In time, 2001 might well be remembered as the year of the overhyped and undercooked, the year storybook wizards cast spells to eradicate critical good judgment, the year from which there was so much detritus to choose that much of the good stuff makes a best-of list only by default. It was the year that proved synthespians could star in hollow sci-fi-action junk as easily as their flesh-and-blood counterparts; it was the year Steven Spielberg played Stanley Kubrick and rendered gigolo Jude as lifeless as, well, Stanley Kubrick. Some insist it was the Year of Nicole Kidman, which it was if you didn't mind her, ahem, "singing" and "coughing" in the dazzling (and, ultimately, dazzlingly vapid) Moulin Rouge and "acting" in The Others, which wasn't half as terrifying as How Highor Freddy Got Fingered.
Douglas Curran
Dead aim: With Jack Nicholson (right) starring and Sean Penn directing, The Pledge just couldn't miss.
Disney Pixar
Horrors: Shrek may have gotten more press, but Monsters, Inc. will prove itself to be a truly timeless fairy tale.
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It's almost easier to pick the year's worst than its finest. Leading the pack is I Am Sam, in which Sean Penn does his Rain Man dance for Oscar only to watch it horribly misfire, followed closely by Captain Corelli's Mandolin(Nic Cage, who, given recent choices, might bementally challenged), Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back(Kevin Smith proves you canmake a movie with your head up your ass), The Center of the Worldand Intimacy(highbrow porn, which is sobeside the point), Hannibal(or, Ridley Scott's Glad He Ate Her), The Mexican(Brad + Julia - George = oh, God, no), Novocaine(and what ever became of Steve Martin, anyway?), Waking Life(not stoned enough to care, dude), Mulholland Drive(a movie better when it was a failed TV pilot) and Vanilla Sky(did I say that out loud)?
Fine, that's a bit too much hyperbole; the bad always outweighs the good in an industry that abhors its audience by giving it what it only thinksit wants. Yes, we desire more Chris Kattan and Tom Green. Can't live without more laughless movie parodies. Will cease to exist unless Adam Sandler or Rob Schneider or David Spade make a movie a year. Studio bosses and their brainless minions might as well spit in our eyes. (No, wait, they did. Or didn't you see America's Sweethearts?)
And on that note:
In the Bedroomand A Beautiful Mind will linger long after the expiration date stamped on so much Hollywood and indie "outsider" product offered up this year. They're touched by magic, much more so than those two movies about stones and rings. Same goes for Monsters, Inc., which has made nary a Top 10 list and finds in its rightful place Shrek, which is as empty as the head of Kevin Spacey, who once more loses cred and goodwill with K-PAXand The Shipping News, two films that so want to be liked you can't help but loathe them.
There were some intriguing contenders for this list, among them In the Mood for Love(how could something so Wong be so right?), The Devil's Backbone(spooky, at least to the art-house set), The Royal Tenenbaums(better on second viewing, though not worth a third), Panic(the best Sopranosepisode ever), Sexy Beast(nononononono, yesyesyesyesyes), Ghost World(not as good as the comic book), Gosford Park(Altman's best in years, for what that's worth), A.I. Artificial Intelligence(a touching toy story undone by its finale, when the batteries ran down), The Million Dollar Hotel(loathed for all the wrong reasons), The Business of Strangers(buy Stockard in Channing), even the terribly flawed Black Hawk Down, which is the best sort of war movie -- overwrought but ashamed of its thrills, pro-heroics but anti-war -- undone, finally, by its hysterical anti-Clinton politics and the uncomfortable sight of watching a few dozen good ol' boys mowing down a few hundred black men without thought or consequence. (The film breaks your heart by playing up the deaths of 19 soldiers; it breaks your spirit by playing down the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Somalis.)
But even The Good Stuff was too much like Ali (the movie, not the man), which floats like a butterfly only to sink like a BB. We expect too much, we get too little. Sounds like business as usual. What follows is, of course, in alphabetical order -- though A Beautiful Mindwould top the list, regardless.
A Beautiful Mind: The biopic Alishould have been -- a "true story" reverie never caught flat on its feet. Don't know when Ron Howard learned to direct, but this adaptation of Sylvia Nasar's biography of John Forbes Nash Jr. is wrenching but never strained, poetic but never sentimental. Trapped inside the broken mind of the mathematician who won the Nobel Prize in 1994, we're never sure what's real or imagined, and when the truth's revealed, it's devastating. Too bad Russell Crowe won the Oscar when he didn't deserve it.
Chopper: Former music-vid director Andrew Dominik makes his feature-length debut with a movie about a violent, self-righteous criminal whose published (tall) tales may or may not be the stuff of self-made myth. Eric Bana plays Mark "Chopper" Read as likable rogue, and the movie never judges; we've plenty of room to do that ourselves in a film that eschews narrative for vignettes woven together with blood and bullets and the occasional knife to the ear.
