Eric Heideman's 2000 list

People have been listing their top ten films of 2000 along with up to ten honorable mentions and up to ten stinkers, total of up to 30. Well, I've seen 37 films of 2000 and I'm going to name them all, so there. I'll divide 'em into five Hall of Shame films, 13 Also Viewed, ten Honorable Mentions, and my Top Ten. (I know, that doesn't add up, but bear with me.) I'll also rate them by the five-star system. Keep in mind: Casablanca and Vertigo are five-star films. Blade Runner and The Sixth Sense are five-star films. I don't give a lot of films five stars.

Hall of Shame

Special Hall of Shame #1: How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Haven't seen it, but read the movie storybook, read various people's comments. Sounds like a perfect illustration of one of Heideman's Laws: If the original starred Boris Karloff, it probably doesn't need a remake. The original's available on videotape, script and lyrics by Dr. Seuss, direction by Chuck Jones, narration by Boris Grinch Karloff, together with another Seuss/Jones Whoville collaboration, Horton Hears a Who.

The Patriot--Hall of Shame #2. This is by no means a bad film, but given the talent that went into it and the majesty of the subject--the American Revolution--it should have been so much more. Wealthy plantation owner Mel Gibson has no slaves, only paid employees. Yeah, right. And all the atrocities spread out over a comparitively polite war were committed by one British officer. These two bits of phoniness rob a fascinating era of its moral complexity. (In fairness, Gibson's character feels guilty because he himself presided over an atrocity 15 years ago, during the French and Indian War.) This raises an interesting topic: television has done all right by the American Revolution in, for instance, PBS' Liberty! series, Commercial TV's George Washington miniseries, and Disney's '60s The Swamp Fox, about the historical Major Francis Marion, whose adventures were partial inspiration for The Patriot. But the only first-rate motion picture about the Revolution I can think of is 1776, and even that was adapted pretty closely from a stage musical. Why has Hollywood, which has produced hundreds of interesting films about the U.S. from 1860-1876, done so little with the years 1775-1783?

Pay it Forward--Hall of Shame #3. This should have been a four-and-one-half-star film. It had an appealing story full of (Frank) Capra-Corn. It had Helen Hunt's raggedly emotional performance, Kevin Spacey's portrayal of rigid self-control over a chasm of emotion, and another artlessly moving performance by Haley Joel Osment, who I'm coming to think is probably the finest kid actor cinema has produced. Then the writer and the director, who up till the last 15 minutes had been successfully blending story and ideas, sledge-hammered their Ideas home and squashed the story. The Earth wasn't destroyed by a comet, but it might as well have been.

Hamlet--Hall of Shame #4. Set in contemporary Denmark, though using an abridged version of Shakespeare's language. It's okay. It's Hall of Shame because they took the best script ever written and only made an above average film out of it. See Kenneth Brannagh's 1996 Hamlet, still the contender, or if you prefer an intelligent digest version try Mel Gibson's.

What Lies Beneath--Hall of Shame #5. Good acting by Michelle Pfeiffer and Harrison Ford, handsome cinematography, and enough subtle touches that it promised to be a classic horror film. But it piled shock after twist after shock until what started as gripping actually became dull. So many current directors just don't know when to quit.

ALSO VIEWED:

One and One Half Stars (Below Average; Some Merit):

Scary Movie. This has made a couple of your stinkers lists, and it gets my lowest numerical rating, but it's not part of my Hall of Shame, and when people suggest that it's the worst thing since canned beets the contrarian in me feels compelled to defend it. The two Wayans brothers were trying to throw a whole bunch of dumb gags at us so fast that we couldn't help laughing. That's the same method employed by Mr. Abrams and the Zucker brothers (Airplane, Police Squad) and, in days of yore, by Larry Fine and the three Howard brothers. The Wayans don't succeed as well as the Zuckers, much less the Howards, but their film made me smile. The unpretentious ads for Scary Movie promised a silly, mildly amusing film. For my $3, it delivered.

Two Stars:

The Road to El Dorado
Dracula 2000
Ditto. I expected to be mildly entertained, and I was.

Three Stars (above average; not necessarily memorable):

The Cell. I, like others, was made uncomfortable by the lingering scenes of female victimization, but I did find the film visually innovative, and I was impressed by the balletic grace of serial killer Vincent D'onofrio, an underrated actor (who played Conan-creator Robert E. Howard in 1996's The Whole Wide World).

