December 26, 2003
By D.K. Holm
Lists, Lists, O Lists
The Best and the Worst of 2003
[nota bene: The following review, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending, don't read on!]
In various forums over the years I have decried, as a professional movie reviewer, the cult of the 10 best lists. But wherever I go they haunt me. Newspapers seem to demand them. Readers seem to like them. But to me these annual orgies of chest-thumping hold about as much interest as those other tedious bores of film history: the fairness of the Academy Awards, the battle over censorship, and the blacklist. All of these topics have merit, of course, but what they lack is satisfying resolution, and as a reader I grow weary of yet another unimaginative rehashing of the same issues over again.
Ten Best lists have a number of drawbacks: they artificially divide the onrush of film history into arbitrary concise segments; they play up to the commerciality of the bogus award season with its meritless glad-handing and preening; they are rarely truly comprehensive because no one person can see everything in one year; and they are unduly confining: why 10? Why not 15? Or 20? Or 100? In that regard, Andrew Sarris and Jonathan Rosenbaum write the best 10-Best lists. They refuse to let the exigencies of journalism dictate undue brevity.
But now, in my dotage, I am beginning to change my tune. I'm beginning to feel warmly toward that annual task that was the bane of my existence. I now see that 10 Best lists provide handy shopping lists for people visiting video rental stores. They also provide a thumbnail sketch of a reviewer's aesthetic constitution. Best of all, they cleanse the cinematic palette at the end of one year as the writer embarks on yet another 12-month grind of high hopes and ambitious projects.
One of my favorite days of the year is that Sunday in January when the LOS ANGELES TIMES CALENDAR section publishes its "Sneaks" issue, listing all the films due for release in the following year. I pore through it the way a sports nut looks at season previews or a sex perv consults a singles directory. I have on my desk the issue for Sunday, January 19, 2003, and it beams with coltish excitement at the prospect of THE MATRIX RELOADED, X-MEN 2, SEABISCUIT, and Meg Ryan's AGAINST THE ROPES.
Yes, that's what they put on the cover. What turned out to be a disastrous sequel, a slightly better sequel, a Ron Howard-PBS-style crowd pleaser, and a movie that ended up postponed. The TIMES cannot be faulted for its optimism, of course. After all, its writers are just as excitable as any other film fan and they only know what they read in the press releases. And on paper, many of the films listed in the section sounded great. But it's funny now to note how many of the films that I came to esteem in the course of last year were buried amid these hundreds of announcements, if mentioned at all.
For example, I couldn't find a citation for perhaps my favorite movie of the year, LOST IN TRANSLATION. Thinking back on the film, I grow wistful at the achingly delicate tenuousness of the relationships forged in a foreign land. I will return to this film again and again.
And after all, shouldn't that be the criterion by which one selects a "10-Best" candidate? Isn't the perfect 10-bester one that you know you are going to buy on DVD ASAP and watch over and over again? That you will make a part of your life for the rest of your life? That's my criterion, anyway. As a working reviewer and a film fan, why bother to put, oh, I don't know, ASSASSINATION TANGO or THE DANCER UPSTAIRS (to mention two I haven't seen) on your list as great films solely out of some duty to self-betterment and fine art everywhere when in fact you personally will never bother to watch them again? A 10-best list should be seized by the reviewer as a celebration of those few films that enter the personal pantheon as classics.
 |
In that regard, KILL BILL, VOL. 1, a film with which I have a continuing relationship, is up there jostling for first place with LOST IN TRANSLATION. But so is DARK BLUE, the first recent cop movie to capture the gritty unsavoriness found in the best cop TV shows such as THE SHIELD.
But then also up there clawing for a supreme position is THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS, simply one of the most adult films of this or any other year. It jostles for prominence with IRREVERSIBLE, a film that is BARBARIAN's dark reverse image, and seeks to humiliate DEMONLOVER, a film that, for all its flaws, I find myself frequently pondering.
The only comic book adaptation of the many that came out last year that I thought really captured both the essence and the particulars of the source was DAREDEVIL, which is no doubt enough to make many readers laugh; and S.W.A.T. was to me an object lesson in how to make an efficient, effective action film. I also admired Colin Farrell's character. Meanwhile, THE RUNDOWN was a surprisingly charming action film.
