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	Peter Sobczynski's Top 10 "Best & Worst" Movies of 2003 by Peter Sobczynski

Looking over the films that I have selected as the best to emerge during 2003, I sense that this article will prove to be utterly useless to most people. Considering the fact that only a couple of the selections achieved the sort of wide commercial penetration that is required today if a film is to be successful, it is likely that many of you will have not even seen many of the films on the list (and because they didn't get a wide theatrical exposure, the larger chain video stores will be less likely to stock them in large numbers when they finally emerge on video). And since the list pretty much excludes most of the highly hyped year-end titles, I am certain that my choices will be dismissed as a willful act of perversion that goes out of its way to exclude the movies that are currently getting all the hype on television and on magazine covers.

Needless to say, these choices were not made as a grand attempt in cinematic one-upmanship on my part. I selected these films as the best of the year because, more than any of the 200-odd movies I saw last year, these were the ones that amused me, perplexed me, scared me, enchanted me, turned me on and expanded my notions of what the cinema could achieve. After all, aren't those the reasons that we go to the movies in the first place?

KILL BILL VOL. 1 (directed by Quentin Tarantino): Yes, Tarantino's homage to gory 1970's exploitation films lacked the dense plotting and memorable dialogue of his previous films-and it was only half of a movie to boot. However, this fraction of a film (the conclusion is tentatively set to be released on Feb 20) had more life and energy in any one scene than there is in most complete action epics. From the opening moments (with the hallowed ShawScope logo and the ancient Klingon proverb) to the jaw-dropping final battle at the House of Blue Leaves (and anchored by a better-than-you-think performance by Uma Thurman as the vengeful Bride), "Kill Bill" was a giddy love letter to the art of cinema from a director who can make the audience feel as jazzed watching his movies as he clearly was making them.

LOONEY TUNES: BACK IN ACTION (directed by Joe Dante): On the surface, it may have looked like another soulless assembly-line creation designed for no other reason than to sell more crap for Warner Brothers (possibly one of the reasons why it died at the box-office). However, rather than being another cynical cash-in along the lines of the monstrous "Space Jam", director Joe Dante (the genius behind the "Gremlins" films and "Innerspace") turned in a film that, with its wit, endless energy and scenes filled-to-bursting with in-jokes and homage galore, resembled a family-friendly version of "Kill Bill". In recent years, there have been many attempts to revamp classic characters in a contemporary context with generally dreadful results (as in the evil "The Cat in the Hat") but Dante, a longtime fan of the old Warner Brothers cartoons, managed to create a movie that contained plenty of contemporary humor (such as Porky Pig and Speedy Gonzales bemoaning the fact that political correctness has left them unemployed) while retaining the behavior and attitudes that made characters like Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck so beloved in the first place.

MAY (directed by Lucky McKee): Without question, the most terrifying (yet strangely moving) American horror film in recent memory, this film was all but abandoned by its distributor, Lion's Gate, and only dribbled out into a couple of theaters before going to video. As a result, most audiences missed seeing the most powerful piece of acting of the year in the lead performance of Angela Bettis. As the lazy-eyed misfit title character, a lonely girl who will go to extreme lengths to make a friend, Bettis was creepy to the extreme, to be sure, but she was always quite sympathetic and touching (and since she made it so easy for viewers to relate to her early on, it made her later descent into madness all the more affecting). Perhaps it didn't receive a proper release because it was too arty for horror audiences and too scary and bloody for the art-houses. Regardless, McKee (making a stunning debut as writer-director) has made a legitimate masterpiece of the genre-one that I would happily rank right up there with such things as "Psycho" and "Repulsion".

MASKED AND ANONYMOUS (directed by Larry Charles): The first film to truly utilize the odd charisma of Bob Dylan (including the ones that he himself made), this was a decidedly strange fantasia in which an out-of-the-loop musical icon (guess who) is recruited to perform at a "benefit concert" for unknown people in an unknown country (one that looks like the ugliest aspects of Mexico and Nicaragua, though it was filmed entirely on location in Los Angeles). Of the few who actually saw the film (including critics who should have known better), many dismissed it as a confusing mess in which Dylan and an all-star cast (including Jessica Lange, John Goodman, Jeff Bridges, Penelope Cruz, Mickey Rourke and others) stumbled from one mystifyingly allegorical scene to the next. However, while most current films are like simple pop records (which can be easily grasped and understood on the first listen), "Masked and Anonymous" is more like a Dylan record-it rattles in your mind as it grows on you and forces you to react to it instead of merely accepting it.

