..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..RJ Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

January 6, 2004

A look at ten of the year's best, movies that thrilled others but left me cold, an honor roll of 2003's documentaries, notes about Angels in America and Millennium Mambo. Plus: Emir Kusturica's Underground, finally on DVD. Next column: more noteworthy disks and a rundown of some of 2003's memorable movie moments.

Present tens

In the Winter 2003 issue of Cinema Scope, my colleague Mark Peranson comes down with a perennial case of the blague: "Perhaps it's the depression brought on by the changing of the seasons (I.e. festival fall to shitty Hollywood winter)... but standing back... I can't help but feeling a little disappointment. Maybe it's the truly abysmal nature of the year in film 2003... Compiling a top ten list for the year is sheer torture. I don't recommend it to anyone."

I'm back in Pollyanna mode, as it felt like a great year for golden moments within movies while the omens for the industry in all its large and small permutations grow ever more batty. (In the first six months of the year, I was able to miss any number of commercial horrors while visiting small, fascinating festivals like Winnipeg's Film Exchange, an all-Canada film festival and seminar series held on the coldest weekend of the year - 40 below on a sunny Saturday. Two weeks at the Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival in April was also a tonic after the necessary slog of Sundance in January. I've omitted listing a number of lively titles I've seen at festivals, hoping to write about them when they're more readily accessible.

So many wonderful documentaries, so many mixes of documentary and fiction, so many voices from around the world. I can't be a pessimist when a distributor like Focus Features tries to hammock their distribution efforts somewhere between Miramaximalism and Sony Pictures Classics minimalism-Swimming Pool, 21 Grams and Lost in Translation have all been peddled imaginatively; when the money behind Palm Pictures permits a release slate as diverse as The Eye, demonlover and Millennium Mambo and other underfunded ventures (RIP, Cowboy Pictures) foolhardily struggle to break even in the modest, modest market for foreign language and truly independent ventures.

Lost in Translation. Defining emotional time zones and the Sudafed-and-Johnny Walker mindset of twenty-first century road warriors; jetlag as Ecstacy; regret, longing and desire as woozy narcotics. Sofia Coppola's loose-limbed, elusive yet mature postcard from the edge of the West.

Lilja 4-Ever. Fucking Moodysson: the third great film from a young master, to paraphrase both the title of Moodyson's first movie, Fucking Amal (released in the U.S. as Show Me Love), and Ingmar Bergman's justifiable reaction to that great picture. Lost Highway meets Mouchette and the result is magnificent, giving us innocence, innocence tested, innocence corrupted, corruption rejected in the worst, yet most pure manner. It's an earnest drama that means to change the world, and tells us, more than any dystopic Philip K. Dick conceit, We Have Failed The Future. Moodysson also attuned to the power of music in dreams of escape. Lilja opens with a roar, a song by the German heavy metal band Rummstein, the lyrics of which translate as "my heart burns." Throughout, the narcotic strains of techno suggest a kind of unimaginable paradise on the other side of... what? The border? This life? The first time I saw the movie, at the Vancouver International Film Festival, it ended with this credit: "This film is dedicated to the millions of children around the world exploited by the sex trade." It wasn't on the U.S. print I saw. Yet it's typical of Moodysson's project. He says he made it to make audiences angry. To realize, in metaphorical terms, how cold the world can be. It's like an outcry of adolescent anger, with the energy and purity of angry pop. When you're young, "Why can't the world be perfect? is a perfectly good question. How fucked up is the world? Lilja 4-Ever is but a furious glimpse.

In America. Kitchen sink magical realism: Irish Fellini. "I love what lives": Djimon Hounsou as the full-throated avatar of gangling, unseemly beauty as it passes bittersweetly in an unspecified time: that is, a child's memory, as in, two daughters of Jim Sheridan. Plus a bunch of Shakespearean weather amid the temptestuous elements of this family romance. The movie's ending breaks every rule in the book, particularly in terms of suspension of disbelief, and it is magical, transporting, and effective beyond any expectation. A character turns to the camera. The face is beautiful. The expression is beautiful. The image slows. The heart breaks. "It's like at the end of Beckett's 'Endgame,' right? What does Hamm say?" Sheridan asked me in an interview. "'Get over here and love one another.'"

Elephant. Life is but a scream. Elephant is about inexplicable beauty and the fragility of each breath as it is taken. It's autumn. Leaves are falling. The green lawns are strewn with autumn's rustling bursts of color: leaves turn most brilliant just as they are dying. We follow almost a dozen students at a suburban high school, through classrooms, the library, cafeteria, the grassy quad, locker rooms. Faces become landscape. Seemingly inconsequential actions are repeated from multiple points of view. The frame is boxy, shot in the 4:3 ratio of a television screen or videogames; the 16mm box of Frederick Wiseman's black-and-white documentary classic, High School, or, as Van Sant has pointed out, the format of every badly imagined, fear-inducing instructional film shown to students into the 1980s. With acknowledged borrowings from the 1970s stylized color of the brilliant, deadpan photographs of Southern seer William Eggleston and the tracking, gliding, lengthy takes of Hungarian maxi-minimalist Bela Tarr, the writer-editor-director is calculated in his choice of influence, his intersection of pretty youth unaware of what their day will bring and the wistful drift of Tarr's tracking shots: "Satantango 90210," anyone?

