(1)In general, films eligible for this list are films less than three years old that were released in New York or Los Angeles during this year -- in general, films eligible for an Academy Award. The blue number is the number of times I've seen the film.
| Review sometime. |
(1)| Shortish review here. |
(1)| Review maybe. |
(1)| That wacky trickster Neil LaBute. He sets up Possession as your typical intelligent Light Literary Romance -- think Shakespeare in Love, I suppose, if you like in Love more than me -- while all the while including confusing flashback elements that seem problematic: Flashbacks to olde-tyme duo incidents the modern-day duo couldn't know about, flashbacks to olde-tyme duo incidents the modern-day duo won't find out for another two reels, found bits of information about the olde-tyme duo that contradict what we already know or have assumed, vague statements between the modern-day duo about pieces of their lives left unsaid. But then, in the last four minutes of the film, LaBute confirmed what I had started suspecting twenty minutes prior: Possession isn't primarily about romance or anachronism (as most critics have said). Possession is about the inability to perfectly reconstruct another's history; it's about how our deaths mean that -- no matter how many journals we’ve kept, no matter how many people we’ve given our oral history to, no matter how well-known we are -- secrets will be buried under six feet of black soil. The ending (not the Big Revelation regarding one of the modern-day duo, but the very last scene) is actually dreadfully depressing, despite its bittersweet veneer, and I think LaBute means it to be. |
(1)| Review here. |
(1)| Review sometime. |
(1)| What this movie is is a version of My Dinner With André where André spends the entire running time of the film trying to get Wally laid because that will prove to André that his view of the world is the most legitimate one. Also in this movie Wally is André's nephew. Ten scenes, I believe, in the entire 100-minute film, three of which are fantastically fantastic (my favorite scene of the year: Roger's "sex is everywhere" conversation with Nick amid traffic), and the rest of which range from good to quite good. LaBute's and Mamet's wordy subversions of masculinity are obvious comparisons, but Roger Dodger ending is somewhat, um, kinder, I guess, than either In the Company of Men or Oleanna. Only major problems: All the best scenes are in the first two-thirds of the film, and why is it that the final encounter is what calls Roger to action rather than the even-more-morally-repugnant situation with Nick at Roger's boss's party? Campbell Scott better win some awards for this. |
(1)| Morally very complex: The last third of this 45-minute film is about the director of the film and a teacher trying to convince a girl to show her face in order to wash it, contrary to her father's reading of the Koran. Further, no one in the film argues against covering up women's hair, and in fact the teacher explicitly states her agreement with that policy. It's more than a bit bothersome of a quandary -- why is the pressure from her teacher and Makhmalbaf better than her father's pressure? -- and Makhmalbaf knows it, calling attention to the dilemma by splicing in the sounds of schoolchildren yelling "Ab!" ("Water!") in their learning of the alphabet. And to add one more layer to the mix, her decision parallels the decision of many refugeed Afghan schoolchildren earlier in the film to disobey their parents and the Iranian government and attend school, as shown in the first two-thirds of the film. Final freeze-frame not up to A Moment of Innocence standards, but what freeze-frame could be? |
(1)| All I will say is while the ending is thematically apt, it's just, I dunno, missing something. |
(1)| At about the midway point (specifically at the mirror scene, which nearly brought me to tears) I thought this might be the best film of '02. The last half isn't quite as enchanting, and I'm not sure that the Hoffman subplot (while thematically apt; it, too, is about responsibility) works with the rest of the film on a textual level, but still. |
Also-rans:
Signs (M. Night Shyamalan) B+ (1)
| Sorry, Lisa, although I was worried by the end of the ineffectual, lugubrious first reel. (Shyamalan, no great dialogist he, wouldn’t know a good verbal joke if it hit him with a baseball bat.) But M. Night comes back around, thankfully, partially due to his typical Asian arthouse stick-crucial-action-offscreen-while-instead-focusing-on-an-unimportant-foreground-object cinematic style that is effective generating his films’ essential creepiness, and partially due to seven or eight great set pieces (the flashlight; the Brazilian birthday party; the first, non-violent use of a butcher knife). Shyamalan is a genius at taking clichéd ideas for films and microing them: Unbreakable was the first thirty minutes of a superhero movie stretched to feature length, and this is War of the Worlds with a static, one-family P.O.V. Ending pretty much hated by like-minded critics, but as long as you jive with Shyamalan’s belief that there is a God and that He is behind certain “coincidences,” then the ending works on a Magnolia-esque shower-of-frogs level: ridiculous, yes, but knowingly so and lovably so. If someone picks his nose in the first half of a M. Night Shyamalan film, you can be sure that bit of snot will be used to, I don’t know, kill an alien or something. |