The Big Kahuna. Scriptwriter David Mamet is also a playwright, & this feels like a filmed stageplay: it's all talk. But it's interesting talk, well-spoken by Kevin Spacey and Danny DeVito.

Gladiator. When a new Ridley Scott film comes out, I hope it'll be another classic like Alien (1979) or Blade Runner (1982), or near-classic like Thelma and Louise (1991). Alas, Gladiator is merely pretty good. Russell Crowe's performance was excellent, and I enjoyed Richard Harris as the good Caesar (when he talked about the Good Old Days in Rome I kept expecting him to break into "Don't let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one, brief, shining moment...") But Gladiator suffers from English Patient Syndrome: it's too long for what it is, and when the payoff finally came I no longer cared that much. Here's hoping Scott does a Director's Cut that's 20 minutes shorter--no scenes cut, just micro-cuts throughout the film.

Return to Me. The story's pretty slight, but Minnie Driver & David Duchovny make a sweet couple.

Bounce. The plot is contrived but the emotions (of Ben Affleck, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Gwyneth's kids) are real.

Chocolat. A parable about the redeeming power of chocolate. Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp make another winsome couple.

The Family Man. Rounds out this quartet of romances. I liked this one best (because I'm a sucker for It's a Wonderful Life clones ) and I thought Nicholas Cage and Tea Leoni had the most interesting chemistry.

Three and One Half Stars (Good):

The Wonder Boys. This chronicle of novelist/English professor Michael Douglas' mid-life crisis has made a couple of Top Ten lists, and I enjoyed watching it a year ago. I'm ranking it relatively low because it hasn't stuck in my memory the way a number of films of 2000 have. But any film featuring Frances McDarmond is worth seeing.

Love's Labours Lost. Set in Europe just before WW II, and combining about an hour of Shakespeare's dialogue with several romantic songs from the 1930s. A friend and I saw the new Hamlet, then cruised over to another theater to catch Love's Labours. I was glad we viewed them in that order! If you're going to screw around with the Bard, this is the way to do it.

What Women Want. It's nice to see Mel Gibson doing comedy. Helen Hunt is solid. Good entertainment, and thoughtful, too.

Honorable Mentions:

Still Three and One Half Stars:

#20: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. This just squeezes by What Women Want to make my Honorable Mentions. I loved The Blair Witch Project (1999) and I agree with 80% of the praise I've read about it. But now I empathize with people who said that they were inevitably disappointed after all of that film's masterful hype. Crouching Tiger has gorgeous cinematography of the Chinese countryside. The fight scenes are breathtaking. And Chow Yun Fat and Michelle Yeo make charismatic, appealing protagonists. The best part of the film, for me, is their mutual smoldering, unrequited passion. but as the final credits rolled I wasn't the only person in the audience going, Yes? And? Insofar as I was able to understand them, the plot and theme were extremely simple, even by the standards of a comic book or a '40s B Western. You've got all of these super-powered individuals at some unidentified period in China's past who can leap tall buildings with a single bound, and who have swordfights with each other, destroying other people's property in the process. To what end? As my defense of Scary Movie indicates, I don't require that every film be deep. I'd probably have given C.T.,H.D. four stars if it had contained one additional sentence of dialogue--Chow Yun Fat telling the ditzy super-powered heiress, "You have great power, but you must learn to discipline yourself so that you may protect peasants from the depredations of roving brigands." I know, I know. This isn't Japan, and they aren't Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. I've only seen a few Hong Kong martial arts films, and am doubtless missing lots of cultural subtext. I mentioned to David Christenson (who hadn't seen C.T., H.D. yet) that the only thing that seems to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys is that the good guys have adult emotional self-control. David said that mastering one's passions is the primary indicator of virtue in Hong Kong martial arts films. My friend Clarke tells me that C.T., H.D. is adapted from volume 2 of a venerable trilogy of Chinese novels, and that the film does convey a wealth of cultural information, albeit very subtly. (For instance, he said, Chow's character belongs to a sect of buddhism that follows specific practices, and Chow and Michelle don't get it on because of a complex point of honor stemming from the fact that he long ago avenged his master by killing the man to whom her family had betrothed her.) My criticism is that, given that writer/director An Li appears to have hoped that this film would, without sacrificing its own cultural values, also appeal to a wide Western audience, the film could and should have done a better job of filling things in for those of us not in the know. Where's Laurence Fishburne when you need him?

