2003 wasn’t that bad. Perhaps it was because I got to see a lot of movies for free, and that naturally means I got to see a lot of movies I might not have seen otherwise. I think there was a great deal of creativity on display – and I also think filmmakers are learning to think again.

There were 5 films this year that I would’ve been glad to put my name on – films that not only reflected this year socially and culturally, but also films that will be repeatedly returned to in years to come. In no particular order those 5 are: Elephant, The Fog of War, 28 Days Later, Lost in Translation, and Touching the Void (opens January in US). There are other films I admired as well, though for me they’re a small notch down: American Splendor, Capturing the Friedmans, Gerry, 21 Grams, and Gigli, the most misunderstood picture of the year. There were also a few revolting films that were nearly unwatchable: Finding Nemo, The Missing, and The Matrix Revolutions.

If you were paying attention to the films mentioned above you’d have noticed 2 by Gus Van Sant – Elephant and Gerry. I guess that makes him the director of the year. Coming off of a rather publicly controversial stint as a mainstream filmmaker he found his groove again and reinvented himself as an amalgam of Terrence Malick, Stanley Kubrick and Michelangelo Antonioni. If you think that praise is overdone, wait 10 years.

When Shaun saw Gerry he had an almost violent reaction. He panned it in his review and condemned it as the most boring film he’d ever seen. Give or take. Van Sant’s problem was that not only was he taking a radical detour, he had virtually no credibility as an art director. Good Will Hunting was released in ’97, half a dozen years ago. That’s an entire generation in film-going history. College students weren’t even in high school when his indie classics Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho were released. They were kids at the time. It’s been almost erased from most people’s consciousness that he debuted with Mala Noche at the same time that the Coens debuted with Blood Simple, or Jim Jarmusch with Stranger than Paradise, or Spike Lee with She’s Gotta Have It! He was a part of the 1980’s indie club. Then he made a popular film that made a hundred million dollars and won Oscars.

Gerry is a film where what’s important (and interesting) exists within the nuances of the film’s anonymous leads, played by Matt Damon and Casey Affleck. There are no wasted shots. Each scene and each set-up is self-contained and motivated. As we follow their disastrous desert journey to see “the thing,” the drama lies in the details – details that are usually not called attention to. For instance, it can be pretty well argued that Damon’s character survived because he was able to turban-up by wrapping his second shirt around his head, thus blocking himself from direct sunlight. Affleck’s character, however, forgot his second shirt on the giant rock he was stuck on, leaving him exposed to asphyxiate while his brain fried. But there was no dialogue to call this to prominence. It simply happened and if you noticed it you were being observant. A lot of the time what we’re watching, during long takes without conversation, are the subtleties of their friendship – the competitiveness, their intelligence, skills.

Van Sant followed up at the end of the year with his Cannes-winning Elephant, also photographed by Harris Savides. In doing so, Van Sant and Savides have defined themselves as one of the most promising director/cinematographer pairings in modern film. Their style is based on improvisation, designed to find new solutions to old problems. They avoid traditional coverage and force viewers to participate. I think they’re making the types of films that we’ve been dying for. These films are direct descendents of Days of Heaven, Full Metal Jacket, and L’Avventura. They’re being made with that type of purity and demand of search. These are classic art films.

When I saw Elephant at the New York Film Festival, I immediately wrote that it was the best American narrative film I’d seen all year. I still wouldn’t back down from that. It was one of those times where within the first 5 minutes I knew if it could keep up what it was doing, it would be a masterpiece. It did. And it was.

Elephant was exactly what I’ve been waiting for: a film that breaks down the overwhelming trend in modern American art films to fashion themselves subjectively (and stylistically) to fit a certain jaundiced POV, and in the process eliminate depth by cutting off peripheral juxtapositions. It was a film that forced its audience to think. It didn’t care what you thought. As long as you thought. It wasn’t trying to tell you how to feel. The journey wasn’t about the characters onscreen, so much as it was about each audience member going on their own journey.