(1)| Not in the same area code with the intelligence and importance it thinks it has, Report virtually ignores the question at the film's core ("When is it reasonable to take away the rights of a few for the good of society?") to instead answer an impudentless question with only one possible answer for non-predestinationists: "Do we humans have free will, and are we able to change our future and blah blah blah stupid stupid stupid..." How completely undemanding is that question, hmm? I'm not sure Steven cares about the former question, even after spending half the movie setting it up; if he did, then there'd be a bittersweet tone to the ending (an insert of a newscast talking about a certain type of crime, for example) rather than this happy crap he left us with. And I'm even more upset, because Report is so gosh darn entertaining that if it were about what it's freakin' 'posed to be about, it'd probably be my film of the year. I hate you, Steven. (I still love you, though, Samantha.) |
(1)| Lethargic Tobey as Spidey an inspired choice, and it's symbolic of the rest of the film, which largely eschews special-effects sequences (ho-hum here, I'm afraid) for laying out character motivations. (See also Unbreakable.) Funny, too, 'specially the "Go go gadget web!" scene. |
(1)| Review maybe. |
(1)| Review maybe. |
(1)| The most aesthetically electrifying documentary I've ever seen. It makes Mr. Death look placid. In fact, Errol Morris' Fast, Cheap and Out of Control is probably the best comparison -- both are in the rare genre of impressionistic non-fiction films, as most non-fiction films are either expressionistic (Michael Moore's films) or realistic (duh) -- but while Morris' film was about how we control our environment, the death of men and mankind, obsession, and much more, McCollum uses his considerable visual talents to talk about family isolation and, well, corn, and never saying as much about either of those topics as one might hope. However, that is a small bone to pick in any film where there is stop-motion animation of two ears of corn having sex. |
(1)| Like Memento, except less intellectual and challenging -- a Hollywoodified Memento, I suppose, which is less annoying than one might think. Robin Williams good for once -- quite good, in fact. No major problems except for the irony that sets it all in motion. |
(1)| Short review here. |
(1)| Marriage/Greek Wedding comparison shortly. |
(1)| Needed more fun scams and less of Leo trying to please his father; very nice, otherwise. |
(1)| Someday -- someday soon -- a script is going to fall in Sam Mendes’ lap. It will be a great script. It will not have a scene where a homophobe misinterprets a drug deal as his son having sex with his male neighbor and then the homophobe realizes that he’s a repressed homosexual and kisses the neighbor. Nor will the script reiterate the theme of the film -- say, a gangster father trying to keep his son from choosing the same career -- over and over again in the last ten minutes so that even Anna Nicole Smith can figure it out. And then Mendes will make one of the best movies in the history of cinema. Perdition is better than Beauty, no doubt -- no scene as bad as the former above, no performance as bad as Benning’s -- but it’s still one of those movies that seems a lot dumber in retrospect than it did unfolding onscreen because Mendes is an expert at hiding script inadequacies in superlative style. (The second-to-last shooting, a scene where it’s painfully obvious to everyone in the audience what’s going to happen, is virtuoso because of Mendes’ method of subtly, ingeniously putting another character barely in the frame: I’m not just talking about the idea, which has been done before [by Yang, for example], but also the execution.) After Carter Burwell, Thomas Newman is our greatest movie scorer. |
(1)| TBA. |
(1)| A fine documentary on how, in the '50s and '60s, doctors used to blame autism on the children's mothers for not giving the child enough attention. A bit unfocused, perhaps -- they should have stuck with three of four families instead of (I think) about 10 -- but consistently poignant; it'd be hard to ruin this material. |
