Best and worst of 2003

BEST OF 2003:

1. Kill Bill is an ass-kicking, blood-splattering mindfuck of a samurai movie, and an extremely welcome return to the fray for Quentin Tarantino after five years of inactivity. A majestic martial arts meltdown which pays overt tribute to any number of Hong Kong movies, Leone’s spaghetti westerns, ‘60s Japanese bubblegum flicks and Blaxploitation nuggets, it’s both an instant action classic and a dazzling formal experiment.

2. Good Bye Lenin’s ode to the dying days of the German Democratic Republic (1945-1990) is an utter joy, however delusionally rose-tinted its recollection of the Honecker regime. A bright-eyed teenage commie must protect his Party-devoted mother from the unbearable truth that reunification has occurred while she was in a coma: he goes to extreme lengths to preserve the illusion, in the face of impossible odds. Life-affirming stuff.

3. City of God. Probably not much welcomed by the Brazilian tourist industry, the searingly powerful City of God serves up a shocking though all-too-believable depiction of life among child gangs on the scuzzier side of Rio de Janeiro, and makes even the most violent street-set US movies look like fairground rides. In particular, the lead character is the wildest sight since Joe Pesci took aim in Goodfellas.

4. Lord of The Rings: The Two Towers, as with its forerunner, was absolutely awe-inspiring in scale, scope, ambition and execution. Only time will tell whether the trilogy’s dependence on bluescren technology will date it horribly, but for the moment, it’s all that could have been envisioned and more.

5. Intolerable Cruelty. Any year which contains a new Tarantino movie and a new Coen brothers’ movie has to be a good year, and the Coens’ latest didn’t disappoint. It’s an almost-conventional romantic comedy starring George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones, but fear not, the brothers are hardly about to go all Mills & Boon on us. Clooney’s hotshot divorce lawyer and CZJ’s gold-digging serial divorcee trade caustic barbs, swipes and snipes quite brilliantly.

6. Far from Heaven, a gorgeous riff on Douglas Sirk’s 1950s melodramam classics, is easily Todd Haynes’ best and most linear film to date, set against a lush autumnal backdrop, and starring Julianne Moore as a domestically smothered housewife whose obnoxious husband (Dennis Quaid) belatedly realises he is gay. Extraordianarily touching.

7. In America, Jim Sheridan’s beautifully dark, funny and deeply moving memorial to his late infant brother had even the most jaded of film-saturated critics weeping profusely long before the credits arrived (yes, that’s a confession). Without any cheap manipulation, Sheridan’s account of raising two young kids in a run-down NY apartment rips the heart in two. Easily his finest hour.

8. The Pianist deserved every Oscar it got, as Roman Polanski broke his lifetime’s silence on the matter to deliver his first-person remembrance of an extremely troubled childhood evading Nazi pursuers in the Warsaw ghettoes. At 148 minutes, some found it ponderous, but Polanski’s masterful directon, combined with the almost-silent heroics of Adrien Brody in the lead role, made this an unforgettably momentous experience.

9. Irreversible. If watching a man’s face and cranium getting bashed in with a fire extinguisher in the opening scene doesn’t get you, then the harrowing, protracted nine-minute anal rape sequence involving Monica Bellucci almost certainly will. Profoundly disturbing, someway up its own arse (apologies if the metaphor seems inappropriate) but visually enthralling and fantastically powerful, Irreversible is less a movie than a trawl through Dante’s innermost circle of hell.

10. Thirteen is a brilliantly accurate portrayal of the noxious peer-pressure shit teenage girls get up to as they blossom into adulthood – in Catherine Hardwicke’s award winning film the thirteen year olds cut themselves, get high, drunk, laid – and that’s just before curfew. Either you’ll see it and wonder what the fuck has gone wrong with today’s girls, or why the hell it’s taken movies so long to get around to these topics.

And an honourable mention to:
Dark Blue, Secretary, Russian Ark, Touching The Void, The Kid Stays in the Picture, Spirited Away, Gangs of New York, Buffalo Soldiers.

WORST OF 2003:

1. The Hot Chick faithfully follows the formula established by visionary auteur Rob Schneider’s first two features, Deuce Bigalow Male Gigolo and The Animal, but somehow manages to be more atrocious than either. Fart jokes, shit jokes, piss jokes, fat people jokes and paedophile jokes reverberate everywhere, as Schneider and a teenage cheerleader transplant bodies, resulting in the spectacle of Mr. Schneider dancing around a pole in some sort of pink bikini, in the process probing the very rectum of cinema’s possibilities. Stunning.

2. Stealing Harvard, this year’s Tom Green masterpiece, defied belief at the magnitude of its incoherent insanity, though it never quite scaled the delicious heights of Green’s utterly deranged debut Freddy Got Fingered, possibly because this time out no-one would let him direct it. Unlike Mr. Schneider’s noxiously calculated schtick, the primitive wide-eyed idiocy of Green’s output begs you to take it to your heart, but he’s very much an acquired taste. At any rate, Stealing Harvard is out of its brains.

3. Tears of the Sun is the nastiest of this year’s gung-ho US imperial propaganda efforts, with Bruce Willis leading an elite SWAT team in darkest Nigeria and trying to civilise the place before its bloodthirsty inhabitants tear one another to shreds. All Nigerian nationals, as well as anyone else, would do well to steer miles clear of this distressingly ill-informed heap of shit.

4. Trapped in a cinema with the A-list talents of Charlize Theron, Kevin Bacon and Courtney Love: it’s a true-life nightmare come to pass, with a preposterous murderous-psycho plot enlivened only by some of the most shocking acting in professional history. It takes some believing.

5. Legally Blonde 2. No, it’s not Jimmy Hill in a Barbie wig (despite appearances), it’s Reese Witherspoon in a catastrophic retread of the inexplicably successful original. Downright laborious, gushing and pink – a bit like gonorrhoea, but less fun.

6. Seeing Double- S- Club the Movie. Before these infernal mini-popsters breathed their last collective breath and went their separate ways, the corporate spooks responible for concocting them decided it was cash-in time. Hence Seeing Double, a showcase of their immense talents which makes Spiceworld look like a work of genius.

7. Analyze That wins the most-pointless-remake award hands down, with DeNiro and Billy Crystal’s comic sparring providing no laughs whatsoever, and irritation by the bucket-load. Whether they know it or not, these two deserve better.

8. Darkness Falls on the future of horror cinema, as evidenced by the avalanche of piss-poor horror movies – Wrong Turn, The Sin Eater, Final Destination 2, Jeepers Creepers 2 – wasting cinema space. For pure incompetence, though, Darkness Falls gets the vote.

9. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen must have been the most misconceived blockbuster in living memory – a gang of superheroes drawn from the ranks of Victorian literature? – and should never have seen the light of day. Sir Sean Connery didn’t hit the director hard enough.

10. Kangaroo Jack. Antipodean marsupials are always game for a laugh, it might be believed, and Kangaroo Jack , a merry lark set down under which teams a cute computer-generated hopalong creature with two brainless American humans, makes you pine for Paul Hogan. Or Rolf Harris.