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The Best Films of 2002

Maybe I'm just projecting my inner state of mind onto what I saw, but this seemed to be a year where movies were figuring themselves out. For that reason, 2002 was a great year to watch movies. While the number of flat-out masterpieces was somewhat low, there were more interesting movies than I can ever remember seeing in one year; movies that seemed to be working busily at the problems laid before them, problems with the world, problems with the state of the movies as an industry and as an art form.

The number of noteworthy films is so great that I have to mention no less than 30, and somehow squeeze 15 of them into my top ten of 2002. I'll get away with this by giving special designation to four of my top 10 as movies that were undistributed and so inaccessible for most people in America to see -- hopefully 2003 will offer up the opportunity. I'm already excited to announce that my favorite film of the 21st century, PLATFORM, by the amazing young director Jia Zhangke, will finally be getting distribution this spring. I should also give a special mention to WHAT TIME IS IT THERE?, the latest and most metaphysical masterpiece by Tsai Ming Liang, which was released in 2002 and would have been in my top three if I hadn't already put it high on my list in 2001.

I think overall there was better work coming from outside America, with three films that even conquered the conventional Hollywood genres: cartoon feature (SPIRITED AWAY), teen sex comedy/road trip movie (Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN) and musical (SILENCE, WE'RE ROLLING). But my faith in American filmmaking was upheld by a lot of interesting if not masterful work coming from both within Hollywood and without. My favorite film of 2002 was American, even though it's probably the most obscure title on my list.

1. THE MAD SONGS OF FERNANDA HUSSEIN (undistributed) This film probably means more to me and my particular interests than it will to most people, though on the other hand, I can't quite understand how the only film this year that dealt with the effects of the Persian Gulf war on everyday American people NOT matter to a lot of us. As I wrote in my original review, "The story follows the downward trajectory of three New Mexico residents in the wake of the Gulf War: a woman whose children are the victim of a vicious hate crime because their last name is Hussein; a high school student whose increasing interest in peace activism leads him to run away from his sheltered home; and a returning soldier who indulges in an empty existence while trying to shake off the horrors he's witnessed. The film is not perfect, with some badly acted scenes, and the politics are unquestionably partisan, though nothing less than compellingly heartfelt. Made over 6 years and 13 credit cards, this film taps into a raw live-wire energy that means everything to today's sorry state of independent filmmaking. Both the characters and the film brandish a fierce, wounded innocence that gives way to inconsolable rage at their own ineffectuality under the shadow of war, modulated by some vivid musical and visual digressions, and culminating in a finale of apocalyptic spectacle of fascination and horror." John Gianvito's first film is admittedly rough on the edges, which is probably why it didn't pick up a distributor. But I've found those rough edges to have taught me more about movies and moviemaking than anything else I've seen this year. This is a film that shares much with the films listed down at #10, but frame for frame there was more raw passion, fury, and hunger for expression of inexpressible feelings in this movie than in any of the others. This film screams out at me, "The movies are ALIVE, and they are part of the world I live in." And I am grateful.

2. RUSSIAN ARK. 300 years of Russian history covered in a single 96 minute take traveling through the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg -- Alexander Sokurov's masterpiece is much more than a cold technical exercise -- it s a passionate and often humorous though melancholy meditation of what Russia was, is and will be. The gleeful melancholia is also generated through the restless camera movement, and how it creates moments that come blindingly from out of nowhere and then disappear into the void of history. This film really nails a sense of instant discovery and instant loss that I think is central to the art and beauty of the motion picture.

3, 4 and 5. SPIRITED AWAY, Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN and SILENCE, WE'RE ROLLING (undistributed) were the most entertaining films of the year for me, if only because they had much more to offer than entertainment. Hayao Miyazaki's SPIRITED AWAY is possibly the greatest animation feature ever made, was not only an restlessly inventive delight to watch, but had a plethora of observations on civil conduct and the enduring virtues of courtesy and compassion in a society far more complicated than what you find in most movies, animated or otherwise. Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN was many things: an eye-opening fresco of Mexican society, a meditation of love and death bursting with spontaneous energy, and the best teen-sex comedy I've ever seen. I'm not sure why Youssef Chahine's hilarious SILENCE, WE'RE ROLLING has yet to find a distributor, since its insights on celebrity culture seem perfect for American appetites, and it spills over with joy and music besides.

