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Favourite Film Things 2001 - Part 3
compiled by Fiona A. Villella |
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The Entries
Best of 2001
by Jared Rapfogel
Enough has been written about the events of the year and their effect on movies (and vice versa) that I don't feel the need to add my two cents, except to say that movies seemed neither all-important nor unimportant to me before September 11th and so in that sense at least, nothing has changed. It's hard to know how to evaluate the year's worth of movies. Labeling a single year “good” or “bad” cinematically speaking strikes me as distressingly vague—when people do so they rarely bother to explain what exactly they mean by one or the other. For one thing, in the mainstream American press, there's usually an unspoken assumption that it's exclusively or primarily American releases being judged, which obviously limits the playing field substantially. There's nothing wrong with concentrating on domestic goods but it's presumptuous to do so without making the choice explicit. On the other hand, if you open up your survey to films from all over the world, you can't honestly pretend to have seen more than a tiny fraction of the year's films. Secondly, it seems to me that there are very different ways for a year to be “good.” If you're judging a year by the number of unqualified masterpieces produced, you're likely to be disappointed more often than not—masterpieces are hard to come by. But a true love of movies isn't sustained by masterpieces alone—personally, I think of a successful year as teeming with movies that come within sight of the summit. If one or two or three of those manage the rare, almost miraculous feat of scaling the heights, then I'm ecstatic; but if it came down to it, I'd rather see many near-perfect films than one or two masterpieces. (For those who are baseball-literate, criticizing a year for lacking masterpieces is like criticizing a season without a perfect game, even though it was full of no-hitters.)
The Tailor of Panama deserves mention: I liked this movie a lot when I first saw it, mostly for its very strange, wacky sensibility and for Pierce Brosnan's evil-James Bond star turn—it struck me as clumsy and awkward at times, but thrillingly out-there. Seeing it again just the other day, though, I found that its unconventionality is much more substantive and subversive than I remembered, involving not just genre-tweaking but a very broad, very frank satirical attack on the U.S. military and the CIA (among other things). It's sad that this was so little discussed upon the film's release—given more recent events, its relevance is undeniable and it's almost hard to imagine the film being released these days. The satire may have seemed too broad at the beginning of the year; now it seems like a documentary. It's funny, but maybe a little too funny to be funny. It's also the case that, living in New York, most of the movies I see are not new releases. When people ask me what my favorite films of the year are, I'm at a loss—I don't really distinguish between the old and the new. As far as I'm concerned, with all the opportunities I have to see movies from all over the world and from all periods of film history, every year is a fantastic year. This year I saw a few movies that vaulted to the very top of my all-time list: Nicholas Ray's Bitter Victory, Chris Marker's The Last Bolshevik, and Frantisek Vlacil's Marketa Lazarova, a truly astounding film. And thanks to various retrospectives, I saw each and every film by Tsai Ming-Liang, Ousmane Sembene, and most satisfying of all, Eric Rohmer. Finally, I'd like to mention the one day when I decided, bravely, to give movies a rest for an afternoon and broaden my cultural horizons by detouring into the art world. I went to the New Museum to see the William Kentridge exhibit, which had been strongly recommended to me, only to find that the heart of the show consisted of a series of profoundly beautiful, strange, and magnificent animated films. Some lists
Best new releases (NY) of 2001 (and festival films soon-to-be-released):
Best films without an American distributor (as far as I know):
Revived or newly encountered in 2001:
Series and retrospectives:
Jared Rapfogel is a regular contributor to Senses of Cinema and Cinema Scope. © Jared Rapfogel December 2001 back to list of contributors
2001 Reflection
