Best Films of 2003
December 31, 2003
If the year in movies has taught us anything about modern filmmaking, it’s that bigger isn’t always better, but when it is, it helps to have a story and characters we can believe in and care for. A case in point, the “biggest” film of the year, “Finding Nemo”, was really a small underwater road film with wit and snappy dialogue to spare, while the intended blockbusters, “Hulk”, “Bad Boys II” and “Tomb Raider II”, fell apart thanks to unappealing action and disagreeable characters. Steve Bartman had a better year than most of the over inflated Hollywood sequels this summer, and he had a whole city up in arms. Some films had heart (“Elf”), and some didn’t (“The Matrix Reloaded”), and while “Hulk” at least had moral ambiguities to its story, for the most part, it, and its fellow big budget ilk (excluding “X2” and “T3”) reached a point of overkill near the end of August with their redundancies and sloppy hedonistic attitudes about marketing and audience intelligence before making way for the long overdue “prestige” pictures for the Oscar season.
The multiplex’s this year found very few real gems, the likes of ‘Nemo, “Pirates of the Caribbean”, “28 Days Later”, “Kill Bill”, and “Mystic River” were too often surrounded by crass franchise sequels, slapdash comedies, and poorly conceived teen romance dramas that get churned out weekly by a Hollywood money machine that looks for quantity over quality, as in, the number of theaters they can cram one stinker into while effectively hogging the space more popular art house films (like “Lost in Translation” or “Bend it Like Beckham”) may find, if their lucky. But this isn’t revelatory news; ever since the dawn of the blockbuster era (1975 with “Jaws”) the best films undoubtedly are relegated to big city art houses (thankfully we live in close proximity to Buffalo, which has a few of these fine establishments) while smaller cities are stuck with the mainstream garbage. So, for every “Dumb and Dumberer” and “Underworld” at the local multiplex, a real beaut like “Blue Car” or “Owning Mahowny” play to little crowds at the art houses, just waiting to be discovered, if not at the theaters than when the token three copies hits the shelves of Blockbuster, buried next to the fifty copies of “Daddy Day Care” and “Anger Management”, which scream out to the would be renter with big names and tacky premises.
If you can get over the cynicism of the Hollywood marketplace, than you will see that, despite some reports, 2003 wasn’t really a bad year at the movies, it just wasn’t as good as 2002. Though we didn’t have the entertaining high felt with “Chicago”, or the poignancy of “About Schmidt”, we did have Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow in Gore Verbinski’s wildly adventurous comedy “Pirates of the Caribbean”, as well as such memorable “smaller” films like the smart teen street romance, “Raising Victor Vargas”, the single take wonder of Aleksander Sokurov’s “Russian Ark”, and Christopher Guest and company mocking yet idolizing folk music in “A Mighty Wind”, one of the funniest films of the year. And even though Arnold Schwarzenegger may now be the Governator, the summer proved that, even without James Cameron at the helm, Arnie could still amuse and carry a B-picture as his best character, the Terminator. When you boil it down, yes, like every year, the bad outweighed the good, but what was good was enough to push aside the bad, so in honor of that simple statement, in descending order, here are my picks for the 10 best films of 2003:
10. Lost in La Mancha:
2003 was a banner year for documentary films reaching the limelight, with the likes of “Capturing the Friedman’s”, “Winged Migration”, “Spellbound”, “Stevie”, “The Fog of War”, and “The Weather Underground”, but possibly the best of the bunch was “Lost in La Mancha”, a riotous and penetrating look at big budget filmmaking gone horribly wrong. Directors Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe started filming Terry Gilliam’s attempts to create “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” as the behind the scenes documentary for the DVD release, but ended up getting a feature length film out of the footage when circumstances beyond anybodies control (weather, sickness, money troubles) forced the strictly European funded mega-production to shut down for good. A fascinating peek at what it is like to stage a big film and have it collapse at your feet. It’s fear and loathing in Spain, and Gilliam comes off looking like some kind of tortured genius in trying to re-imagine Cervantes’ novel, which, fittingly, once brought down the ultimate tortured auteur, Orson Welles.
9. Lost in Translation:
Perhaps the most honored and talked about art house film of the year, Sofia Coppola’s second film is a funny and profound story of two souls, one old, one young, lost both in reality (Tokyo), and spiritually, in their hearts. Bill Murray plays Bob and Scarlett Johansson plays Charlotte, two people holed up in a huge Tokyo hotel, alienated by their work (Bob is a washed up actor, making a living on cheesy commercials), family (Charlotte is married to a flighty photographer who doesn’t pay her enough mind), and the language barrier of a modern day metropolis. A deeply personal film for Coppola, who creates a world of existential longing and eventual healing through friendship and acceptance; this is a very special film, with Murray at his sublime best.
8. Kill Bill: Vol. 1:
Some scoffed at the thought of cutting Quentin Tarantino’s bloody kung-fu extravaganza into two halves, but on its own, ‘Volume 1.’ Works as one pure cinematic experience, with Uma Thurman kicking serious behind as an ex-assassin left for dead on her wedding night and out for revenge. Q.T.’s film features buckets of fake blood, a snappy soundtrack (love the use of “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down) by Nancy Sinatra), hundreds of film geek in jokes, and even a ten-minute long anime sequence. In other words, can’t hardly wait for ‘Volume 2.’