LOST IN TRANSLATION (directed by Sofia Coppola): "The Virgin Suicides" announced Coppola as a new director to watch and her second effort, following the tentative relationship between an ennui-stricken actor (Bill Murray in his best work since "Rushmore") and a lonely young newlywed (an equally strong Scarlett Johansson), marks her as one of the most interesting American filmmakers working today. In creating a sort-of romance which relies less on grand events and more on the smaller details-such as the song you might choose to sing at a karaoke bar-Coppola has made a charming, funny and ultimately moving film that will be touching audiences for a long time to come.

A MIGHTY WIND (directed by Christopher Guest): Seeing as how he was utilizing the same semi-improv structure and actors (including Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, Catherine O'Hara, Parker Posey and the invaluable Fred Willard) that he previously deployed so brilliantly in the classic comedies "Waiting for Guffman" and "Best in Show", it wasn't really a surprise that Guest's latest film, following a few folk groups as they reassemble to put on a tribute concert, would turn out to be one of the funniest films of the year. What was surprising is that it would turn out, thanks to the wonderful performance by Eugene Levy as a burned-out singer trying to pull himself together for the show, to be a genuinely touching one to boot. His character could have been played strictly for laughs but Levy and Guest have invested it with enough humanity and compassion to make him genuinely believable-which, of course, only makes the comedy even funnier.

SWIMMING POOL (directed by Francois Ozon): Most mysteries are annoying because they tend to be driven so completely by the machinations of the plot that the characters wind up getting the short end of the stick by comparison. Not so with this smart, sexy film-while the mystery (if there indeed even was one) was engrossing enough to keep viewers debating the various plot twists for weeks after seeing it, the real energy came from the two main characters. As a repressed author who goes to the south of France to recharge her creative batteries (and does so in ways that she never could have anticipated), Charlotte Rampling, a wonderful actress whom Hollywood has never quite known what to do with, has never been more compelling to watch. And as the frequently naked girl who turns the author's life upside-down, Ludivine Sagnier took a role that could have easily just been the cinematic equivalent of a modeling job and made it memorable.

THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE (directed by Sylvain Chomet): Describing this surreal French animated film in a way that comes close to doing it justice is an exercise in futility-the closest I can come is to suggest that it plays as if Jacques Tati and Terry Gilliam had somehow managed to collaborate on a project. The story-in which a determined club-footed grandmother, aided by the aging vaudeville act of the title, doggedly pursues her champion cyclist grandson, who has been kidnapped by the French Mafia for nefarious reasons-is simple enough for even the youngest audiences to follow with delight but there is plenty of wit and visual wonder for the grown-ups as well. As the film is currently playing on the art-house circuit, it might be difficult to locate a theater showing it but if you get the opportunity to see it on the big screen with your family, take it-I'm guessing they will find it even more enchanting than "Finding Nemo".
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FINDING NEMO (directed by Andrew Stanton): Not that there was anything particularly wrong with "Finding Nemo" to begin with. Somehow, the good folks at Pixar (whose previous hits have been "Monsters Inc.", "A Bug's Life" and the "Toy Story" films) have managed to come up with another winner in the story of a neurotic fish on a desperate quest to find his missing son, currently residing in a fish tank in Sydney. Like all the Pixar films, this was beautiful to look at and contained both a lot of humor and a perfectly selected voice cast (including Albert Brooks, Ellen DeGeneres, Geoffrey Rush and Willem Dafoe), but it also had a fully developed and gripping story that those other elements emerged from instead of replacing. This is the secret behind the incredible Pixar winning streak-the films work not because of the cutting-edge CGI animation but because of the cheapest (and rarest) element of all.inspiration.

