THE TEN BEST MOVIES OF 2001, Saith Macresarf1.
Mar 24 '02 (Updated Jan 18 '07)
The Bottom Line MULHOLLAND DRIVE, GHOST WORLD, AMORES PERROS, LOST ORDERS, etc, were The Best Movies of 2001, not the crowd pleasers. [So, have I other head-splitting truths?!]
It has become the conventional wisdom in recent times that no really good movies come out of Hollywood in a given year. The great movies are said to be produced in Shanghai or Iran, but never in The Film Capital of the World. My TEN BEST MOVIES OF 2001 gives the lie to that canard, at least in part.
Most years, the critics who raise croaking laments may be entirely correct -- or pretty close to it. How can we remember (or forget) Oscar winners like THE ENGLISH PATIENT (Minghella, 1996) or TITANIC (Cameron, 1997)? These films were considered by the Motion Picture Academy the finest of their year, but the former certainly was largely forgotten by the time the winning envelop was opened. And the latter was a triumph of excess, absurdity and bombast. Moldy, specious Romanticism and wham-bam special effects, going in one brain and out another, instantly forgotten, is the stuff of modern Oscars. One probably has to go back to Bertolucci's THE LAST EMPEROR in 1987 to find an Oscar winner which was a great movie. Even then, it could be argued that THE LAST EMPEROR was not truly a Hollywood movie, at all.
The Year 2001, befitting its auspicious date, was an exception. Hollywood turned out half a dozen very worthy films. (Only one or two were nominated for Oscars, however.) I should like to honor a few of them in my Ten Best List.
You will NOT find the Most Nominated Hollywood films here. THE LORD OF THE RINGS: The Fellowship of the Ring (Peter Jackson), an Australian film anyway, is a splendid Part I for a trilogy, but unlike THE GODFATHER (Coppola, 1972), it does not stand by itself. A BEAUTIFUL MIND (Ron Howard), its biographical failings to one side, is anti-climactic, as if sharing in a Nobel Prize would fix up a terribly flawed and complex life. IN THE BEDROOM, although a serious effort, is a victim of its quiet observational technique, especially in its last half hour when, faithful to its short story roots, it strays into melodrama. (It would have made a marvelous short subject.) Finally, MOULIN ROUGE has all the disastrous symptoms of an Oscar winner. The film is tasteless, over-produced, takes place in The State of Unreality (nominally, Belle Epoch Paris, France), and mistakes burlesque for romantic fantasy. If it wins the Oscar, MOULIN ROUGE will have its nearest rival -- THE ENGLISH PATIENT and TITANIC being a class by themselves -- in THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH (De Mille, 1952).
MOULIN ROUGE will probably win.
[March 25, 2002 -- I was overly pessimistic. The Oscars were fairly distributed, though I thought GOSFORD PARK a much better film than A BEAUTIFUL MIND. As it turned out, MOULIN ROUGE won awards for costume design and art direction, both well deserved, which should be credited to Baz Lurhmann's production designer and companion, who may be the real talent of the pair.]
And so, without further fuh-h-h-thering, here are my choices, shoe-horned into the system -- somehow -- because, for reasons known only to the Inner Sanctum, there seems to be no Epinions category for the Ten Best Films of 2001.
[August 13, 2002 -- Thanks to Alexis Johnson and Baron Jackson, and their teams, the 10 Best Movies of 2001 list has just been set up.]
