Honorable Mention
Show
Place
Directed & written by Quentin Tarantino, R
The conclusion of Tarantino’s kung-fu-slash-spaghetti Western epic is set in a crazy mishmash world of junk food cartoons and afternoons at the video store. This is a world of the movies, created solely in the mind of a boy who wants to play with all his favorite toys at once, even if they don’t all go together. Yet, in a weird miracle, Tarantino and his cast breathe life into these camp caricatures; they couldn’t live in our world, but they could quite possibly live in his, and die by the rules we have invented to keep ourselves entertained by it. Golden Globe nominee for Supporting Actor David Carradine.
House of Flying Daggers
and
Hero (2002)
Directed & co-written by Zhang Yimou, PG13
Politics, philosophy, and martial arts spectacle collide in these two similar, yet very different pieces by Chinese master Zhang Yimou (yes, “Hero” is technically a 2002 release, but I’m putting it here anyway, and you can’t stop me). Visually, few films embody the “Other World” thesis of this article so well, thanks largely to cinematographers Christopher Doyle and Xiaoding Zhao. The Amused makes a solid argument for “Hero” taking place entirely in the mind of the Emperor Qin, as he debates the cost and responsibilities of his tyranny, while “House of Flying Daggers,” set a thousand years later, is like a painting come to life to debate whether the Emperor’s decisions made any difference. Oscar nominee for Cinematography (“Flying Daggers”) and Foreign Film (“Hero”).
Directed & written by David Mamet, R
Hell yeah. Mamet’s espionage thriller par excellence is all about kicking ass and taking names, about not telling the audience a damn thing it doesn’t need to know, and even leaving a few of those things out. The film is at once concrete and realistic—and as a samurai spy (Val Kilmer) sacrifices his life and soul to obey orders on a wild goosechase in the Middle East, a potential mirror of our world—yet it is at once an exploration into the very concept of abstraction and of fiction itself. What do we need to make a story, and what can we leave out?
#1 - #8
Directed & co-written by David Gordon Green, R
“There are a whole lot of red ants right here.” The world of David Green is a place where the mundane is extraordinary, where the ugly is beautiful, where reality is magical, where grime is poetry, and where the tangents are the story. The Brothers Grimm-esque pursuit of two brothers by their evil-yet-pathetically-sympathetic uncle is the vehicle for taking us through a Dixie that never quite was, where eras seem to be subtly colliding.
#2 The Saddest Music in the World
and
#6 Cowards Bend the Knee
Directed & co-written by Guy Maddin, R & NR
To some degree or another, insane Canadian genius Guy Maddin sets all his films in his private universe: his glowing, sparkling, grainy, scratched-up vision of what the movies would look like if the last century had gone by without sound or color. The celebration of movies as movies, and not as replicating reality, has rarely been as pure as in Maddin’s films. In “Cowards Bend the Knee,” a scientist looks at a sperm sample and sees a hockey game in it, and things only make less sense from there on, while “The Saddest Music in the World” uses a beer-soaked battle of the bands to examine the phenomenon of sadness. Great stuff. Megalomaniac: Guy Maddin.
Directed by Martin Scorsese, PG13
A movie with everything: an unforgettable whacko, thrilling special effects, old Hollywood styling, and cutting edge direction from the great American maverick of the ‘70s. Scorsese has turned what could have been an ordinary biopic into an examination of the American character: its resilience, its fanaticism, its often blind forward momentum, its vigilance against tyranny, its obsessions with reshaping the world in its image. Yet the movie is a fun time, a fast three hours, filled with deadpan humor, usually involving Howard Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio) standing over a jar of his own urine. And what directing! Like so many of the highly ranked movies on this list, the joy the director gets out of simply looking at things through a camera felt palpable to me. Scorsese had me smiling from beginning to end. Megalomaniac: Howard Hughes.
Oscar winner for Supporting Actress Cate Blanchett as Katherine Hepburn, Film Editing, Cinematography, Art Direction, and Costumes; Oscar nominations for Picture, Director, Actor, Supporting Actor, and Original Screenplay; Golden Globe Winner for Best Picture (Drama) and Best Actor (Drama).
Spider-Man 2
I’m not as vehement about this film as I am about past winners of this award. But I must admit: I didn’t go to the bathroom once during “Spider-Man 2,” yet somehow I still missed the part when it became the “best superhero movie ever.” I liked it more than its predecessor, mostly because Tobey Maguire made me feel for his troubled Peter Parker and because director Sam Raimi and actor Bill Nunn gave themselves more opportunities for humor. The “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” sequence is pretty priceless. Co-screenwriter Michael Chabon, Pulitzer-winning author of the comic analysis “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay,” certainly has some interesting things to say about the allure of superhero stories, but whatever effect his conclusions might have had was dulled by ham-handed dialogue and a score that beat everything home with a sledge hammer. The rest of the movie struck me as an average computer-generated superhero flick.
I’d also like to take this time to mention that the experience of watching Bertolucci’s “The Dreamers” was identical to the experience of not watching it. That movie passed right through me the way scientists speculate faster-than-light particles pass through the earth.