Dark Globe.

A weekend of playoff football (ugh, so close, Jets) has fed into the Golden Globe awards which, I must say, have been pretty disappointing this year. I root for both Clive Owen and Natalie Portman in general, but Closer was a lousy film, and I would have much preferred to see some love for Eternal Sunshine at some point in the evening, even if Sideways and The Aviator are deserving in their own way. (I have yet to see Million Dollar Baby or Ray, but would be very surprised if they turned out better than Charlie Kaufman’s magnum opus.) Ah well, perhaps this’ll help Jim Carrey beat the Golden Globe curse.

2004 in Film.

Happy New Year, everyone. Inauspiciously for 2005, it looks like I’m starting the year a day late on the end-of-2004 movie roundup…but better late than never. As you probably already guessed, this year’s film list will be the first in four years without a Peter Jackson Tolkien adaptation in the #1 spot (although I’m still keeping it warm for The Hobbit in 2008.) Nevertheless, my top choice this year was an easy one, and those of y’all who come ’round here often can probably figure it out.

Top 20 Films of 2004:
[2000/2001/2002/2003]

1) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The one true classic of 2004, Eternal Sunshine has only grown in my estimation since its initial release in March. (David Edelstein’s take on it as one of Harvard philosopher Stanley Cavell‘s remarriage comedies is well worth reading.) A heartfelt examination of love, loss, and memory, Eternal Sunshine was also a strikingly adult take on romance and relationships, the kind you usually don’t get from Hollywood. With great performances from a caged Jim Carrey and an electric Kate Winslet, the film managed to be both an earnest, passionate love story and a wistful paean to those person-shaped holes we all carry in our hearts and memories. Along with Annie Hall and High Fidelity, it goes down as one of my all-time favorite films about the mysteries of love. (Why even bother? We need the eggs.)

2) Garden State. Writer-director Zach Braff’s “anti-Graduate” debut was a small but touching ode to home that, along with reviving Natalie Portman as an actress and offering the best soundtrack of the year, delivered exactly what it promised. A bit hokey at times, sure, but Garden State wore its heart on its sleeve and, for the most part, got away with it. It was a witty and eloquent voyage to the Jersey burbs and a testament to the proposition that as Paul Weller put it, it’s never too late to make a brand new start.

3) The Incredibles. Pixar has been delivering well-constructed eye-popping wonders since Toy Story, and The Incredibles is the best of the lot. I figured it might be awhile before a movie topped Spiderman 2 as a sheer comic book spectacle, but, as it turned out, The Incredibles did it only a few months later. One of the best comic book films ever made, The Incredibles was two hours of unmitigated fanboy fun. I’m going to go out on a limb and say it’s probably also the best Fantastic Four film we’re ever going to see.

4) Sideways. Like a fine 1961 Cheval Blanc, Alexander Payne’s elegiac toast to California wine country and the regrets and indignities of middle-age has a tendency to linger in the senses. Paul Giamatti must tire of playing depressive, barely sociable losers, but he’s great at it here…Sideways isn’t as funny as Election, but it is a memorable trip.

5) Spiderman 2. A definite improvement on the first adventure of your friendly neighborhood wallcraller, Spiderman 2 was a perfectly made summer film that stayed true to the spirit of Peter Parker. Along with X2, this is the gold standard for comic book-to-film adaptations right now…let’s hope Batman Begins is up to snuff.

6) Shaun of the Dead. Although it lost its footing shambling to its conclusion, Shaun of the Dead was great fun for the first two-thirds of its run, and it’s now probably my favorite zombie movie (everyone should have one.) A much-needed dry British humor fix to tide us over until Hitchhiker’s Guide.

7) The Aviator. A bit on the long side, Scorsese’s life of Howard Hughes is most fun when it stays away from the airfields and lounges about Old Hollywood. Two very clean thumbs up.

8) The Assassination of Richard Nixon. A dark, unflinching 90-minute descent into violent futility. I originally had this before The Aviator, then figured the degree of difficulty on Scorsese’s flick was much, much higher. Nevertheless, this funereal biopic for non-billionaire crazies, while grim and not much fun, was well-made and well-performed, and I expect it’ll stay with me for awhile.