by Jonathan Rosenbaum I'm still making up my ten-best list for the Chicago Reader, in a year that for me was dominated by, among others, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, ABC Africa, and Waking Life. But I'd like to focus here on the momentous change in my cinematic life brought about by my finally breaking down and purchasing a DVD player—one that can play all the territories, and which is affording me a new kind of experience (as well as definition) of cinema. Consequently I would cite as my favorite pieces of film criticism—along with Adrian Martin's "John Cassavetes: Inventor of Forms" in Senses of Cinema Issue 16 (Sept-Oct 2001)—the "multimedia" essays by Yuri Tsivian and Joan Neuberger on Eisenstein's Ivan The Terrible in Criterion's two-disc DVD set, in a package which also includes deleted scenes, sketches, and storyboards. And in perhaps still another category—let's call it the film as theme park—I'd like to cite two other two-disc DVD sets, both from France: deluxe editions of Louis Feuillade's Fantomas and Wong Kar-wai's In The Mood For Love. The latter is especially provocative in featuring cut scenes that I like in some ways as much as those included in the film, except for the fact that these appear to belong to a different film—an alternate version of In The Mood For Love that never existed. Jonathan Rosenbaum is the film critic for the Chicago Reader. He is the author of many books including Placing Movies: the Practice of Film Criticism (University of California Press, 1995), Movies as Politics (UCP, 1997), and more recently Dead Man (BFI, 2000) and Movie Wars: How Hollywood And The Media Conspire To Limit What Films We Can See (A Cappella, 2000). © Jonathan Rosenbaum December 2001 back to list of contributors
2001 Reflection
by Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa
The photographic narrative style of What Time Is It There? with the digitized world of A.I. and the rotoscoped unstable world of Waking Life, and classical, romantic beauty stripped of history of the In the Mood for Love are challenged by the sober portrayal of the strong women in The Circle. The global culture of corporate America, portrayed magnificently in Yi Yi, is a poetic prelude to the tragedy and loss of September 11th and the following war in Afghanistan, reminding one of the thinking monkeys of the late Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and the possibility of media, especially film to inform, inspire, and challenge the audience. Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa is a Chicago-based filmmaker, teacher, programmer, and critic. Her essay on Iranian filmmaker Sohrab Shahid Saless is included in the English collection Life And Art: The New Iranian Cinema (London: National Film Theatre, 1999). © Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa December 2001 back to list of contributors
2001 Favourites
by Angelo Salamanca Sublime Bordering On The Orgasmic:
Amores Perros (Love's A Bitch, Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2000) Inspirational:
The Pledge (Sean Penn, 2001)
Angelo Salamanca has been involved in film for 15 years. He has recently written and directed his first feature film. He is based in Melbourne. © Angelo Salamanca December 2001 back to list of contributors
Favorite Films 2001
by Girish Shambu In no particular order:
Mulholland Drive (David Lynch)/Waking Life (Richard Linklater)
Millennium Mambo (Hou Hsiao-Hsien)/What Time Is It There? (Tsai Ming-Liang)
Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff)/Lovely Rita (Jessica Hausner)
Battle Royale (Kinji Fukasaku, 2000)/A Dog's Day (Murali Nair)
Orphan Of Anyang (Wang Chao)/I'm Going Home (Manoel De Oliveira)
Martha…Martha (Sandrine Veysset)/ Last Wedding (Bruce Sweeney)
After The Reconciliation (Anne-Marie Miéville)/In Praise Of Love (Jean-Luc Godard)
Heist (David Mamet)/The Deep End (Scott McGehee and David Siegel)
Kandahar (Mohsen Makhmalbaf)/Delbaran (Abolfazl Jalili)
La Cienaga (Lucretia Martel)/Love's Refrain (Nathaniel Dorsky)
Va Savoir? (Jacques Rivette)/Time Out (Laurent Cantet) Highest pleasure quotient: Discovering the treasure trove that is the Ernst Lubitsch oeuvre. From the razor-sharp German silents (like The Doll and The Mountain Cat) to early American pre-talkies (like his magnificent version of Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan that contains not one epigram from its source), the golden 1930s of Trouble In Paradise, One Hour With You, The Merry Widow, Ninotchka and The Shop Around The Corner, ending with the graceful and mordant Heaven Can Wait and Cluny Brown. Could this be the most underrated body of work in cinema? Girish Shambu is on the faculty at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York. © Girish Shambu December 2001 back to list of contributors
Here's my Top Ten and my alternative Top Ten list, respectively, of best films for 2001.
1. Rosetta (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 1999) Brilliant special mentions that make up the other Top ten list are:
1. Nurse Betty (Neil LaBute, 2000)
Megan Spencer is the resident film critic at Australian national broadcaster Triple J Radio and is an independent video documentary maker. She is based in Melbourne. © Megan Spencer December 2001 back to list of contributors
Released:
Amores Perros (Love's A Bitch, Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2000) Unreleased:
Mark Spratt has a long working background in exhibition, cinema management, programming and freelance reviewing. The director of Potential Films, he has now been a distributor for over 10 years. © Mark Spratt December 2001 back to list of contributors
In roughly preferential order.