| A throw-in-everything-but-the-kitchen-sink-and-hey-why-not-throw-in-the-sink-too Bollywood musical/comedy/drama/sports film/romance, it’s silly, fun, and less forgettable than one might think. I was never once bored in nearly four hours, which is startling; it helped that most of the last 90 minutes was a single cricket match, a sport which I now find as charming as curling. |
| Like Election, two-thirds genius, one-third stupidity; alas, the stupidity controls more and more of the film as it approaches the finale. Love love love those letters. I don't know why everyone's so huffy about Bates' nude scene; it didn't make much of an impact on me either way. |
| Fine, but securely strapped into its genre restraints. Surprisingly unfrightening, and unsurprisingly showoffy. Film goes downhill after one main character leaves the film and another one enters. Ending nice. Forrest, Dwight, and Jodie all give predictably lovely performances. Not much to say, really. |
| Most critically acclaimed film of two-oh-oh-two according to the of course infallible Rotten Tomatoes, so, uh, you know, I'm wondering if anyone else, well, you know, has these, ahem, objections to the film as, um, a good film? I suspect I'm carving a hole a la my ho-hum reaction to The Tiger, He Is Crouching, and I do prefer Spirited Away to that film, but did anyone else find Spirited empty? Confusing? Purposeless? Did anyone else find that the protagonist Chihiro was too blank? That male co-protagonist was way, way, too blank? That the plot had no forward motion? That the plot had no motion at all and seemed more like a condensed six-episode Chihiro mini-series that Miyazaki had created for Japanese television? Once Chihiro is abandoned by her unwitting parents and becomes the quintessential Disney OrphanTM, I can't say I felt attached to her adventures beyond an intellectual curiosity (and, of course, a visceral enjoyment); in fact, over the course of the film Chihiro became very reactionary -- just doing what others tell her to do -- and because the film didn’t delve into that reactionariness, there was little of narrative interest to grab onto. Absolutely fantastic from moment to moment both aesthetically and schematically, but it’s simply much less than the sum of its parts. |
| Same problem as Minority Report, really; it wasn't about what I wanted it to be about, and what it was about wasn't that interesting. Beautiful, though. |
| With this and The Pledge I am christening a new genre of film called, "The tick-Matthew-Prins-off-because-the-films-seem-so-smart-until-the-last-freakin'-scene-where-they-get-really-really-stupid-and-have-an-ending-that-is-the-exact-opposite-of-the-ending-a-film-this-smart-ought-to-have film." I think the name of this genre will catch on quickly. "[F]ilms that so elegantly seem to subvert a genre and don't are vile tricksters that deserve to be thrown into the Potomac." |
| Like The Emperor's New Groove -- Lilo's obvious reference point, even if Lilo is slightly more uneven -- it seems less like a proper Disney animated "classic" than a two-hour (I'm imagining it with commercials) pilot for an ABC Saturday morning cartoon. That is not necessarily a bad thing. If Lilo weren't an orphan (ugh!), I'd say this were the most un-Disneyish of the nuevo Disney cartoon inventory; those who are fond fans of the nuevo Disney cartoon inventory, such as Kim, will be suitably disappointed. Ending so, so outlandishly Deus ex machina that I almost believe they were poking fun at the convention. Almost. All children in animated films should be voiced by children. |
| Not as funny as Soderbergh's Schizopolis, but very similar in its amateurness and its ability to turn apparent unpredictability to thematic significance. There is no working filmmaker I have more respect for than Soderbergh. |
| Review shortly. |
| Review shortly. |
| The Betty Fisher, I like. The other stories, not so much. (Geez. I would have written a proper review had I known the film was going to get an actual American release.) |
| The main problem with VeggieTales at film-length is the same problem with VeggieTales in half-hour segments. There’s never an adequate reconciliation between the Biblical earnestness of the storyline with the wacky surrealism around the edges. It’s all pigeonholed: 2 minutes of wackiness, 1 minute of earnestness, 4 minutes of wackiness, 2 minutes of earnestness, and on and on until the numbers add up to 75. (With “Silly Songs with Larry,” the compartmentalization is even more explicit on video.) Please compare/contrast with the greatest comedic film to come out of the Christian ghetto, Steve Taylor’s Down Under the Big Top, where the humor is constantly and thankfully emasculating the earnestness (man with toothpaste coming out of his mouth during John’s “faith, hope, and love,” speech; Phil’s admission that he had only read the Cliffs Notes of the Bible). Also, as you may recall, the whale saved Jonah in the Bible; what in the world kind of symbolism is it that here the whale de Dios is shown as a punishment? Kudos, however, for a somber ending to the story-within-a-story (if not the movie proper, which of course has a cheery denouement) and a couple handfuls of typically bizarre Veggie moments. |
