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5. "Bad Santa"
Finally, finally a film for those of
us who feel like Scrooges around the holidays and think Christmas movies are the
worst genre ever conceived. I could go on about how Terry Zwigoff's film skewers gross American holiday
consumerism with the soul-sucking images of fluorescent mall lights and drunken
Santa Clauses ... yeah, I could praise that. But really, this movie rules
because it's wonderfully offensive, mean, relentless, vulgar (profanity hasn't
sounded this poetic since Mamet) and wet-your-pants hysterical. Oh, and they should
give Billy Bob Thornton, looking like a Santa's lost, strung-out
reindeer, a special Oscar for depravity.
4. "Lost in Translation"
Filmmaker Sofia Coppola's
heartbreaker of a film feels like a fragmented, surreal dream. There is
basically no plot, just a couple of American strangers -- one a middle-aged
actor (Bill Murray, in the role of his life), the other a bored
wife (Scarlett Johansson, who may be even more impressive) of a
self-absorbed photographer -- isolated in a Tokyo hotel who wander around the
city, drink at the bar, and stew in their rooms. Eventually, they find each
other, share their dreams, problems and ice their loneliness for a time.
Films like this are so rare; it is the type that Wim Wenders used to make in the '70s. It works because
of sustained mood and atmosphere; individual scenes (like Murray singing Roxy Music at a karaoke bar) that would be throwaways in
other films here lift your heart to the heavens. The two actors do their little
dance, dodging our expectations just when we think we've figured them out.
Coppola skirts past the dangerous May/December romance traps, and yet still
manages to create the most beautiful, tender love story of the year.
3. "Elephant" / "Gerry"
Director Gus Van Sant made the comeback of the year, even though he
really never went anywhere. Van Sant has been making movies in Hollywood; this
year, he came back to his indie roots and created two of his most heartfelt and
challenging works. The first was "Gerry," which tested audiences like no other
film this year. In it, Casey Affleck and Matt Damon go for a walk in the desert and get lost. So,
they keep walking ... and walking ... and walking. Watching it is like
meditation, and you eventually slip into a dream state. Eventually, the film
reveals itself as a Darwinian play, with the two men locked in a subtle power
struggle. Van Sant's other achievement was "Elephant," a film that while
stronger than "Gerry," borrows its style to capture a day in the life of a high
school. The camera glides around capturing the dreamy feeling of being a
teenager, floating place to place. A tragic event takes place towards the end of
the film (thus the Columbine comparisons), but Van Sant smartly doesn't try to
offer excuses. He doesn't give audiences a cathartic way out of the conclusion;
he instead shows life and then lets the tragedy linger. It's a shocker of film,
one that never leaves you.
2. "Capturing the Friedmans"
Andrew Jarecki's documentary is unlike anything you've ever
seen. It's an investigation of a Long Island family in which the father (an
admitted pedophile) and his youngest son are accused of child molestation in the
mid-'80s. Whether the father or son are innocent or guilty is never made clear
in the film (there is no tidy summary of the events) because that's really not
what Jarecki's film is about. Instead, he is more interested with the Long
Island community that condemns these two men before trying them. "Friedmans"
becomes a study of American hysteria, where society succumbs to witch hunts over
and over again. In this case, it destroys a very close-knit family and because
the Friedmans videotaped themselves unraveling during the course of the case, we
get to see first-hand the frightening effects of a community governing itself.
Unbelievable stuff, but it's all real.
1. "All the Real Girls"
28-year-old writer/director
David Gordon Green is fearless. In a time where it's chic to be ironic, he's
happy making quiet, natural films about real people and their problems. He
shouldn't be so perceptive at his age, so intuitively sensitive to human anxiety
... but thank heaven he is. His second feature (after "George Washington") returns again to the small town
populated by characters who will never leave and love to speak their minds ...
and Green loves to listen them talk. In the gorgeous, lyrical "All the Real
Girls," the talk revolves around love, and much of it is done by womanizer Paul
(co-writer Paul Schneider) and his best friend's sister Noel (Zooey Deschanel). Green captures the initial dopey pleasure
of falling love, that often gives over to fear and regret in such an organic way
that it often never feels written (how do you write giddy, lovelorn lines like,
"I had a dream that you grew a garden on a trampoline and I was so happy I
invented peanut butter"?). This is genuine, honest emotion explored without
gimmicks or condescension. Green has only made two features, but his earnest
voice is one of the most fascinating in American cinema.
Just missed: "American Splendor" | "Morvern Callar" | "Irreversible" | "The Secret Lives of Dentists" | "School of Rock" | "Dirty Pretty Things"
Foreign Six Pack: "Ten" | "Divine Intervention" | "City of God" | "Man on the Train" | "The Cuckoo" | "Swimming Pool"
Misunderstood: "The Good Thief" | "In the Cut" | "The Shape of Things"
Overrated/Over-hyped: "Mystic River" | "Kill Bill, Vol. 1" | "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World" | "28 Days Later"
Ugh: "House of Sand and Fog" | "Stuck on You" | "The Human Stain" | "Masked and Anonymous" | "The Matrix Reloaded" and "The Matrix Revolutions"
Best Film of 2003 Not in a Theater: "Angels in America"
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 2003? Write us at heymsn@microsoft.com