9) The Bourne Supremacy. Perhaps a bit too much like its predecessor, Bourne II was still a better Bond than anything we’ve seen in the past 20 years. Paul Greengrass’ shakicam work here bodes well for Rorshach in The Watchmen.

10) Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkhaban. It’d be hard to make a better film of Harry Potter’s adventures at Hogwarts than Alfonso Cuaron did here — Azkhaban managed to capture the dry wit and subversive spirit of the books that’s so missing in the Chris Columbus movies. That being said, Azkaban also made it clear that much of the fun of Rowling’s tomes is uncapturable on film. What was great fun to read on the page ended up seeming like Back to the Future II on the screen. With that in mind, Year 6 begins on 7/16.

11) Ocean’s 12. Two swollen hours of Soderberghian glamour and inside baseball. Not everyone’s cup of tea, I know, but I found it an agreeable improvement on Ocean’s 11. (Don Cheadle’s accent is still terrible, tho’.)

12) Touching the Void. Snap! Aigh! Crunch! Aigh! It’d be hard to forget anything as memorable as Shattered Femur Theater. Well worth seeing, if you can stand the pain.

13) Fahrenheit 9/11. Hmmm…perhaps this should be higher. I definitely left the theater in an angry froth (not that it takes much)…unfortunately, apparently so did all the freepers.

14) My Architect. An excellent documentary on Louis Kahn, brilliant architect and terrible family man. Alas, it’s also a less-excellent documentary on Kahn’s son, and his Oprah-like quest for self-acceptance.

15) Kinsey. Take that, red staters.

16) Hero. A memorable meditation on love, power, and kick-ass kung-fu, until its train-wreck derailing in the last half-hour.

17) The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. As I said yesterday, Aquatic was a jaunty Wes Anderson joyride that nevertheless gets a little lost in its terminal cuteness. When you care more about the leaving-behind of Cody the three-legged dog than you do the death of a major character, there’s a problem.

18) I Heart Huckabees. Huckabees had its heart in the right place, and made for a decently appealing night at the movies…but it also had a terminal-cute problem.

19) Collateral. If the movie had maintained the promise of its first hour throughout, Michael Mann’s Collateral would have been a top ten contender. Alas, it all falls apart once Tom Cruise goes bugnut psycho in da club.

20) Kill Bill, Vol. 2. There was probably one really good movie somewhere in the two Kill Bills. The second half was closer to it than the first.

Not Seen: Bad Education, Before Sunset, Finding Neverland, Friday Night Lights, Harold and Kumar, Hotel Rwanda, Maria Full of Grace, Million Dollar Baby, Ray, Spanglish

Worst Movies of the Year: Van Helsing, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, The Chronicles of Riddick, The Village, Code 46, Closer, Alexander, 21 Grams (2003)

Biggest Disappointment: The Ladykillers

Ho-Hum: Team America: World Police, The Alamo, House of Flying Daggers, Troy, King Arthur, Anchorman, Blade: Trinity, Shrek 2

Worth a Rental: Mean Girls, The Manchurian Candidate,
Hellboy, The Machinist, City of God (2003)

Best Actor: Jim Carrey, Eternal Sunshine; Paul Giamatti, Sideways; Sean Penn, The Assassination of Richard Nixon.
Best Actress: Kate Winslet, Eternal Sunshine.

Best Supporting Actor: Thomas Haden Church, Sideways
Best Supporting Actress: Cate Blanchett, The Aviator; Virginia Madsen, Sideways.

2005: On paper, it’s looking like a better year for film, fanboy and otherwise, than 2004. The slate includes Star Wars Episode III, Batman Begins, The Chronicles of Narnia, All the King’s Men, PJ’s King Kong, Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, Gilliam’s The Brothers Grimm, Polanski’s Oliver Twist, Malick’s The New World, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Constantine, Sin City, Fantastic Four, and my own most-anticipated project, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. So here’s to the new year!

From Plato’s Cave to Lacuna, Inc.


