BEST IN FILM 2003 - Unfashionable Observations

BEST IN FILM 2003
by Xavier Morales

THE LORD OF THE
RINGS
the return of the king

Peter Jackson's mythical masterpiece allows us to taste a small piece of heaven. The world of wonder and awe that is Middle-Earth can only exist in our heart of hearts, in the dreams of our childhood, in the

hopes of our naked spirituality. Far removed from the desperate nihilism of the post-modern age--replete with its insistence that all values lack final importance--we find this brilliant, almost simplistic tale of a hobbit and his ring, determined to purge his world of an immeasurable evil. Jackson's film takes us back to a time when virtue mattered, when good mattered, when loyalty mattered, when friendship mattered. It is not our world. It is a goal for our world. It is a testament to the mistakes and failures of the modern age. It is a testament to what the present age has lost. Watching The Return of the King is an experience like no other in that it fulfills a need that has been forced to become secretive in our society: that of religion, of spirituality, of mythology. With the victory of science, our truths are no longer derived from myth or religion: they are derived from mathematics, physics, and chemistry. The effect is not so much a more accurate picture of life, as a less wondrous one. We are no longer special beings; we're simply a mass of atoms whirling endlessly in a vacuum of dead matter. The Return of the King manages to take on the nihilism that ensues from the progress of science by giving back to us what we as human beings need: an awe-inspiring story full of magic and sorcerers, mystical creatures, epic battles, great romances, and true friendships. For what is spirituality if not the urge toward this feeling of awe? To be humbled by the possibilities of our dreams: that is spirituality. And this film ultimately gives us the opportunity to experience this lost bit of humanity.

KILL
BILL
vol. 1

Style as substance. This is a proposition that Quentin Tarantino knows well. After Kill Bill, he will be known as one of its foremost proponents, along with fellow auteur David Lynch. With a minimalist plot and a cast of characters you

can count on one hand, Kill Bill, Vol. 1 makes quite sure that the audience never forgets what kind of movie they're watching: A violent movie. A very violent movie. One of the most violent movies ever released by an American movie studio. And Tarantino isn't even apologetic. Why? Because while this movie is indeed about violence, it's not about the kind of violence that strikes fear in our hearts, or confounds our moral sentiments. At least, this is what Tarantino would have us believe, and he does. Instead of shocking us, or horrifying us--as violence properly should--Kill Bill's violence dances with the idea of violence as artform. Tarantino transforms a social evil into an object of admiration by adding a sprinkling of beauty and grace. For if there is one thing that can suspend all of our supposed moral convictions, it is our sense of wonder. A captivated audience is a vulnerable audience: indeed, this is the first precept of all religions. Tarantino manages to exploit this human trait to the fullest degree in this film--a testament to the power of art to dilute our most precious social constructs.

LOST IN
TRANSLATION

Sofia Coppola came into her own in 2003. With her brilliant, subtle drama about two people who share only their sense of hopelessness together, the director of The Virgin Suicides has cemented her reputation as a philosophical visionary bent on exploring the existential crisis attendant to everyday living. Bob is a

depleted soul who wakes up in the morning out of habit more than anything else. Charlotte is a smart, but disillusioned young woman who does not know what to make of the time she has been given. Both are bored with life in the most tragic of senses: nothing titillates them, nothing excites them, and there is nothing to redeem or even justify their existences. When they eventually find each other in the bar of the Tokyo hotel in which they're both staying, they immediately find that they have more in common with each other than appearances alone could ever suggest. In their long, tender conversations in the middle of the night, they are able to relate to each other in a very personal, non-sexual way that ends up rejuvenating their vigor for life. By simply talking and experiencing each other's presence and points of view, they are able to see a wonder about life that was previously hidden from them. Plato once wrote that the unexamined life is not worth living. In a sense, Bob and Charlotte discover this the hard way. But once they do, they find that it is marvelous.

THE SHAPE OF
THINGS

One can always count on Neil LaBute to bring us some of the most twisted morality tales in all of contemporary cinema. The director of the now-classic In the Company of Men explores the ethics of beauty in The Shape of Things--a film about Adam, a nerdy college kid who finds himself in the unlikely

position of having an attractive, sexually-tenacious art-student girlfriend. However, we find that her love for him seems to increase in direct proportion to the alterations made to his appearance, and his very identity. Starting with a simple haircut, moving to a new wardrobe, and eventually even getting a nose job, Adam constantly has to choose between autonomy and connection. Of course, this is only the beginning. Along with Adam's physical evolution, we notice a change in his personality as well: how he treats his friends, what it is that he values, and who he wants to be. In the end, this film represents a stinging indictment of post-modern man's fickle allegiance to moral and ethical systems. LaBute suggests that these allegiances are not so much a product of our convictions, but rather of our options in accord with something as shallow as our appearance. Exposing our obsession with the surface of things, The Shape of Things gives us the year's most intriguing moral dilemma.