Some argued that its seemingly objective approach, done without any moralizing, was irresponsible. Not only was it correct, it really wasn’t objective. What Van Sant did was to follow multiple characters in a totally subjective way – but by using so many POV’s he rendered the picture as a whole equal in its distribution. It was also criticized for not providing a motivation for its 2 teenage gunmen. I think it did. Only the answers aren’t explicit, they’re implicit. The audience is forced to bridge the gaps. What can we learn from the details of the characters’ lives? What would compel them to take the actions they take? The answers lie in our own experiences. What do we remember about our own times back in high school? I graduated in 1993, and this was just when people were slowly becoming aware of the internet. It was just before gansta rap, and hip-hop in general, took over. Just before schools began gutting arts programs in favor of profit-driven athletics. Video games were about to start going 3-D in the aftermath of Desert Storm. You’re looking at a generation of kids raised on the hypocrisy of Barney and Born-Again Christian values, raised in the shadow of AIDS by parents who fucked like bunnies in the ‘70s and now work all day for corporations (and have to, to support their families) and are never around. Kids have free access to information like never before. These kids have always existed. What they have now are the means to carry out their dreams. And the legitimacy of the media to commit murder. We’re living in a boxed-in society where our lives have already been custom-designed: from school to work to retirement. If kids are already seeing their lives as worthless, seeing their parents’ lives as worthless, but see a world of celebrity they’ll never attain on TV and in the movies, it will create a major anxiety of powerlessness. If you take way somebody’s future, or at least create that impression (witness the Palestinian youth), they will react violently. And by turning to horror they not only find an expression for their impotence, but they get to totally dominate others and play God. And in conclusion, they’ll have done something that will always be remembered. It’s the old push-down/pop-up effect.

Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation was unquestionably the most well-liked film of the year. It was a film that received great press not because it had a lot of money behind it, but because everybody genuinely liked it. Every article said the same thing: Sofia Coppola has directed her second feature at age 32 and defined herself as a filmmaker with her own vision.

It was a film that just worked. All of the elements came together perfectly like some bizarre love child spawned of David Gordon Green’s improvisational intimacy and John Hughes’ hip comic timing.

It was also one of the few introspective films of late. By introspection, I mean from the director. Sofia was actually riffing on her own experiences, and the high-profile nature of her real life made these elements that much more informal and revealing. It was this honesty that people related to. They never felt like she was trying to get away with anything, never trying to trick them, never condescending to them from her position of royalty. Her rapport with the audience was as honest and sweet as the relationship between Scarlett and Bill.

If Lost in Translation continues gathering as many awards as it has so far, it could build enough momentum to be to The Return of the King what Annie Hall was to Star Wars a quarter century ago. After all, The Return of the King certainly wasn’t the best film of the year – its reward would be based on the entire The Lord of the Rings trilogy. But then again, perhaps just giving Peter Jackson the Best Director award could suit that. We shall see.

If the Academy chooses to recognize cinematographer Lance Acord with a nomination, as well as Harris Savides for Elephant, I will consider it a major victory for the younger generation. Both came up through the ranks of 1990s music videos, working with Spike Jonze and Mark Romanek. I’ve felt in recent years that the Academy’s taste has been pretty conservative – notice how none of Paul Thomas Anderson’s or David Fincher’s films have been nominated? And as much as I like the work of Conrad Hall, I don’t believe he deserved either of his recent Oscars. Both films, American Beauty and Road to Perdition were expertly lensed, but that was it, for me. They were great examples of classic filmmaking. I didn’t mind his win for American Beauty, though I didn’t care for the overwhelming praise afterward – I just don’t think he needed to be honored the second time. His son, also Conrad, photographed Panic Room the same year, breaking new ground in using CGI to enhance natural photography, but was ignored. I don’t mean this in any way to be disrespectful; I just felt the need to express this as an observation.

These tastes also help launch Miramax’s Oscar chances every year, no matter how studio-driven and culturally irrelevant their films are. Miramax has become exactly what it apparently stood in opposition to a decade ago: a conservative corporation. I still haven’t seen Cold Mountain. I’m sure it’s well made. There’s a lot of talent behind it. But right off the bat I’ve got issues with it for being too pretty. This thing should look grungy like McCabe & Mrs. Miller, not some Vanity Fair spread by Annie Leibovitz.

