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By Dave McCoy
MSN Movies
Going to the movies in 2002 was a little like being on a diet for 11 months and then being whisked away to your favorite restaurant in December and given a credit card. Let's face it, other than some solid foreign food and a couple Hollywood snacks (About a Boy, The Good Girl), film lovers didn't receive a solid meal all year long. Hollywood was too busy tossing out mindless action films and banal romantic comedies, or teasing us with flawed efforts. Just when we thought we'd gotten something interesting, like Minority Report or Signs, the films would self-destruct in the final act, leaving us starving for something more substantial. Little did we know that the studios were hoarding all of the goodies for after Thanksgiving. Of the 16 films cited below as the best of 2002, half were released in December. While it makes for one hell of a 2002 finale, it does make us wish Hollywood would spread the love a bit more evenly through out the year. Oh well, happy feasting.
10. "The Pianist" -- Roman Polanski waited his entire career to finally make a Holocaust film (he escaped the concentration camps as a child in Poland and lost his mother there), but finally found his material with Polish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman's autobiography. Adrien Brody gives the performance of his life as Szpilman, a celebrity forced to hide in the Warsaw ghettos during Nazi occupation. Polanski's approach is cold and unsentimental (the last gripping, hellish hour is nearly silent), but the film chills you to the bone: It is like being stuck in a Francis Bacon painting for 2½ hours.
9. "The Piano Teacher" -- Isabelle Huppert's risky, tour de force performance as a repressed piano teacher teetering on the edge of sanity carries Michael Haneke's (Funny Games) deeply disturbing film about love, sadism and madness. Trapped in a drab existence and suffocated by an overbearing mother (a maniacal Annie Girardot), the teacher escapes through pathological sex fantasies. When a student (Benoît Magimel) finally offers her love, things get even worse. This French film isn't for everyone, but if you have the nerve, you'll never forget it, or Huppert.
8. "About Schmidt" -- Writer/director Alexander Payne (Election, Citizen Ruth) gets Jack Nicholson to do something he hasn't done in several decades: truly act. As an emotionally dead, wandering widower, Nicholson gives his finest performance since, perhaps, Chinatown. You actually forget you're watching Nicholson on screen. As for the film itself, Payne again proves himself the master of suburban satire, skewering ordinary American life and creating a bleak comedy that is one step away from tragedy.
7.
"The Lord of the Rings: The Two
Towers" -- Yes, it has no beginning
and no end, and yes, it lacks the grace and subtly of the first installment.
However, Peter Jackson's glorious return to Middle Earth was still
the best thrill ride at theaters all year. There are times (the Ents battle, for
example) during Towers where your mouth drops open and you feel like
you are seeing something for the first time. It's quite an impressive spectacle
and the final installment can't come soon enough.
6. "Adaptation" -- Call it the best meta film experience of the year. Call it the strangest film of the year. Call it the hardest film to describe of the year. Any of 'em work, but Adaptation is also the funniest film of 2002. Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze top their previous effort, Being John Malkovich, with this tale of a screenwriter's (yes, Charlie Kaufman) struggles with writer's block, not to mention sexual frustration, anxiety and his obnoxious twin brother, Donald (both roles played wonderfully by Nicolas Cage. It gets funnier, more insightful and more touching with subsequent viewings.
5. "The Hours" -- Fans of Michael Cunningham's time traveling novel said it couldn't be filmed: A film based on a novel that is an homage to another complex novel? Thankfully, they were wrong. Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliot) does a masterful job weaving together three stories, all revolving around Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway -- creating a fluid, stirring film about regret, missed chances, and whether the comfort of death is better than the pain of life. Nicole Kidman (as Woolf), Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep together give the ensemble performances of the year.
4. "Femme Fatale" -- The biggest crime of the year was that Brian DePalma's sly, intelligent thriller didn't find the audience it so deserved. This is the smartest film DePalma's made since Dressed to Kill and the first real DePalma movie since Body Double (i.e. one where the studios didn't have final cut and ruin his vision). Essentially a send-up of film noir, Femme Fatale, underneath its sleazy, glossy surface, is about vision: how movies affect the popular consciousness, how our eyes trick us and how things we see may not always be what they are.
3. "Punch-Drunk Love" -- P.T. Anderson saw something in those awful Adam Sandler comedies that the rest of us missed. What he picked up on was the anger lurking under the goofy surface, and he constructed a romantic comedy out of that anger. Basically, Anderson has a made a conventional romantic comedy; he's just whimsically screwed with the typical conventions. Boy and girl still fall in love but the road to that final shot are unlike any we've seen before. This is one of the more uncomfortable, tense romances you're likely to ever see.
2. "Far From Heaven" -- Todd Haynes' glorious homage to the Douglas Sirk's women's weepies of the '50s is so
thorough that it makes you feel like you're back in a movie theater during the
years of Technicolor, when women wore scarves on their heads and men donned
hats. Every little detail -- from Elmer Berstein's soaring scores to the
histrionic acting to the graceful composition -- is perfect and so is the
film.
1. "Y Tu Mamá También" -- On paper, it reads like one of those bawdy teen comedies of the '80s: Two horny adolescents travel through Mexico with a sexy, vivacious 29-year-old woman searching for a beach that may not exist. But, in the hands of Alfonso Cuarón, it's much more transcendent. It's a film about the beginning of the end: of life, of friendship and of innocence. It's a road film about paths not taken and a buddy film where the most important thoughts are cruelly left unsaid. It's hot, erotic, hilariously funny and ultimately poignant. Watching Y Tu Mamá También leaves you feeling giddy and alive. What more do we want from the movies?
Honorable Mentions:
The Fast Runner (Atanarjuat)
Full Frontal
Lantana
The Good Girl
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
I
am Trying to Break Your Heart
Dave McCoy is Lead Editor for MSN Movies. He's written for newspapers, magazines, weeklies and on-line publications about movies, TV and music for longer than he cares to admit.
What was your favorite film of 2002? Write us at heymsn@microsoft.com
