2003 Film List - Page 19

Adam_S · 02-29-2004, 04:19 AM

I've seen
Matrix: Revolutions -

- too many words, it should not be a Terry Brooks novel in space!
Capturing the Friedmans -

½ - my, that was well edited, and lookit all the pretty B-roll footage!
City of God -

- dammit I've not room on my top ten list!
American Splendor -

- why do I discover two of 2k3s best films on the same day, poor top ten...

and now I've seen:
Whale Rider -

- an equal of the brilliant Peter Pan, dang I need a best fifteen list now! and what'll happen when I see some of the other big films I missed?!

Adam

Jason Seaver · 02-29-2004, 05:27 PM

Updated with Mystic River (

½) and House Of Sand And Fog (

½) as I cram for Oscars.

Brook K · 03-04-2004, 03:59 PM

In This World: Michael Winterbottom's latest is a neo-realist film about two refugees attempt to journey from Pakistan to London to being new lives in a country with opportunities to offer. Their journey includes encounters both harrowing (smuggling past border guards, not speaking local languages, packed into trucks and shipping containers) and touching (strangers willing to help, pickup soccer games). Jamal, the younger of the two, is our touchstone. It is his humor and spirit that carries them, and us, along the way. He grows up in this film, his eyes opened to a world of possibilities, both good and bad.

Shot on DV throughout the Middle East, just making the film was an accomplishment. It delights in little moments of pleasure amidst dangerous and uncertain environments. As we grow to know and like the characters, their predicaments becoming increasingly harrowing and life threatening. Here Winterbottom has done his job well. However he also chooses to have a narrator interrupt at times with various bits of info and statistics. These are meant to inform viewers on the plight of refugees, but include digs with no context given, like one that equates the US bombing of Al-Qaida in Afghanistan to the Soviet invasion.

Moments like these detract enough from the film that, while I can and do recommend it, it didn't make my top 10. B+

Next Up: School Of Rock

Brook K · 03-05-2004, 01:05 PM

School Of Rock: In a year that, for me, was very lacking in quality comedies, School of Rock is the best of the pack. The quintessential "feel-good" film, carried by Jack Black's performance but aided by the strong concept and yeomen work in the casting department in assmbling a fine group of kids. The first half of the movie is especially strong, with Black's love of rock & roll combining with the kid's thirst for knowledge to create many warm and hilarious scenes. Its unfortunate that the student-teacher dynamic takes a back seat in the 2nd half to purely formula situations like bringing Black and Joan Cusack together, Sarah Silverman's dastardly villain, and stereotypical American movie parents who don't support or understand their kids.

But it does salvage things by the end, and given how much I laughed and enjoyed myself, it earns a high grade. Not quite top 10, but top 15 or 20. A-

Next Up: Waiting a couple of weeks for Veronica Guerin and Shattered Glass

Brook K · 03-17-2004, 11:52 AM

Veronica Guerin: Pure laziness. Structured like 1,000 other biopics, not a single moment of inspiration or imagination in the entire running time. Shot in a completely plain and conventional "style". Cate Blanchett does what she can, but if the filmmakers are so clearly uninterested in the material, why should I be? The ending is the worst, a drawn-out 5 m slo-mo sequence of information we were already given in the opening moments of the film set to the most banal new age music imaginable. The Secret Lives of Dentists has competition for worst movie of the year. D-

Next Up: Demonlover

Nick Sievers · 03-19-2004, 07:56 PM

Brook K · 03-19-2004, 11:39 PM

Sounds like a fantastic film Nick, very minamalist.

I was probably a little harsh on ol' Veronica. I just have no patience for the simply average these days.

Demonlover is a difficult film to talk about, it exists mostly on the basis of theme - monolithic, faceless corporations that seek to control us with porn and comics or something like that, a coming apocalypse of amorality? Anyway, if you are fascinated by such things, this is your movie, if you're not, there isn't much of a reason to watch. The characters certainly offer no help. Aside from Gina Gershon's brief turn, I found them uniformly uncompelling. They are cyphers within a coldly unemotional film that is in some ways a conspiracy thriller with no thrills. While I found the bits about the profitability of porn and anime websites making them targets for corporate control interesting, I don't believe the writer has any clue how corporations really operate. C+

Next Up: Shattered Glass

SteveGon · 03-19-2004, 11:52 PM

Quote:

I just have no patience for the simply average these days.

Ditto that.

Still, I'll probably rent it (only a buck anyway) just to watch Cate.

Brook K · 03-20-2004, 12:15 AM

Ok Steve, but you've been warned Celtic Dirge Alert!! Celtic Dirge Alert!! There's nothing like reinforcing that a movie set in Ireland is Irish than a good ole Celtic dirge. And the movie is so enamoured with the idea that it features two different dirges back-to-back.