Here’s my list of the best and worst films of 2003, up until this point. Keep in mind, however, that this list is so far incomplete and may change after the holidays.
The Best of 2003
1. “Lost in Translation” – Sofia Coppola’s brilliant, lovely, moving, gorgeous postcard to Tokyo is quite possibly the best demonstration of the fact that Bill Murray is a man who needs an Oscar now. He’s terrific as a Hollywood actor filming a series of whiskey ads in Japan, and he’s matched by Scarlett Johanssen as a lonely newlywed who befriends Murray over their shared feelings of isolation. Coppola’s piquant romantic comedy is a pitch-perfect story of two lost souls connecting in a bustling, alien metropolis and is the one movie, above all others, that’s necessary to seek out and savor for all its small, carefully crafted nuances.
2. “The Secret Lives of Dentists” – Alan Rudolph directs this stylish depiction of a marriage falling apart with equal parts caustic wit and genuine feeling. Campbell Scott as a dentist who suspects his wife (Hope Davis) of infidelity has never been better and Denis Leary steals scenes as the foul-mouthed personification of Scott’s anxiety.
3. “Finding Nemo” – Shot in liquid images so supple and tactile that you almost feel as though you are right there floating in the ocean. “Finding Nemo” is a kid’s animated film that’s also the year’s greatest example of truly beautiful pop art. A multi-tiered comedy that works for both kids and adults with sacrificing either audience. Deeply, movingly heartfelt, absolutely beautiful and wondrously funny, it’s unexpected proof that the best showcase for the comic talents of Ellen DeGeneres and Albert Brooks are as animated fish.
4. “American Splendor” – A gloriously messy, skewed, jumbled amalgam of documentary, animation and wry suburban comedy. Based on the comic books of underground legend Harvey Pekar – which are in turn based on Pekar’s life as a shambling, insecure misanthrope – “American Splendor” is a witty, heartfelt celebration of iconoclasm done with a remarkable, rubbery soul that bends the meaning of movie-making to its wondrously stretched limits. Paul Giamatti and Hope Davis (again) have the roles of a lifetime embodying the withered frame of Pekar and his wife, but it’s the movie’s notions of new cinematic boundaries that truly astound.
5. “The Magdalene Sisters” – Peter Mullan directs this harrowing fact-based tale with such burning, galvanizing humanity that it tears directly into your heart. “The Magdalene Sisters” is, essentially, a women’s-prison picture turned into high art, but even as the tragedies and degradations pile up, the movie hints at a hopefulness and strength that even devastation can’t tarnish.
6. “Thirteen” – With “Thirteen” you get to see a star being born. Evan Rachel Wood looks like she could be your average bubbly blonde teen starlet, but she acts with a tender fearlessness that zooms right into the roiling heart of her characters. Here she plays Tracy, an angelic seventh grader who slides into the abyss of self-destruction when the adolescent pangs of wanting to belong hit. Tracy’s fall from sweet, wounded teenybopper to raging, desperate hellion may make for the scariest film of the year.
7. “Cabin Fever” – A flesh-eating virus that turns skin into rotting, raw shards of meat. A mute boy who delights in karate kicks and biting people. A party hearty sheriff’s deputy with the soul of a stoner. Eli Roth’s twisted, blackly comic horror film is this generation’s equal to the guts-and-glory imagination of “The Evil Dead.”
8. “Bend It Like Beckham” – Exhilarating. Gurinder Chadha’s joyous comedy follows Jess (the supremely charming Parminder Nagra) an Anglo-Indian girl who longs to play girl’s soccer but is torn between her desires and her duty to the tradition of the old world. The story is pure cornball formula, but Chadha directs it with such jubilant glee that one can’t help but feel their spirits soar.
9. “Mystic River” – Powerful, dark, unrelentingly sad, Clint Eastwood’s finest work of art in years is a Greek tragedy brought to the level of a working class Boston neighborhood. Sean Penn, Kevin Bacon and Tim Robbins turn in brutal, honest, harrowing performances as three childhood friends whose lives intersect once again when the daughter of one is murdered. At times overwrought, but nonetheless an unflinching depiction of grief and retribution.
10. “demonlover” – It derails in the final half hour and turns into the most elliptical, unfathomable film David Lynch. Until then though, Olivier Assayas’ sleekly clinical, assured exploration of eroticism, alienation and corporate betrayal fascinates and beguile. Assayas has the hypnotic kick of a natural born filmmaker.
