There have been better years for the movies than 2003. There've been worse ones too, although it might not feel that way to anyone forced to sit through American Idol's From Justin to Kelly.
In the end, though, it was the good ones that stuck with us. There were more good movies this year than could possibly fit on a single Top Ten list. Among the many fine films that almost made this year's Best-of list, Dirty Pretty Things and Finding Nemo go right to the top of the class. The Man Without a Past, In America and the ever-so-arty Northfork were also top contenders, as was the bloody genre flick 28 Days and that smarter-than-average blockbuster X2: X-Men United. And let's not forget the exquisite French import Friday Night, another film that never even managed to make it to town.
But so much for the ones that didn't make the cut. Some absolutely remarkable films appeared in 2003, and here, in order of preference, are our choices for the very best of the bunch.
1. Lord of the Rings: Return of the King Is three-and-a-half hours too long to sit through a movie? Not if you're talking about the richly imagined, beautifully told conclusion to Peter Jackson's consummately cinematic re-working of J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy. Jackson's fantasy-adventure landmark brings to vivid life dozens of characters and species, all engaged in torturously entangled machinations leading up to an elaborate Uber-Battle for the fate of humankind. The scale of this fantastic Wagnerian spectacle is immense, but the story is intimate in an engaging way that never loses sight of its humanity. Best of all, the final installment of the trilogy brings to the surface a lovely structural symmetry that ties everything together with grace and humor.
2. City of God A film that bursts with life in all its nuances, entwining beauty and ugliness in complex and unsettling ways as its stories flip back and forth through several decades in the lives of assorted street thugs inhabiting a Brazilian shanty town. The film's fluid, elastic sense of time recalls the post-modern playfulness of Pulp Fiction or Amores Peros, and the style is both visceral and dazzling. We've seen variations of this story before — the blood, the budding psychopaths, the all-too-young victims of urban decay — but never quite like this.
3. American Splendor Like the comic book on which it's based, the movie American Splendor is about real life in all its drab, dreary glory — but it's also about the ways life sometimes transcends its own mundane details and becomes something sublime. The subject here is cranky, middle-aged file clerk Harvey Pekar, whose daily grind is related in a series of droll, darkly humorous vignettes. Filmmakers Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini have a ball communicating all the rich contradictions in the material, cleverly meshing real-life characters and the actors playing them, as well as live action and stylistic devices borrowed from cartoons.
4. Capturing the Friedmans Andrew Jarecki's documentary puts us uncomfortably up-close and personal with the Friedmans, a middle-class suburban family tearing itself apart as it strains to cope with charges of child molestation. What transforms Capturing the Friedmans from an interesting film into an extraordinary one comes down to the Friedmans themselves, a bizarre mix of Barnum and Bailey showmanship, brutal honesty, and sexually repressed secrets and lies. A film as funny and heartbreaking as it is scary, Capturing the Friedmans reveals the truth to be a very slippery thing, as complex and elusive as a dozen Rashomons.
5. Lost in Translation Sofia Coppola's eccentric little wisp of a film is a pure beauty, achieving a seemingly effortless balance of understated wit, lyricism and off-the-wall absurdity. Half comedy, half something else entirely, the movie almost entirely avoids conventional narrative while showing us what happens when two people of very different ages and circumstances meet in a strange, faraway place and make a connection. The film's not-so-secret weapon is Bill Murray, who has been very good before in movies like Rushmore and Groundhog Day, but here finds what might just be his perfect role.
6. Talk to Her Pedro Almodovar's latest is the odd, funny and extraordinarily touching tale of two very different sorts of relationships, both involving comatose women tended by men who don't always make the best choices. If All About My Mother was a film about the ways that women see themselves through the eyes of men — playing roles and reinventing themselves in the image of what they're expected to be — Talk to Her is its perfectbookend.
7. Elephant Gus Van Sant's very personal reaction to the violence of Columbine is a record of moments inexplicably frozen in time, an elegy for lives about to be lost. The camera simply follows various high school students through the seemingly inconsequential events of their day, as the lush strains of Beethoven lend eloquence and poignancy to even the most banal and awkward activities. When the bloody apocalypse we're expecting does finally materialize, our accumulated intimacy with the victims and victimizers alike makes it all the more horrifying. Preaching is the last thing on Van Sant's mind, but Elephant says more than all the movies Michael Moore will ever make in his life.
8. Kill Bill Volume 1 Tarantino's unabashedly bloody, beautifully made art-splatter opus is a shrine to the movies. Gone are the temporal convolutions and elaborately clever monologues that originally made Tarantino's reputation, with fancy storytelling and witty repartee bowing before the demands of style and the notion of the movie itself as one big pop culture reference. It's as if the filmmaker is willing himself to disappear from his own film, submerging personality and ideas before the sheer forward momentum of this dazzlingly visceral speedball of a movie.
9. Bad Santa The year's biggest guilty pleasure was this delightfully disgusting bit of funny business from Terry Zwigoff (Crumb, Ghost World) about a department store Santa from Hell. Zwigoff takes material that might otherwise have come off as a typical, lowbrow mainstream yuk-fest and stamps it with a distinctively neurotic personality that's not only hilarious but also very sad and real. Bad Santa revels in its own bad taste, keeps it real, and gives new meaning to the phrase "painfully funny."
10. The Triplets of Belleville Sure, Finding Nemo was great and all, but the most brilliant and blazingly original animated film of the year was — surprise! — one for the grown-ups. French animator Sylvain Chomet's The Triplets of Belleville is unlike anything we've seen before, although its feel is timeless and its wildly imaginative story is barely a story at all. Triplets creates its own singular universe, with a nonsensical sensibility that's as surreal, vaguely sinister but wholly delightful as that of Jeunet/Caro (Delicatessen, City of Lost Children) or Jacques Tati (Chomet's official "creative inspiration"). The movie's dialogue mostly consists of grunts, yelps and screeches, the plot is always secondary to a dream logic as mysterious as it is loony, and the hand-drawn animation does beautiful things that computers can only dream of.
Contact Film Critic Lance Goldenberg at lgoldenb@tampabay.rr.com, or 813-248-8888, ext. 157.
This article appears in Jan 1-7, 2004.