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By John Demetry
The other films on the list aren't to be discounted. (Nor many films that just missed the cut: L'Humanite, Hamlet, Judy Berlin, Thirteen, Criminal Lovers, Water Drops On Burning Rocks, etc.). They found fresh, thrilling manners of personal expression while challenging audience complacency--that's what Pauline Kael meant by “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang”. They prove that, with everything seemingly against it, film art is going steady into the new millennium. The following 11 Best Movies of 2000 are for keeps:
1. The House of Mirth -- When the lights go down and the first image cascades across the screen, it becomes official: There isn't a better filmmaker in the world than Terence Davies. This queer filmmaker's numerous political, personal, and aesthetic concerns give heart-wrenching immediacy to this Edith Wharton adaptation set in New York 1907. The most moving film of the year; it made me look deeper into my relationship to the world than any other. I'll explain how in the Entertainment column next week. In the meantime, don't miss it. 1. Mission to Mars-- This film attempts to bring the art of cinema back to the public through the popular genre of science fiction. Critics, whose elitist perches were rocked by this film, attacked it. Audiences fell sway to the hype. Its subsequent failure at the box office makes all the more poignant director Brian De Palma's dream of connection through storytelling, a virtual DNA-strand of human spirituality. One astonishing, clear-eyed sequence after another projected through the cultural murk.
4. Queer As Folk, 1 & 2 -- Theatrical screenings at queer film fests of
this British series, bountiful with cinematic elan and queer experience,
provided a reconsidering of queer culture's moral imperatives with members
of our culture sitting elbow-to-elbow. This ritual experience ushered
146-degrees hot Stuart Alan Jones into the realm of myth: queer rage
discovers love and goes west.
5. Time Regained -- Raul Ruiz tackles more than adapting Proust's In Search of Lost Time for the screen. He also encourages audiences to explore their memories of film in a Proustian sense: how film participates in shaping our identities. Furthermore, he reveals the way film-a sensual medium-can mirror the complexity of one's identity, sexuality included. It's a magic lantern show that never hedges on the political. 6. Trixie --Emily Watson's wide-eyed, corkscrewed facial and verbal expressions felicitously convey modern anxiety. Director Alan Rudolph places the actress' countenance in close up, examining a poignant terrain. Within a mystery film context, that face is the film's true, haunting mystery. It's the performance of the year, unlike similar acclaim in 1996 for Watson's performance in Breaking the Waves, because of Rudolph's surprising empathy.
8. Supernova -- Maybe the hardest film to watch for film lovers, knowing that MGM, through Francis Ford Coppola's supervision, chopped Walter Hill's visionary sci-fi masterwork, thus driving Hill into a culture-damaging hiatus. However, the result is still fascinating. The Hill touch remains imprinted on every intact image and every retained nuance. Even as the Coppola crew tried to dumb it down, we get a fascinating dialectic at play. The film's binary themes of escapism and connection find ultimate expression in the struggle between the unmistakable auteur spirit of Hill and the insidious facsimile of (pseudonym) Thomas Lee. The state of the art hangs in the balance. 9. Black & White -- I'm still reeling after this film's release last spring. An unusual Altman-style exploration of a particular milieu: here, the world surrounding New York Hip Hop. Despite its mammoth cast (from Mike Tyson to Claudia Schiffer to Robert Downey, Jr.) and its cross-cutting portrait of our society, every moment adds up to a shockingly honest self-portrait of its writer-director, James Toback. In a film that cuts deep, he reserves the sharpest jabs for himself. 10. The Wind Will Carry Us -- Of the Iranian films this year that I was fortunate enough to see, this is the best. It solidifies Abbas Kiarostami's standing, along with Mohsen Makhmalbaf, as Iran's master of cinema. Its unusually wide release is well deserved. I can't think of a more inviting introduction to both Kiarostami's rigorous technique and his country's cinema. The uninitiated will be hooked.
11. Pola X -- Director Leos Carax is a visual philosopher. His latest is
like Francois Truffaut's Two English Girls as done by a nouveau Jean-Luc
Godard. Taking it all in can be daunting. Audiences leave angry. ("The worst
movie you'll ever see! Every bad movie cliché," said one to me!) Bah! This
brash mix of modernist oppositions between light and dark and post-modern
"death of the artist" rage takes you into the world of an artist's
mindscape. The effect is like 3-D without the glasses; you just gotta wear
your imagination.
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Black & White was rated one of 2000's best films by GayToday's reviewer
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