In this World. Modern Europe, modern technology, the world of borders and crossings. I still like Michael Winterbottom and writer Tony Grisoni's cryptic original title, referring to one protagonist's UK immigration file: "M11578112."

Irreversible. His hand, her belly: fingertips soft as breath. Earlier (I mean, later): there's a bravura scene that, psychologically, is even more disturbing, as we discover the jealous dynamic that plays between Marcus and Pierre over the affections of Alex. In a scene almost as long as the genuinely appalling rape scene, the three banter in a Metro subway car on the to the party where all will go wrong, Noeis the complete director of actors and psychology, putting a scalpel to the pretensions of the "civilized" trio. Pierre is a sad brother to Dustin Hoffman's impotent intellectual in Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs. The scenes grow calmer still, leading toward a beginning of several touching scenes of fragile domestic intimacy and revealing a sweet secret Alex is carrying.

Cold Mountain. Soviet cinema's intensity, patient Italianate detours, pained Southern digression: divagations of longing. Simmering perfume. As a Southerner born and bred, I was thrilled and tickled by Minghella's romanticized setpieces.

Friday Night. Nan Goldin without the damage, pleasuring the bruises. Claire Denis does not work often enough.

Capturing the Friedmans. A stand-in for the mad, blossoming beauty of docs all year: why is that clown so angry? Why does truth, however arrayed, trump the cleverness of fiction?

Raising Victor Vargas. The post-neorealism (as well as the post-Mike Leigh cinema): Peter Sollett is one of the observant, insistent young directors (David Green's another) who like to listen as well as watch.

Wild card. Finding Nemo, a gorgeous, sweet, funny entertainment. Even though half the movies coming out of the studios have enough computer generated imagery to be considered animated films, I still can't consider animation as the same as live action.

Out in the cold

Angels in America. It belongs on Top Ten lists, but it didn't have theatrical distribution. I've cheated on several lists, putting it in there around four or five, but for this one, I'll set it aside for its own special mention.

Angels in America is one of the first "period" pictures to etch the fallen World Trade Center onto the skyline, and in cinematographer Steven Bernstein, effects supervisor Richard Edlund and Mike Nichols' incarnation, its panorama is mistiness against mistiness, distinct in its indistinctness. As the key shot begins, traveling across a Brooklyn rooftop, we see Mary Louise Parker barefoot-in-the-rain flexing herself against gravity as she turns to her estranged husband and intones a line like, "The end of the world is beginning." Heavy-handed or feathery frisson? I think it's both, which is typical of the beauty of this compelling and talkative and major movie. I'd like to have seen a dozen more Robert Altman movies in the past twenty years-he didn't pull this one off--but despite what some writers have noted about the diminution of Tony Kushner's comic effects, the capable, theater-bred yet movie-precise Nichols seems to have been the right choice.

New Year's treat

Hou Hsiao-hsien's Millennium Mambo opened in new York on New Year's Eve. A 2000 entry, it seems like ancient history and still completely present tense. I've watched the opening sequence-shot of Millennium Mambo dozens of times on a Hong Kong VCD from Toronto's Chinatown. While the movie's narcotic rhythms and repetitions and sudden bursts of beauty, in composition, music, gesture and perspective, are gratifying throughout, the opening is what stays. The entire movie is there: a voiceover from a character we do not ever see situates the story we are about to witness at the turn of the century while we watch, in ever-so-slowed motion, impossibly pillow-lipped model/actress Qu Shi running along a pedestrian walkway, practically skipping, aware of the Steadicamming camera behind her, turning her head, flinging her hair, smiling slightly at our witness as we are told the story took place long, long ago, yet we are in this fleeting moment, this present of youthful feminine beauty while the movie's low-key techno theme begins to pulse. She does skip, down stairs at the end of the shot, the camera staying at its higher perspective, and the instant she is about to leave the frame? A cut to black and the simmering apparition of the main title in English. A lifetime packed into one shot of a woman in her youth, smiling, smoking, laughing, skipping, disappearing.

Going to the dox

Documentary practice thrives: this year alone, I was especially struck by To Be and to Have, Stevie, Capturing the Friedmans, The Fog of War, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, and The Weather Underground, as well as Balseros, Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary, Bus 174, Lost in La Mancha, Spellbound, and Stone Reader.

The cooler

Some movies left me chilly, while others swooned.