6. ATANARJUAT: THE FAST RUNNER, aka GANGS OF THE ARCTIC CIRCLE, got brownie points by many critics for being the first movie produced and shot by the Inuit people (when did we stop calling them Eskimos?), but there is much more going on here than the creation of a trivia question. This film makes as inspired a use of digital video as any feature I've seen, not only because the sub-zero conditions made it impossible to shoot on film, but in the way an ancient myth of timeless human frailty runs headlong into the digital age, preserving a centuries-old tale and the cultural practices of its time for future generations to remember. Only in the end credits, when we see the preparations of the actors and crew, do we realize that this is as much of a fiction and an anthropological project for them as it is for us. It also doesn't hurt that this film kicked the collective butts of STAR WARS and LORD OF THE RINGS in the mythical action department.

7. (tie) THE PIANIST and IN PRAISE OF LOVE. It was hard not to see these films as being the attempts of two old masters to redress the way Spielberg's SCHINDLER'S LIST converted wartime atrocity into mass entertainment. To that end, both films fixed on three crucial themes: survival, resistance, and freedom through artistic expression. 73 year old Jean-Luc Godard showed he was very much in tune with the world with a film dense with images that seemed to carry an ongoing conversation about the world's failure to truly learn from its own history, and the failure of movies to do anything about it. Movies, which for Godard once held an unlimited potential to liberate people from conventionality, have now become a chief means to oppress us: freedom has become an advertising slogan for ideological mass consumption. Roman Polanski's film was more commercial, and yet strangely un-commercial in its matter-of-fact telling of the horrors faced by a Jewish pianist who miraculously survived the Holocaust. No camera tricks, no flashy dramatic moments; Polanski's reverence for his subject matter was profoundly felt, and the result was perhaps the most mature film he's ever made. Both films made quite a powerful virtue out of the practice of helpless observation.

8. (tie) PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE, TIME OUT and I'M GOING HOME comprise an intriguing trilogy on the three stages of man, respectively, young love, midlife crisis and imminent death. Paul Thomas Anderson threw a gauntlet of crazy cinematic effects to emphasize Adam Sandler's stumbling progress towards happiness; it was like experiencing puberty all over again. Laurent Cantet's masterpiece about a laid-off middle manager who concocts a fictional job to impress his family and friends was a stifled scream cracking the glass walls of white-collar culture. 94-year old Manoel De Oliveira gave us an equally affecting vision of the world and a taste of experiencing life at his age, as well as his patience and wisdom, charting an elderly actor's acceptance of his own demise over the course of giving three amazing performances. TIME OUT's Aurelien Recoing and I'M GOING HOME's Michel Piccoli gave perhaps the two best male performances of the year.

9. (tie) TEN and THE ORPHAN OF ANYANG (both undistributed) offered provocative subterranean views of Iranian and Chinese society, respectively, and both demonstrated how the simplest techniques can be the most effective. Abbas Kiarostami unveiled his most minimalistic film to date -- two mini-DV cameras fixed inside a car -- to create a vivid portrait of women in Iranian society, a symphony of passing scenery, disembodied voices and demure faces encompassing an awesome spectrum of womanly experience, unpatronizingly rendered -- this is the movie THE HOURS wished it was. Wang Chao also used extreme long silent takes to show the apathy and despair of an unemployed urban dweller who adopts an orphan baby to make a fast buck -- but in between the silence there's a world of human feeling, at times so vulnerably exposed that the camera dares us not to notice.

10. (tie) ADAPTATION, 25th HOUR, GANGS OF NEW YORK and ABOUT SCHMIDT were all flawed, gnawingly frustrating, but incredibly ambitious and vital movies that wrestled with major issues in American society and culture. Perhaps more overreaching and problematic than all of these was GANGS OF NEW YORK, a strident and occasionally mind-blowing attempt by Martin Scorsese to cram his 50 years of movie watching into one film, while bravely launching the argument that New York was where the world first collided and gave birth to 21st century global culture: not so much in a melting pot as a Molotov cocktail. Just as all-encompassing was ADAPTATION, a brilliantly inbred attempt by writer Charlie Kaufman to reconcile not only his own eccentric talents with Hollywood convention, but also his selfish narcissism with a selfless embrace of the world; and he achieved several moments of amazingly tender observation before junking the film with an infuriatingly lame climax. In sharp contrast, the single best movie ending of 2002 was in 25TH HOUR, Spike Lee's best film in years, a messy but impassioned cry for moral clarity hope for the future in a world of post-9/11 uncertainty. Lee's dealing with personal prejudices and failures was much more in-your-face than the well-mannered whitebred hypocrisy skewered in ABOUT SCHMIDT, a mature attempt by Alexander Payne to get past the easy satire of his previous films and move towards a more complicated and profound application of his tremendous gifts at social observation.