Via All About George, A.O. Scott applies Stanley Cavell to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I’m a big Cavell fan…in fact, his reading of Emersonian perfectionism figured heavily in (and, with Michael Sandel’s work, helped inspire) my political philosophy list last week. Can’t wait to see how Cities of Words turned out, and how close it dovetails with his old Moral Perfectionism course at Harvard.

Forget-Me-Not.


While The Ladykillers ultimately fell well short of expectations, I thought Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind lived up to the hype and then some. One part Annie Hall, one part Sliding Doors, three parts Charlie Kaufman, Eternal Sunshine is an exceptionally strange take on the romantic comedy, and probably the best flick by the screenwriter in question since Being John Malkovich. (It probably helped that I tend to be a fan of almost all the folks at work here, particularly Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Tom Wilkinson, Mark Ruffalo, Elijah “Bad Frodo” Wood, and David Cross.) While the movie occasionally lapses into gratuitous symbolism (The “lost and gone forever” name “Clementine,” for instance) and hokey pop psychology (All of the Carrey-as-baby scenes were done more quickly and effectively in the Cameron Diaz-Catherine Keener chase scene through Malkovich’s brain), Sunshine is a fun, thought-provoking look at relationships and memory, and one that definitely holds together better than Gondy and Kaufman’s last collaboration, Human Nature.

I don’t want to say too much about Eternal Sunshine, as I think it’s probably a movie best enjoyed fresh. But just to give a sense of where my own brain was at during the film, there’s a scene near the end where Joel and Clementine are talking in a Barnes & Noble, and as they chat the books around them slowly lose their color and titles, until they’re all just blank. I think this scene unnerved me more than any other in the film…I wanted to shout, “Not until Thursday! Just remember them until Thursday!” Until then, I’d like to keep my mind as spotted as possible, thank you very much.

Visions to Come.

It’s been a quiet January as usual for fanboy and fangirls, and particularly in the wake of the Grey Havens last month. But lots of news out and about today: Terry Gilliam and James Cameron both discuss their next projects (The Brothers Grimm and Untitled Big Idea CGI Sci-Fi respectively), USA Today looks at a number of fantasy projects (including Lemony Snicket, Narnia, Elric, Artemis Fowl, and The Hobbit), and a longer trailer premieres for Frodo (and Charlie Kaufman’s) next project, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, also featuring Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Tom Wilkinson, Kirsten Dunst, and Mark Ruffalo (previous trailer here.) Also, we’ve got a few more new Spidey II pics, some small Episode III tidbits, and The Ring‘s Martin Henderson possibly up for Superman. (Hmm…I hope not.)

Coming Attractions.

AICN points to a flurry of new trailers, most notably The Missing, a Blair Witch western with Cate Blanchett and Tommy Lee Jones (no, he’s not playing the pollution Indian), and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the new Charlie Kaufman script starring Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst, Elijah Wood, and Tom Wilkinson (and directed by Michel Gondry)…looks like Kaufmanesque fun.

Adaptation.

Caught a number of films in the theater and on DVD over the past week, so as per usual, here’s the skinny:

L’Auberge Espagnole: I went into this movie more blind than usual – The only review I had read was George‘s, and for some reason I thought the film was about a mid-life crisis. So I was quite happily surprised by this sweet comedy about assorted European Erasmus students enjoying a Barcelona summer. Like Y Tu Mama Tambien (which I thought was a little overrated but good nonetheless), this movie illustrates yet again just how tame and lame our domestic youth comedies have become. L’Auberge was funnier, sexier, and more intelligent than any of the assorted American Pies or their ilk, and, whatsmore, all of the characters acted and seemed like “real” people. This movie seems to understand that it’s possible to capture the joys of youth and friendship without resorting to a constant stream of lame, mostly unfunny gross-out jokes. Even when L’Auberge founders in cliche (Here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson) or somewhat hamhandedly offers us a life-lesson in the last ten minutes or so, its moralizing still didn’t come off as egregiously as in Old School or Anger Management, to take two recent examples of bad American comedy. In sum, L’Auberge Espagnole is a fluffy film but a fun one nonetheless, and special marks go to Kevin Bishop as the visiting brother/terminal wanker – He more than makes up for the Audrey Tautou factor.

