Film Freak Central's Top 10 of 2001

THE YEAR THAT WAS…
by Walter Chaw

Even though 2001 began like 2000 ended (poorly) and had a summer that could only count as its highlights a film so bad it became a handy satire of summer movies (The Mummy Returns) and two silly anachronistic pieces that got points for using David Bowie songs well (A Knight's Tale, Moulin Rouge!), the cinematic year resolved itself by the end as one of the strongest in memory.

The most disappointing film of 2001 is Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes. There's no defense for it: thirty seconds of brilliance encased in over two hours of impossibly dull blockbuster. Some may be surprised not to see A.I. as "most disappointing," but one needs first to possess expectations for them to be disappointed. Kubrick once said of Schindler's List: "The Holocaust was about seven million people dying; Schindler's List is about a few hundred people surviving." Hardly a shining endorsement for the prince of supercilious self-importance, yet Spielberg persevered under the presumption of a phantom Kubrickian mantle, and what should have been a thinkpiece on our responsibility to the things upon which we project our love became an ode to a washing machine that couldn't eat spinach. Also dashing hopes: Harry Potter's terminal case of Chris Columbus syndrome (symptoms: cowardice, loss of wonder), Ali's decision to exclude insight and plot, The Majestic's odd dedication to avoiding irony, and A Beautiful Mind's decision to be guided by Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman.

The title of "most socially irresponsible film" goes to Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor, a piece so reprehensible at its empty core that it barely made its money back domestically despite an over-the-top extravagant advertising campaign and theatrical saturation. It's popular sport to call American moviegoers "sheep" and "mindless," but it's been proven over and over that no matter how many horses you get to the watering hole, you can't make them drink twice if it's swill. Pearl Harbor is the worst film of the year (over Glitter, Joe Somebody, Affair of the Necklace, The Musketeer, etc.) simply because it took the death of thousands of American servicemen and fashioned a cheap, excruciatingly written life-support system for a CGI attack so poorly executed that it inspired hoots of joy from some audiences that didn't know any better. See, the Japanese were the bad guys. Someone should've told Mr. Bay–using very small words.

As you peruse our choices, mine and Bill's, please consider that we are flawed, have occasionally been remiss, and I personally wish I could extend this list even further so as to give a nod to Hedwig and the Angry Inch, but alas.–Walter Chaw, January 1, 2002

