Welcome to the third instalment of the Noughts Report. A sequel to 90s All Over Me, each entry revisits a year in film from the 2000s, highlighting movies big and small and the careers and genres and trends that ignited or flamed out along the way. This attempted kaleidoscope is 100% subjective and AI-free, so if I bag or barely mention a film you love, or orate at length or heap praise upon a film you loathe, I apologise.
Two pieces into the Noughts Report, I’m very conscious how subjective this series is, in terms of the films I spotlight vs. those mentioned briefly, the order in which I tackle each year, and what rabbit holes I choose to go down. I’m sure my last piece was very frustrating for someone whose favourite film of 2002 was The Hours or Chicago—both excellent, to be clear—to see them dealt with perfunctorily while paragraphs were expended on Dragonfly and Hollywood Ending.
In structuring this third instalment, I strategically chose to kick off with Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, the awards season and box office victor of 2003, in hope of currying favour upfront. However, this plan may backfire, because I really don’t care for this film. I applaud Peter Jackson and company for the mammoth accomplishment of landing this epic trilogy, of making it outside Hollywood without compromise, and telling it across three works as per Tolkien’s novels. Return of the King is Act Three, paying off the massive story and its many threads, but 3+ hours of payoff without much modulation isn’t dramatically satisfying. Fellowship had table-setting, world-building, discovery, charm, wit, wonder, awe. The Two Towers had more world-building, palace politics, intrigue, texture, ratcheting of stakes. Return of the King has battles and denouements, and by film’s close, I have serious battle and denouement fatigue.
On the flip side, I adore Daredevil, a dreadful, stupid film of questionable coherence. In fairness, I haven’t put that adoration to the test since the early 2010s, and likely won’t soon, but for whatever reason Mark Steven Johnson’s adaptation of Marvel Comics’ blind, street-level vigilante hit enough pleasure centres that I don’t care that it contradicts itself on a scene-to-scene basis, that some of the filmmaking is shoddy, that its soundtrack is smothered in Goth metal. I like the four lead performances, with Colin Farrell in particular showing more spark here than he would in the generic SWAT and The Recruit; I enjoy Graeme Revell’s score; I like the central romance between hero and anti-heroine, indebted as it is to Batman Returns, and so on.
Daredevil was one of three movies based on Marvel properties released this year, cementing superheroes as new coin of the realm and Marvel—in the wake of 2002’s Spider-Man—as the main tap for IP. Releases were not yet interconnected, so each film is its own beast. Where Daredevil was a bit of a bounce, X2: X-Men United was a success. Time has been mixed on this wildly uneven franchise and director Bryan Singer has torched much goodwill, but there’s plenty to appreciate about how X2 builds out its world, juggles its ensemble, and cleanly integrates its digital effects.
Ang Lee’s Hulk was less audience-friendly, boldly splicing Greek tragedy and heightened Universal Monster pathos into its comic book storytelling: entirely apt for a character like the Hulk, but a tad too arch for mainstream punters. Nonetheless, I love the swings Lee’s movie takes and would rank it in the top tier of the genre. There was also an undeniable kick seeing Antipodean export Eric Bana in lead—and Jackman in the X-Men movies, though familiarity would breed some contempt—and as a lifelong Jennifer Connelly fan I appreciated her high-profile run post-A Beautiful Mind. From a very different corner of comics, American Splendor translated the autobiographical work of Harvey Pekar to screen with humour, heart, and rough edges intact.
Outside Return of the King and X2, the most anticipated sequels of 2003 were The Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions. Perhaps because I don’t regard The Matrix as sacrosanct, I have time for Reloaded and its philosophical babble, its undeniable action sequences, and its bent towards breaking the toy. Revolutions, in contrast, suffers the same issue as Return of the King: all spectacle and battles and payoff to the point of fatigue.