DRACULA: PAGES FROM A VIRGIN'S DIARY (directed by Guy Maddin): As fans of such films as "Archangel" and "Careful" have known for years, Canadian director Maddin has been one of the most consistently unique directors working on the contemporary world film scene and this may well be his most jaw-dropping effort to date. In adapting a ballet rendition of the Bram Stoker warhorse to the big screen, Maddin has created a film that is absolutely unlike anything you have likely ever seen in a movie theater. Visually extraordinary (it looks like a genuine surreal silent film from the 1920's that has been rediscovered and beautifully restored), Maddin has accomplished something truly amazing with this film-he has taken one of the most familiar of all stories and made it feel thrillingly new and exciting.

My ten runners-up are David Cronenberg's "Spider", Errol Morris' "The Fog of War", Neil LaBute's "The Shape of Things", Eric Byler's "Charlotte Sometimes", the Polish Brothers' "Northfork", "The Stone Reader", Satoshi Kon's "Millennium Actress", Alan Rudolph's "The Secret Lives of Dentists", Bob Rafelson's "No Good Deed" and Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini's "American Splendor".

The other movies that gave me various degrees of pleasure this past year (in roughly the order I saw them) were "Gerry", "He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not", "Bend It Like Beckham" "Dark Blue", "The Good Thief", "Lost in La Mancha", "All the Real Girls", "Old School", "School of Rock", "Irreversible", "Willard", "Raising Victor Vargas", "Ghosts of the Abyss", "Owning Mahowney", "Capturing the Friedmans", "Down With Love", "Spellbound" "Onmyoji", "The Matrix Reloaded", "A Decade Under the Influence" (particularly the extended version on DVD), "The Eye", "The Man on the Train", "The Man Without a Past", "Whale Rider", "28 Days Later", "The Hulk", "T3:Rise of the Machines", "Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl", "Dirty Pretty Things", "How to Deal", "Garage Days", "Open Range", "Freaky Friday", "SWAT", "Pistol Opera", "Freddy vs. Jason", "The Other Side of the Bed", "Demonlover", "Once Upon a Time in Mexico", "Spy Kids 3-D", "So Close", "Shattered Glass", "The Station Agent", "The Singing Detective", "Intolerable Cruelty" (especially the final stand of Wheezy Joe), "Bubba Ho-Tep", "Bus 174", "Love Actually", "Elf", "21 Grams", "Scary Movie 3", "Elephant", "The Missing", "House of Sand and Fog", "Big Fish", "Bad Santa", "The Barbarian Invasions", "Calendar Girls", "Stuck on You" and yes, "Return of the King".

It isn’t that 2003 had more bad movies in release than in previous years (although I will note that I came up with a list of worthy films a lot quicker than I did for my 10 Best list). No, the thing that made this year’s bad movie output seem especially overwhelming was the sheer lack of effort that the filmmakers put into their work. As was clearly illustrated in the wonderful documentary "Lost in La Mancha", it takes an extraordinary amount of time and effort to bring together all the elements required to make a feature film. Knowing that, it seems astonishing that people would go through all that in the service of a project that would, even to the untrained eye, seem deeply flawed from the get-go.

As you will no doubt notice, 2003’s most infamous film, the Ben Affleck-Jennifer Lopez botch "Gigli" is nowhere to be seen on this list. This is not to suggest that it is some misunderstood work of art - it was a bottomlessly stupid and ill-conceived disaster that took an awful screenplay ("Gobble-gobble" anyone?) and a pair of miscast stars who generated zero on-screen chemistry and somehow came up with a whole that was less than the sum of its parts. However, there are some good reasons for its exclusion. First, the film does contain one great scene-the best of all the freaky cameos contributed this year by Christopher Walken - which is more than I can say about these other films. Second, everyone and their grandmother has already taken a whack at the film - there simply isn’t any challenge to it. Most importantly, there simply wasn’t any room. Even after disqualifying hopeless movies that never had a chance of succeeding in the first place (anyone who willingly attended such dreck as "House of the Dead", "Head of State", "Love Don’t Cost a Thing", "Kangaroo Jack" or "Darkness Falls" deserved what they got) as well as those that came and went without anyone noticing ( such as "Gods and Generals", "Le Divorce", "Die Mommie Die", "Cold Creek Manor" and "Blue Car"), there were still so many films to choose from that I was actually able to select double-features of loathsomeness for each slot on the list and still couldn’t find room for "Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star" or "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen".