American Splendor: beautifully acted, particularly by Paul Giamatti and Hope Davis, wonderful conception, formally ticklish, ultimately sour if hopeful.

Big Fish. I'm glad Tim Burton got to think about the loss of his father while awaiting his son.

Girl With a Pearl Earring. Ambitious inertia: almost an oxymoron.

Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. I admire Peter Jackson. A great, great director. LOTR? Been there, seen that.

Love Actually. Surprised it's not a big success. Suffocated by its too-muchness and eagerness to dandle.

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. Peter Weir's filmmaking is precise and searing. The story? Couldn't follow the murmured plot, didn't want to with such imaginative pictures.

Monster. Runaway Train-era Jon Voight imitating Bugs Bunny. A heartfelt performance in a film that attempts to depict "truth" without drama, as if it were a documentary. Nick Broomfield's two documentaries about Aileen Wuornos capture the pitifulness of her fate in painful, painstaking fashion.

Mystic River. I admire its bits and pieces and its mournful meanness. But greatness? And that music credited to Mr. Eastwood...

The Triplets of Belleville. My eyes were open.

21 Grams. I love Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu's passion, but the hyper-melodrama and dense gloom of 21 Grams kept me from loving the movie. I should see it again and figure out what exactly wasn't working for me.

Whale Rider. Wanted to love it plenty. Many good things. Fine young actress. Terrific sentiments. Gooey effect.

Soon to be forgotten (by me)

Anything Else. Woody Allen, consumed by fits of ritualistic typing, continues to make the few who watch his movies long for not the days when he made funny movies, but when he (or his producers) went for extra drafts and days of reshooting when a slack first assembly didn't hit the mark.

Dr. Seuss' Cat in the Hat. And it made a fucking fortune. Wonder if kids are choking down the Burger King toy tie-ins as well.

Cremaster 3. The emperor's new testicles.

Dog Days. I've grown to admire Austrian cinema's elder terrible, Michael Haneke, with his last several films. How long will it take Ulrich Seidl to get past the distastefulness of a film like this?

Down With Love. Down with Down with Love!

Duplex. Reshooting is not a virtue for a thing that ought not have been shot at all.

Gigli. Really.

Kill Bill Vol. I. If not for Uma Thurman's physicality, the compulsive kamikaze kleptomania would be a terrible two-hour death. Can't wait for the second part, seeing her get the privilege of making out with David Carradine.

The Last Samurai. Promise?

Matrix Revolutions. A colleague of mine who smokes tons and tons of pot has some theories about why this is the best of the three movies, but I couldn't follow it. Now which pill did the Bros. Wachowski take? Blue? Red? Blue?

The Missing. Revenge of The Alamo?

A Mighty Wind. A meager comedy.

Northfork. Meretricious, meaningless whimsy.

Seabiscuit. Two words: David McCullough. Enough said.

Spun. Meth acting: yuck.

Going underground

Emir Kusturica's bold, epic farce of the horrors of war through the last fifty years in the history of former Yugoslavia is, among other adjectives littering its notices, brilliant. While the politics seem to be purposefully muddied, every scene is bursting with music, jokes, outrageous behavior, drinking, sex, drinking and simple, elemental tragedy. Underground (Podzemlje -- Bila jedom jedna zemlja), winner of 1995's Cannes Palme d'Or, but only now available on American DVD, is furiously inventive, overlong, overwrought, battering, mesmerizing, magical. Kusturica's political meanings are often obscure, even to his fellow former countrymen, causing a brouhaha so fierce in Serbia and Bosnia, as well as among dogmatic French intellectuals, that Kusturica briefly decided never to make a film again. (He's finishing a few since.) From an outsider's perspective, accusations of treason do not make much sense. Instead, the massive project of Kusturica's convulsive, carnivalesque comedy seems to celebrate the vivacity of the survivor. Underground begins with a Felliniesque 1941 Luftwaffe bombing of Belgrade, including the extraordinary vision of the results of the bombing of the city zoo. We meet Marko and Blacky, two charismatic gangster-patriots. Blacky (Lazar Ristovski) is the force-of-nature national-hero type, unable to stop eating even as bombs burst over his head. Marko (the remarkably expressive Miki Manojlovic in one of the most physical comic performances of the nineties) is the bureaucrat in paradise as the duo run guns, steal gold, get rich and long for the same woman, Natalija (Mirjana Jokovic). Marko designs an underground city for everyone to hide in; once the war is over, he lies to his compatriots, claiming the fighting still rages outside, while becoming one of Tito's right-hand men and keeping Natalija to himself. Kusturica's mournful, magical canvas may be the least boring three hours ever committed to film. (Also note the reviewer on the back cover, quoted as saying that Underground Is " bursting with music, jokes, outrageous behavior, drinking, sex and drinking." What was he thinking?

- Email Ray Pride