1. Agua E Sal (Water and Salt, Teresa Villaverde, 2001) 2. La Naissance De L'amour (Philippe Garrel, 1993)
3. The Flowers Of Shanghai (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 1998)
4. Women Of The Night (Zalman King, 1999) 5. Agnus Dei (Miklos Jancso, 1970) 6. SIB (The Apple, Samira Makhmalbaf, 1997) 7. Sátántango (Béla Tarr, 1993) 8. Suzhou River (Lou Ye, 1997)
9. Black And White (James Toback, 1999)
10. Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999) To which I might add Romance (Catherine Breillat, 1999), Three Seasons (Tony Bui, 1998), In The Mood For Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000), Uptight (Jules Dassin, 1968), The Rage: Carrie 2 (Katt Shea, 1999), Thieves After Dark (Sam Fuller, 1983), Anzio (Edward Dmytryk, 1968), Maborisi (Hirokazu Koreeda, 1995), Abendland (Fred Keleman, 1999), the restored version of Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966), and so many others. The year's biggest laugh was provided by the video store scene in Bleeder (Nicolas Winding Refn, 1999), an indispensable guide to which filmmakers are considered hip and which are considered square (how horrifying to find John Cassavetes in the latter group). Sam Mendes' vilely misogynistic American Beauty (1999) stands unchallenged as the worst film I saw in the last 12 months. In his Chicago Reader review of Richard Linklater's Tape, Jonathan Rosenbaum remarked that "We keep encountering more and more twaddle about the state of world cinema even though the growth of digital video makes it impossible for anyone to keep up with the state of local cinema in any large city, much less any country, still less the world". This is certainly true, but I think it might be useful to bear in mind an alternate truth, which is that one has only to see Agua e Sal in order to know that world cinema is in pretty good shape. Brad Stevens recently completed a book, Abel Ferrara: The Moral Vision, which will be published soon in the UK by FAB Press. He has written for numerous film magazines worldwide. © Brad Stevens December 2001 back to list of contributors
Best Films of 2001
by Stephen Teo
Bad Guy (Kim Ki-duk, Korea 2001)
Funeral March (Joe Ma, Hong Kong 2001) and
One Fine Spring Day (Hur Jin-ho, Korea 2001)
The Circle (Jafar Panahi, Iran 2000),
Platform (Jia Zhangke, China 2000)
Mirror Image (Hsiao Ya-chuan, Taiwan 2000) House of Mirth (Terence Davies, USA 2000), Sexy Beast (Jonathan Glazer, UK 2000), The Gleaners and I (Agnès Varda, France 2000), The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke, Austria-France 2001) Retrospectives
Best experience: watching Raul Ruiz's first completed feature Three Tragic Tigers (1968) for the first time, in a Ruiz retrospective organized by the Hong Kong International Film Festival. Second best experience: Watching a restored Night of the Hunter (1955) being premiered at the UCLA theatre. Even though I saw only about half the film because I had to rush to the airport (I had seen the film many times before, of course), I did get to see the extra features that were put on for the show, including several outtakes of Charles Laughton introducing the movie with biblical quotes, and Lillian Gish, replacing Laughton with the reading (because he just couldn't get it right). Criticism Tomes on Hong Kong cinema are still coming out, attesting to the vibrancy of film criticism in this area. The newest offering is At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World, edited by Esther Yau (published by University of Minnesota Press, 2001), and it's one of the best. The one book that I most looked forward to reading this year was Christopher Frayling's Sergio Leone: Something to Do With Death (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), although after reading it, I came away with mixed feelings (it was good on Leone's life and work, but there were quite a few moments when Frayling seemed intent on biting the hand that feeds him, such as giving Peter Bogdanovich far too much space and scope to destroy Leone's reputation, unfairly in my view). I enjoyed reading the "Film Critics" pieces in Senses of Cinema, Issue 13 (April-May 2001); and the John Cassavetes section in Issue 16 (Sept-Oct 2001) is the most sustained, comprehensive coverage on a single filmmaker that Senses has yet done. Stephen Teo is the author of Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions (London: BFI, 1997). He is currently working on a Ph.D.