The rest of the best:

UNKNOWN PLEASURES and MILLENNIUM MAMBO, two minor films by two major filmmakers, both dealt with the problem of how to capture what it's like to be young and lost in the 21st century, with results both brilliant and disappointing. The first hour of Jia Zhangke's blistering look at life in a post-industrial wasteland felt like raw footage taken from another planet, while Hou Hisao Hsien's film slips into a narcotic neon techno rhythm while repeatedly pulling the rug from under itself. Both films end unsatisfyingly, but that may be the price to pay for trying to ride the tiger of the here and now.

ARARAT, BLOODY SUNDAY and BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE were dazzling not only for their overreaching ambition and sincere political purpose, but also for the brilliance of technique employed in pursuing their agendas (except for ARARAT, which made up in insight what it lacked in technique). Atom Egoyan's depiction of his own failure and aching desire to recreate the genocide of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire several decades ago was much too busy and far from perfect, but the expression of his own wounded memory and hunger for justice was too compelling to deny. Paul Greengrass' re-enactment of a 1971 Irish uprising that led to bloodshed used handheld camera techniques that made it seem like I was watching actual footage buried in a time capsule, a startling (and disturbing) accomplishment in cinema verite. Michael Moore's examination of violence in America played fast and loose with facts and often bullied its audience into sharing its views, but its go-for-broke attitude is commendable and it certainly succeeded in raising social awareness like no other film this year.

FEMME FATALE and MORVERN CALLAR were two highly contrived odes to the allure of unstable women and of a filmmaking technique that answers to nobody except its own crazily inspired brilliance. Brian DiPalma's film was as slick and pre-designed as Lynne Ramsay's was ragged and dissolute, but both were very sexy and occasionally stunning in their dizzy celebrations of existential vapidity.

SOLARIS and THE HOURS were two attempts by respectable Hollywood hacks to infuse formula with substance (or was it the other way around?). And so even though they did everything they could to process difficult ideas into bite-sized pieces dressed in cool moods, they were still among the most thought-provoking Hollywood movies I saw this year, even though they both seemed to take themselves too seriously (but again, self-congratulation is the Hollywood way).

CHANGING LANES was formulaic and predictable in spots, but that didn't stop it from being a compelling and honest study of male futility, and more than once struck paydirt by revealing things about American social values that seem true to me. While Jack Nicholson is gunning for his hundreth Oscar, yet another powerful Samuel L. Jackson performance will be going by unheralded.

MINORITY REPORT and CATCH ME IF YOU CAN showed Spielberg regressing back to high-entertainment mode after the major artistic breakthrough of A.I: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, but although the dazzling diversionary cinematic eye candy concocted in these films compromised their thematic depth, there doesn't seem to be anyone on the planet right now who can move a story forward better than Spielberg.

TALK TO HER and FAR FROM HEAVEN were two overhyped critic-pleasers that were best viewed as solidly-constructed cinematic massage parlors with all sorts of clever signifiers of meaning decorating the walls; no doubt they were artfully composed and carefully contrived, but the more one thinks about what they're really saying, the more dubious their achievements seem.

BEIJING BICYCLE and DEVILS ON THE DOORSTEP were two films that examined the stubborn pride of mainland Chinese people with mixed but worthwhile results. Wang Xiaoshuai's BICYCLE seemed overly repetitive in its design but its socially progressive heart is in the right place. The first half of Jiang Wen's DEVILS is "bang-your-head-on-the-seat-in-front-of-you" stupid-cute bumpkin humor as insufferable as Zhang Yimou's HAPPY TIMES, but then the second half is a depiction of martial law gone horrifyingly wrong, and worthy of the war movies of Stanley Kubrick.

Also worth noting are ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU CHOU, 8 MILE, MONSOON WEDDING, THE QUIET AMERICAN, THE ROOKIE and SUNSHINE STATE.