While putting together a collection of my film pieces for an upcoming book I included an appendix listing my 1,000 favorite films and videos made between 1895 and the present–features and shorts, live action and animation, narrative and experimental. The point was to cite not the works I consider the most important historically but the ones that still provide me with the most pleasure and edification.
Of course, it’s also a truism that the closer you get to the present, the likelier it is that a favorite will eventually be forgotten. This is no doubt what literary critic Harold Bloom had in mind when he implied that it’s the sifting out of time and history, not critics, that establishes a canon. Yet I believe that the business and the critical discourse combine to do much of the sifting–by making cultural items available or unavailable, valued or devalued. If I had to name all the possible contenders for the best films of 1920 in 2002, the list I’d come up with would have at least as much to say about 2002 as it would about 1920. By the same token, choosing the best movies of 2002 in 2002 entails making wild guesses about what selections might survive until 2084.
It’s a kind of playful and comic encyclopedia of all the things digital video can do to stretch, compress, combine, and otherwise distort human bodies, compiled with neither malice nor anxiety. It unravels mainly in two contrasting spaces. One is a circular work space spotted with people at computers and backed by picture windows overlooking skyscrapers, which the camera glides past in perpetual motion. The other, viewed from a fixed vantage point, is a windowless boxlike chamber resembling both a living room and a bomb shelter, where kitschy objects and members of a nuclear family clustered around a TV set appear, disappear, explode, reappear, and get scrambled in various combinations.
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Y tu mama tambien. Apart from having the best sex scenes of any movie I saw all year, this shrewdly plotted, engagingly acted, and exuberantly directed Mexican comedy by Alfonso Cuaron is a prime example of a non-American movie that beats Hollywood at its own game in terms of energy, craft, and showmanship. Other good examples, all on my list of runners-up are The Cuckoo, The Fast Runner (Atanarjuat), Last Orders, Mostly Martha, Nine Queens, Rabbit-Proof Fence, Secret Ballot, and Time Out. I’d be hard put to come up with eight 2002 Hollywood films that were as entertaining as these, and the same virtues are apparent on a smaller scale in the conventional but brilliantly executed short film by Cuaron included on the Y tu mama tambien DVD, a sex farce entitled You Owe Me One.
The Cat’s Meow. This speculative account of the 1924 death of Thomas Ince aboard the yacht of William Randolph Hearst–who was hosting a party that included Marion Davies, Charlie Chaplin, Elinor Glyn, Margaret Livingston, and Louella Parsons–was a welcome return to form for Peter Bogdanovich, who ironically became more of a pro after he lost his commercial clout in Hollywood a quarter century ago. Derived from an excellent Steven Peros script, this beautifully mounted ensemble period piece proved to have more staying power than Robert Altman’s Gosford Park, perhaps because it has more to say about its characters. The performances of Kirsten Dunst (Davies), Edward Herrmann (Hearst), and Eddie Izzard (Chaplin) are especially impressive, displaying fresh insight into their real-life counterparts. Along with Far From Heaven and 8 Mile, The Cat’s Meow was the best “Hollywood” had to offer in 2002–though it was actually shot in Germany and Greece, for a modest $6 million.
I can think of at least 30 other good reasons for going to see new movies over the last year, and I’ll list them alphabetically and, except for the first ten, which would make up my list of second-best favorites, without ranking.