| A film about a director who goes psychosomatically blind sounded just horrid to me, but it's the Woodster, so I was contractually obliged to see it. Not as bad as I was expecting -- partially because Barney Cheng's translator is the best performance in a Woody film since Sean Penn -- but rarely very inspired. Ending stupid. I would like to see Woody act opposite a 60-year-old woman for once rather than 30ish ingénues. |
| Huh. I had a pre-viewing supposition that Atanarjuat would be worthy, but dull. Turns out that it’s exciting (I wasn’t watch-checkingly bored until well into the third hour), but kinda daft: the storyline is both silly and simplistic -- any Greek mythological tale would be a good synonym -- and there’s nothing significant learned about anybody, but it did keep my attention. Absolutely the wrong film to be shot on digital video. Go visit the Alaska Native Heritage Center instead. |
| Film reviewing rule #103: No film starring Neal Patrick Harris as an intern for a Black Power organization may receive a grade lower than a B-. Average comedy, otherwise: One big laugh (the conclusion of U.B. falling down the hole), quite a few more smaller laughs, some groans, some shaking of heads, some ennui. |
| There is not one moment of this film that is as inspired as even a below-average Gondry music video (say, Björk's "Jóga" or Radiohead's "Knives Out"). I just don't get it. I'm crushed. Unless Mike Leigh's or the Dardennes' latest films whomp, probably my biggest disappointment of the year. |
| Full review here. |
| Not bad for James Bond, but long. My word, was Halle Berry bad. |
| In six words: Clue as musical French sex farce. I appreciate Ozon’s subversion of the Agatha Christie genre without terribly liking it: The monotony of the unvarying plot points and constant “shocking” personal revelations is meant as satiric -- a commentary on the harm of unfettered truth -- but that doesn’t mean it’s pleasurable to watch the repetitive deconstruction. Unexpected ending works thematically but not as emotional apex, as was intended; Ozon obviously wants us to feel some compassion for the character at the center of the scene, but given the disclosures in the previous 100 minutes regarding that person, we can’t. Musical numbers lovely in an amateur Everyone Says I Love You manner. |
| Segments where Varda talks with admirers about how wonderful the original Gleaners was: self-congratulatory; segments where Varda talks with people profiled in the original film: 14/21/28/35/42 Up lite; segment where Varda disses Le Pen: superfluous, silly, and not at all keeping with the themes of either film. Not bad otherwise. |
| I do not understand why everyone likes this movie. Just because a movie is based on a true story doesn't mean that it doesn't have to ring true. |
| No hyperbole: I have never before felt this out-of-sync with an audience in my life. The (few) parts I thought were funny, no one else laughed; the very (very, very, very) many parts the audience thought were funny, I thought were stupid ethnic humor, or stupid sexual humor, or just stupid clichéd humor. And the other oddity: Toula is the first "ugly"-girl-turned-"beautiful" in movie history to look better post-makeover than pre-. Huh. [Second viewing revisions: To my surprise, Wedding did work marginally better the second time around, mostly because the subdued, sparse audience made it viable for me to view the film less as a comedy -- which it still does not work as, dang it! -- and more as a somewhat successful character study of the father; there is a compelling despondency within Gus that belongs in a more sober film, and if anyone involved in the film deserves one of the numerous Oscar nominations Wedding is likely to get, it’s Michael Constantine. But no one can ever convince me that this is an uproarious laugh-fest.] |
| Musicals need be judged on the ratio of transcendent moments to ugh moments, and this has plenty of the latter (to start, any time miscast Gere sings) and only two of the former: my man John C.'s heartrending "Mr. Cellophane" and "Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes, they both, oh yes, they both, oh yes, they both reached for the gun, the gun, the gun, the gun, oh yes, they both reached for the gun." |