#19: Traffic. A sprawling--but never dull--two-and-one-half-star look at the Mexican/ U.S. drug trade that draws no simple conclusions and offers no easy answers. It suggests that our current war on drugs isn't working, but it in no way romanticizes drug use. There's a bit of silliness when Michael Douglas goes charging off, alone and unarmed, to rescue his teenage daughter from pushers, like a character in a Michael Douglas film, forgetting that he is the Drug Czar of the United States and there are safer and surer ways of saving his kid. Apart from that this is a mature (and entertaining) look at a serious subject. Michael resembles his Dad as never before, perhaps because, this time, he's playing a grown-up.

#18: Unbreakable: I know The Sixth Sense. I've seen The Sixth Sense four times. Unbreakable, you're no Sixth Sense. But, hey, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) tends to get unfairly overlooked because it's the movie Orson Welles made after Citizen Kane (1941). M. Night Shimalyian's Unbreakable does offer lots of good stuff to chew on, starting with solid performances by Samuel L. Jackson and Bruce Willis. Remember in The Sixth Sense when Bruce Willis has had enough and hauls out his bazooka to kick ass on all those ghosts? This time he hauls out his bazooka and kicks ass on comic-book collectors. Suckers go up like tissue paper.

#17: Space Cowboys. Now here's the way to do Capra-Corn. What's not to love about Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland, and James Garner as a quartet of geezers making outer space safe with that old-time professionalism? It's worth pointing out that Tommy Lee, who was a college dorm-mate of Al Gore's, here plays a 70-year-old man without geezer make-up, and we buy it. That's acting.

#16: The Contender. A U.S. Senator (Joan Allen) is nominated by the President to replace the deceased Vice President. Troubling rumors and photos from Allen's past get leaked to the internet, and Allen refuses to testify about those rumors to the Senate confirmation committee because she believes that politicians' personal lives are nobody else's damn business. This doesn't quite make my Top Ten because of occasional touches of Hollywood phoniness (the Senate hardly gives her any grief about the fact that she's a vegetarian atheist who wants to confiscate handguns). But it's basically a serious film about a serious subject. Allen is great, as is Jeff Bridges as a loveably sleazy Prez (actually, he reminds me more of Lyndon than Bill), and Gary Oldman is chilling as a moral majoritarian Senator.

#15: Meet the Parents. I wish I could fit all of my Top 15 in my Top Ten! This is a delightful comedy of manners featuring Ben Stiller (Mystery Men's Mr. Furious) trying to win over his fiancee's demented ex-CIA agent Dad. There are also a couple of gifted cat actors.

#14: Shadow of the Vampire. This one misses my Top Ten because of a family quarrel. I'm a lifelong devotee of the classic (read old-style, subtle) horror film, and last year I wrote two articles (for Darkling Plain Magazine #1 and MonsterZine.Com #1) on German silent horror. I was enthralled that there'd be a film about the making of F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), both the most artistic and the most fun of silent horror films. My problem is that the film only seems interested in using a long-ago, lawsuit-proof film to make a point about the vampiric nature of filmmaking, and doesn't seem interested in the actual circumstances of the film's making. They have the names of the Nosferatu cast and crew right, but there are several examples of just plain sloppiness. For instance, there's a reference to the royal theater, though Nosferatu was filmed during the Weimarr Republic. Murnau has been called the greatest German director, and he also had a brief but notable directorial splash in the U.S. before dying tragically in an auto accident in 1931, age 42. He deserves more attention from today's film buffs (Minneapolis Public Library has Lotte Eisner's critical biography of Murnau). I'm also bugged about the film's disrespectful treatment of actress Greta Schroder, who in Nosferatu played horror cinema's first genuinely heroic woman (more fuel for this list's discussion of the ways that cinema's portrayal of women actually seems to be moving backward). Grumble grumble grumble. Shadow is a fun movie, with the usual strong performance by John Malkovich (Murnau); and William Dafoe, as Max Shreck, is awesome, an actor playing a vampire playing an actor playing a vampire. The most original & touching part of the film is Max Shreck giving the vampire's perspective on Bram Stoker's novel, Dracula.