Anyway, here are the movies:
10. MEMENTO: Many enthusiasts would call this clever puzzle the best movie of the year. New Director Christopher Nolan runs his film in reverse, showing us the recent bloody, confused life of an unreliable noir narrator, the dissolute Lenny Shelby. It has verve, super editing and a non-stop performance by Guy Pearce, but it is, after all, just a wonderful trick. That's a good enough value in action and suspense, however, to earn MEMENTO a ten spot.
http://www.epinions.com/content_15398178436
9. MONSTER'S BALL is a Southern Gothic of profound proportions, mixing issues like Capital Punishment, Bigotry and Miscegenation in a strange and revealing romance of American Life. How Leticia Musgrove (Halle Berry) heals herself after the execution of her husband Larry (Sean "Puffy" Combs), and how his executioner, Hank Grotowskie (Billy Bob Thornton), discovers his humanity in her bosom makes for a truly perceptive film. Roberto Schaefer, another new director to watch, puts the parts together skillfully, although in the end, they may not quite all fit. Actors like Peter Boyle and Heath Ledger give strong support, and Halle Berry should win an Oscar. (Billy Bob Thornton should have had a nomination either for this picture or THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE.)
[Hollywood's good angels smiled on Halle Berry, and she got her Oscar.]
http://www.epinions.com/content_55061941892
8. CHUNHYANG may not be a crowd pleaser in a Western sense, but Im Kwon-Taek is being recognized at last as one of the World's great film directors. Here, he returns to the classic Korean theatrical art of Pansori, and a famous 18th Century story of class and love. Im presents it in shimmering color, with an exquisite eye for detail of the period. The film contains one of the few authentic erotic scenes I saw last year. Should CHUNHYANG keen your eye for movies by Kwon-Taek, there are over a dozen others to choose from.
http://www.epinions.com/content_7983697540
7. GHOST WORLD: Terry Zwigoff caught the attention of younger film filmgoers when he documented the bewildering life of underground Cartoonist Robert Crumb (CRUMB, 1994). In GHOST WORLD, his first theatrical movie, Zwigoff brings to life the cartoon novel of Daniel Clowes. Doing so, he illuminates in a stylized way the lives of American teenagers, represented by Thora Birch and Scarlett Johansson, and also the pathos of lower middle class aesthetes, like the one played here by Steve Buscemi. A rare American Art Film. Memorable.
http://www.epinions.com/content_33281183364
6. OUR LADY OF THE ASSASSINS: For those with eyes to discern, Barbet Schroeder, shooting on the spot in Medillin, Columbia, reveals the almost inevitable result of destabilizing a Third World nation with drugs and weapons. The picture is one of young men who casually gun each other down on the street, or slay anyone else who irritates them. We do not see the mothers and fathers, their coffee farms ruined by World monopoly price fixing, employed now by the drug trade, but we do see the fireworks they shoot off when a neighborhood cocaine shipment makes it into the United States. American Forces are at war in Columbia right now, and half a dozen other places in the World, part of our crusade against terrorism. Few Americans saw OUR LADY OF THE ASSASSINS. When we begin to reap the results of "The War on Terrorism," many of us will be surprised. See OUR LADY OF THE ASSASSINS and you will not be.
http://www.epinions.com/content_40908590724
5. UNDER THE SAND: This strange drama about the inability of someone to accept the death of a loved one could teach the makers of HARRISON'S FLOWERS a good deal. The film is a mystery, a celebration of French habit, an examination of human character, a study of a woman having to cope with suddenly living by herself -- and a ghost story. It has the distinct advantage of having Charlotte Rampling as its star, and an interesting new French director, Francois Ozon, in charge.
http://www.epinions.com/content_21469695620
4. GOSFORD PARK: My only pick which is also an Oscar Nominee for Best Picture, this satire of British aristocracy has applications to the new ruling class of America. The film is a triumphant third comeback for 76 year-old Robert Altman. If Altman can conceive, stage and draw together more films this good, I hope he goes on for at least another decade. GOSFORD PARK is, in my opinion, the best film of those nominated for the Oscar.
