year in film – Page 2 – Memphis Flyer

Backing further and further away from the weird, wonderful breakouts of 1999 (American Beauty, Three Kings, Being John Malkovich, Election, etc.), Hollywood continued to blow outrageous sums on a litany of unwatchable marketing-plans-masquerading-as-movies in 2001. No point in dissing obvious product from Not Another Teen Movie to Swordfish, but the real disasters this year were “prestige” atrocities like Hannibal and Pearl Harbor and ambitious, overedited duds like Vanilla Sky and Moulin Rouge.

But there was plenty of great stuff on the big screen in 2001 if you were willing to dig deeper than each week’s most heavily marketed opener. With a few late-December releases (most notably Michael Mann’s Ali) still unscreened, here are 20 films that made going to the movies in 2001 a worthwhile experience:

1. Mulholland Drive — As a fan of Twin Peaks and a grudging, conflicted admirer of Blue Velvet, I never expected to love a David Lynch film, but Mulholland Drive was one of the most intriguing, most enjoyable, and most spellbinding films I’ve seen in years. A puzzler at first, upon repeated viewings Lynch’s Mobiüs-strip meditation on the plight of a pretty young thing lost in the patriarchal Hollywood maze is entirely coherent, even carefully constructed. Sure, there are a few stray red herrings, a remnant of the film’s initial role as the pilot of an abandoned TV series, but everything that really matters fits neatly into place. Part Nancy Drew and part Persona, part film noir and all pulp fiction, Lynch, for the first time since Blue Velvet, made all of his fetishes and visual tics matter, resulting in a koan-like parable that will still be studied and worshiped decades hence.

2. Ghost World — If Mulholland Drive finally yoked David Lynch’s private obsessions to something the outside world could care about, no film in 2001 was as intimately connected to the way we live as Ghost World. A bittersweet valentine to two teenage bohemian goddesses (Thora Birch and Scarlett Johansson) estranged from American mall culture, director Terry Zwigoff’s spiritual sequel to his documentary Crumb was a brave and insightful film. Ghost World‘s greatness lay in how it confirmed the essential righteousness of its protagonists’ alienation yet also questioned that alienation in an almost unbearably moving social critique. Along the way it also managed to provide knowing commentary on a variety of essential subjects, among them the transition into adulthood, the toothless platitudes of secondary education, the value of art, and the precariousness of friendship. Not bad for a modest little movie that may have also been simply the funniest thing to hit the big screen all year.

3. In the Mood For Love — One of the world’s greatest filmmakers, Hong Kong master Wong Kar-wai finally made his Memphis debut with a film that marked a jarring departure from the frenetic style of earlier classics such as Chungking Express and Fallen Angels. A period piece set in the Hong Kong of Kar-wai’s youth, In the Mood For Love was a laser-focused chamber film, a tense pas de deux around unrepresentable and ineffable desires.

4. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon — Star Wars comparisons be damned, this action import so delighted in and was so respectful of the magic of human movement that it reminded me of nothing less than Errol Flynn’s The Adventures of Robin Hood (the only “swashbuckler” I’ve ever enjoyed more) and Singin’ In the Rain (another loving genre meditation). But as thrilling as the action scenes were (and with most other modern action films relying on computer-generated images and whiplash editing, they were very thrilling), the narrative pull of the archetypal plot and the inspired performances from actresses Michelle Yeoh and young Zhang Ziyi were every bit as captivating.

5. George Washington — This film screened locally only once and at The Orpheum as part of this year’s IndieMemphis Film Festival (and kudos to the festival for bringing it), and if you were one of the 60 or so people who were there, good for you. A gentle, gorgeously photographed Cinemascope indie, director David Gordon Green’s debut tale of working-class kids in a small, unnamed Southern town was a true American original that deepened tremendously with repeated viewings — not that too many Memphians had the chance.

6. The House of Mirth — Reaching depths of feeling and horror unimagined by Merchant-Ivory, British director Terence Davies’ devastating adaptation of Edith Wharton’s social satire may be the greatest “costume drama” ever filmed. With Gillian Anderson’s performance of a lifetime in the lead role, this was masterfully direct narrative filmmaking and unjustly ignored.