SHATTERED GLASS was announced dutifully in the L. A. TIMES, like a few other of these films, but I esteem it less for its story about journalistic perfidy than as a fine album of American acting at its best, with its realistic turns from Hank Azaria, Steve Zahn, Chloe Sevigny, and Peter Sarsgaard, among many others.
The oppressive and persistent role of the camera in our lives was captured in two diametrically opposed films that I hope to watch again and again, the documentary CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS and the horror film MY LITTLE EYE.
It's almost pro forma to add a Coen Brothers film to any 10-Best list for a year in which they have released a movie, and this year it's INTOLERABLE CRUELTY, with a funny performance from George Clooney and a delicious one from Catherine Zeta Jones. But Richard Linklater's SCHOOL OF ROCK was also a surprise, a delightful film in a disreputable genre.
And then there is BAD SANTA, the CITIZEN KANE of alcoholic Santa movies, which matches SHAKES THE CLOWN as a film that is genre unto itself. It also joins a small list of truly great Christmas movies: DIE HARD, THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTED, EYES WIDE SHUT, and A CHRISTMAS STORY.
All of these movies are my favorite film of the year. In other words, my top 10 list consists of 14 Number Ones.
Other films from last year that I esteem but need to spend more time with include TERMINATOR 3, FINAL DESTINATION 2, GIGLI, THE GURU, THE GOOD THIEF, HOLES, THE HARD WORD, CABIN FEVER, WILLARD, LOST IN LA MANCHA, WRONG TURN, and IDENTITY.
But this list of likes is culled from the films I've seen. In going over the L. A. TIMES "Sneaks" pull-out as well as other articles about the films of 2003, I'm surprised at how many movies from last year that I've missed. There are reasons for this. For one thing, on the average there are about six to eight advance screenings of films for critics each week. Now, I'm a screening whore. I find it painful to pass up a free movie. But these days the screenings come not only unrelentingly, but also often at the same time, forcing the solo reviewer to choose between equal temptations. And then there is the DVD factor: one has to save something for disc.
But there are other reasons for missing films. I haven't seen THE RETURN OF THE KING yet; I am assuming that it would be on this list if I had. And why haven't I seen it? Because a testy studio rep from the "screamer" school of publicists took exception to a question I asked about MATRIX RELOADED advance screenings (to which critics in my town were selectively invited) and thus banned me henceforth from all Warner Bros. and New Line screenings forever more. On the one hand I find it despicable that a petty despot can wield such power in a small territory and deny her boss, the studio, full potential coverage of its movies for petulant reasons; on the other, thanks! That's two few movies a week I have to bother with!
But on with the show. Now we enter the nether regions, the bad, the laughable, the insulting to the intelligence. The worst of the year.
Believe it or not, I don't relish compiling such a list. For one thing, an ecumenical problem plagues me. Just what constitutes a "worst" list? What exactly is a worst movie of the year?
Well, for one thing, I don't think that such films would be the obvious choices. For example, with all due respect to my colleagues, what is the point of decreeing CHARLIE'S ANGELS: FULL THROTTLE, or LARA CROFT TOMB RAIDER: THE CRADLE OF LIFE to be among the worst films of the year? Wasn't it more or less a given at the very start of 2003 that these films would be what they are? We assume such films are bad. And if they are among the worst, they are bad compared to what? I mean, I kind of enjoyed watching the girls in these two films running around in articles of clothing drawn from their unyielding closet of costumes, and wouldn't mind seeing the films again at some point under the proper circumstances, bad as they are in most ways.
No, the worst films are those that undermine the integrity of the cinema. They are movies that are overrated, that fool people into liking them, that the worst critics champion, and that the Academy drools over, overrated exercises in conventional filmmaking clichés. It would be a film with high ambitions that fails. That doesn't just fail to live up to its premise or goals, but actually betrays them in some weird political and/or psychosexual way. Seemingly great films that are in fact meretricious works.
On that basis, one of the worst films of the year would be ELEPHANT. We assume that LARA CROFT will be bad. But an ambitious film that is compromised by pusillanimous unwillingness to admit what it is really about, that denies that it has thesis about a horrific public event, or worse, has a bogus theory about the cause of that event, that is a bad film, regardless of how well shot or interestingly constructed it is. Give me IRREVERSIBLE over ELEPHANT any day.