Four Stars (Very Good):

#13: The Gift. Sam Raimi, of the Evil Dead trilogy and Darkman and the feminist Western The Quick and the Dead and Briscoe County & Hercules and Xena, is known for drawing intense performances from his actors. Witness The Gift's genuinely creepy turn by Keanu Reeves. Who'da thought the lad had it in him? The versatile Cate Blanchett is as persuasive as a psychic Southern widowed Mom as she was as Good Queen Bess. Raimi, who started his career directing in-your-face horror, here delivers subtle horror in the classic tradition (or psychic crime-suspense, if that label makes you more comfortable). This is the film that What Lies Beneath should have been.

#12: Small-Time Crooks. This is Woody Allen's best film since--well, since Antz, but he didn't direct that. S.-T. C. is a heartfelt return to the spirit of his early, funny films, unpretentious, silly, warm-hearted, making deeply flawed characters lovable. Allen has a long and honorable record of recognizing talented women and giving them substantial roles. Here Tracy Ullman steals the show with an Oscar-caliber performance.

#11: The Color of Paradise. Moving Iranian film about Mohammad, a gifted blind boy (Mohsen Ramezani) whose widower-father sees his son as preventing him from having a normal life, with reconciliation coming after a harrowing emotional journey. I got chills from the scene in which Mohammad rescues a baby bird from a cat, then climbs a tree to return the bird safely to its nest.

Top Ten:

Still Four Stars:

#10: Best in Show. Another laugh-out-loud funny movie from the creative team that brought us Waiting for Guffman, including Christopher Guest, comedian Fred Willard, and SCTV alumni Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara. After this you'll never watch a dog show with a straight face!

#9: State and Main. One doesn't normally say the words David Mamet and funny in the same sentence, but writer/director Mamet's look at a Hollywood crew making a feature film in a small Vermont town is a real hoot. Mamet gets in some merciless digs at show biz while being generous to his characters, each of whom, however twisted, is ultimately likable. Great comic turns by Philip Seymour Hoffman, William H. Macy, Alec Baldwin, Sarah Jessica Parker, and especially the film's mainstay (and Mamet's wife), .Rebecca Pidgeon.

#8: Thirteen Days. A no-nonsense drama about the Cuban Missile Crisis. Whatever else you say about the Kennedy brothers, during those two weeks in October 1962 their calm, unflappable common sense saved human civilization. I've read about the Crisis, but the film gave me a new appreciation into how very close we came. Steven Culp is very good as Robert Kennedy, and Bruce Greenwood gives far and away the best portrayal to date of JFK. I'd have preferred that viewpoint character Kenneth O'Donnell (Kevin Costner) had been a supporting player, and that the viewpoint character had been Bobby. But's let's hear it for director Roger Donaldson and writer David Self for having the confidence to tell a great true story undiluted by hokum.

#7: Chicken Run. I'm less fond of full-length animated features than many. In general, I think the right length for an animated story is 7 ½ minutes, 26 if it combines the talents of Dr. Seuss, Chuck Jones, and Boris Karloff. But yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree. Chicken Run is a swell movie. It has plenty of subtext for those who like that sort of thing (a friend of mine is working on a theory analyzing it from a Marxist perspective). It has lots of movie references. And hey, it has funny chickens. It's great the way the movie makes them more or less sentient while they are also, clearly, chickens. People will be watching this for a long time.

#6: O Brother, Where Art Thou? Minnesota's Coen brothers (Fargo, etc.) score again with a freewheeling adaptation of Homer's Oddysey set in the Depression-era Deep South. And it has lots of lovely bluegrass music. It'd be a shame to give away more. This film is Really Different, and often exuberantly funny, with bravura performances by George Clooney and John Goodman. (Warning: there are a couple of disturbing animal scenes, and I was more relieved than usual to read the Humane Society's no animals were harmed disclaimer.)

#5: Billy Elliot. A boy in a recession-ridden early '80s English mining town decides that he wants to be a ballet dancer, and goes through all the trouble you'd expect. (To top it off, he's straight, so he doesn't fit anybody's stereotypes of anything.) My friend Polly remarked, Why is it that every British movie is either a period piece or depressing or both? I said, "There's A Hard Day's Night". She said "That was made a long time ago". And it's a period piece. But while Billy Elliot contains a full measure of sadness, it's an ultimately exhilarating look at being true to your bliss.