© Stephen Teo December 2001 back to list of contributors
by Boris Trbic
1. The Isle (Kim Ki-Duk, 2000) Boris Trbic holds an M.A. in Media Studies and is a scriptwriter, reviewer and media teacher. © Boris Trbic December 2001 back to list of contributors
Reflections on Cinema in 2001
by Erik Ulman I see few new films each year, since in San Diego we don't get many of the ones I most want to see, like Godard's Éloge de l'amour, for instance, or Straub and Huillet's Sicilia! or Operai, Contadini or, indeed, anything they've made since the mid-'80s, when their work (infuriatingly) stopped getting US distribution; so this reckoning is far from conclusive. Still, of the new films I saw this year, I liked Lukas Moodysson's Tillsammans best, for its warmth and abundance. At first I was irritated with its zooming and lurching camera; but this instability proved both engaging and appropriate. The film's subject is a commune in 1975 Sweden, whose complex relationships it follows with humor and without condescension: both Moodysson and his marvelous cast deserve high praise for the vividness and humanity of the characterizations. On the other hand, I most detested American Pie 2, which a friend and I attended as a sociological experiment and found so dispiriting that we had to take refuge in Planet of the Apes. It is in many ways the opposite of Tillsammans: grindingly formulaic, sexually hypocritical, dully acted, and relentlessly unfunny, except, apparently, to the teenage audiences on whose crassest instincts Hollywood capitalizes and depends. If American Pie 2 was the worst new film I saw, Jacques Rivette's Va Savoir was the most disappointing. I deeply admire what I have managed to see of Rivette's work from the '60s and '70s; and although I've been more lukewarm about his recent films, advance notices describing Va Savoir as “nimble” lifted, tentatively, my expectations. Unfortunately, I found the film flat, banal, and dishearteningly conservative. Tropes familiar from Rivette's earlier movies, notably the imperfect parallels between theater and life in L'Amour fou, recur here, but are divested of formal, intellectual, and emotional intensity; and the few moments that promise to come to life (a dinner conversation ostensibly about Heidgger; the concluding resolution of the film's tangled relationships) simply don't. One remembers the incredible vitality and risk of Rivette's earlier films, his collaborations with performers among whom the late Juliet Berto was perhaps the most glorious; and one wishes that something of the joyous and conspiratorial invention that surges through Céline et Julie vont au bateau could have found its way into this stale and plodding farce. I might also mention my disappointment with Apocalypse Now Redux, which in revised form revealed its confusion, excess, and bad faith altogether too clearly. Apart from that, I have seen many older films for the first time this year, among which my favorites would include They Were Expendable, Point of Order, Au Hasard Balthasar, Moses und Aron, and On Top of the Whale; and I was also impressed by several indelibly alert performances, most notably by Lou Castel in Fists in the Pocket and Zohra Lampert in Pay or Die. Among the film books I've read recently I would single out for praise Gilberto Perez' The Material Ghost, which strikes me (especially in his exposition of History Lessons and his thoughts on Renoir, Kiarostami, and Ford) as some of the best criticism I've read—intelligent, nuanced, patient. Any disagreements I may have with certain of his valuations (for example, his dismissal of Letter to Jane) don't diminish my admiration. One last note: 2001 should also be remembered for Budd Boetticher, who died at the age of 85 on November 29. In April, Scott Marks, film curator at the San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts, programmed a miniature Boetticher retrospective; and it was a delight not only to see both a restored print of Seven Men from Now but also the great director himself. I am grateful to have heard him reminisce, and for the modest, elegant, and resonant films (The Tall T, Comanche Station…) that he left us. Erik Ulman is a composer and writer currently teaching music at the University of California, San Diego. © Erik Ulman 2001 back to list of contributors
2001: a year in the movies
by Fiona A. Villella Just a word or two: here in Australia, we're significantly behind so that items on this list will be last year's discoveries for many elsewhere in the world. A sad state of affairs indeed. In addition: I don't claim to have seen everything released in Melbourne this year (which I haven't) and so this list is the best of the limited amount of films I managed to see this year. (In some kind of order…)
House of Mirth
Rosetta
Saint-Cyr
You Can Count on Me
The Circle
The Town is Quiet
A.I.: Artificial Intelligence
'R-Xmas
Yi Yi
Platform / Peppermint Candy
The Man Who Wasn't There
Zoolander / Monkeybone
The Son's Room Other highlights: Kippur, The Gleaners and I, The Piano Teacher, Calle 54, Wreckmeister Harmonies, À Ma Soeur!, Walk the Talk, Mullet, Vengo, Vertical Ray of the Sun, The Yards, Time and Tide, Running Out of Time, The Others, The Party, Amores Perros, The Pledge, Brother, Ring, Liam, The Isle, Faithless, Joint Security Area. Guilty pleasures: Riding in Cars with Boys, Dude, Where's My Car? Classic reruns: Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Raging Bull, New York New York, The Blue Gardenia, Ivan's Childhood, The Bartered Bride, Sound of the Mountain, The Apartment, One, Two, Three, Germany, Year Zero, The Decameron, Deep Red, Les Anges du péché.