[GOSFORD PARK did not win, of course. It would have been shocking if a film so good had so succeeded. And Bob Altman did not get an Oscar for Best Director, the Academy preferring a faithful booster, Ron Howard. But Jullian Fellowes, who knows of what he writes, won for his gracefully intricate GOSFORD PARK screenplay.]
http://www.epinions.com/content_57535860356
3. LAST ORDERS: This film opened in December 2001, and despite the presence of most of the British actors not in GOSFORD PARK, a script based on Graham Swift's Booker Prize novel, and a really talented Australian director, Jim Schepisi (THE RUSSIA HOUSE, 1990), I must say LAST ORDERS has been hardly noted -- although its reviews have been excellent. As played by Michael Caine, lived by his wife (Helen Mirren), his best friend "Lucky" Ray (Bob Hoskins), his undertaker Vic (Tom Courtenay), his drinking buddy Lenny (David Hemmings) and his step-son Vince (Ray Winstone), this One Day in the Death of Jack Dodds encompasses a meditation on our lives apprised, as the friends arrange to scatter Jack's ashes at the mouth of the Thames. A crop of newcomers stand in for these brilliant veterans in the younger days of their characters. DON'T MISS THIS MOVIE.
http://www.epinions.com/content_58916441732
2. AMORES PERROS, a bookend for OUR LADY OF THE ASSASSINS, may be one of the greatest urban films ever made. Once again, a film created in a foreign land has much to tell us about how things will go in America. In this case, the projection is one of urban dwellers who, it is suggested, are becoming isolated, crowded into smaller spaces, with class divisions, environmental degradation, shortages, people on foot at the mercy of large dogs, deteriorating services, rapacious businessmen, violence, rising crime, running gun battles in the streets, police not able to keep order, autos used as weapons, assassin as an ordinary job description, people closer to their pets than to each other. [Hey, it's almost here already.] A number of interlocking characters, in parallel stories, work out themes of abandonment, desire, loss, maiming, death and redemption. And of course, AMORES PERROS does not, as such, take up foreign terrorists or global warming. However, welcome to the future, Americans.
http://www.epinions.com/content_18837900932
1. MULHOLLAND DRIVE. I have now seen five times this dark dream fantasy about our ambition for fame, reaching it, maintaining it, living with its consequences, giving into its morphia -- and losing our lives and souls for it, no matter how fleeting it may be. I am seldom so fascinated by a film, but each time I see MULHOLLAND DRIVE, I understand a little more fully its scope. Alas, each time I see it, I also notice something puzzling or enlightening that I had not seen before. (I begin to wonder if David Lynch did not have multiple alternate prints released.) It is a Rorshshach test! MULHOLLAND DRIVE surely is far and away the best American film of 2001. It is by and about Hollywood, but it is also about the celebrity society that most of us to some degree or in some fashion aspire to. Naomi Watts and Laura Harring, the picture's White Rose Tweedledum and Red Rose Tweedledee, should become World class stars through their performances in this movie, and if there were any justice, David Lynch would be awarded the Oscar for Best Director. MULHOLLAND DRIVE will be discussed and debated throughout the coming decade.
[It was entirely fitting that MUHOLLAND DRIVE, nominated only for Best Director, won nothing at all from the 74th Academy Awards! That showed how bankrupt the Awards were this year.]
http://www.epinions.com/content_41824587396
Well, that's it, folks. I wish that I might have crammed THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE, SEXY BEAST, BLACK HAWK DOWN, THE ANNIVERSARY PARTY, PANIC, I AM SAM, IN THE BEDROOM, HAPPY ACCIDENT, and PEARL HARBOR onto the list, in roughly that order, but I had resolved that this year, I would make no lists with a), b) or c) additions.
If you have not seen some of the films above, forget the explosions, the blue screens, the animal function jokes, and all the people who really aren't there -- in some highly promoted movies. Instead, go see, or rent, the movies I have listed.
They are among the very best.
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UPDATE: January 18, 2007 -- Back here for a bit of maintenance, seeing David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE about to open, and noting the work of other directors on this page, I must say, the list doesn't look too bad.
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macresarf1
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Location: San Francisco, Ca.
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12/21/09: Ten years ago, today, I published my first epinion. Many thanks!
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