The Hulk: Ok, we may suck at comedies, but there are some things that American film does well, and very few of them are evident in The Hulk. “I’m trying to make a delicacy out of American fast food,” said Ang Lee about this project, and I had high hopes he might make something special out of the green machine. Well, I usually like Ang Lee, and I like the Hulk comics (never cared all that much for the TV show), but sadly, the two together didn’t work at all. Hulk begins with a great credit sequence and then falters for the next hour and a half…in fact, the Hulk himself doesn’t show up until an hour or so into the movie – Instead, we’re forced to sit through long, bad monologues about memory repression and daddy issues that never really amount to all that much. Even when it seems the movie is starting to find its sea legs, when [Significant Spoilers to follow] Hulk escapes into the desert and Nick Nolte (chewing the scenery like Al Pacino gone rabid) surprisingly becomes the Absorbing Man, it turns out to be just an illusion. Instead, we get more improbable conversations about daddy, and the Absorbing Man – one of the Hulk’s classic villains – instead becomes Cthulu the Jellyfish God or something. All in all, Hulk turned out to be long and boring. It’s sad, really, ’cause this film could have been really good. The Hulk looks right, even if his jumping is a bit off (He should come down with the force of a minor earthquake each time, not bounce around like Q-Bert), and I liked the comic book wipes and fades employed throughout the picture. But, in the end, to quote Amadeus, the Hulk suffers from too many notes. They could’ve played up the Frankenstein angle or the Jekyll and Hyde angle, but they don’t have time to do both and layer on all the Freudian repression stuff. Make all the delicacies you want, but in the end Hulk should be big, green, angry, and destroying stuff (He also should be talking, but oh well.) Somewhere along the way, Ang Lee lost focus and became more concerned with making an arthouse “comic-book movie” than with making the Hulk. Particularly given how pitch-perfect X2 turned out, this is a considerable disappointment.

Human Nature: Charlie Kaufmann’s other movie (besides Being John Malkovich, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and Adaptation, the last of which seems at least tangentially related to the material of this film) was a holdover from my Blockbuster night earlier in the week. And while there are a number of funny scenes throughout the movie, they sadly don’t add up to being a very funny film. The performances are generally good, particularly Tim Robbins as a repressed, manners-obsessed scientist (who tells his tale from beyond the grave, which was a bit strange since I watched Jacob’s Ladder again only last weekend), Rhys Ifans as “Puff,” the ape man subject of Robbins’ experiments (One of the funnier scenes in the movie involves Ifans trying frantically to hump a slide show screen, despite being continuously shocked by Robbins), and Miranda Otto (a million miles away from Rohan) as Robbins’ coquettish, quasi-French assistant. Sadly, though, there’s a lot of downtime between the jokes, and I lost interest in the movie in the last half hour or so. I’m on the fence on this one, but in the end I guess I wouldn’t recommend it.

The Grey Zone: This film is obviously a 180 degree turn in tone and content from Human Nature, so I’m glad I ended up watching them on different nights. The Grey Zone is a very bleak tale of the 12th Sonderkommando, the group of Jewish prisoners assigned to tend the murdering gas and fires of Auschwitz in 1944. Hard to watch at times, it might even be more unflinching than The Pianist, since it just throws you immediately into the horror without the slow buildup of the Szpilmans. Most of the action of the movie, which began as and still feels like a play, evolves around the plans for a coming uprising, and how they’re thrown into disarray by an unusual event in the gas chamber. If you can stomach it – and can get over the anachronistic accents and Mamet-y dialogue, the Grey Zone is well worth viewing, not the least to experience the surprise of a film in which David Arquette gives a more nuanced and absorbing performance than Harvey Keitel, who reminded me of Kurt Fuller’s impression of Col. Klink in Auto Focus.

2K3 (and 2K2 films.)

Happy New Year, y’all…and I hope everyone had a safe and happy New Year’s Eve. After a hectic past couple of days (which included spending most of my 28th birthday (12/29) driving up the East Coast in holiday traffic and entertaining some old DC friends for a pre-New Years get-together on the 30th), I decided to spend the evening with Berkeley, DoD, and a 4-pack of Guinness. All in all, I quite enjoyed 2002 (Year in Pics), even if the leadership deficit in Washington often seemed despairingly large this past year. But, at any rate, here’s looking to a peaceful, fun-filled, and productive 2003 the world over.

