Practicalmadness

The esteemed critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, who is the main movie reviewer for the Chicago Reader as well as the author of Movie Wars and other good texts about cinema, has just lost all his credibility in my eyes. This is to say that while I respect him for bucking the critical establishment and sticking to his guns on some sure-to-be-controversial opinions, it becomes clear to me now that there is no point where his taste in movies and mine overlap.

Take as Exhibit A his top ten movies of 2003 list, where he names 25th Hour (an Oscar contender from last year, released in Chicago in January '03) as co-best picture, and also cites Cold Mountain, Masked and Anonymous and All The Real Girls as standouts.

I have seen none of these movies, but friends I trust and other critics whose opinions I value tell me that I'm not missing much, and unlike Jonathan Rosenbaum I don't have the luxury of seeing a movie like Masked and Anonymous -- which nearly every critic, mainstream or otherwise, and most moviegoers are calling the worst film of the year, because I have to pay for it.¹

As for 25th Hour, I considered seeing it, but never felt strongly enough to pull myself out of the apartment and drag ass all the way downtown for it. Recently a co-worker (whose opinions about movies I don't always agree with, but respect as being as learned and well-thought-out as my own) told me it wasn't that great. This moves it to the bottom of my list.

Rosenbaum shares my background somewhat -- we're both movie brats from Alabama, although while I was raised on recent studio fare I think he grew up on indie and foreign films, as well as the classics -- and he does agree with one of my opinions about one of the year's most talked-up films: that Lost in Translation is "a rich-kid's view of Tokyo", redeemed only by the presence of Bill Murray.

I would go so far as to describe Rosenbaum's list as nostalgic: he cites "Down With Love" (a satire of 50s-era Rock Hudson-Doris Day pictures), a documentary about Maya Deren, some of the Iranian/North African neorealist pictures he's written about for years, The School of Rock. While some of us are looking to the future of cinema, Rosenbaum, I think, is looking for something of the past in the present.

I may not have seen ten pictures in 2003, but there were standouts, such that I can now make a list:

• Morvern Callar: A portrait of a deadened soul, trying to find solace in consumerist culture -- or, at least, that's my simplest read on it. It's a movie that reduces Samantha Morton's boyfriend (who, at the opening of the film, has committed suicide) to a tape recorder, defines its heroine by her blank state and the fact that she works in a supermarket, and has her trying to escape her life by taking a packaged vacation. It's actually a little disconcerting that this isn't an American movie; perhaps it's just that most Americans lack the perspective to understand why this movie is disturbing.
• Mystic River: Clint Eastwood's craft as a filmmaker is guileless -- you will never get a bravura tracking shot or even a jump cut out of him, but when he has a good script and good actors, it can be gold. What he has here is a solid Greekish tragedy, anchored by the excellent Sean Penn and Tim Robbins. If I have a complaint, it's that the women, Marcia Gay Harden and Laura Linney, are shafted in terms of characterization.
• Master and Commander: Yes, it is a supremely boring film. It has a rhythm all its own, and that's what I like about it -- it places you aboard that ship, in the middle of conflict between empires, between classes, between man and nature. It works because of its simplicity.
• Bowling for Columbine: I've written before that nobody's making angry films anymore. This movie is very fairly described as agitprop for the left, but you have to credit Michael Moore for having the balls to say something about our national obsession with killing each other.
• Kill Bill, Vol. 1: Such concentrated joy for moviegoing, moviemaking, all things movie -- just exploding on the screen in a geeky orgasm of violence, Asian-sploitation, Blaxploitation and red, red vino. This is a movie which, by all rights and laws of nature, should not work. But it does.

And a couple of films that may not have been great cinema, but cannot be avoided:
* The Return of the King: The Lord of the Rings trilogy is one of the greatest works of modern cinema by sheer virtue of its audacity, yet while this final chapter has some of the trilogy's best material, I feel that it's also the most poorly-structured. In part because of the decision to move a good chunk of Two Towers material into the third film, the movie's three-and-a-half-hour running time feels way too short -- very few scenes are given room to breathe, so that the movie we're seeing, I suspect, is a lot less subtle and artful than the movie they made. Also: the fadeouts at the end (the infamous "six endings") were unnecessary, and wreck the rhythm of an otherwise lovely coda. Hopefully next year's Extended DVD Edition will feel a little better.
* The Matrix Reloaded/Revolutions: Unlike many of you, I do not hate these movies, and wasn't expecting the second coming when they came out. I think Reloaded is way too slow, while Revolutions is way too fast. I think that the Zion stuff -- driven by a fetishization of otherness that would make Jonathan Demme do a double-take -- is just plain wrong, and that ultimately, the series simply wimped out. It could have been far more ambitious, and promised way more than it could ever deliver, settling instead for cheap thrills, cheap sex (the Neo-Trinity romance was, if possible, even worse than Natalie and Hayden in Attack of the Clones) and cheap philosophy. It's a movie that doesn't leave a sour taste in my mouth, but is certainly not a fully satisfying or filling meal.