Reviews

I’d been thinking it wasn’t a great year in film, but looking back on it I was dead wrong. It was, in fact, a superb year in film. The disappointments of the Matrix sequels and The Hulk (which I liked, but it should have been so much more) kind of cast a pall on the summer for me, I think. And I wanted Demonlover and Bubba Ho-Tep to be excellent, and neither of them really made me get up and dance. Metaphorically speaking. So I started putting together my favorite movies of 2003 list. I wound up this kind of decent list, but I wasn’t all that excited about it, and then I went back to look at my reviews from the blog. That reminded me of what I said in February and what I said in August and I got a lot more cheerful. This is the list of my ten favorite movies of 2003. I didn’t see every movie I wanted to see, so I can’t claim it’s the ten best movies of 2003. I’m also being a little liberal about foreign flicks; if it was made in 2002 but was released in the US in 2003, or if it hasn’t been released in the US yet but I saw it in 2003, I’ll count it as a 2003 movie. Foreign movies from 2001 and earlier don’t make the cut, though. (Apologies, thus, to Vidocq, Battle Royale and Audition.) Enough preamble; on to the lists. It’s my personal favorite ten movies, plus other movies I thought were really worthwhile but not quite good enough to crack the top ten, plus some movies I wish I’d seen but missed.

About Cheaper by the Dozen: Roger Ebert (original) is wrong, and pretty clearly wasn’t paying close attention to the movie anyhow, since he has a couple of factual errors in his review. So, no, it’s not a three star movie. 1.5 stars, maybe. Not funny, not charming, kind of depressing. Me, I like my cheerful uplifting Christmas movies to be about success rather than failure.

I saw The Last Samurai on Tuesday — the new one, not the 1990 one, although I gotta say that one looks interesting. John Saxon and Lance Henriksen together again! But I digress. Not particularly to my shame, I am a Tom Cruise fan about fifty percent of the time. I think he can be a superb actor; I also think that he spends at least half his movies chewing scenery. You just never know. This time around, he bothers to act rather than over-emoting, and that means that a fairly typical movie about Americans encountering a different culture gets to be better than it should be. That, plus Ken Watanabe, who makes a huge difference as a credible intelligent rebel lord. ...

I almost passed on Intolerable Cruelty, but it’s been a long time since I missed a Coen Brothers flick and I figured I might as well watch George Clooney emanating suave for a couple of hours. The Coens didn’t write the movie, which means it’s not the pure hit of creative oddness I wanted, but it was still OK. As Coen screwball comedies go, it’s no Hudsucker Proxy, and as Coen romantic comedies go, it’s no Raising Arizona. I don’t think it was trying to be a screwball comedy, really; there wasn’t any snappy dialogue in the classic screwball sense. It felt more like a casual exercise than anything else. ...

It’s a little known fact that the best gonzo journalists around are writing for a little ezine known as the Death Valley Driver Video Review (original). One time I was making fun of Bionic J because she was wearing this big skiing goggles and I said she looked like a doofus like Yoko Ono.

So, about Matrix: Revolutions… It was worth ten bucks for me to watch the Wachowskis do cool visual sequences, and I don’t just mean the SFX. They do astounding visual stuff better than just about anyone. Check out Bound sometime, which is an utterly beautifully filmed movie with no special effects at all. Revolutions does not disappoint there. Plot? Yeah, there’s plot. It’s less unwieldly than Reloaded, and not as complex as one might suspect or expect. But don’t see it for the screenplay. ...

Bubba Ho-tep ought to have been great. I mean, hey: Elvis, JFK, Texas, and a mummy. What’s not to like? I think the problem was that the setup creates a certain gonzo expectation, and the movie doesn’t want to be gonzo. The movie wants to be a tragi-comic exploration of old age in a nursing home, with a dark sarcastic twist in the form of the mummy. It works pretty well on that level, but it sabotages itself because, hey — it’s Elvis! Funny! ...

Since 1978, he’s released 34 albums. That’s sort of the standard entry point for discussing Jandek, because there’s not much else to say. There’s no conclusive evidence about the person who makes the records, and the music is inaccessible and dark. He lives in Houston, he releases about a record every year, and he charges $8 apiece for them (or $4 apiece if you order 20 or more). It’s sort of bluesy, sort of folky, sort of out of tune. Alas, since his record label reissued all the old vinyl on CD, you can’t easily find his songs on the Internet anymore. ...

Nobody but Tarantino could have made Kill Bill. Which, if you have a taste for the coppery scent of Tarantino’s oeuvre, is about all the review you need. It helps to have seen Switchblade Sisters. Um. OK, so it’s insane grindhouse cinema turned up a few notches. The extended Japanese scenes are an homage to Japanese samurai flicks. The Texas scenes taste like Sergio Leone, just a bit. There’s a touch of blaxsploitation. She’s wearing Bruce Lee’s jumpsuit. ...

I saw Igby Goes Down last week, and came out in a morosely sad mood. Some reviewers were not entirely thrilled by the New York upper class milieu in which the story plays out, so fair warning: if you don’t particular care about rich kids with problems, it’s not the movie for you. That said, Kieran Culkin is absolutely great as the lead character, and the rest of the cast is solid. The director, Burr Steers, got Ryan Phillippe to play the role he knows how to play; he’s the same spoiled brat we saw in Cruel Intentions. Amanda Peet gets a similar boost from good casting. Igby’s parents, played by Susan Sarandon and Bill Pullman, are just solid. And the best of all is Jeff Goldblum, playing an emotionless affable friend of the family, breaking beautifully away from the roles he’s been doing in summer blockbusters for the last few years. ...