7. Together:
One of the most melodramatic foreign films to be released nationally in America this year was this heartbreaker from China and director Chen Kaige (“Farewell My Concubine”, “Yellow Earth”). Tang Yun plays Xiaochun, a 13 year-old violin prodigy who is moved to Beijing from the main land by his loving and poor father to study under professional scholars, including a recluse (Wang Zhiwen) and an accomplished professor (Kaige). More a story of the father and son than a story simply about music (but boy is there good music) “Together” is impossibly sentimental and somewhat familiar, but Kaige (returning to China after some ill advised English language films) holds it all together like the stern teacher he plays, and it ends up being quite a fun and emotional lesson.
6. American Splendor:
In a perfect world Paul Giamatti and Hope Davis would both receive Oscar nominations for their superb performances as married comic book nerds in Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini’s hilarious, freeform pseudo-documentary on the life of underground Cleveland comic writer Harvey Pekar. Giamatti inhabits Pekar, a grumbling, perpetually foul hospital file clerk who gains reluctant acclaim for his realistic ‘American Splendor’ comic series, while Davis is Joyce Brabner, his tough wife and eventual co-writer. Blending animation, docu-style interviews with the real life characters and a general understated malaise, this jewel, which won the grand jury prize at Sundance last January, is the oddest and painfully funniest biographical romance of the year.
5. Millennium Actress:
Technically, Satoshi Kon’s Japanese anime feature is a 2001 film, but received American distribution, minimally as it was, in 2003 stateside, so it is eligible for this list, and thankfully, it is now available to a wider audience on DVD, for its story of a reclusive actress and her long career through Japanese film history is a charmer and its execution makes for one of the most visually dazzling and inventive anime films I’ve ever seen. Kon takes a simple premise; a film crew tracks down Chiyoko Fujiwara on the eve of the destruction of her old and grand studio for an interview, and spins it into an epic spanning the ages of Japanese history, the manner of stardom in the old studio system of Japanese cinema, and a self reflecting look at the very act of documentary filmmaking and audience participation. If you’re a fan of anime, or just like a good narrative, this brilliant film is a real find.
4. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King:
2003 began with everybody talking about ‘The Lord of the Rings’ (via “The Two Towers”) and it ends just the same, with Peter Jackson’s conclusion to his massive undertaking of J.R.R. Tolkien’s vast novels on everybody’s minds, while leading the charge towards the Oscars. A blockbuster in every sense of the word, Jackson manages to successfully wrap up multiple story lines (which we’ve obsessively lived with, unfinished, for two years) with deep characterizations, stunning visual effects, rousing battle sequences, and emotion to spare. The trilogy as a whole will now forever be the standard in which we judge action-adventure fantasy, and it’s not likely to be matched any time soon.
3. Whale Rider:
The only thing this heartfelt film has in common with LOTR is that it was shot in New Zealand, and like Jackson’s film it uses the lush landscapes to hauntingly beautiful effects. Director Niki Caro’s adaptation of Witi Ihimaera’s Maori classic is a lovely little film about a young girl, Paikea (Keisha Castle-Hughes), who yearns to be accepted by her grandfather, Koro (Rawiri Parantene) as he tries to teach the teenage boys of his tribe how to be the leader, for which she rightfully believes she is. An emotional and spiritual film, with a star turn by Castle-Hughes, just try watching the school recital scene (where Paikea lovingly honors her grandfather to his empty chair) without a tear in your eye, it’s a challenge.
2. Finding Nemo:
The most colorful film of the year (and I’m not just talking about the green it’s taken in at the box office and on DVD) was this Pixar computer animated film about the adventures of two fish as they travel to Australia looking for the lost titular clown fish. Sweet, surreal, and brimming with slapstick humor, director Andrew Stanton and the geniuses at Pixar have made their best film to date, and the voice work of Albert Brooks and Ellen DeGeneres as Marlin, the father, and Dory, the forgetful blue Tang fish, made the long and often arduous summer movie season fun for adults and kids alike, and as marvelous as the first screening is, it gets better and better with subsequence viewings. A true animation classic.
1. The Man on the Train:
In a year where bashing the French became a national cliché, it turns out that the best and most intelligent (and little seen) film of the year was this French existential masterpiece about two lonely men who, by way of conversation, find out more about themselves through the other persons life than they could ever have imagined. French pop star Johnny Hallyday plays Milan, a retired thief who gets off of the train one day at a random stop and is befriended by an old English professor (Jean Rochefort), who takes him to stay at his empty house while Milan plans one last bank robbery. Through long conversations Milan and the professor begin to realize that maybe they’d have been happier in the other’s shoes, but on a more metaphysical level, they begin to essentially contemplate life in and of itself, and if any profession, be it bank robber or poet, can live up to mans expectations with himself and his surrounding world.
Director Patrice Leconte specializes in films about odd relationships (“The Girl on the Bridge”, “The Hairdresser’s Husband”) and like Eric Rohmer, he fashions beautifully composed mise-en-scene around little more than people talking, and I’m not sure there was a film I’ve seen this year that penetrated deeper into the psychology of human existence, friendship, coincidence, and disappointment. Leconte is one of France’s best directors, and “The Man on the Train” may be his best film yet, it’s perfect, and in a year where perfection was in short supply, it’s a real eye opener.
by Adam Suraf