In that vein, another deeply bad film is AMERICAN SPLENDOR. To get at the root of what is really wrong with this film, simply compare the careers of the two real life cartoonists who appear in it: R. Crumb, who has never sold out and who has maintained his dignity and his distance from abject commercialization, and Harvey Pekar, whose money grubbing whining consumes not only the film but pages in recent issues of ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY and COMIC ART magazine.
And I hate to rain on Sean Penn's parade. I really do. He is really good in MYSTIC RIVER and 21 GRAMS. But both these films are the bunk. MYSTIC RIVER is predictable and boring. The kudos Eastwood has received for this conventional film fail to note that he is one of the most visually indistinctive directors now working. I prefer my filmmakers to seize control of the look of their films, like a Leone, a Scorsese, a Coen, a Hitchcock, an Argento. And just what is the point of 21 GRAMS? The time juggling in AMORES PERROS was cute and career-making, but what does this approach add to this bland yet obvious tale? Both these films are among the most overrated of the year.
And I am getting tired of Hollywood mis-adapting good books. Now, obviously, it is difficult to completely faithfully adapt any good novel; TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY is a rare example because the filmmakers had six hours to work with (and they still cut out a lot). But MASTER AND COMMANDER: THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD is an outrageously disrespectful adaptation of the O'Brien books, a slap in the face to the people who loved them. Why did they bother? And when will they leave Alan Moore alone? THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN is the second lousy reworking of one of his comics in as many years, and I'm sick of it. And speaking of bad adaptations, THE HULK takes the world of the comic, its sentimental masculine Jekyll and Hyde torment, and feminizes it into a chick flick. I don't think that's what Stan Lee had in mind.
I doubt if any other review in the country will pair these two films, but here's another set of lousy films: WINGED MIGRATION and the remake of THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. Both are examples of cunning manipulation of a target audience, in the one case caring, liberal environmentalists, and on the other potato chip munching slackers. And both are in their way cruelly and equally violent, imposing cinematic clichès on the way the world — of nature and of man — works. MASSACRE is in its way a bizarre, cruel, and ignorant betrayal of the way '70s slasher films worked. Yet both are beautifully and cleverly photographed (and in MASSACRE Jessica Biel is spectacularly, lushly rendered on screen).
Let me just say one word. WONDERLAND. What a shocking waste of acting talent. But worse, what a poor use of pop tunes to "illustrate" a story. Only Spike Lee is less adept at music, also just stringing together a bunch of songs, without rhyme or reason, over consecutive scenes, as if the director put on a "Hits of the '80s" anthology and left the room.
 |
There are several reasons why 2003 was, for the most part, underwhelming. First there was the virus of sequelitis. There were over 25 sequels released by the major studios last year. There is nothing inherently wrong with a sequel, and Hollywood has been dependent on them since the silent era. But in contemporary Hollywood the problem with sequels is that they are really remakes, a retelling of the same story with some slight variations, usually in the direction of excess. There are few true sequels. THE GODFATHER PART II, drawing on elements from the source novel while adding new tangents, actually does extend and deepen the story of the first film. On the other hand, what is ROCKY II but the same movie with a slightly different ending and a numeric label where a title should be? Most of the 2003 sequels I saw were terrible. ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO bore witness to the further decline of its director's once inspiring work, rehashing the same old material (but with a strong character created for Johnny Depp and a couple of other actors), while LEGALLY BLONDE 2 was a disastrous comedown from a surprisingly entertaining and winning progenitor.
2003 was also notable for a further decline in comedy. Of the ones I saw only the titles listed in the "best" list above qualify as successful comedies. BUFFALO SOLDIERS, DICKIE ROBERTS: FORMER CHILD STAR, THE HAUNTED MANSION, BRINGING DOWN THE HOUSE, were, quite simply, not funny. The worst, however, was SCARY MOVIE 3, which took a black franchise and bleached it. The result was like Pat Boone covering an NWA number.
