The time has come around when the best of the year's films are selected. The list, in alphabetical order is based on films that open in Canada during the period of January 1st to December 31st, 2002. The exception is "Donnie Darko" which was released direct to video/DVD. I cannot claim to have seen every single film released in 2002 nor all the Christmas ones yet. Point to note is "Black Hawk Down" opened in the U.S. in December of 2001 but in Canada in January of 2002.
Canadian films have made their mark this year. "Betty Fisher" is a Canadian/French co-production (though little seen here) and "Atanarjuat" is purely Canadian Inuit.
"Atanarjuat - The Fast Runner" has all the element of a true epic - tragedy, romance and comedy with some action, being based on an ancient Inuit legend with a universal story brimming with emotions. Set in the eastern Arctic wilderness, it is the first Inuit language film, but most importantly, it is also proudly Canadian. The film begins with the murder of an Inuit camp leader and a power struggle. The new leader's evil son plans to murder the camp's two best hunters, Atanarjuat (Natar Ungalaaq) a.k.a. the Fast Runner and Amaqjuaq, the Strong One. Atanarjuat's escape, by running naked across the frozen tundra, is no doubt the film's best sequence. The film traces Inuit life, through this man's story, the tribe's songs, chores, beliefs and rituals. But the film, shot on widescreen digital Betacam and transferred to 35 mm, is spectacular in outlook. From the kayak floating across the crystal clear Arctic waters, reflecting the shimmering sunlight to the glimmer of a fire in an igloo breaking the darkness of night, this is astonishing beauty. The climatic fight on the polished iced igloo floor is well executed and worthy of any action flick. The film was shot on location at Igloolik, a small island in the north Baffin region of the Canadian Arctic. The sea-ice, space, sky, northern lights and breathtaking landscape are the film's real stars. "Atanarjuat" was Canada's official submission for the 2002 Best Language Film Oscar. Sadly, the Academy shunned it - and it did not even receive a nomination. But it has gone on to win more important awards like the Camera d'Or in Cannes and the Best Canadian Feature film at the Toronto International Film Festival. No doubt, it will win the most prestigious award of all, a place in the viewer's heart. Enthralling, stunning, captivating and pure delight, this is pure cinema at its best!
Veteran France director Claude Miller rose to fame with the brutally frank drama "La Petite Voleuse" (The Little Thief) based on a Truffaut script. His latest offering, also featuring a strong but disturbed female protagonist in the form of "Betty Fisher" (Sandrine Kiberlain) is again, a relentless look at life and how it unfairly treats a helpless human being. After Betty loses her son in a freak accident, her mentally unstable mother kidnaps a boy from a loveless, uncaring woman (Mathilde Seigner) as a replacement. Initially distraught, Betty eventually adopts the boy as her own, but not after undergoing several trials. The odd thing is that Betty treats the boy as a love object rather a living being. The tale is told from different points of view, from Jose's (the kidnapped boy), from Joseph's (the actual son), from the mother's etc. It is a clever premise which holds the viewer's attention from start to finish. Miller's varied camerawork (for example, focusing on boy then, on reflection of boy through window), creates an eerie unsettling feeling, like a premonition to a catastrophe. Yet, his humour can be ironical. "Why would I kidnap kids when I hate kids," argues the gigolo and main suspect in the kidnapping. But traits of Miller's early harsher films ("Garde A Vue" and "La Petite Volesue") are still prominent. The pivotal scene at the airport where director Miller brings all the stories to closure is impressive and satisfying. The film is aided by the excellent performances of its three lead actresses who all shared the FIPRECSI prize of best actress at the Montreal Film Festival.