Of course, as in the past two years, a 2003 post means it’s now time for the 2002 Movie Roundup. (As per usual, movies I haven’t seen yet aren’t listed, which this year include The 25th Hour, About Schmidt, Bowling for Columbine, Bloody Sunday, Catch Me If You Can, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Far From Heaven, Frida, The Hours, Jackass, The Ring, and Chicago.) So without further ado, my

Top 20 Films of the Year:

1. Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. No surprise here. Although Fellowship may have delivered a bigger emotional impact, Peter Jackson and co. handled massive expectations with aplomb and deftly translated J.R.R. Tolkien‘s most unwieldy tome (Silmarillion notwithstanding) into the action-epic of the year. (Speaking of action-epics, given that both Braveheart and Gladiator actually won Best Picture, TTT deserves a nomination, if nothing else.) And the creation of Gollum as the first fully-realized digital character in motion picture history not only stands as an award-worthy breakthrough in bridging special effects and acting, but also as another sad reminder of the disrepute to which the other fanboy/girl trilogy has fallen. The bar has been raised…again.

2. In the Bedroom. A hold-over from 2001 that I happened to see in the first weeks of 2002. I can’t remember another film this year that resonated so strongly. While I think last year’s award hoopla erred too far toward the histrionics of Sissy Spacek and away from the nuanced performance of Tom Wilkinson, the moral center of the film, In the Bedroom nevertheless powerfully depicts how ostensibly “good” people eventually find themselves contemplating and acting out evil deeds. Plenty of complex and memorable scenes throughout, such as Wilkinson watching the distracted guests at his son’s funeral, or his pained attempt to forge a connection with Marisa Tomei, a woman he has nothing in common with except loss. A very, very good film that, if anyone has the stomach for a double dose of grief, bookends nicely with Atom Egoyan‘s The Sweet Hereafter.

3. About a Boy. A surprisingly good translation of Nick Hornby‘s third book. A bit fluffy, perhaps, and as I noted here I’m not sure how I feel about some of the underlying premises, but very well done nonetheless. After all, making both Hugh Grant and a precocious young British lad palatable at the same time is no easy task.

4. Secretary. A heart-warming romantic comedy about a boy, a girl, and the spankings that brought them together. Both James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal are great in this pic, although I’m getting kinda sick of Jeremy Davies (his overly mannered performance in Solaris was distracting too.) While critics are falling all over themselves about the admittedly good Y Tu Mama Tambien for its frank look at sex, I found Secretary the better, and sexier, film of the two. (I thought Y Tu Mama Tambien was more explicit than it was erotic, which is a small difference but a difference nonetheless.) A lot of the people I’ve spoken with had trouble with the ending, but I thought that it ended the only way it really could…any other way would’ve given the audience the out they wanted to condemn these people as sideshow freaks. By treating this bizarre couple as just another relationship in a weird wide world, Secretary offers a portrait of two people “just right” for each other that is much more touching than the average, vanilla romantic comedy.

5. Adaptation. Despite what the sidebar says, I sense this one slipping in my mind while Gangs of New York moves up. Nevertheless, Adaptation was an interesting and fun mind twister for the first two acts (worth the price of admission for the nut muffin reward monologue alone, not to mention Meryl Streep‘s stoned dial tone.) Like Secretary, I see how the movie had to end the way it did, but still…I think there’s something to be said for Stephanie Zacharek’s position that, in a year when some very good adaptations were made (2 of the top 3 here, for example), Kaufman’s self-referential, Hollywood-hating story here is a trifle indulgent. But, for now, it holds the five spot.