Favourite film crit: Fiona A. Villella is the editor of Senses of Cinema. © Fiona A. Villella December 2001 back to list of contributors
Joel Schumacher's Tigerland
by Peter Wilshire Joel Schumacher's Tigerland (2000) is the best film I've seen all year. I think it's also one of the best anti-war films ever made, up there with Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola 1979) (I have yet to see the new Redux version), Paths of Glory (Stanley Kubrick 1957) and the granddaddy of all anti-war films, the original version of All Quiet on the Western Front (Lewis Milestone 1930). However, it is also a film that appears to have been criminally underrated and overlooked by many film critics and writers, at least in this country. Why didn't they give the highest praise to this film? Is it because Tigerland is directed by Joel Schumacher, a big Hollywood director and producer? Admittedly, Schumacher has made a string of mainstream films of varying quality including, The Client (1994), Batman and Robin (1998) and 8mm (1999). Maybe another reason is because it's too easy to dismiss the film as just another story about the Vietnam War. But Tigerland is not strictly a film about the Vietnam War nor is it a 'combat film'. Indeed, it is not a conventional war film at all. What makes Tigerland fascinating is that it's a complex psychological study of young recruits as they're being trained for war. Utilizing a cast of largely unknown young actors, Tigerland consists of finely detailed and complex characterizations that are rarely seen in films with a 'war' theme. The three main characters are Bozz (played by Irish actor Colin Farrell), his friend Paxton (Mathew Davis), the all-American college recruit who also narrates the film, and the psychopath, Wilson (Shea Whigham). Tigerland is a daring undertaking for any director, particularly a big Hollywood producer and director like Joel Schumacher. When was the last time a major Hollywood director attempted a film so confronting and so psychologically complex? I think it is a remarkable achievement and Schumacher must be given great credit. Tigerland certainly deserves more recognition. In time, I hope it will justifiably be regarded as one of the great anti-war films. Peter Wilshire is a Cinema Studies Honours Graduate at La Trobe University, a film writer, and a life-long film enthusiast. © Peter Wilshire December 2001 back to list of contributors
Otherwise, the interest is primarily in foreign movies: Flowers Of Shanghai (Hou Hsiao-Hsien); Yi Yi (Edward Yang); Code Inconnu (Michael Haneke); In The Mood For Love (Wong Kar-wai). The Hollywood cinema, dominated by corporations, is now (with even the future of life on the planet in jeopardy) given over to the project of 'not letting people think'. Endless 'action' movies with explosions, computer-generated spectacle, car chases...; gross-out movies; painting-by-numbers romantic comedies. Usually with rapid editing and no real acting, just 'expressions', hence no real characters, just faces making the expressions. Favourite Film Criticism: Two admirable books on Classical Hollywood by the increasingly prolific Deborah Thomas: Reading Hollywood: Spaces And Meaning In American Film; and Beyond Genre. Robin Wood is the author of several books, including Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan (Columbia University Press) and Hitchcock's Films Revisited (Columbia University Press). He is a founding member of the CineAction editorial collective. © Robin Wood December 2001 back to list of contributors
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