The Worst of 2003
1. “The Cat in the Hat” – Everyone who had the misfortune of suffering through the dark, decrepit version of “How The Grinch Stole Christmas” from a few years ago got off lucky compared to anyone who sat through this clattering, cacophonous nonsense. This noisy bastardization of “Cat in the Hat” exemplifies everything that is diseased and wrong about modern mainstream cinema, the way that everything is reduced to a focus-grouped rubble. This is a movie about greed and hypocrisy, in which the whimsy and fantasy of Dr. Seuss is at once flattened and puffed up into a loud, ungainly approximation of “joy” meant to do nothing but serve the corporate hucksters at its base. Mike Myers, apparently still digging at his already strip-mined Austin Powers routines, turns the titular anarchist into an obnoxious sociopath, while the screenwriting (what a word) team pumps up the film with a noxious series of offensive Asian stereotype jokes, filthy double entendres and hiply “ironic” humor out of place in a so-called children’s film. I have one thing to say about the makers of this reprehensible garbage: To hell with you Mike Myers, to hell with you director Bo Welch and, especially, to hell with you Audrey Giesel for so thoroughly selling out the memory of your dear, beloved husband to sell more corporate product.
2. “My Boss’s Daughter” – Here’s what passes for ripe targets in “My Boss’s Daughter”: rape, suicide, grossly bleeding head wounds. A blackly comic screwball farce that’s about as funny as that head wound, the justly long-shelved “Daughter” casts Demi Moore accessory Ashton Kutcher as a spineless jellyfish who agrees to housesit for his boss (Terence Stamp, in a monumental act of career suicide) in order to get close to his crush (Tara Reid). Hijinks predictably ensue, but what isn’t so predictable is that this disgusting film would a) display no sense of taste or decorum and b) have no idea what a comedy actually is.
3. “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle” – Quick: name the summer film that was most egregious in its artless moneygrubbing? Was it Ang Lee’s sour, sitlited “Hulk,” the aggressive schlockiness of “Bad Boys 2” or was it the pompous mediocrity of “The Matrix Reloaded”? No, I think it may have been the garish stupidity of this relentless assault on everything good and decent in cinema. Director McG reduces everything – plot, character, logic – to a greasy happy meal, and does a disservice to humanity by equating female strength with bubble-brained bimbohood.
4. “Alex and Emma” – Imagine “The Great Gatsby” crossed with “When Harry Met Sally” as made for the Hilary Duff crowd and you still won’t approach the sheer stultifying boredom of Rob Reiner’s deadly “romantic” “comedy.” Luke Wilson, looking like the world’s most placid frat boy, is miscast as a neurotic author who must write his new novel in thirty days or be killed by Cuban mobsters. Kate Hudson, draped in a harsh curtain of brown locks, plays the stenographer who helps him write it. Reiner forgets the most important rule of a romance: you actually want to have the couple fall in love.
5. “House of the Dead” – Brain dead. What do you get if you make a movie out of a videogame that makes you feel like your being forced to watch an endless
loop of a truly awful gamer attempting to play a mediocre videogame? You might get something that resembles this dopey, Z-grade zombie flick that can’t even properly rip off the worst of lame 70s cannibal cinema. At least it’s proof now that “The Matrix” should be officially retired as the bar for cheap cinematic “hipness.”
6. “In The Cut” – Meg Ryan gets naked. That’s the big news about this numbingly preposterous “erotic” thriller from Jane Campion, who turns eroticism into the most babbling academic dissertation possible.
7. “Radio” – Cuba Gooding Jr., groveling for an Oscar, is a mentally handicapped man who becomes the mascot for a high school football team in the South in the 70s. This safe, sanitized film jerks tears with such force that it results in bruises.
8. “Gods and Generals” – This static, lifeless Civil War drama looks and feels like a middle school history textbook bought to life. Worse yet, this gaseous dud lasts four miserable hours long.
9. “From Justin To Kelly” – It’s when Justin Guarini, wearing that gnarled, caramel-colored mop of an afro, sings the love song “Timeless” to the blandly adorable Kelly Clarkson in this off-key cash-in of “American Idol” with the look of a repressed murderer on his face, that you realize that Hollywood should never, ever attempt to make movies out of reality TV again.
10. “The Life of David Gale” – What made Kevin Spacey, Kate Winslet and Laura Linney agree to star in this cynical, trashy tabloid of a drama is beyond any normal human comprehension.
