Welcome to 5 Favorites. Each week, I will put together a list of my 5 favorites (films, performances, whatever strikes my fancy) along with commentary on a given topic each week, usually in relation to a specific film releasing that week.
As my taste in film matured throughout the 1990s, the 2000s was the decade I matured as a critic. There were a ton of films I considered for this final 5. Here are the ones that made the final list but didn’t quite make it through: Dancer in the Dark (2000) was Lars von Trier’s masterpiece about a woman going blind who commits murder to steal the money needed to get her son an operation to stop him from suffering the same fate. It’s a grim, bleak musical with music by Björk who also stars in the film. It was a terrific film and was perhaps the darkest film of the year. Yet, Requiem for a Dream (2000) gave it a run for its money. Looking at the lives of four individuals (played by Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, and Marlon Wayons) as each struggles with drug addiction. It remains Darren Aronofsky’s best film and is one of Burstyn’s absolute best performance. She should have received the Oscar for it. Moving on to another actor who should have had an Oscar for one of her 2001 efforts, The Others (2001) was easily Nicole Kidman’s best, though it would be Moulin Rouge! for which she’d get a nomination (and lose). This film, about a mother with photosensitive children who finds a haunted manor where curtains open by themselves and threaten their safety. A haunting and scary good time.
Moving forward another year is one of the best animated films of all-time. Spirited Away (2002) remains the pinnacle of director Hayao Miyazaki’s career and this gorgeous fantasia brought all of his interesting ideas to fascinating life. There appears to be a theme with the selections that didn’t make the list, they are often their filmmakers’ best works. That would be a hard point to argue with some, but Martin Scorsese’s best film is The Aviator (2004), a look at the life of aviator Howard Hughes who became a successful and reclusive Hollywood powerhouse. Leonardo DiCaprio should have received his Oscar for this role, but it was Cate Blanchett in a brilliant impersonation of Katharine Hepburn that took home the well-deserved gold. This paragraph in particular is all about films that were very close to making the fifth slot on the list, but all just barely missed. Zhang Yimou’s Hero (2004) was probably closest of the five, but his beautiful martial arts masterwork features Jet Li, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Maggie Cheung Man-Yuk, and Zhang Ziya in a tale with a rich visual tapestry of symbolic colors. Jean-Marc Vallée had a singular vision and his desire to bring queer stories to the cinema was unparalleled at the time and one of those efforts, which never ended up with a U.S. theatrical release, was C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005) about a young Canadian in a conservative family coming to terms with his sexuality. Finally, rounding out what could be considered the rest of a top ten of the decade, is Children of Men (2006). Alfonso Cuarón had already begun to make a name for himself with American audiences, but Children of Men wasn’t a film that brought him adulation from viewers, but from critics, there were few better praised films of its year. The film is a haunting look at a quasifuturistic society where childbirth has ceased and the world is crumbling around everyone.
Lets round out the list of quick shout-outs with four films that stood out as genre exemplars in the decade. After the success of Chicago, everyone tried to put together a popular musical and most of them failed, but one of the few bright spots, and the best musical since Evita a decade earlier, was Dreamgirls (2006). Director Bill Condon looked at the explosive Civil Rights movement as a backdrop for the tumultuous rise to fame of a girl group loosely based on the Supremes. It starred Beyoncé, Jamie Foxx, Eddie Murphy, Danny Glover, Anika Noni-Rose, and Oscar-winner Jennifer Hudson in a sensational film. Let the Right One In (2008) was remade, but it was the Tomas Alfredson original that really sparkles on the big screen. Let the Right One In is a fascinating look at a young vampire looking for a new caretaker and finding it in a bullied neighbor boy. For animation, Spirited Away might have been the pinnacle of the decade, but WALL-E (2008) was the embodiment of everything that made Pixar one of the great animation houses in history. A poignant tale about a futuristic society that has left behind its littered landscape for the vastness of space and the little droids roaming the surface just trying to make it a little better. And finally, one of the best sci-fi films of the decade is Neill Blomkamp’s documentary-style film about a government agent who finds himself brought into the middle of a dangerous situation as an extraterrestrial race looks to break free of its slum-like internment camps. District 9 (2009) was a great film and it was even more shocking that it landed in the Best Picture race against all odds.
Now, let’s hit the best stuff.
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (2001, 2002, 2003)
Peter Jackson’s adaptation of the J.R.R. Tolkien classic novels proved to be a sensation spread out over three years and three films. The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King remain the greatest fantasy film adaptations of all-time and stand tall among all films, not just genre pictures. Tolkien’s film is about a great menacing evil who has set his sights on a powerful ring that will help him hold dominion over all of Middle-Earth. It’s up to a nine-member fellowship of Hobbits, Elves, Dwarves, and Men to embark on the perilous journey to destroy the ring before it can fall into the villain’s hands.
Filmed simultaneously, Jackson not only captured the adventure and excitement of the novels, but managed to improve them in many ways. While they weren’t entirely perfect, it was a staggering achievement with some of the greatest technicians working at the peak of their craft to lovingly create a film that can stand the test of time and feel as welcoming and involving as the day they were released. The cast is superb with a great range of British and American actors coming together in a cinematic tale that redefined a genre and enabled the event picture to rise to prominence once again. While no film has managed to come close to this one’s beauty, that speaks to its universality. Not even Jackson could reach its pinnacle again.