Another factor leading to the etiolating of cinema was the further decrease in foreign films on offer. Jonathan Rosenbaum speaks eloquently and frequently about this crisis in international cinema, and I will leave it to the reader to track down that reviewer's words on the subject. Suffice it to say that the state of things is as bad today as it was when he wrote about the matter, if not worse.
KILL BILL VOL. 1, Volume Nine
KILL BILL VOL. 1
The eastern intellectual èlite hath spake: KILL BILL bad; MYSTIC RIVER great.
In the most recent issue of the NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, Daniel Mendelsohn takes on KB, and Geoffrey O'Brien writes glowingly (if not flowingly) about MYSTIC RIVER. Mendelsohn, some of whose essays I've appreciated, has been blessed with a George Jean Nathan drama award for his writing on the theater, while O'Brien has several good film books to his credit and is the general editor of the Library of America (was it he who got Hammett, Chandler, and Nabokov into the mix?), so both of these guys no doubt know more than I do. And as contributors to the esteemed bi-weekly, they set the tone for how these films will be perceived by the journal's constituency, those Park Slope professionals with their fragile designer eyewear, those dedicated foodies who shop only at a co-op, who are obsessed with getting their pampered kids into PS 321, and who laugh knowingly at art films at Lincoln Plaza — when they bother to go out to see films at all.
KILL BILL is not for them. Or at least, the NYRB's arbiter has decreed that the film is not for them. But that being said, may I make a few demurrals about Mr. Mendelsohn's critique?
 |
Why is it that when brainiacs talk about genre films they don't feel the need
to do accurate, detailed research? "To the accompaniment of some upbeat pop
music," Mr. Mendelsohn writes, talking about the scene in which Michael Madsen
cuts off a cop's ear in RESERVOIR DOGS. As everybody except uptight New York
intellectuals know, the tune is actually "Stuck in the Middle with You" by
Stealers Wheel, and far from being "upbeat" in the conventional sense, it is an
account of someone trapped in a confusing and uncomfortable situation,
ostensibly a high guy at a weird party, but with universal application ("And
I’m wondering what it is I should do./ It’s so hard to keep this smile from my
face,/ Losing control, yeah, I’m all over the place./ Clowns to the left of me,
jokers to the right,/ Here I am, stuck in the middle with you"). Would Mr.
Mendelsohn get very far in his career if he were just as incurious about
telling details in Euripides?
Further, Mr. Mendelsohn asserts that the DiVAS squad in KB is based on shows like CHARLIE'S ANGELS, and links it to the reference in PULP FICTION to a show supposedly called "Fox Force Five." There actually was a show called C.A.T. SQUAD, produced by William Friedkin, but that seems not to have any similarities to "Fox Force Five." In any case, Mr. Mendelsohn doesn't grasp that the DiVAS are bad, that they are paid assassins, while Fox Force Five was good. In any case, they are nothing like Charlie's Angels, who are private detectives, and in any case, '70s shows did not "celebrate" assassins.
Mr. Mendelsohn also says that RESERVOIR DOGS opens with a "group of thieves arguing about the meaning of the lyrics to Madonna's 'Like a Virgin.'" Hmmmm. I don't recall anyone arguing about it; just Tarantino's character making the analogy. Maybe his auditors are a little skeptical, but … There is an argument a little about the efficacy of tipping, but that, of course, is a different thing.
Another error of observation occurs when he tries to describe what happens after The Bride kills Vernita. The Bride "turns around to find that Vernita's young daughter has witnessed the whole thing. But — as the Bride apologies to her — the girl says nothing at all, shows no reaction. Neither does the audience." Maybe not his kind of Lincoln Center audience, all constipated into silence by their hypercritical agenda. In any case, The Bride isn't really apologizing. She's explaining why she did what she did, and telling the girl that if she is still sore about it when she grows up, The Bride will be waiting, setting up an interesting continuity of vengeance as a never-ending cycle.
Oh, well. Apparently genre films are not worthy of attention to detail.
Mr. Mendelsohn's real point is that "what few critics have remarked on is how boring all this [violence] actually is." Perhaps these unnamed critics have not remarked on the film's supposedly boring violence because it is not true. Of course, if your favorite films are dry adaptations of Goethe and James, the grungy genre work that Mr. Mendelsohn seems to disdain would be boring. What I personally love about KILL BILL is that the film takes seriously the kinds of codes and rituals that mainstream culture views as trivial things. "How tedious, for all their color and noise, the scenes of violence are," Mr. Mendelsohn continues. Ah. The old porno argument, that smut is boring. Personally, I have never been bored by a porno movie. Uninterested, maybe, but not bored.