7. Traffic/Ocean’s Eleven (tie) — Steven Soderbergh is a national treasure. These days Hollywood movies are so test-marketed, money-driven, and pop-culture-infected that few filmmakers (Michael Mann also comes to mind) manage to make straightforward entertainments of the same quality the studio system regularly produced a few decades ago. Then you have Soderbergh, who has been churning out smart, entertaining, mainstream genre pics at a record rate. This year, he graced the screen with two radically different yet equally accomplished, examples — the oh-so-serious Traffic and entirely frivolous Ocean’s Eleven. The drug-war critique Traffic didn’t have quite the snap of Soderbergh’s other recent work, but it was still a model for the intelligent epic, with its D.W. Griffith-worthy cross-cutting and panorama of great performances and moments. Ocean’s Eleven, despite the great cast, could have easily been unwatchable in the hands of a typical Hollywood director-for-hire, but Soderbergh’s exquisite editing and subtle direction found the grace notes and small comic moments others would have missed, resulting in the kind of stylish, witty, and exciting popcorn move Hollywood tries to make all the time and almost never does.

8. Memento — Guy Pierce was brilliant in this post-modern Point Blank, the rare recent American film to be based on a narrative gimmick that takes said gimmick and runs with it. Told backward, this tale of a man with short-term memory loss ingeniously provoked the same woozy mood and necessarily hyperactive in the audience as it did in the film’s protagonist.

9. Amélie — As inventive as it was manipulative, as honestly romantic as it was utterly artificial, this French art-house smash was a welcome addition to American screens at least in part because manipulative American entertainments are rarely this entertaining anymore (Pearl Harbor, anyone?). So utterly charming and kinetic that it convinces you to ignore your qualms and give in to its “feel-good” rush.

10. A Time For Drunken Horses — As unremittingly realistic as Amélie was artificial, this documentary-like tale of Kurdish children struggling to survive along the Iraq-Iran border was no great work of cinema, but it conveyed the simple, communicative power of the medium itself like no other film in 2001. And after 9/11 it deepened in poignancy, humanizing a region of the world that Americans are far too ignorant of.

Honorable Mentions (in order of preference): Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Start-up.com, Waking Life, A.I., Amores Perros, The Anniversary Party, The Princess Diaries, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Fast and the Furious, Before Night Falls.

Everyone’s saying that 2000 was the worst year for film in decades. I don’t believe that. If you choose to listen to serious critics whose reach doesn’t stop at the borders of the Hollywood publicity machine, there’s plenty of action overseas, and I’ve sampled enough contemporary foreign fare to believe the hype. But, in Memphis, where filmmakers like Wong Kar-Wai, Abbas Kiarostami, and Claire Denis are essentially barred from local screens, it was a bleak year indeed.

In 1999, the success of films like American Beauty, Three Kings, and Being John Malkovich supposedly signaled a return to interesting cinema from American studios. In 2000, Hollywood was back to all-crap-all-the-time. Last week the Village Voice published its second annual national film critics poll. Of the poll’s top 10 films, exactly zero were made in the U.S.A. Only one, Lars Von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark, has played Memphis. Surely Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The House of Mirth will make it here eventually, but will we ever see the likes of Edward Yang’s Yi Yi, Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love, or Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us?

The prognosis doesn’t look good. Malco? AJAY? National distributors? Are you listening? For the sake of local film lovers, please open the gates and let the world in.

Until that happens, the local pickings will be slim. But here’s one critic’s take on the best films that opened in Memphis during the calendar year 2000 (Directors names are in parentheses):