#4: Frequency. For my money, this is the year's undiscovered gem. It makes sophisticated use of time-travel paradoxes, which is probably why most critics ignored it: like Blade Runner, it went right over their heads. I'll give one lovely example: a son in 1999, communicating with his Dad in 1969 thanks to the aurora borealis, has warned his Dad that he is/was about to be killed while firefighting. We intercut between the more-cautious-than-usual Dad on the job and his son, 30 years later, sitting in a bar with his pals. Suddenly the son's beer glass slips out of his hands. The film intercuts among 1969/1999/1969/1999/1969/1999 and various points between until, with a crescendo, the glass hits the table, at which point everything is different, but only the son remembers how things used to be. For his pals the past has always been this way. DO see this one.

#3: Dune--The Miniseries. Tim said I could count this. I will point out that Spielberg's now well-thought-of film Duel started out on TV in 1971. Since David Lynch's well-intentioned 1984 failure to do justice to Frank Herbert's classic 1965 science fiction novel, the SF fan community has been waiting for somebody to do the job right. This series (now available on video, about four hours long with the ads gone) does. The FX are spectacular for television, and would (& I hope someday will) look good on the big screen. The acting's good, the script is consistently intelligent, and it's faithful to the novel as far as I can remember (my SF book discussion group, Second Foundation, read the novel just before going to the movie late in '84). I'm sure that some cuts and simplifications were necessary to turn a complex 500-page novel into even a four-hour film. This film is proof, if any were needed, that thanks to CGI there's nothing except stupidity preventing Hollywood from doing faithful adaptations from the classics of science fiction.

Four and One Half Stars (Near Classic):

#2: Finding Forrester. A 16-year-old literary genius (Rob Brown), living in Harlem, keeps his intellectual pursuits to himself and gains social acceptance playing basketball. Then he encounters a celebrated, reclusive novelist named Forrester (Sean Connery), and both their lives flower from the friendship. This film about a young male growing comfortable with his talent makes a good thematic companion to Billy Elliot (and to the director's Good Will Hunting). Connery gives his best performance in years, perhaps since 1992's Medicine Man (I haven't seen The Rock). He brings his usual grumpy authority to the part, but he also plays the part with vulnerability and uncertainty. (Forrester was born in 1930, the same year as Connery.) But while I'd be happy to see Sir James Robin of Locksley Bond get an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor Award for this, the Best Actor of 2000 Award belongs to Rob Brown for his graceful, multi-faceted, never less than persuasive performance as a man of two cultures, both of which are treated with respect.

#1: X-Men. I have Uncanny X-Men #1 stored in plastic in the same safe place where I keep #1 of The Avengers, Justice League of America, and The Amazing Spider-Man, and I thought this film did an entirely satisfactory job of filling in 37 years of back-story with no obvious expository lumps. I saw it with a friend whose only knowledge of things X was the ten minutes of background information I gave her, and she thought it was a good, comprehensible story. If you've ever felt like a misunderstood mutant, chances are you'll like this movie. Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellan are, of course, magnificent as friends/arch-adversaries Professor Xavier and Magneto. The opening scene of young Eric (Magneto) Lensherr in a concentration camp helps establish him as a grand villain with noble motives, however misguided his methods. And while I've never been a big fan of Wolverine, I agree that Hugh Jackman totally inhabits the character, steals every scene he's in, and is the film's big discovery. Anna Paquin is also excellent as Rogue (actually a blending of the comic book's Rogue and Kitty Pryde). Yes, Magneto's grand plan is a bit silly, but that usually goes with being a super villain. My one criticism is that The Beast isn't in the film (his scientific knowledge is bequeathed to Jean Grey) and that Cyclops (James Marsden), Jean Grey (Famke Janssen), and Storm (Halle Berry) aren't given enough to do--but some of their bits are restored in the VHS/DVD version, and there's room for their growth in the sequels. The film helped me see something I'd never noticed: despite their radically different styles, Cyclops and Wolverine are more alike than either will admit; both can kill accidentally if they let their guard down for a fraction of a second. This--along with Tim Burton's 1989 Batman-- is a prime example of how it's possible to take the serious ideas in a comic book, treat them with respect, and make something that's not just a very good comic book movie, but simply, a very good movie.