| Questioning Faith had an intriguing festival write-up at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival: “[Director Macky] Alston spends his two years in seminary interviewing friends and learning how their different faiths reconcile them with a theology that stands up to even the most cruel loss.” I had seen that Cinemax was planning on showing the film in June; I thought it a bit odd -- but perhaps encouraging -- that the racy cable channel had picked up the film. Perhaps they’d found religion: Hallelujah, Hallelujah! (At the time of the festival, this was the only film I saw that had distribution.) Two minutes into the film, I knew why Cinemax had picked it up: seminary student Alston was a practicing homosexual, and he was questioning his faith because a fellow gay seminary student friend had died of AIDS. That didn’t damn the film, of course -- gays can have insights into the human condition, too -- but the Cinemax-ready subject must have helped the network ignore Alston’s “original” questions and insights. Why must God have taken my friend away from us? Is there a God? If there is, is he just for have taken my friend away from us? How can bad things happen to good people? Etceteras. These are legitimate questions, yes, but they are questions that everyone (especially every seminary student) has had, and none of the people Alston talks to have remarkable answers. Perhaps that’s for the best, since the film is narcissistically focused on Alston: Alston’s voiceover fills up any quiet moment, Alston is shown in two-shots of him and his interviewee, Alston is shown in pictures with the deceased. Barely a moment in the first two-thirds of the film doesn’t have Alston in it somewhere; that’s great if somehow you find him fascinating, but tedious if you find him tedious. Only the last third of the film, where Alston disappears and instead focuses on a reverend who is going in for chemotherapy, is appealing. The thesis of Questioning Faith, as much as there is one, is that people have different views of God. Wow. I’m shocked. |
| I am required by law to inexplicably dislike one film a year that everyone else likes. A couple nice scenes that barely give the film its C+, but none of the three storylines worked for me: the grieving mother story was ho-hum ordinary until its freaky (in a bad way) end, the clock-turning plot was didn't show anything about the character, and what in the world was going on in the storyline with the girl? I did not get this movie. |
| I think she should have married the rich guy. |
| More like: Main plot, B-; Love story, D-. I was embarrassing Kim with my laughter over the oh so powerful "love" between Amidala and Anakin. (She had her hand over my mouth part of the time.) The rest is marginally better than Episode One: The Jar-Jar Chronicles, despite dialogue that could be improved by most intelligent tenth graders. I seriously mean that last part. ("You've grown." "So have you. More beautiful, I mean.") Best clothing in a film since Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love; if I'm noticing the clothing, you know it's good. |
| Shocking that this Disney movie could go its entirety without giving the audience a reason to prefer the protagonist's materialism to the antagonists'; geez, in the final five minutes, the protagonist commits what I’d consider a pretty immoral act without any sort of justification than “because he wanted to.” Disney dudes, just because the hero is the hero doesn’t mean you don’t have to let us know why he is a hero. Long John’s role as father proxy interesting, though. |
| Dear John C. Reilly: It is difficult for me to consider you one of the greatest actors of your generation when you are in crap like The Good Girl and The Perfect Storm and For the Love of the Game. Please only act in P.T. Anderson films. Sincerely, Matthew D. Prins. [Noncontentless review for Beth-Annie: The Good Girl is astonishingly arrogant and, well, flat-out mean. Every hick’s motives are treated with sarcastic disdain: No s’therner could find something real in Catcher in the Rye; no woman who works at a Pamida proxy could have dreams beyond her small town; no store manager could give a heartfelt tribute to a dead worker. At least Todd Solendz puts his misanthropy up front; this is more like Waiting for Guffman minus pathos and humor and character involvement but plus condensation. John C. works so, so hard to humanize his character, and the degree to which succeeds is a testament to his acting ability. (And he’s the only one who does succeed; Aniston is monochromatically brooding, Gyllenhaal is a clichéd unstable-shoddy-writer-who-thinks-he’s-profound, and let’s not even discuss the Bible thumper and the best friend and the girl who hates her Retail Rodeo job, shall we?) I do not like this movie.] |
| Hi. When I make my first movie, it will not have a five-minute scene that consists entirely of men looking at another man's well-endowedness in a bikini while the well-endowed man gives a soliloquy about the best way to sell property. I hope I am not making a bad artistic decision here. |
| Um, well that sucked. It looks like Christopher Guest puked, and that puke directed this film. |