6. Spiderman. Probably the second-best foray in yet another lousy crop of summer films (after Minority Report), but at first viewing much more fun than Spielberg’s film. Spidey was a great movie for the first hour, but got a bit perfunctory in the second. On the plus side, I don’t think you could have handled the origin story (or J. Jonah Jameson, for that matter) any better, but the Green Goblin still seems grossly misconceived. (Casting Willem DaFoe, who looks just like the Goblin without the mask on, and then fitting him with a static, sterile green faceplate, is just a mistake of monumental proportions.) And I’m still not too big on Kirsten Dunst as MJ – she screams Gwen Stacy at me. But, fanboy issues aside, Sam Raimi‘s movie was still probably the most satisfying summer film this year.

7. Gangs of New York. I find my thoughts dwelling on this one, so much so that I’m probably going to end up seeing it again. Ultimately, I think Gangs is an almost-great but deeply-flawed film. When you see Daniel Day-Lewis, Jim Broadbent, Liam Neeson, John C. Reilly, or the wonderful recreation of Five Points, you get a sense that this could be one for the ages. But then the film just flounders around for too long with no sense of purpose, other than a meager and barely compelling revenge story. Scorsese‘s beautiful tracking shot of Irish immigrants disembarking in NY harbor and promptly entering the Union army (as coffins are unloaded from nearby ships) gives you a sense of how amazing this film could have been. But, most of the time, you’re just wondering how much longer it’s going to take for Amsterdam DiCaprio to get his act together. And the draft riots issues have already been discussed at length here.

8. Solaris. Like GONY, this film feels like a missed opportunity (and like GONY, I would very much like to see the rumored 45-minute-longer cut.) I liked Solaris more than most people I’ve talked to, but in the end it seemed a bit narrowly conceived. It was a very interesting rumination on relationships and memory – you ultimately know and love the stylized people created in your head more than the actual persons in front of you – but after awhile, I felt like shaking George Clooney and saying “Look, I know it’s weird to see your dead wife again and all, but there’s an alien intelligence trying to communicate with you outside the ship.” That sense of wonder that should have accompanied much of the film is lost by the time Clooney arrives on the space station. And like I said before, Jeremy Davies is distracting.

9. Minority Report. This film was probably the best of the summer movies, even if Spiderman was more satisfying. I liked the brooding atmosphere of this film – if anything, Spielberg‘s vision here makes AI look better too. But, sadly, the film completely falls apart at the end. As I said here, I’m of the school that everything that happens after Tom Cruise is placed in Tim Blake Nelson‘s jail is a Brazil-like vision. This view might explain the ending but, if the picture were better, it wouldn’t need explaining.

10. Y Tu Mama Tambien. As noted above, I think this film is getting overrated in many critics’ end-of-year lists, but it was still quite good. Like Secretary, the way sex is handled in the picture makes your realize how cartoonish it’s become in most American films (where, as Ebert notes here, the closest thing one gets to mature handling of sexual themes is in throwaway garbage like American Pie.) And Maribel Verdu makes for a intriguing Mrs. Robinson of sorts. But, to me much of the voice-over throughout, and particularly in the “two years later” final scene, was hamhanded. For example, when our trio is driving through Mexico and pass a car wreck which is then contextualized by our Amelie-esque narrator, I was completely taken out of the picture. Good, but not as good as it’s currently being made out to be.

11. Blade 2: Bloodhunt. A popcorn film that delivered on exactly the level I wanted it to, from iconic Reservoir Dogs-type shots of Blade and the Bloodpack to an Aliens-like “we’re not all going to make it” rampage in the sewers of Prague. There’s no scene in the movie as good as the meatpacking plant vampire rave that kicks off the first film, but that’d be a hard moment to top anyway. Well-done throughout as a bubble-gum, comic book movie.

12. Below. Speaking of popcorn flicks, David Twohy‘s Below got undeservedly buried by Dimension films when, at least for the first hour and a half, it was quite a spooky ghost story in the Twilight Zone tradition. Like Minority Report, it completely fell apart in the end, of course, but I always like to see Bruce Greenwood and Olivia Williams get some work, and Holt McCallany‘s scene in the mirror still gives me the shivers.

13. The Bourne Identity. Another surprise. While the new Bond flick only stayed intriguing for the first thirty minutes or so, this film managed to hold my interest throughout. Matt Damon is believable, Chris Cooper and Brian Cox do excellent character work here, and Franka Potente and Clive Owen help lend the film an authentic European flavor that’s gone completely AWOL over in the Bond series. (Sadly, though, Columbia’s own Julia Stiles seems grossly miscast.) If the first film’s any indication, I’d rather see another Bourne than another Bond.