Worst of all, it lacks any vitality or progressiveness. Those were the trademarks of the early Miramax films. Today, Miramax is too busy emulating the MGM of old. In its wake we’ve had a lot of upstarts digging into its territory – from Focus Features (Universal) to Fox Searchlight (News Corp.). This was an especially good year for both. Focus started the year off on a high note by winning multiple Oscars for The Pianist and continued later with Lost in Translation and 21 Grams. Fox Searchlight had summer hits with Bend it Like Beckham, Thirteen and the great 28 Days Later.

28 Days Later, Danny Boyle’s  mini-DV zombie film, might have been the most important film of the year in terms of the medium itself. Shot for only $8.5 million with consumer video cameras, it proved that mini-DV, when used creatively, can be an exciting cinematic format. And even more important, Fox’s decision to release it with 2 different endings was brilliant marketing and a sign of things to come. (Once everything goes digital, it will be rather easy to change scenes to audiences’ specifications.)

This movie made me high. It made Shaun high. It pulled off the great high-wire act of combining entertainment and ideas. Some thought the ideas expressed were thinly developed and window dressing at best, but I would argue its success based on the amount of message board chatter. People got it. And after all, it is only a zombie movie.

28 Days Later depicted a world in chaos. A world where order has collapsed. A world where xenophobia is on the rise. Rage. Disease. War. It brought humanity back to its basics in a way not seen since The Dead Trilogy and Apocalypse Now. This was a picture designed to make us stop and look around.

I predict a good shelf life for 28 Days Later. It was just on the cusp of being dead-on relevant and being ahead of its time. A few years from now the slowpokes will have caught up.

Danny Boyle’s use of mini-DV and newsreel footage was in synch with the growing blurred line between fact and fiction. Witness films like Touching the Void, American Splendor and The Fog of War; in varying degrees they mixed documentary footage with staged recreations and animated graphics.

Closer to the narrative side was American Splendor, by Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman. Adapted from Harvey Pekar’s autobiographical comics, this was one of the most solid films of the year. In truth, it’s probably as good as the films listed in my top 5 – I think I’m holding back on it because it’s a good film for any year. I don’t believe a film like this is inherently important to 2003. It’s a great character study with classic performances by Paul Giamatti, Hope Davis and Judah Friedlander (Where’s his name been during awards season?).

Closer to the documentary side was Errol Morris’ The Fog of War. Morris has an almost unreal ability to make musical compositions out of documentary filmmaking. His visual sensibilities mixed to Philip Glass’ score – mixed with the fact that Robert McNamara is a scary stand-in for Donald Rumsfeld – created a sort of death dance.

Numbers…statistics falling from the sky like bombs…skulls tumbling down a stairwell to an unforgiving floor below…and McNamara himself, in his mid-80s, talking with a greater clarity than a man half his age about how he devised bombing campaigns during World War II that killed over 100,000 Japanese in one night…

This movie had a greater urgency than any other film this year. Americans don’t like history. It’s the most unpopular subject in school. Regardless, this picture should become mandatory viewing for high school students.

Somewhere between the two was Touching the Void, based on Joe Simpson’s book about his catastrophic mountain climbing adventure 20 years ago. The film mixes interviews with Simpson and his climbing partner Simon Yates, and dramatic footage recreated on the actual mountain.

Director Kevin Macdonald had a hell of a time getting the picture insured. His choice to shoot the dramatic portions on the mountain itself, through snowstorms and in ice crevasses, is something that needs to be seen. I actually sat there wondering how they’d done it? With this film and his Oscar-winning One Day in September, he’s got to be taken seriously. Cause these 2 movies are as good as anything out there.

On the straight-up documentary side there was Capturing the Friedmans. I saw an early press screening and the mood outside afterward was pretty enthusiastic. I didn’t expect it to become the phenomenon that it did. There was something eerie about the popular success of a film that reconstructs through home movies the collapse of a family amidst allegations of child molestation. I’m curious how the clown is doing in the film’s aftermath – I’ve actually heard former clients say that they’d never hire him again. It was a painful movie for such a success.

And speaking of pain there was Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu’s 21 Grams. I’m of the opinion that there are brilliant things about this film, and that it’s one of the year’s best, but I also think it’s somewhat unsuccessful. I feel frustrated.