Mr. Mendelsohn quotes Tarantino from the NEW YORKER about the relationship between a filmmaker and his audience, which it is like an S&M dyad, with the audience the M; this resembles Hitchcock's famous remark about putting the audience through it. But to what end? To delight, not to "punish," as Mr. Mendelsohn suggests. Pulling an old Kael trick (when she didn't like a director), Mr. Mendelsohn suggests that the violence in Tarantino's films is "compensatory, reflecting a certain anxiety about masculinity."
He also further charges Tarantino's films with evincing adolescent embarrassment over adult sexuality — but has he seen JACKIE BROWN? He claims that the violence is presented without any "moral comment." But the violence in the films is moral; it is about justice and revenge and righting wrongs. I am having a hard time seeing that as fundamentally immoral. Then, using an old clichè, Mr. Mendelsohn calls QT the poster boy for a generation "whose moral reasons to violence has been alarmingly dulled by too much popular entertainment." Oh. That old argument. Tarantino's movies are set "in the context of random and, sometimes, unmotivated crime." This statement, on a purely factual level, is untrue. But then Mr. Mendelsohn changes his line of attack. It is "not the violence, but the emptiness, the passivity" that he objects to in Tarantino. I have no idea what he means here. But he sure is writing himself into a corner, making himself, willing himself to dislike the films (to fit into the NYRB's agenda?).
For Mr. Mendelsohn, Tarantino's film "offers few of the traditional satisfactions of drama — even genre dramas such as martial arts of spaghetti westerns." This too is flatly wrong. But perhaps such a statement resonates with the food obsessed Park Slope intellectuals.
Tarantino supposedly "doesn't bother to give [the violence] emotional resonance." What is moral resonance? In any case, this is not true. Mr. Mendelsohn decries the "sheer randomness of the killings." Again, not true. The Bride is after very specific targets. She is following a path of ever increasing hardships, as in traditional kung fu movies, and like Bruce Lee in GAME OF DEATH. In this, KILL BILL is like a video game, in which the player progresses through a maze by besting each level's guardian. Or could it be that KILL BILL is like THE ODYSSEY, in which … or is that too "pretentious" a comparison for a genre piece?
Tarantino "assumes that you, too, have seen enough kung fu movies and bad old westerns (to say nothing of bad Seventies chick-cop shows [specific titles, please?]) to know why these characters do what they do." But isn't it obvious why they are doing what they do? The Bride is getting vengeance — justice on those who, as far as she knows, killed her husband and unborn daughter. Why does one need a background in martial arts films to follow that? Mr. Mendelsohn's charge that the film lacks "a sense of intellectual process or judgment" is also flatly wrong. At least I think it is wrong. Reading it again, I'm not sure I even know what that means. But then, the older I get the harder I find it to understand, really understand, what I'm reading. Maybe he just means that Tarantino fails to fill in the blanks about such things as why The Bride left the DiVAS; things possibly answered in the second part.
Mr. Mendelsohn has a nice phrase, "temporal scrambling," when he refers to Tarantino's narrative tricks, but then goes on the attack again. He mocks Tarantino for working in a video store, as if researching one's art, in one of the few ways that Tarantino could, is bad. Or maybe it is just the type of art that offends Mr. Mendelsohn. A little more Tarkovsky, and a little less Samuel Fuller would do quite nicely for him. But one of Mr. Mendelsohn's bigger points really defies sense. He says that the "movieness" of Tarantino's films "is itself a far greater problem than its violence." Funny. I find the "essayness" of Mr. Mendelsohn's essay a really big problem.
Mr. Mendelsohn concludes by taking a swipe at Tarantino in suggesting that the director might really think "revenge is a dish best served cold" is an old Klingon saying. But apparently "cold" is how Mr. Mendelsohn and his constituency prefer their movies served to them.
NEXT TIME: PAYCHECK
E-MAIL THE AUTHOR |
ARCHIVES
