PERSPECTIVES ON 2002
Although
I had already been living in New York City for several months by the beginning
of 2002, it wasn't until around February that I made a concerted effort to make
my acquaintance with as many of the city's major cinema spots as a full-time
student's schedule would allow. Twelve months later, I am torn by two
opposing voices: one telling me that I've seen enough, take a break, and the
other telling me that I've only just started, and I'm slacking off big time.
This conflict remains unresolved.
—Jaime
Christley
After
reaching previously untapped depths of poignancy with A.I. in 2001,
Steven Spielberg was back to his old emotional tentativeness in both his 2002
releases. Minority Report and Catch Me If You Can—like
Empire Of the Sun—hinted
at all sorts of complex, dark issues, but then pulled back without examining
them, as if the director had become spooked.
—Damien
Bona
Spielberg
played it safer perhaps in his two films this year when compared to the
genuinely odd A.I.,
but what he sacrificed in originality he made up for in grace and bravura
technique.
AI’s excruciating
incoherence and faux-profundities thankfully had no place in the fleet, nearly
perfectly executed Catch Me If You Can
(and, to a lesser extent, the first 2/3rds of Minority
Report).
—Philip
Fileri
For me, The
Pianist was definitely one of the films of the year. The early scenes have
an absurdist touch that make later scenes of violence and spiritual
degradation--like one scene involving people being forced to dance in the
streets--even more resonant. And a scene late in the film between
Szpilman and a German officer says as much about beauty of life as any other I
can think of.
—Daniel
Smith
The
year's biggest (good) surprise was George Clooney's remarkably assured
directorial debut, Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind. It had seemed
that Spike Jonze was Frank Capra to Charlie Kaufman's Robert Riskin, John Ford
to his Frank S. Nugent. But it turns out that Kaufman found his ideal match in
Clooney's infectious buoyancy. The movie's exuberance is strongly
contrapuntal to the inherent sadness of the material, which becomes all the more
pronounced because of the contrast. (By comparison, in Adaptation and Being
John Malkovich, Jonze's sardonic dead-pan style simply piled additional
irony on already-ironic, self-aware material—always
a potential problem in self-referential movies.). As much fun as Confessions
is, we are still watching the spectacle of a desolate man trapped in his
solitude while the rest of the world goes on its merry way.
—Damien
Bona
One
film I need to defend is Austin Powers in
Goldmember—an exuberantly crude, shallow, in-poor-taste comedy that flies
from one sequence to another without ever letting up an ounce of energy. I liked
the first Austin Powers film and hated the second, so I was thoroughly
unprepared to love the third, but in retrospect I’m not surprised that it
works so beautifully. With the assuredness that people would respond to his
sense of humor, Mike Meyers let himself run loose, and the result is as bizarre,
as beautifully timed, as free of self-consciousness, as the great Marx Bros.
vehicles.
—Max
Scheinin
On City of God:
It's as if, on Who's Line Is It Anyway?, Fernano Mereilles had been a
contestant for "authors" and had to do "Los Olvidados in
the style of P.T. Anderson (or Martin Scorsese)." This is a good
thing, by the way, and it's not all that Old Razzle-Dazzle, in any event.
Mereilles understands the importance of counterpoint. In the midst of the
"leaving the life" party, the shot I remember most is the one that
holds for several seconds on Ze Pequeno's face as it dawns on him that all his
machismo isn't getting him the thing he wants most.
—Victor
Morton
Surveying
the current state of American cinema and filmmakers, one came away from 2002
with a thoroughly mixed assessment.
While old masters like Scorsese and De Palma showed that they can still
exhilarate and deliver, impressively refining and summarizing their particularly
obsessive themes and styles, many high-profile younger auteurs like Payne,
Fincher, P.T. Anderson, and Soderbergh faltered.
And of course, some—Mendes, Shyamalan, and Solondz (whose 2001 film
wasn’t released until 2002)—continued to prove that they never had it to
begin with.
—Philip
Fileri
Biggest
Headscratcher: That Todd Haynes's lifeless exercise in deconstruction, Far
From Heaven, impressed so many people who you might think would have known
better. Haynes's slathering an ironic 21st Century sensibility upon a
mid-20th century sub-genre adds nothing to our understanding of the prototype,
and illuminated little about the 1950s or the 2000s. Or racism,
patriarchy, the oppressiveness of heterosexual dominance, the nature of cinema
or the essence of artifice. Admittedly, the picture looked swell, even
though the "look" was not so much that of a Sirk movie as a hybrid of
Sirk, Ross Hunter pictures in general, Nick Ray, Minnelli and Ophuls.
—Damien
Bona
Both
The Son and Irreversible present a world of sin, La Cinema de Boue,
but in the former film's world, there is grace, and in the latter's, there is
not. In addition, both are stylistically off-putting to their potential
moral audience. I went to see The Son with a Howard University
history professor, a conservative Roman Catholic who I thought would like the
film, but who found it "excruciatingly slow." And Irreversible—I
would hesitate to recommend it to any human being who had never done time at
least once in his life (and I do mean his).
—Victor Morton
Large
and Small-scale, Both Epically Overrated Epics: The Lord of the Rings: The
Two Towers (Peter Jackson), Atanarjuat the Fast Runner (Zacharias
Kunuk, 2001).
—Philip
Fileri
It
was great to have Walter Hill back in fine fettle. Undisputed is
the kind of modest, smart, kinetic, beautifully-made action movie that has all
but disappeared—in temperament and style it recalls the 50's work of Phil
Karlson and Don Siegel. And it's a reminder why the exasperatingly uneven
Hill was such an exciting and promising newcomer back in the 70's.
—Damien
Bona
A series devoted to William Wyler at
the Film Forum yielded a revelation: his 1930s movies, the best of which include
Counsellor at Law, The Good Fairy, and A House Divided (the
last of which provides still more evidence that Walter Huston was one of our
greatest screen performers).
—Jaime
Christley
Two films, Ten and Blissfully
Yours, are united by an intriguing conceptual similarity: both play around
with and push against typical assumptions, in effect asking, "When does the
real movie—or
the heart of the movie—begin?" When the title credits appear a good
forty-five minutes into Blissfully Yours, it's not only an amusing jolt,
but it’s
also a cleaver slicing the film in two, leaving the sunlit jungle of the
movie’s second part sheltered and separate, formally, geographically, and, as
it seems, emotionally.
Kiarostami’s new movie comes to us as a series of encounters
interspersed between a black-and-white ten-second countdown, as if all the
viewer is seeing is the prelude to something more—both the prologue to some
imaginary film to come and a structural complement to the video coda of Taste
of Cherry.
Perhaps we might even interpret it as another suggestive way of placing
video before film, calling to mind Godard’s own video-film inversion in Éloge
de l’amour.
—Paul Fileri
Not a lot of new talent on my list,
which is partly a result of my missing Toronto this year.
Presumably I’ll catch up with the noteworthy 2002 debuts over the
course of the next few decades.
—Dan
Sallitt