14. Undercover Brother. For that matter, I’d rather see another Brother than another Bond too. An Austin Powers ripoff, perhaps, but I found it funnier than Goldmember. The scene with Doogie testing Eddie Griffin‘s grasp of whiteness by asking him Friends trivia was a classic in and of itself.

15. Blue Crush. Laugh if you want, but Blue Crush was a surprisingly solid grrl power film, with appealing characters, realistic interactions, and beautiful Hawaii scenery. The 8 Mile for the X-Games set, Blue Crush was a much better film than I had expected, even if some of the CGI surfing effects are pretty lame. Extra points for the Blestenation hip-hop remix of Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer,” which really should have been the summer joint of 2002.

16. Insomnia. Like Minority Report and Below, Christopher Nolan‘s third effort starts well but peters out by the end. I liked it, but didn’t find Al Pacino half as good as everyone made him out to be. As for Robin Williams, he’s good in this, as he was in the rather stilted One Hour Photo, but you don’t get points for simply not being zany. An ok film that falls in the rankings for the insipid ending and for wasting the lovely Maura Tierney.

17. 8 Mile. It’s Rocky for skinny white guys! Flashdance without the welding! Yeah, this film is predictable, but like Curtis Hanson‘s earlier Wonder Boys, it evokes an air of authenticity that carries the picture through its rough spots. I particularly liked the banter between “Rabbit” and his friends, even if some of them, most notably Sol (Omar Miller, the big tubby playa) and DJ Iz (De’Angelo Wilson, the earnest black power guru) seem like direct lifts of Stacy and Sharif from the much-better Menace II Society. And, although he’s pretty good in this film as himself, I still can’t really see Eminem having much of a movie career, even if his name was being bandied about for Bruce Wayne in Batman: Year One.

18. Austin Powers in Goldmember. Goldmember wasn’t bad, either. In fact, I liked it more than the second one and found the character of Goldmember inexplicably funny (must have been the youth in Belgium.) That being said, Mike Myers is still throwing the kitchen sink at you in these films. It’d be a better film if some of the unfunnier stuff was pared down.

19. Amelie. An interesting update on the romantic comedy and assuredly a better Jeunet film than Alien: Resurrection, but in the end it left me a bit cold. Would you really want this doe-eyed French girl interfering in your life the way she so often does? I doubt it. The “new” letter from the long-dead husband seems particularly jarring.

20. Red Dragon. A completely unnecessary film, tantamount to remaking Silence of the Lambs with Ed Norton as Clarisse. That being said, it was much better than Ridley Scott’s bloated, boring Hannibal, and there is plenty of good character work here, particularly from Ralph Fiennes, Emily Watson, Harvey Keitel, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman.

Biggest Disappointments: Road to Perdition, Signs, and, yes, Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones.
Most Annoying Phenomenon: My Big Fat Greek Wedding All I can say is, been there, done that.
Best Actor: Daniel Day Lewis, Gangs of New York. Runner-Up: Tom Wilkinson, In the Bedroom
Best Actress: Maggie Gyllenhaal, Secretary. Runner-up: Maribel Verdu, Y Tu Mama Tambien

Best Supporting Actor: Andy Serkis, LOTR: The Two Towers. Runner-Up: Jim Broadbent, Gangs of New York.
Best Supporting Actress: Meryl Streep, Adaptation. Runner-up: Toni Collette, About a Boy.

And, finally, here’s to 2003, a year which will witness a Hulk, two Matrices, and hopefully the biggest baddest epic of them all, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.

Books, Bagginses, Belluccis.


A slew of teaser posters for long-awaited flicks have hit the web in the past few days, included the one-sheet for Adaptation, four more character-oriented TTT posters, and this first look at the lovely Monica Bellucci as Persephone in the Matrix sequels. (Notice her head isn’t cut off as in the first six preview posters…as it turns out full versions of each of them can be seen at the official site.)