The lead performances by Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro and Naomi Watts were all impeccable. Penn could sit on the couch smoking cigarettes for 2 hours and it would probably be interesting. Del Toro gave his best performance – he’s usually more reserved, but here he had a spark of anger. And Watts…it was almost agonizing to watch her put herself through that. It was a performance that was too raw for it to not be personal. This was something – someone – she needed to experience. And finally, there was Melissa Leo as the film’s anchor. She should be more of a factor at the awards than she has been.

I guess the problem is that the revenge story, unlike say In the Bedroom, came off as melodramatic. This was covered to a degree by the acting and rapid pace of images. But the latter also caused a problem by limiting the performances to mere note-hitting. Nothing lasted long enough for it to fully sink in. And I think the type of grief portrayed here requires a more moderate pace.

I think this type of note-hitting was also an unpleasant aspect of The Lord of the Rings. I wasn’t crazy about The Fellowship of the Ring. It had too much ground to cover, looked a bit rushed, and needed some streamlining. I also didn’t act favorably to the digital world of Middle Earth, since it looked too clean (plus I was a fan of the old Rankin & Bass cartoons).

The Two Towers really impressed me. It was just a giant unending motherfucker of an epic. Lots of battles and a non-stop barrage of creatures. At that point I declared it the greatest screen spectacle since 2001: A Space Odyssey.

After seeing The Return of the King, I’m afraid that’s all the series is: spectacle. While it’s unquestionably a great achievement in scale and profit and design, I don’t think the material is that great to begin with. Tolkien’s genius was in the creation of a new world in extreme detail, and the chronicling of its myths. But the story boils down to this: A Hobbit and his friend head off to destroy an evil ring, while their friends battle an army of bad guys.

Does something that simple really require 9 hours? There are only so many times Gandalf can come to the rescue at the last moment. Only so many times we can think Frodo is dead, but he survives. Only so many times we can watch Aragorn run headfirst in the front line of an epic battle without getting so much as a scratch.

I also think that it might’ve been a poor choice to shoot all 3 films simultaneously. Instead of Peter Jackson being able to take his time on each installment, he was juggling all of Middle Earth at once. It looked it. It looked like note-hitting. Get she shot and move on. This was also impacted by the amount of green screen acting the cast had to do with elements that were created via CGI.

I miss the Peter Jackson of Heavenly Creatures. That was the best film he’s made so far. Next up for him is a remake of King Kong with Naomi Watts. She’s perfect – the only actress who could successfully switch between a glamorous Grace Kelly blonde and a rundown junkie.

The Matrix also concluded its trilogy this year, but without the same level of success. The 2 sequels went from boring to embarrassing. And that’s unfortunate because it can be argued that the original was the most influential film of the last 5 years. I also believe it should’ve occupied the Oscar slot that went to The Sixth Sense, in 1999.

With 4 years between the first and second episodes, the style initiated by The Matrix had been sucked into our culture like crack cocaine in the ‘80s.

It simply couldn’t live up to itself. It also didn’t help that the Wachowski brothers are trying to position themselves in the media as neo-Kubricks.

In my opinion, Revolutions was the worst big movie of the year. It featured lame acting and dialogue, unimaginative design and no plot. It proved how dumb the general set-up was. If these machines are intelligent enough to turn humanity into batteries and create The Matrix, why can’t they just detonate a large hydrogen or neutron bomb to exterminate the free people of Zion?

This was a blown opportunity to create something truly original. Instead the Wachowskis melded every cliché, every myth, every hokey proverb into a pretentious muddle. Many naïve fans of the original The Matrix fell victim to the marketing matrix.

Revolutions barely beat out 2 other God-awful films from 2003: Finding Nemo and The Missing. On 2 occasions I tried to watch Nemo. I walked out of it in the theater, then a friend rented the DVD and had to stop it midway. He never finished it either. It looked like the most market-researched piece of shit I’ve ever seen. If critics object so poorly to manipulative trash, why do they keep praising Disney? Disney is a money machine. Period. It has no greater agenda. And I don’t mean this as a slight to the talented people at Pixar, I just can’t handle cute kiddie films.

As for The Missing, is there a more astonishingly mediocre director than Ron Howard? Has any other successful mainstream director created such an uninspired, market-driven collection of work? They’re anonymous Hollywood products.

