#16 — Shattered Glass (Billy Ray, 2003) There’s a pleasing irony at the heart of Billy Ray’s Shattered Glass. In making a film based on real events, Ray has a certain amount of leeway to embellish and rearrange, shifting the … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 00s — Number Sixteen
#17 — Gosford Park (Robert Altman, 2001) Of course, there’s no shortage of admirable traits in Robert Altman’s finest films, but one of the clearest is the way they are rooted in the eras in which they were made. M*A*S*H … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 00s — Number Seventeen
#18 — You Can Count on Me (Kenneth Lonergan, 2000) I feel like I owe Laura Linney an apology. If you reattach ten years of torn-off calendar pages to the wall and find me back in the fall of 1999, … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 00s — Number Eighteen
It’s been a while since we’ve ventured out the theater for a new film, a dry spell that will end this weekend. Here’s a hint as to which movie isn’t inspiring our forthcoming ticket purchases. I miss Buffy. (Posted simultaneously to “Jelly-Town!”) Continue reading I have ever so much money, I’m gorgeous and I can fly
Last week, I responded to a post at the In Contention blog celebrating the best picks the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences made at their annual awards ceremony with my own version of the exercise. Certainly, we all knew that a follow up was inevitable, especially since, as much fun as it is to recall moment when the Oscar ceremony made you beam with satisfaction, it’s even more fun to rail against the misbegotten moments. So here’s the opposite of what we did last week: the worst selections made by the Academy during the 00s. Worst Best Picture: … Continue reading Stop right where you are, already you’ve gone too far
The Missouri Breaks (Arthur Penn, 1976). The film has Marlon Brando at the very beginning of his anything goes, deliberate insanity phase, and Jack Nicholson still wrapped in the energy of his wild genius phase (this film arrived in theaters almost exactly six months after One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and just a couple months after he won his first Oscar). It’s a revisionist western, a style and genre that Arthur Penn had done quite well with a few years earlier. All this makes it equal parts surprising and sad to report that the resulting film is drab. The … Continue reading Howard and Williams, Kazan, Mamet, Penn, Weber
#19 — Born Into Brothels (Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman, 2004) When evaluating documentaries, it’s easy to the conflate the worthiness of the subject with the quality of the filmmaking, which is why, for many years, Oscar pools could be … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 00s — Number Nineteen
#20 — Cache (Michael Haneke, 2005) Michael Haneke pulls no punches. The German-born and Austrian-raised director believe that films should have missions, usually to challenge and provoke. Watching his films gives the strong sense that he’d much rather leave an … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 00s — Number Twenty
The Oscar season is just starting to heat up. I’ve been fairly silent on the subject, but I’ve been consuming the news hungrily, poring over multiple online sources to get the latest on hosts, nominee counts, and the ever-shifting dynamics of what’s up or down, hot or cold, in or out. Earlier today, one of my my favorite digital stopovers posted an article looking back at the worthiest Academy Award winners of the past ten years. As I think I’ve established, I find this sort of thing absolutely irresistable, and, after all, I’m a little preoccupied with considered the cinematic … Continue reading If I were a rich man with a million or two, I’d live in a penthouse in a room with a view
#21 — Chicago (Rob Marshall, 2002) When Rob Marshall was charged with bringing Chicago from the stage to the big screen, it had been years since a musical had achieved significant success at the box office, so there was a … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 00s — Number Twenty-One
Coffee for Two 