The animated compilation The Animatrix seems to be held in more affection than either Matrix sequel; not my bag, but more power to anyone who loves those mini-movies. The best-known of that anthology, ‘Final Flight of the Osiris’, screened before Dreamcatcher, a sci-fi/horror/buddy comedy-drama directed by Lawrence Kasdan, scripted by William Goldman, from a novel by Stephen King, a triptych of talent disproportionate to the tonal trainwreck it bequeathed.
Lots of sequels dominated the multiplexes, with varying degrees of critical and commercial success. I like Lara Croft: Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life and 2 Fast 2 Furious more than their predecessors, and like Bad Boys 2, Charlies Angels: Full Throttle, and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines much less than their predecessors. Terminator 3 especially suffers from the absence of creator James Cameron’s artful commercial aesthetic, but is solid enough under Breakdown director Jonathan Mostow’s watch and sits atop the mountain of ropier Terminator sequels and prequels that followed.
Terminator 3 was Arnold Schwarzenegger’s last film of the decade; he’d return to screens in the 2010s following his sojourn into state politics. While it’s not anomalous for major stars to clock out at the height of their fame, whether permanently (Grace Kelly marrying into monarchy) or temporarily (Jimmy Stewart going to war), it’s kind of crazy that two of the biggest stars of the 90s, Mel Gibson and Schwarzenegger, would hang up their leading man spurs within a year of each other.
Two potential franchise-starters, both period adventures, were released in 2003: LXG: League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl. One left standing. Whilst the X-Men series has peaks and valleys, the Pirates sequels experienced an incremental and then steady decline in quality. The first remains a banger though, its many gambles—throwing a ton of money at a pirate film, a Disney theme park adaptation, a movie headlined by a weird Johnny Depp—paying off considerably.
LXG—another comic book adaptation, from no less than an Alan Moore source—did not connect and led to two retirements in the form of Blade director Stephen Norrington, done after two feature films, and disgruntled star Sean Connery. It’s a serviceable popcorn film, albeit rather flat-feeling despite all its ornamentation, and ultimately wastes its great premise—basically the Avengers with heroes and villains of Victorian era literature, e.g. Allan Quartermain, Mina Harker, Mr Hyde, the Invisible Man—confirming Alan Moore’s worst suspicions about Hollywood dumbing down comic book material, especially his.
Another type of event film was Kill Bill, Volume 1, the return of Quentin Tarantino to theatres six years after his third film, Jackie Brown. The film marked a reinvention and expansion of sorts for Tarantino, the student-magpie-bricoleur pulling all-new tricks out of his metaphorical bag: still predisposed to violence, well-honed expletive-laden dialogue, and pop culture bricolage, but no longer bound to the milieu of crime films set in and around the Los Angeles area, and with a significantly expanded visual vocabulary and knack for staging impressive set pieces. The film and its sequel also contain perhaps Uma Thurman’s best on-screen work as the titular Bill Killer.
Thurman also appears in a film I neglected to discuss from 2001: Richard Linklater’s Tape, opposite then-husband Ethan Hawke and Robert Sean Leonard. Based on a play, this three-hander set within the confines of a motel room and shot on video feels very much like an acting and technical exercise for its four key creatives. These qualities timestamp the movie, but also give it a certain brute urgency.
Among the Tarantino imitators that emerged in the wake of Pulp Fiction, Troy Duffy was one of the most obnoxious; his movie The Boondock Saints is basically the version of a Tarantino movie that a 12-year old boy who’d never seen a Tarantino movie would conjure. The release of documentary Overnight only piled on the ignominy, and lest that sound cruel, this behind-the-scenes record of Duffy’s spiralling ego after being plucked from obscurity to make The Boondock Saints shows him to be thoroughly deserving of ignominy.
That deleterious fate has eluded Tommy Wisseau, who has profiteered considerably off the cult adoration of The Room, which combines overripe Tennessee Williams melodrama, skin flick, and dreadful filmmaking and acting. I enjoyed my single communal viewing of the grimly fascinating film, with a game crowd in its Rocky Horror-esque element, but that was enough. Like The Boondock Saints, the making-of—enshrined in co-star Greg Sistero’s memoir and James Franco’s adaptation The Disaster Artist—is much more interesting.