Topsy-Turvy (Mike Leigh): Confession: I’ve never seen a Gilbert and Sullivan musical. And part of the triumph of Mike Leigh’s film — an in-depth look at a particular moment in the pair’s working partnership — is that my lack of experience isn’t a hindrance. Meticulously researched and ferociously acted, Leigh’s meditation on the collective creative process of theater (or film) as seen through the prism of that famous relationship managed to be as personal a film as was released last year despite focusing on the lives and work of other artists. And the film was elevated to the realm of the miraculous by its bold, unexpected finale, which hands Topsy-Turvy over to three previously minor characters and reveals reservoirs of feeling and experience beyond even the film’s sprawling and deep surface. It’s an ending that inspires the radical notion that there are entire other films that exist beneath the great one we’ve just seen. Discounting the re-release of Rear Window, Topsy-Turvy was the only masterpiece to grace a local screen all year.
Boys Don’t Cry(Kimberly Pierce): This new American classic, featuring Hilary Swank’s Oscar-winning turn as Teena Brandon, a Midwestern girl killed for impersonating a boy, is harrowingly affective as a agitprop about hate and violence, sure. But what makes it great is the delicate relationship between Swank and Chloe Sevigny as Lana, Brandon’s girlfriend. It’s this relationship that exposes the absurdity of clinging too tightly to society-imposed gender roles. And Sevigny’s beautiful performance makes Lana the true heart of the film.
American Movie(Chris Smith): This documentary portrait of struggling, Wisconsin-based horror filmmaker Mark Borchardt partially acts as a corrective to the more widely seen Fargo in its loving but honest rendering of the subject’s (and filmmaker’s) working class, Midwestern milieu. But the real triumph of this howlingly funny and legitimately touching film is the way Borchardt manipulates the process to essentially turn American Movie into the autobiographical feature that he can’t raise the money to make himself.
Kikujiro (Takeshi Kitano): This unjustly attacked road movie from the Japanese master Kitano may have been the only truly important foreign language film (though Pedro Almodovar’s All About My Mother and Majid Majidi’s The Color of Paradise might count too) to be granted a Memphis screening this year. Here Kitano’s usually hard-boiled subject matter (see the wonderful Fireworks and Sonatine) gives way to an achingly sentimental tale of a young boy taken to visit the mother he’s never known. The wrenching stylistic shift allows us to appreciate even more Kitano’s wittily minimal style and accomplished physical performance.
Erin Brockovich (Steven Soderbergh): Mainstream American film’s most compelling movie star teams with its most compelling filmmaker for a deliriously entertaining meta-movie that finally cements Julia Roberts as both her era’s Barbara Stanwyck and its Joan Crawford. Old fashioned studio values meets Soderbergh’s own foxy personal style for a film that shamed the competition of all other media- and corporate-appointed blockbusters.
You Can Count on Me (Kenneth Lonergan): This drab, basic looking movie is so indifferently shot that it’s almost too un-cinematic to recommend. But the concern here is on acting and dialogue, not on the visuals, and this look at the reunion of two adult siblings is so well-written and so lived-in that it’s a triumph anyway. In an American film culture that seems increasingly incapable of making films featuring recognizable human beings, here are people and a world that seem ineffably real, and a story that picks up the rhythm of life and eschews easy resolution. If Mark Ruffalo doesn’t win an Oscar for his stunningly natural portrayal of the troubled brother Terry (and he won’t), then the Academy needs to finally be dismissed for the sham it is.
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai(Jim Jarmusch): This comic and poetic archetypal doodle from the great American independent Jarmusch was simultaneously a meditation on the history of gangster films and, in its own way, the greatest hip-hop flick since Krush Groove.
Dancer in the Dark (Lars Von Trier): After two viewings, I still haven’t sorted out my conflicted feelings about the Danish auteur Von Trier’s latest cinematic assault. But one thing’s for certain, there may not have been a more audacious film screened locally than this musical tragedy.
Magnolia (P.T. Anderson): A bold, beautiful mess. Anderson’s three-hour-long Altmanesque ramble reaches for the kind operatic emotions way out of vogue in this era of the relentlessly impersonal.
The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola): Sofia Coppola’s directorial debut was a stylish, atmospheric meditation on puberty that was stunningly mysterious and erotic. Phil Spector made little symphonies for teenagers. Here, Coppola makes a little art film for teenagers.

Honorable Mentions: All About My Mother(Pedro Almodovar); Cradle Will Rock(Tim Robbins); Quills(Philip Kaufman); The Poor and Hungry(Craig Brewer); Billy Elliot(Stephen Daldry); Alice et Martin(Andre TechinŽ); Shower(Zhang Yang); The Original Kings of Comedy(Spike Lee); Me, Myself, and Irene(Peter and Bobby Farrelly); High Fidelity(Stephen Frears).