The greyish blue images revealing a landscape populated by stick-like figures at the beginning of "Black Hawk Down" could have easily represented an arena of starving slaves or a outer space desert of skinny aliens but director Ridely Scott ("Alien", "Gladiator" and recently "Hannibal") is intent this time is to show the true state of under-nourished and starving Somalians in the October of 1993. The sounds of an eerie tune add to the certain desperation and hopelessness. Scott and producer Jerry Bruckheimer - Bruckheimer made millions from commercial flicks like "Pearl Harbor" and "Armageddon" - abandon their usual commercial fictional fare to embark on the creation of an uncompromising riveting anti-war film "Black Hawk Down". Based on the actual event of the blotched American mission as documented by journalist Mark Bowden in his book of the same name, the film is a harrowing no-nonsense account of what good soldiers go through to learn the important lessons in life. Their mission was to abduct two top lieutenants of the Somali warlord, Mohamed Farrah Aidid, as part of a strategy to quell the civil war and famine ravaging the land. The camaraderie of the soldiers, rivalry between units (the Rangers and Delta Force unit) and U.S. patriotism are given the token nod. But noticeably missing in Scott's film are the staples like character development and the politics of war. There is no one hero, no protagonist to root for. These are real youth, enlisted to fight for God and country. Ken Nolan's script skims the surface of motives behind the mission leaving out as much of the politics as possible. If there is any fault in the movie, Scott plays it formulaic at the end. The injection of a bit of melodrama as a pilot (Ron Eldard) looks at a photograph of his wife and daughter just before being struck by the butt of a rifle and some trite dialogue about heroism almost spoils the atmosphere so carefully created in the rest of the film. "Black Hawk Down" is one compelling movie. It moved this reviewer to tears - twice, in the beginning and again at the end. Once when I watched the innocents - these perfect young elite soldiers, with their bravado and ideals going to fight - and again at the end when I realized that it is the same men, some of whom have lost their lives, if not their minds or parts of their bodies in a mindless war. "Black Hawk Down" begins with a quotation from T.S. Eliot: "All our ignorance brings us closer to death." If the film offers some consolation, it is found at the film's end as Scott resorts to Hartnett's voiceover in relaying an effective message about heroes fighting a war in a distant land.
Writer/director Richard Kelly's amazing cult film went straight to video/DVD (Canada) in 2002 with limited releases in the U.K. and the U.S.. But this 26-year old filmmaker (straight out of film school) shows veteran directors a thing or two by combining several film genres (fantasy, horror, satire and science fiction) into a fresh edgy film while paying tribute to classics like "American Beauty", "The Evil Dead", "Harvey" and "Back to the Future". It all begins when troubled high-school teen Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal), apparently suffering from paranoid schizophrenia sleepwalks to find a giant rabbit informing him of the world ending in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes and 12 seconds. When Donnie returns home, he finds a jet crashed into his bedroom. If the film gets weirder, it also gets better and more spirited. Choice lines with laugh out loud moments every 5 minutes or so help "Donnie Darko" become an unexpected pleasure. Haunting, intelligent, spooky and spiritual, this is 2002's sleeper of the year!
Writer/director Todd Haynes ("Poison", "Safe: and "Velvet Goldmine") rips apart the idyllic 50s and 60s "Leave it to Beaver" family in his tale uncovering the hypocrisy and contradiction of Eisenhower's America. The perfectly managed household with spotless lawns and décor hides a darker evil. When housewife Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore) befriends the black gardener (Dennis Haysbert), the white folk of the town takes offence. Ironically it is her that gets into trouble though it is her husband Frank's (Dennis Quaid) homosexual encounters that break up the family. Both Moore and Quaid deliver powerful performances made even more effective by Haynes subtle control over the material. There is no happy ending here but Haynes offers the viewer a ray of hope in these awful times when blacks are called Negroes and being gay is considered a sickness. Wonderful production sets, wardrobe and score by the ageless Elmer Bernstein.
In "The Lady and the Duke", Eric Rohmer depicts historical Paris by having his characters inserted into sets and paintings. It is thus of great surprise in the first few moments of the film when the period paintings suddenly spring to life. The film centres on Lady Elliot's stay in Paris, from her rescue of an outlaw, of her failure to persuade the Duke (Jean-Claude Dreyfus) from voting against the King's execution to her final arrest under Robespierre (Francois-Marie Banier). As in Rohmer's films, dialogue and conversations are integral to his story-telling technique. Together with the interaction of his players, Rohmer wrings out suspense, intrigue and mystery to his tale. The subtle relationship between the Lady and the Duke warrants some concentration but the actors fare well and they comfortably portray nobility with charm and dignity, complete with the characters' nuances and imperfections. Rohmer has done period pieces in the past, the successful "La Marquise d'O" and "Percival Le Gallois", but this one inevitably, with Rohmer's winning unique style has more feeling. "The Lady and the Duke" was shot on digital beta, the medium yielding the most poetic and pictorial sheen once the characters had been keyed in. The composite images were then transferred to 35 mm film. And it looks (and feels) grand!
The four ordinary blokes sitting by the counter having a pint at the Coach pub could well be anybody. But these four are old friends, here for one single purpose - to carry out the last orders of their late crony, Jack Dodds (Michael Caine), sending them on a journey (road trip - Brit style) to the seaside Kentish town of Margate to scatter his ashes. "Last Orders", based on the Booker prize-winning novel by Graham Swift is on the surface, an ordinary looking film but as it progresses, displays a scope epic and spectacular in the stories that are told. As the four (Bob Hoskins, Ray Winstone, and veterans of British cinema David Hemmings and Tom Courtenay) travel through the beautiful English countryside, making a detour or two to a local pub, the Canterbury Cathedral or to the Chatham war memorial, writer/director Fred Schepisi (the Australian director of my favourites "A Cry in the Dark", "The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith") weaves through flashbacks, the war, courting days, affairs and relationships affecting the men. It is a grand story of the past, present and the hopes for the future. A must-see if not for the performances of the 5 actors alone!
