
5. Y tu mama tambien and City of God
| |
Glimpses into the soul of contemporary Mexico and Rio de Janeiro's crumbling favellas. Y tu mama tambien is perhaps the most exuberant film of the year. Ostensibly a road movie about two teenage boys and a beautiful older woman, it examines love, sex, friendship, beauty, politics, and caste in alternately ribald and numinous ways. City of God, based on a true story, is a devastating but enthralling narrative about armies of well-armed, drug-dealing children who meagerly subsist on the streets and in a cultural genocide are systematically exterminated in gang wars. The filmmakers forego traditional methods of moviemaking for a dazzling bombardment of cinematic pyrotechnics in non-linear storylines, dizzying camera movement, and voluptuous color. In content and form this visceral film pummels the heart.
| |
6. Catch Me If You Can and Auto Focus
| |
In a culture of celebrity here are two individuals looking for their 15 minutes of fame. Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can is based on the true story of a teenager, Frank Abagnale (Leonardo Di Caprio), whose skills as a forger and impostor provide him a means to transform his impoverished life into that of a savvy, swinging swindler--an archetypal Hermes. This is a flawless film, both in execution and substance, that entertains through social satire. And the double father-son theme adds a rich dimension. Di Caprio, Christopher Walken (as the father), and Tom Hanks (as the FBI agent who relentlessly pursues Frank) are all superb. Like Catch Me If You Can, Auto Focus begins with a kitsch pop 1960's title sequence. Greg Kinnear portrays the Œ60's sitcom star Bob Crane, a preppy-looking radio host who dreams of being the "next Jack Lemmon." But the film, directed by Paul Shrader (who wrote the scripts for Taxi Driver and Raging Bull), quickly descends into a sordid darkness as Bob Crane becomes addicted to sex and pornography and begins his downward spiral to the inevitable. Kinnear's performance is haunting and heartbreaking.
| |
7. Adaptation and Spider
| |
Each film offers the opportunity for the viewer to enter into the agitated mind of one character and the deranged mind of the other. Adaptation, although uneven, provides a remarkable look at the often tortuous process a writer undergoes while writing (in this case, a screenplay based on Susan Orlean's book The Orchid Thief), even to the extent of inventing a twin brother (or sub-personality) as inspiration and comic relief. Nicholas Cage cleverly portrays the twin brothers Charley and Donald, and Chris Cooper is sensational as the Florida flower poacher. Meryl Streep is also good as Orlean. Spider is the first David Cronenberg film I've seen that didn't make me nauseous. Probably because it is free of the gratuitously repugnant situations present in his previous work (Videodrome, The Fly, Crash, to name a few). It stars the incomparable Ralph Fiennes as the afflicted schizophrenic Clegg, who may or may not have murdered his mother. Spider is psychologically claustrophobic and we see what Clegg sees. We enter into his obsessive childhood memories and comprehend his terrifying confusion. Spider is the un-Hollywoodized version of schizophrenia.
| |
8. Frida and Nijinsky: The Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky
| |
Portraits of two artists. I reluctantly include Frida because it is far from a perfect film, but many of its images continue to possess me, long after seeing them. My hesitation stems from the fact that there is no continuity of narrative, no thru-line or spine; just a series of images, vignettes, out-takes from Frida and her famous painter husband Diego Rivera's shared experiences. But what images! As a theatre director, Julie Taymor, the film's director, is adventurous and startling. To see the inventive reenactment of the King Kong scene in which Kong climbs the Empire State Building in pursuit of "Beauty" with Diego as Kong and Frida as Beauty is nothing short of thrilling. Or to see the stagnant tableaux of Frida's compelling paintings burst forth into glorious live action is inspired. On the other hand, everything about Nijinsky: The Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky is beyond reproach. Nijinsky was the famed Russian dancer and choreographer who suffered a mental breakdown in 1918 and spent his remaining 32 years in an asylum. Paul Cox, the director, has created an impressionistic melange of poetic visuals, scenes from ballets, and the words of Nijinsky taken directly from his diary--a language which has the flowing feeling of dance to it. In a manic fever Nijinski wrote of being a god. And photographs of him offer proof of his artistic and charismatic divinity.
