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The Best Films of 2000

Last Wednesday the Academy selected their five best films of 2000. A dubious list since 3 of the films weren't released anywhere besides New York and LA until 2001. Even more dubious was that films such as Crouching Tiger and Traffic made most critics' top 10 lists for 2000, even though they hadn't been released in most of America until early January. Which goes to show how today not only the Oscars but respectable film critics have become pawns in Hollywood's marketing game. Movie top 10 lists are not so much a look back as a look ahead, to generate advance buzz for the Oscar race. Critics, awards, it's all part of the business.

Meanwhile, as I draft my own list, my mind returns to a number of films came and went unnoticed in two film festivals I attended: the San Francisco International in March and the New York International in October. In fact, my four favorite films of the year all played at one of these festivals -- and half have gone on to be distributed widely in select cities. Not a bad percentage given that they are all foreign (my top American film of the year, You Can Count on Me, weighs in at #6). Not only are my top 5 films all foreign, they are all Asian (if you count Iran as part of Asia). This may be due to some cultural bias on my part, but nonetheless each of them, standing alone, had more to offer as cinematic, cultural, and sociopolitical experiences than the ten or 20 best American films of the year combined. As Hollywood busies itself with better, more devious ways of marketing its eye fodder, the rest of the world (and Asia especially) is quietly going about the work of making better, more interesting and meaningful movies. I present the evidence as follows:

* indicates that this film currently has no distributor, which means you'll probably not get a chance to see it any time soon. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't know about it, eh?

1. *Platform, dir. Jia Zhangke. At once a definitive statement of life in post-Mao China and the ultimate slacker movie. A paradoxical, 3-hour epic about a gang of rural youngsters who pursue their dreams of being rock stars, this film destroys Traffic in terms of social insight and Almost Famous in terms of capturing the spirit of being a teenager in love with rock music. Narrated seemingly at a snail's pace, the rewards of this film (and they are bountiful) are obtained if one takes it in scene by scene, hung up in a perpetual existence in the present that mirrors the state of the characters, always waiting and hoping for something big to happen. A landmark in Chinese cinema. NOTE: Platform will be the closing film in the Film Society of Lincoln Center's two week series on Urban Cinema in Contemporary China. March 8, 9pm -- it may be your last chance ever to see this film!

2. The Wind Will Carry Us, dir. Abbas Kiarostami. Global film critics' darling Kiarostami takes his cinematically self-reflexive lover's quarrel with the world deep into the beautiful rural hill country of Iran in search ofÉ what? A mysterious death ritual among countryside women? The essence of the Iranian people? The missing link between the ancient and the modern? Leisurely enough to drive most audiences insane from lack of action, Platform and The Wind Will Carry Us are more about just hanging out and taking it all in, rather than being consumed with the Hollywood compulsion of being propelled through time, space, violence and sex. In its own unexpected way, it had more to say about technology and the state of the human race at the millenium than just about any other film in the last year or two.

3. Yi Yi (A One and a Two), dir. Edward Yang. As Dave Kehr wrote in the New York Times, this is more or less a Taiwanese version of American Beauty, but to compare the two is like comparing a novel to a tabloid story. With great sympathy and observation, Edward Yang follows the four members of a seemingly well-off but remarkably non-communicative family as each spins into their own dark trajectory of self-discovery.

4. *Darkness and Light, dir. Chang Tso-Chi. A disarming coming-of-age tale by a former assistant of Hou Hsiao Hsien (the other Taiwanese master of cinema), it features a lively ensemble: a teenage girl, raised in a family of blind masseuses, with her delightful mentally challenged younger brother looking out for her, falls in love with a boy whose clueless yet insolent face is just asking to get smashed by the jealous boys that stalk the neighborhood. An impressive array of moods are evoked in succession, and the overall effect is one of great sadness mixed with gratefulness for the joys of life, in spite of the tragedies that inevitably follow. Plus, it was filmed in my mom's hometown of Keelung.

5. Not One Less, dir. Zhang Yimou. Of course this film has personal significance for me, as it deals with a schoolteacher in the countryside, but it is a great film in every respect. The treatment of the subject matter is something like Zhang's earlier rural film The Story of Qiu Ju, except he's incorporated Wong Kar-Wai's impatient editing rhythm to speed his story along. Zhang is still trying to rediscover his voice after being declaimed as a Hollywood wannabe with Raise the Red Lantern and To Live. At least he's still exploring his options, which is more than one can say for his buddy Chen Kaige (see The Emperor and the Assassin).

6. You Can Count on Me, dir. Kenneth Lonergan -- I've heard people say that this film, however great, is still at heart a small-time, TV movie. That's a sad commentary on the way in which quality movies are being increasingly segregated between the theatrical and video/cable-bound. This film may not have the scope of Traffic, but accomplishes its objectives to a much higher level of satisfaction, thanks to two of the best American performances of the year.

7. tie between *Moloch, dir. Alexandr Sokurov and Quills, dir. Phillip Kaufman. Two films that distort famously sick figures in history (Hitler and Sade) in order to get a certain point across (the taxing demands of political genius and the taxing demands of artistic genius, respectively). Moloch has a breathtaking visual beauty that almost undermines its content; while Quills' has the same problem stemming from its role as an entertainment. Both in the end manage to be moderately provocative in spite of their shortcomings.

9. Traffic, dir. Steven Soderbergh. Admirable for its ambition and fine ensemble acting, though it actually loses something from its slickness and relatively conventional, Miami Vice storyline.

10. tie between Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, dir. Ang Lee and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, dir. Jim Jarmusch. Two films both by NYU Film grads, both updating (or perverting) the martial arts genre in a globally-minded trajectory. Both with moments of sheer delight mixed with clunky missteps, but I guess that's what happens when you try to mix up genre conventions.

Honorable mention goes to Claire Denis' Beau Travail and Ridley Scott's Gladiator, two films about masculinity and martial power that couldn't be more different. Beau Travail was exquisitely photographed, elliptic in form and bewildering to understand. Gladiator had action sequences and audience scenes digitally laid over a paint-by-the-numbers narrative but was throroughly enjoyable trash.