WALTER CHAW films of note missed: The American Astronaut, Amores Perros, Donnie Darko, In the Mood for Love	BILL CHAMBERS films of note missed: Audition, Black Hawk Down, The Circle, Monster's Ball, Shallow Hal
10. GHOST WORLD Terry Zwigoff's Ghost World (based on a Daniel Clowes comic of the same name) is a film that has two main strengths: its screenplay, and Steve Bucsemi. Sensitive and keenly observant, Ghost World begins slowly, only catching its tone when Buscemi appears as a wounded audiophile who meets his match in a bitter teen (Thora Birch) not yet ready to leave off the jaded idealism of her youth. Its final scene is haunting, and Ghost World captures something of the depressive in all of us.	10. IN THE BEDROOM Is the much-hyped twist really all that shocking? The magic of Todd Field's In the Bedroom to me is how organically its turns of plot fall into place. While I'm growing weary of white, middle-class tales that restate the obvious (every house has a story), this one, drenched in suffering, is well wrought.
9. BLACK HAWK DOWN Grueling and respectful, Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down (based on Mark Bowden's Pulitzer Prize-winning articles on the Somalia conflict of several years ago) begins with thirty minutes of character introduction and ends with two hours of the Omaha Beach sequence from Saving Private Ryan. It is a stunning, unflinching look at modern warfare: The first hour of conflict is presented in real time, a minute-by-minute depiction of a raid gone terribly wrong. A grisly and heroic film, and a welcome surprise from a director best known as a creator of meticulous fantasies.	9. A.I. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE A.I. Artificial Intelligence is the ungainly progeny of Steven Spielberg and the late Stanley Kubrick, two filmmakers one would never have otherwise mentioned in the same breath. The strengths and weaknesses of each combine to produce a soulful, untidy work of unrelenting something. Haley Joel Osment continues a string of astounding turns as an Oedipal, would-be Pinocchio, and visually A.I. Artificial Intelligence is probably–heck, definitely–the year's most arresting film.
8. VA SAVOIR (WHO KNOWS) A new film by Octogenarian Nouvelle Vague director Jacques Rivette, Va Savoir is the lightest and most accessible of Rivette's films. It tackles familiar Rivette absurdisms in the presentation of plays within films, searches for lost manuscripts by Italian humorists, and the none-too-subtle interest in Pirandello. Masterfully crafted and possessed of one of the year's most satisfying denouements, Va Savoir is a brilliant film by a master filmmaker.	8. THE AMERICAN ASTRONAUT Telling others about the irresistible The American Astronaut has proved as trying as conveying a dream. Cory McAbee wrote, directed, and stars as the titular sideburned spaceman; his nonsensical mission? Deposit a strapping young man (Gregory Russell Cook), one of the few in the universe to have "excavated a woman's breast," on Venus–a planet that is imagined as a Seurat painting full of Victorian females. This gleefully, wittily juvenile corker of a B-movie send-up has clever, catchy songs to match.
7. BROTHER Japanese Renaissance man Takeshi "Beat" Kitano's American debut is as brutal and uncompromising an action/gangster picture as any since Goodfellas. What Brother lacks in dialogue and cohesion it more than makes up for in Kitano's peculiar sizzle and quiet contemplation. More of a satire of convention than conventional, Brother is a striking film that only missteps when it allows its cast (particularly Omar Epps) to improvise dialogue. Ultimately, that does little to lessen the impact of the piece. Though not the best of Kitano's work (saving that distinction for Hana Bi, my pick for the best overall film of the 1990s), it is a minor mood masterpiece and one of the best films of the year.	7. MEMENTO .kcufdnim tselooc s'raey ehT
6. THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE A faithful resurrection of the film noir genre, The Coen Brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There is a shoo-in for Roger Deakins's fifth Oscar nomination as best cinematographer. It is a beautiful film that features an outstanding performance by Billy Bob Thornton as a barber so repressed that he's invisible–the quintessential noir anti-hero. Thornton is aided immeasurably by subtly hilarious turns from Frances McDormand and Tony Shalhoub. A strange and exhilarating piece of filmmaking.	6. AMORES PERROS (LOVE'S A BITCH) Many have tried and failed: This urban epic from Mexico is the first film to do "three stories about one story" right since Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction turned the anthology format on its ear almost a decade ago. A brutal, Faulkner-influenced black comedy about tumultuous relationships and dogs, Amores Perros is structured as a trilogy, building to a reserved finish of real staying power. The final tale is the most affecting, though the second segment is like a lost "Alfred Hitchcock Presents". Director Alejandro González Iñárritu and writer Guillermo Arriaga Jordan are relentless moralists, but hey, that gets the movie from A to B.
5. THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING The first of Peter Jackson's three adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings epic, The Fellowship of the Ring is simply amazing. No, it's not a perfect film, but it captures something of the work and in me personally that is cause for celebration and reason for excitement. Never a fan of the novels, I find the film to be more coherent, more emotionally engaging, and a good deal more exciting than anything Tolkien presented in his self-described "histories" of Middle Earth. A magnificent dark and melancholy achievement with the heft of real emotion in the interactions between its characters.	5. THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS Another wholly unique, aesthetically striking diorama of dysfunction from Wes Anderson, late of Rushmore. The Royal Tenenbaums depicts a family of geniuses with a brilliant combination of pathos and gallows humour. Aside: The film should do for Gene Hackman's career what Rushmore did for Bill Murray's–both are in peak form here.
4. MEMENTO The second reality-testing film to make my list this year, Christopher Nolan's darkly funny noir piece Memento is something of a tribute to the editor's craft. The film is told in reverse order in small time-chunks, ultimately becoming a commentary on the ways in which memory crafts our identities and essential truths. Guy Pierce, Carrie-Anne Moss, and Joe Pantoliano are a fantastic ensemble.	4. THE PLEDGE Sean Penn's third directorial effort is, like his first two, about parental anxiety, but the film is really a study in violence, and it preys on our cinematic conditioning: The very thing we dread becomes the very thing we anticipate–another way of saying "look forward to." The best bleak thriller since Seven, The Pledge features Jack Nicholson in an antiheroic role that keeps his eyebrows in check and subverts his perfected incorrigibility.
3. THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS The introduction of Wes Anderson as a singular voice in American cinema, The Royal Tenenbaums, Anderson's third film, is a character-loaded riff on Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s fractured fairy-tales. It is all quirk and circumstance and, like Vonnegut's best, it captures something essential about the plight of its characters that touches on the archetypical. Funny, subtle, surprisingly heartfelt, and indisputably brilliant, it features Gene Hackman's best performance since Unforgiven and is one of two films this year in which Gwyneth Paltrow proves herself to be an actress of depth and talent (the other is Shallow Hal).	3. MULHOLLAND DRIVE In my capsule review of Mulholland Drive, I mentioned that I couldn't wait to have epiphanies about this metaphysical cautionary tale; soon after, my inbox was flooded with Monday-morning quarterback deconstructions of David Lynch's woolly aborted TV pilot-cum-arthouse darling. While I want my own epiphanies, not yours (that's why they call it an epiphany), I am glad they're talking about a David Lynch movie out there again.
2. MULHOLLAND DRIVE Perhaps the most unsettling in the recent spate of realty-testing films, David Lynch's ode to the slipperiness of reality is beautiful and thorny. Though I found my way into it through what appears to be Lynch's interest in the late films of Alfred Hitchcock, there are as many valid interpretations of this piece as there are individuals fascinated by it. It is Lynch's most mature work, my favorite of his films, and at the least, the most conversation-inspiring and polarizing film of the year.	2. DONNIE DARKO Newcomer Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko, a tonal cross between Ang Lee and David Lynch, begins, for all intents and purposes, with a jet engine falling out of the sky and landing on the white-picket Darko residence, where the troubled title teenager lives. The film, which celebrates and indicts the eighties in one fell, sci-fi-tinged swoop, is a subtly nostalgic fantasia that, for its sincerity and genuine achievements of profundity, puts most suburban nightmare movies to shame.
1. IN THE BEDROOM In the Bedroom is actor Todd Field's directorial debut, and it's an astonishing one. His film is strikingly austere and possessed of at least three performances deserving of award consideration: Sissy Spacek, Tom Wilkinson, Marisa Tomei–a case could even be made for Nick Stahl, though Stahl's performance in Larry Clark's Bully is a better pick this year. The film is emotionally devastating, and it doesn't make any easy choices along the way. Every minute of In the Bedroom is earned–it is the best picture of 2001.	1. GHOST WORLD The top five films on my list are melancholy affairs; it was a year for movies in which characters felt isolated and haunted. How this is true of Terry Zwigoff's austere Ghost World burrowed it deeper under my skin than many a film ever reaches. Ghost World is about Enid (Thora Birch), an insular teenage girl who meets an even more insular middle-aged man, a record collector named Seymour (Steve Buscemi) with a subsuming knowledge of his interests. The two nourish yet destroy each other. Buscemi/Seymour hit me harder where it hurts than I care to confess. As Enid, Birch gives a performance of fearless, peerless candour; despite her unflagging bitterness towards anything phoney (which makes Enid, like Holden Caulfield before her, a bit of a phoney herself), Birch shows the character compassion, charging every angry barb with human frailty. (I find her the most captivating actress working.) Ghost World is real teen angst, because it talks of life angst, period.
THEY ALSO RAN… *11.* *The Pledge,* *12.* *Hybrid, 13.* *Shallow Hal, 14.* *The Others, 15.* *Waking Life, 16.* *Innocence,* *17.* *Audition,* *18.* *Monster's Ball, 19.* *Jump Tomorrow, 20. L.I.E., 21.* *The Widow of St. Pierre,* *22.* *From Hell, 23.* *The Caveman's Valentine, 24.* *Moulin Rouge!,* 25. *The Claim*	THEY ALSO RAN… 11. The Man Who Wasn't There, 12. Bully, 13. Amelie, 14. Monsters, Inc., 15. Brother, 16. Fat Girl

Film Freak Central’s Top 10 of 2001

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