His latest effort was insipid. Coming off his undeserved Oscar win for A Beautiful Mind he turned in an overlong, ludicrous contraption that operated as part Western, part ghost story. The battling exorcism scene had me laughing out loud; it was so preposterous. This one died quickly.

Now considering that I’ve just kicked these 3 films rather swiftly in the groin, you’re probably wondering how I could possibly defend Gigli? I should stress, I don’t think it’s any type of masterpiece. But it’s really interesting. I say that because I know the version we’ve all seen is not Martin Brest’s cut – the studio took it away from him and reshot scenes and the ending.

I’m pretty confident in what I have to say. I’ve even gone over it with a friend of mine Ubone – a human TV. He suggested it created a new genre that elicits no emotion.

The reason this film failed with everybody is because it’s what I would categorize as (though I think the point of Gigli is to destroy categories) an anti-film. By anti-film, I mean antithetical. Every aspect of this film is designed to lead to the conclusion you least expect.

Like Eyes Wide Shut, audiences were sold slick entertainment with 2 hot stars in the leads. And like Kubrick’s masterpiece, it was really something totally different. This might be hard to accept, but I might even consider Gigli as an art film.

Let’s start with the title. It’s unpronounceable. That was the point. You would think the director of Beverly Hills Cop, Midnight Run and Scent of a Woman would know how to create a simple title, right? This immediately throws people.

Everybody expected a dumb Bennifer comic action flick, and the ads played it up as a fast-paced rollercoaster. Instead it was laconic with delicate widescreen photography by Robert Elswit.

The first image is of Ben Affleck’s Larry Gigli talking directly to the audience about how things can happen that you least expect. The talk is displayed as visual metaphor once we cut to an over-the-shoulder and reveal Gigli talking to a man stuffed into a laundromat dryer. The man is the audience, and the audience watching this film is stuck in a tumbler.

Gigli is to the modern gangster film what McCabe & Mrs. Miller was to westerns – a film that turns convention on its side. It’s a deconstructionist Hollywood gangster flick. Larry Gigli starts off as a tough mafia wannabe, until we learn that he’s in LA. Even his boss dresses like a slob. That’s the first thing – this guy’s trying to be something he’s not. He’s not a tough guy, he’s not gangster #1 – he’s not even a real stud as we later learn.

Larry’s such a screw up that after kidnapping Brian, a retarded kid, in a manner that leaves him quite open for identification, he’s placed with a partner. The partner is a hottie played by Jennifer Lopez – though she only offers the fake name Ricki..

What more could anybody want? They’re the 2 hottest stars of the moment in love in real life… And she turns out to be a lesbian! Ha!

She proceeds to spend the next 90 minutes questioning his sexuality. And everybody else seems to be in on it too. Christopher Walken hits on Larry, confused about his sexuality after meeting his female partner. Larry’s mother, far from being a mob mom, is an ex-hippie who actually hits on Ricki. (We first meet his mother as he’s injecting a hypo in her ass! How unpleasant was that?) Against this backdrop of sexual confusion Baywatch is used to represent an unattainable dream of perfection.

Scene by scene, the curve balls are thrown. During their love scene, Ricki treats Larry like he’s her bitch. Afterward, he’s got his head on her chest, not the traditional way around. This is box office poison. Audiences don’t like their vicarious sexual identities messed with. Men don’t want to watch Ben Affleck deal with latent homosexuality, since he’s their stand in. And women don’t want to see Jennifer Lopez talking about how she prefers pussy to penis.

Brest also disconnects the audience like Neil LaBute did in The Shape of Things. Whereas LaBute used older actors playing college students and had them act as if they were giving a stage performance, Brest used contrasting tones to distance the audience. Almost every conversation leads to an undesirable end. A light banter scene in his car turns to a commentary on male emotional repression and how it affects families. A scene where Ricki should comically stand up to a rude punk turns ugly when she talks about the sickest thing imaginable: gouging out an eye and pulling with it the visual cortex. A romantic bed scene ends with Larry announcing that they have to cut off one of Brian’s fingers. During the finger removal, which is achieved by Larry employing a plastic butter knife on a corpse in the morgue, Brian starts rapping Baby Got Back.

When Al Pacino arrives toward the end as the big honcho, he’s not playing his classic gangster. He’s wearing a light gray suit with a loosened tie and a ponytail! He talks calmly, and then he suddenly blows Larry’s boss’ brains out. And we get to see fish eat chunks of flesh in the tank behind him.