| |
9. Thirteen Conversations About One Thing and About a Boy
| |
Everyone's looking for happiness. In Jill Sprecher's Thirteen Conversations About One Thing four stories of unhappy New Yorkers are woven together to illustrate the interactions between fate, chance, and synchronisity; how everything is invisibly connected. Carl Jung would have loved this film. I watched it on video and by the end I was so grateful because I could rewind it and view it again immediately. A little like Memento, Thirteen Conversations reveals itself like a mystery unfolding and by the end many of the previously enigmatic moments are now recognizable as foreshadowings. This film is so intelligent, so teasing and surprising. Matthew McConaughey, Alan Arkin, John Turturro, and Clea Du Vall all have certain ways of seeing the world, which, through their impulsive behavior and seemingly random interaction with each other, begin to morph into one another's. Again, I hesitated to include a Hugh Grant vehicle, but the truth is, I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of About a Boy. The story (by High Fidelity author Nick Hornsby) revolves around two boys, really. One, a 12-year-old with a rough life, is desperately trying to grow up. The second, a 38-year-old true Peter Pan, who has absolutely everything--but happiness--is trying just as deliberately to remain an eternal boy/puer. Watching these two redeem each other is pure pleasure.
| |
10. Spirited Away and Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner)
| |
Fantasies of imagination: A fairy tale and a folk tale. The Japanese animation triumph, Spirited Away, follows the adventures of a 10-year-old girl, Chihiro, who becomes separated from her parents in a strange theme park. Fright, frustration, friends, and a happy ending make this a true fairy tale. Sinister Shinto spirit gods nightly make their way to an oversized bath house. In order to gain her freedom and save her parents (who, from overeating, have turned into pigs), Chihiro must work for the sorceress, Yubaba, and cater to the nightly clientele of ghosts and monsters. How she is able to protect herself, save her friend, and be reunited with her parents is magical. The Fast Runner is surely the most visually breathtaking film of 2002. This is an Inuit folk tale told by Inuits and is the first Inuktikut-language feature film. The story, about love, jealousy, trust, family, and justice, has the transformative power of a Shamanic healer.
| |
Too Good to Ignore
| |
Bloody Sunday
Filmed in documentary style and with a Martin Scorcese fervor, Bloody Sunday is the volatile account of a demonstration in Northern Ireland in 1972 that began peacefully, but exploded into a deadly riot in which 13 unarmed marchers were massacred by English soldiers.
| |
Baran
Esteemed Iranian director Majid Majidi (The Color of Paradise) has created a moving account of life among the nearly 2 million Afghani refugees living across the border in Iran. Baran and Latif, a pair of teenagers, meet at a construction site where they both work and develop a mutual attraction. An important film because it puts human faces on a war-torn culture that becomes more relavant to us each day.
| |
Gangs of New York
Scorsese's flawed but visionary telling of an historical period in mid-19th-century Manhattan, where violence ruled, but honor was not yet a forgotten virtue. Daniel Day-Lewis' prodigious performance is the primary reason to see it.
|
I'm Going Home
In Praise of Love
Les Destinees
The Man Without a Past
Minority Report
Monsoon Wedding
Morvern Callar
Mostly Martha
Narc
Personal Velocity
Punch Drunk Love
Rabbit-Proof Fence
Russian Ark
Sade
Safe Conduct
Solaris
Warm Water Under a Bridge
| |
Documentaries Worth Tracking Down
| |
(in preferential order)
|
My Voyage to Italy
Rivers and Tides
Bowling for Columbine
Derrida
ABC Africa
Power and Terror in Our Times: Noam Chomsky
Standing in the Shadows of Motown
The Kid Stays in the Picture
Ravi Shankar: Between Two Worlds
The Pinochet Case
The Trials of Henry Kissinger
Hell House
Daughter of Danang
The Cockettes
Dogtown and Z-Boys
| |
Take this eclectic list with you on your video store excursions. Although not every film will satisfy every taste, I hope you will be adventurous in your choices. Vive le cinema!
| |
NOTE: Many of the above titles have already been released on video and/or DVD. For movie lovers outside metropolitan areas there are two excellent sources for mail order rentals:
|
Netflix. * www.netflix.com
Facets Multi-Media * www.facets.org * 800.331.6197
|
|