The title of the film is indicative of the complexity of the film's design. Perdition is the name of the town to which Michael Sullivan (Tom Hanks) and his only surviving son, Michael Jr. (Tyler Hoechlin) are traveling to, in order to escape their pursuers as well as to reach a safe haven. Perdition is also the euphemism for hell, and in that regard, a different road that the father yearns his son not to follow. Despite the gangster setting and the strong father and son theme, director Mendes refuses to stick to any one particular film genre, lifting the film above predictability giving it an edge often lacking in today's films. The film can be described to be about jealousy and competition (between the two step-brothers), tragedy, revenge, combative relationships (between the two fathers and sons), loyalties, destiny and hope. If the mood of the story appears bleak, Mendes and writer David Self ("Thirteen Days") appropriately punctuates the middle portion with lots of wry humour before allowing the film to return to the key issue at hand. In addition, the viewer is treated to Conrad Hall's lush cinematography, whether exterior (Michael Jr. riding his bicycle along the tram tracks in snow covered Chicago) or interior (check the ending done with a swinging mirror reflecting the bath tub in a scene reminiscent of the one with the rose petals tub in "American Beauty"). Hall also shot "American Beauty". Most of the violence occurs off screen, except for the climax. Mendes often offers quiet moments of reflection that deliver the film's more powerful segments proving that more can be revealed though less displayed. "Road to Perdition" has everything going for it. It is smart (looking at life ironically and realistically), brilliantly directed, gorgeously lit, designed and photographed, meticulously edited and scrupulously performed.
Japanese master animator Hayao Miyazaki's latest "Spirited Away" is a totally Japanese production but updated (by the Disney Studios) into a dubbed version with voices from an American cast that includes Daveigh Chase, Suzanne Pleshette among others. "Spirited Away" is as its title suggests, what happens to poor 10-year old Chihiro when she is whisked away into the spirit world. Her parents had been turned to pigs, no doubt due to their greediness (perhaps a lesson to be learnt here for the adults), and she has to work, scrubbing the floors of the bathhouse of the spirits to free them. Though writer and director Hayao Miyazaki understands what works in a fairy tale for children, his imagination stretches out into adult boundaries with humour and a lyricism seldom seen in animation. Miyazaki creates creatures such as three green big ugly bouncing heads, the monster with no face, a spoilt giant baby with a pea-brain and walking soot balls delivering coal to the furnace of the bath-house. If the soot balls could be compared to the walking brooms of Disney's "Sorcerer's Apprentice", Miyazaki's creatures can talk and have feelings as well. There is a certain beauty in the landscape as well. One sequence has Chihiro taking a train that skims the surface of a lake. The lengthy 125 minutes (for an animated feature) passes in a flash, a sure sign of a great film. "Spirited Away" is wondrously entertaining, full of life, morality and hilarity yet poetic and foreign in its tale. Not only is this definitely the best animated feature of the decade but perhaps one of the most spirited one as well. Miyazaki (of "Princess Mononoke") proves once again to be a great story-teller with inspired imagination.
"Va savoir" ("Who Knows?") is a light film about relationships - but French nouvelle vague (new wave) style, and directed by 73-year old master Jacques Rivette. At 154 minutes, it can be considered short, not only because Rivette is better known for his lengthy films such as "Out 1: Spectre" which was cut from 30 hours of footage to a 4 hour 20 minute version and his more recent award-winning 4 hour "La Belle Noiseuse" but also because its length is unfelt by Rivette's intercutting of the action between real life and the play going on on screen and among the principal characters. "Va savoir" returns Rivette to the cinema and theatre as in his "Paris nous Appartient" and "L'Amour Fou". The action revolves around the troupe performing the Italian play, Pirandello's "As You Desire Me" in Paris. The play is not doing too well. It does not matter if the plot is too complex or messy for Rivette spins a seemingly effortless web of intrigue among his characters. Rivette moves his film at a leisurely pace never forcing the intensity. It does not matter if the viewer really cares for the characters for Rivette's intention is to keep the viewer distant and nonjudgmental. Rivette's "Va savoir" starts off with the play and ends, predictably with the characters on the set of the play. If this is a reflection of life imitating art and art imitating life, Rivette and his troupe have accomplished an assured and impressive work, completing full circle blending art, real life and intelligent adult entertainment.