Al Pacino launches into a monologue telling Larry and his partner that they’re fuck-ups. In doing so, he’s telling the audience that our heroes aren’t heroes, but idiots. He knocks them for being dumb enough to try to blackmail a federal prosecutor. He even screams that this is the “21st Fucking Century,” and that they’re not living in Little Italy. It doesn’t get plainer than that.

When he finally announces that the most dangerous man in the world is one who just doesn’t give a fuck, these are the words of Martin Brest. This seems to have been his mantra in making Gigli – however, we’ll never really know what his original cut entailed. One thing I have heard is that they don’t wind up together at the end.

I think what Martin Brest was attempting was bold. I think everybody was expecting a different film, the type of film it was critiquing, and when it didn’t deliver it was judged a disaster. Ben and Jen blew it too, by overexposing themselves. They set themselves up for a fall.

Anyhow, I need to start ending this. There are other films that for various reasons I want to mention. I think the Coens’ Intolerable Cruelty should have been a hit. It suffered from being released the same day as Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill. A lot of people didn’t even know it opened. Others either didn’t realize it was a Coen brothers’ film, or were repelled at the idea of Catherine Zeta-Jones starring in it. It was a good, slightly demented mainstream comedy with lots of wit (check out the use of Simon & Garfunkle as a knock to The Graduate and its idealism).

As for Tarantino’s opus, I think it looked great. Robert Richardson is a visual poet. Unfortunately, the structure was totally unmotivated and the characters were paper-thin. Tarantino is great at filmmaking, but he’s only as good as his references because that’s all he has. And his references are D movies. He elevates the material to a B.

The previously mentioned The Shape of Things was an odd one. I’m still not sure how this was received. It was designed to start conversation and polarize people. This one will have to be judged at a later date. I think a lot of Neil LaBute’s fans are waiting for him to return to his early style. I think they feel like he’s been experimenting lately and they miss the dead-on coldness of his first two features In the Company of Men and Your Friends & Neighbors. I don’t think LaBute really cares too much though. He seems defiant enough to make the films he wants to make. What else would you expect?

I enjoyed Robert Altman’s The Company, and I think Malcolm McDowell deserves an Oscar nomination for his supporting role as the ballet’s director. The picture, shot in 24p HD, was the passion of Neve Campbell – and although she’s the star, the film is plotless. It’s like a dance in its own right.

My initial reaction to Clint Eastwood’s much-lauded Mystic River was that I needed to see it a second time. Unfortunately I never felt strongly enough to see it that second time. Like LA Confidential, also written by Brian Helgeland, it was an intelligent update of genre material. And like that film I never thought it developed far enough from its genre roots to achieve true greatness. Though it certainly lingers after you see it.

The thing that amazed me most about Mr. Eastwood at the New York Film Festival was his calmness. He looked like a man who had nothing to prove and no debts left to pay. I felt the same way about Jack Nicholson at last year’s festival. It’s an atypical occurrence.

And…that for me was 2003 at the movies. I’m leaving things out, I’m sure. There are also pictures I haven’t seen yet. But this is long enough as is. This is probably the last thing I’ll be writing for MovieNavigator. I just don’t consider myself a journalist. I’m a filmmaker. Besides, Shaun is busy working at Panavision now.

I’m moving ahead with the photography I started on this site, so I might do occasional postings of that nature. You can see a recent photo shoot I did with Kevin Macdonald and Joe Simpson here.

I’m also storyboarding 2 of my scripts as possible first features, and I’m going to try to mount one of them by the end of next summer. The All-Nighter is a paranoid thriller designed for a guerilla mini-DV shoot. A Day in Our Life… is a multi-plot examination of life and evolution, and this one’ll require a real, if small, budget. I’m also rewriting the screenplay for Runnin’, the first mini-DV feature by Ippei Taniyama.

I need to stop musing about other people’s films and start making my own. It’s time. I’m better suited to advance film by being behind the camera. Also, I don’t want to start appearing like those eternal GOING OUT OF BUSINESS signs on Times Square stores back in the day.

Copyright 2003 Jamie Stuart

Return to Movie Navigator