28 DAYS
LATER

Danny Boyle's haunting vision of apocalyptic horror is easily the best film of its genre released in the last ten years. Coupling visceral images of an ingenious disease that spreads through blood and saliva, with

the soft pastels of rolling hills kissing the fog of morning, we constant switch between the two jarringly paradoxical emotions of utter terror, and a peace with oneself reminiscent of lazy childhood days spent along lonely river banks with only the tender caress of the sun's rays to keep one company. It is precisely this dichotomy of feeling that sets this film apart from the average fodder of horror movie hijinks. Genuinely frightening, yet beautifully filmed all the same, Boyle's film achieves a kind of transcendence found in the image of a thundercloud: beauty and terror cease at once to be firmly delineated.

xx/xy

Austin Chick's xx/xy is a paean to life's youthful exuberance--to that spirit of carefree love and experimentation that characterizes the Dionysian spirit. Of course, in doing this, the movie alienates and indeed indicts the adult world of making a living, paying the bills, and finding a soul-mate with whom to settle down. The suggestion is that life should not

be artificially constrained by the order of the adult world when its natural instinct is to jump headfirst into the world of chaos and sexual abandon. Why should growing up involve such sacrifice? Nietzsche claimed that the Dionysian spirit represented the death of individuation because of its insistence on becoming one with the orgiastic revel; the Dionysian represented a loss of self in the frenzy of group experience, and other forms of excessive behavior. By contrast, the Apollonian spirit represented order and illuminating clarity--characteristics from which a consistent sense of self could be properly ascertained. xx/xy gives us a harrowing modern picture of both of these dispositions, ultimately highlighting the inherent tension for the individual faced with a choice between such polar opposites. However, the film does not treat the issues with such simple dichotomies. Through the complex characters of Coles and Sam, we are ultimately left to question whether the Dionysian spirit cannot also describe an authentic self. Great questions from a brutally honest film.

THE STATION
AGENT

Thomas McCarthy's sweet little film about a dwarf and his search for peace and quiet is perhaps one of the most subtle comedies to grace the big screen in years. This movie isn't funny because it sets out to be funny. It's funny because life's little ripples are funny to begin with. Utilizing a much-

welcomed purist spirit, the film charms us with things left unsaid, but understood; with shrugs and turns of the head that speak more eloquently than words could ever manage. With a wonderfully diverse cast of characters, The Station Agent proves that friendship is as much a shot in the dark as any other human endeavor. Indeed, one doesn't even need to be playing the game in order to win. Life has a way of making things happen, of rolling right along with or without our participation. We cannot lock ourselves off from life in any meaningful way, for whether we like it or not, the people around us, in living their lives, will sweep us back into the torrent of living. And that's not such a bad thing.

X2:
X-MEN UNITED

So this is what a summer blockbuster is supposed to be like. Unlike Ang Lee's failed attempt at a brainiac version of The Hulk, Bryan Singer's X2: X-Men United gives us the cool superhero characters (Pyro, Storm, Cyclops, Wolverine, Magneto--what more can one ask for?), the dazzling special

effects (Nightcrawler's superb entry into the movie franchise, and the White House, cannot be easily forgotten), and a great good-versus-evil story that ends with one of the most harrowing acts of selfless love to grace the screen this year. X2 is 2003's Spider-Man, chock-full of explosive energy, amazingly creative personalities, and an emotional core to hold it all together. This is one of the rare cases where the sequel is indeed much better than the original.

AMERICAN
SPLENDOR

Harvey Pekar is a small, unhappy man with a small, unhappy life. As boring and downright dreadful as his everyday existence is, however, it's nothing short of riotous comedy. Harvey Pekar recognizes this, and commissions his comic-book friend Robert Crumb to illustrate his thoughts on the mundaneness of his life in a

comic book by the name of "American Splendor." What sets Harvey Pekar apart from the average scrooge is that he is able to laugh at himself and his situation in life. It is no matter that he's overweight and not particularly attractive, or that he's losing his voice, or that he's losing his hair, or that he has a dead-end job as a file clerk at a Veteran's hospital in Cleveland. All of these things surely add up to a pretty crappy life. But Pekar takes it in stride by publishing his almost absurdist life of discontentment in comic-book form, as if to say to life, "Bring it on." Realizing that things simply cannot get any worse for him, Pekar paradoxically finds a kind of freedom from his misery by embracing it as a definition of his very identity. He embraces the notion of amor fati, or love of fate--an unabashed affirmation of life, come what may. In the end, we learn that life's splendor lies not in its sheer content, but rather in our responses to it.

BAD
SANTA

Terry Zwigoff has given us some of the funniest, warmest, and bitterly sarcastic movies of the last ten years. Beginning with the feature-length documentary Crumb, about the bizarre life of comic-book author Robert Crumb, and continuing his success with the unforgettable Ghost World, about a pair of disillusioned

high school graduates who have nothing but witty, spiteful in-jokes for those they meet, Zwigoff has made a name for himself as the miscreant's filmmaker. In Bad Santa, Zwigoff takes the dry humor to a whole new level. Giving one of the best performances of the year, Billy Bob Thornton stars as the bad Santa--a nihilistic, sometimes-suicidal version of the Grinch who stole Christmas. Of course, like all of Zwigoff's films, Bad Santa doesn't merely start and end with the dry wit. Rather, the sarcasm is shown to mask vulnerability, tenderness, and genuine emotion. The Thornton character is not the monster he projects himself to be. When he befriends an introverted 8-year-old boy, we get a glimpse of the bad Santa's true self. Nietzsche once wrote that compassion for the friend should conceal itself under a hard shell, and you should be able to break a tooth on it. "That way it will have delicacy and sweetness." Such delicate sweetness is found in Thornton's character through his friendship with the kid--one of the most disarming relationships in film this year.

Unfashionable Observations by Xavier Morales � 2004