Enjoy and remember-I saw these films so that you didn’t have to...

CHARLIE’S ANGELS: FULL THROTTLE & BAD BOYS 2: Normally I avoid sticking sequels on these lists-especially sequels to films that were hardly works of art the first time around. However, the two were so smug and condescending in their attitudes towards their audiences (the plots for both were so flimsy and half-hearted that it seemed as if the scenes were just randomly spliced together without rhyme or reason) and so overbearing in their publicity campaigns (the basic pose that their stars took appeared to be the notion that since they were celebrities, they could shovel out even the worst crap and their fans would eagerly lap it up) that they came across less as ordinary bad movies and more like cinematic warnings of an approaching apocalypse.

PIGLET’S BIG MOVIE & THE CAT IN THE HAT: It is hard to know what is more disturbing about these two family-oriented botches. Was it the fact that two of the most beloved characters in all of childrens literature were so horrifyingly perverted from their original forms (the former had Winnie-the-Pooh being unnecessarily cruel to his dear friend Piglet and the latter had Mike Myers as a foul-mouthed monstrosity who even refused to rhyme) or was it the fact they both wound up making money while a genuinely creative family film like "Looney Tunes: Back in Action" (which brought beloved characters into a contemporary setting while keeping the qualities that made them unique in the first place) was all but ignored by audiences?

THE LIFE OF DAVID GALE & THE CORE: In 1999, the top acting Oscars went to Kevin Spacey and Hilary Swank but only a few years later, both found themselves in the kind of films that can kill careers. The former was an astonishingly tone-deaf melodrama that took a touchy subject (the death penalty) and turned it into a turgid flop that was so tasteless that even Sister Helen Prejean would have had no qualms about putting it out of its misery. The latter, about a mission to tunnel to the center of the Earth to restart the core, wasn’t as offensive but it was certainly just as stupid.

BOAT TRIP & MARCI X: A wacky comedy about a straight guy who finds himself trapped on a gay singles cruise. A wacky comedy about a dippy Jewish princess who finds herself running a gangsta-rap record label. In theory, these might have been amusing concepts in the right hands. In practice, they wound up being so painfully unfunny that it boggles the mind that anyone put up the money for them in the first place.

THE IN-LAWS & THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE: Perhaps I am a bit biased because these two films are remakes of two of my all-time favorite movies. Then again, remembering the absolute lack of humor in the former (even Albert Brooks failed to generate any laughs) and the absolute lack of terror, horror, suspense or even a basic sense of decency in the latter, I think not.

BASIC & IDENTITY: Thanks to things like "The Usual Suspects" and "The Sixth Sense", films with shocking twist endings are all the rage. However, what the filmmakers of these two turkeys forgot to realize is that if the story itself doesn’t make any sense, the final twist isn’t going to have any impact. These two felt as if the writers came up with the twist first and then desperately tried to construct a story around them.

BRINGING DOWN THE HOUSE & CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN: Remember when Steve Martin used to make smart, intelligent comedies that didn’t actively insult their audiences with hateful humor and retrograde attitudes?

HOW TO LOSE A GUY IN 10 DAYS & ALEX & EMMA: Remember when Kate Hudson used to be a fresh and charming actress who made films that didn’t play like the kind of projects that Meg Ryan would have rejected for being too cutesy?

LARA CROFT TOMB RAIDER: THE CRADLE OF LIFE & BEYOND BORDERS: Remember when Angelina Jolie was such a breath of fresh air that you could safely go into one of her films on the assumption that she could overcome even the weakest of scripts with her sheer force of personality?

DREAMCATCHER & TIMELINE: Stephen King and Michael Crichton, two of the best-selling authors of all time, elected to take the money and run when they sold the film rights to these novels (the former involving an invasion by aliens who like to hide and emerge from people’s butts and the latter featuring a bunch of time-traveling dopes). If they knew just how bad the resulting films would be (and the former, especially, is the kind of all-time dog that will play in Worst Film Festivals until the end of time), do you think they would have run just as quickly to return the money and call the whole thing off?

While the views expressed by Peter Sobczynski do not necessarily reflect the views of Criticdoctor.com, the Critic Doctor will occasionally examine Mr. Sobczynski's film reviews to bring forth an honest examination of those views expressed.