My Original Review (of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring)
My Original Review (of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers)
My Original Review (of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King)
Far from Heaven (2002)
A film that is filled with career-best work from director Todd Haynes, to actors Julianne Moore, Dennis Quaid, Dennis Haysbert, and Patricia Clarkson to cinematographer Edward Lachman to composer Elmer Bernstein, Far from Heaven was a towering achievement upon release in 2002 and its reflective lens has never been sharper in retrospect. Set in the 1950s, Haynes’ film is a celebration of Sirkian melodramas while taking some of those same themes and updating them for the 21st Century.
Moore plays a suburban housewife whose distant husband (Quaid) leaves her feeling unfulfilled. When she strikes up a relationship her Black gardener (Haysbert), the social mores of the time dictate her ostracization in spite of the genuine love she and Haysbert develop. Quaid’s husband is a repressed homosexual seeking comfort in secret trysts in gay bars enabling the ennui and rejection Moore’s character feels that ultimately drives her into the arms of Haysbert. Clarkson’s concerned friend reminds audiences of the kind of character Agnes Moorehead played to perfection. The cinematography is crisp and lush while the score is lovely and embellishes the heights and valleys of Moore’s life. Moore should have won her Oscar for this film and Quaid and Clarkson should both have been nominated. It would be a tough call for me to pick one of the 2002 films competing for Best Picture, but Far from Heaven might just barely beat out Two Towers for that honor, but possibly not.
No original review available.
Kill Bill, Volumes 1 & 2 (2003, 2004)
Quentin Tarantino has a lot in common with filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick and Todd Haynes. None of them feel the need to rush projects, taking time to infuse them with every ounce of their talents. While each has had lackluster films, all of them have created far more unique and rewarding experiences. While Kubrick was a traditional filmmaker who pushed technology and cinema forward, Tarantino takes cinema and paints it in a new lens for modern times. Pulp Fiction was Tarantino’s full break into the mainstream, but he was never more at his creative peak than with this pair of features, Kill Bill, Volume 1 and Kill Bill, Volume 2.
The film follows the Bride (Uma Thurman) as she seeks revenge on the former members of an elite squad whose betrayal demands retribution. The first film opens on a fight with one of them played by Vivica A. Fox while it concludes with a fight between her and Lucy Liu. In between, there’s plenty of excess and excitement as the action-heavy tribute to 1970s martial arts films comes through with glowing perfection. The same is true for the second film where David Carradine, Michael Madsen, and Daryl Hannah are her enemies. The films are riveting from beginning to end and put a polish and flare onto a maligned subgenre of 1970s pictures. Tarantino has spent his career reframing those films in a present-day lens and all of them are engaging in their own ways with this being my favorite of his 2000s output.
My Original Review (of Kill Bill, Volume 1)
My Original Review (of Kill Bill, Volume 2)
Brokeback Mountain (2005)
In the wake of the AIDS crisis, queer cinema, which had been making inroads in theaters for a few years, pushed those films back into the closet with few mainstream films in the 1980s and 1990s featuring gay or lesbian stories. LGBTQ movies made a slow return to prominence throughout the 1990s culminating in a rich era of 2000s films where LGBTQ voices were being heard loud and clear. While many of those films were either heavy dramas built on the dying queer trope or were comedies designed to get audiences laughing, romantic dramas were few and far between. Ang Lee aimed to change that with his ode to the western in his adaptation of Annie Proulx’s short story about two ranch hands watching sheep in the mountains while finding a companionship in a society hostile to such actions.
While Lee’s Brokeback Mountain does rely on some existing tropes of queer cinema, it humanized same-sex relationships in a way few popular films had done before. Embodied in the brilliant performances of Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, the film stands as one of the great works of 2000s cinemas and has been a fond favorite of mine since its release. That the film environment was still hostile to such films, the film was criminally overlooked for Best Picture that year with Ledger unfairly losing best actor to a weak impersonation. Still, those two films have largely faded from memory except as Oscar footnotes while Brokeback‘s legacy remains as vibrant as ever.
There Will Be Blood (2007)
Another film that still feels as significant and relevant today as it did 16 years ago, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood took a backseat to 2007’s critical darling No Country for Old Men. Anderson’s film adapts Upton Sinclair’s novel 1927 Oil! about silver miner Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) in his ruthless operations to become a wealthy oil tycoon during Southern California’s oil boom at the turn of the 20th Century. Day-Lewis commands the screen like few actors could and gives us a complex, aggressive figure whose adoption of a dead workers’ son (Paul Dano) allows him to position himself as a family man in spite of his lack of patriarchal skills.
Robert Elswit’s cinematography drives the audience’s perception of this towering figure looming large over an industry while exhibiting the barbarous and traitorous traits that are emblematic of wealthy men. A gorgeously mounted film with Anderson’s keen eye for detail and thematic juxtaposition, There Will Be Blood is a sometimes violent, always insightful look at the worst traits of men as they seek to dominate and control all that is around them. It’s a frightening and perceptive feature that remains one of my favorite Anderson films although I prefer Boogie Nights more.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.