Tarantino’s pal and past & future collaborator, multi-hyphenate Robert Rodriguez, delivered two new movies, both sequels, in 2003. Spy Kids 3D: Game Over feels cheaper and more threadbare than its predecessors, but it does afford the pleasure of Sylvester Stallone, as the antagonist, donning a range of silly disguises.
Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Rodriguez’s sequel to El Mariachi and Desperado, goes bigger than its predecessors, but never quite big or bold enough to justify its Sergio Leone-emulating title. In particular, the final third underwhelms when it should soar. Over in Japan, Takashi Kitano would revive Zatoichi—a Japanese movie folk hero comparable to the Mariachi or Man with no Name, portrayed by Shintaro Katsu across 26 feature films and 100 episodes of television over almost three decades—in the very entertaining Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman.
The prospect of Tom Cruise as a samurai provoked audience giggles whenever I saw The Last Samurai’s trailer play before another feature, as did the moment in the film when Cruise first appears in samurai regalia. Fortunately, Cruise does not play “the last” samurai, but rather a Yankee soldier in Japan who bears witness to the end of Feudal Japan. The titular samurai is thoughtfully essayed by Ken Watanabe in his international breakthrough role, with Cruise—as earnest, committed, and laser-focused as ever—in the “Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves” role as audience avatar (or “Sam Worthington as audience avatar who’s an avatar in Avatar” role).
Director Edward Zwick—best known for large-scale period and military dramas like Glory, Legends of the Fall, and Courage Under Fire—reminisces in his highly readable autobiography how Cruise’s presence and support made this the most comfortable and well-resourced production he’s ever worked on, and the results are certainly on screen in the top-tier production value and combat sequences.
The year’s two best films were also historical: Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World and Open Range. The former—a Napoleonic War-era naval adventure featuring Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany as Aubrey and Maturin, heroes of Patrick O’Brien’s voluminous series of novels—I liked very much on release, and with each passing year I increasingly appreciate its deft handling of tone and exquisite craft.
That the gifted Peter Weir would deliver an excellent film should be little surprise; however, his disposition towards the material—compared to, say, a more obvious match like Ridley Scott—is in retrospect surprising: the earliest setting of a Weir film prior had been 1900 (Picnic at Hanging Rock), he’d not staged combat scenes since Gallipoli, and his American productions of the past twenty years were all contemporary or-near contemporary and mostly preoccupied with American characters (the odd hulking Shrek-like Frenchman aside) and settings. Master and Commander would be Weir’s penultimate feature.
In contrast, Kevin Costner had proven an acolyte of the Western as actor (Silverado, Wyatt Earp) and actor-director (Dances with Wolves). Open Range, his third directorial effort, is more intimate in setting and scope than Dances with Wolves and The Postman, and here he takes co-lead and proves a generous co-star to Robert Duvall. The pair play free grazers who fall afoul of Michael Gambon’s land baron and fight back when their friend is brutally beaten. The film is luxuriously paced but never dull, gorgeously shot, and adds realistic wrinkles and curveballs to the shootout finale, making it muddier and scrappier than the likes of John Sturges would cook up (with no disrespect to John Sturges).
Though not quite in the same league, I’m also fond of Ron Howard’s Western The Missing, where Cate Blanchett enlists her estranged father Tommy Lee Jones to locate her abducted daughter. This is one of those Howard titles from the decade I find much more interesting than his Oscar-minted A Beautiful Mind or blockbusting Dan Brown adaptations. The material affords Howard opportunity to tap into Ransom and Backdraft mode and muster some tense action sequences, though this is a much more self-serious work.
An Antipodean bushranger Western was the marquee local release of 2003: Gregor Jordan’s Ned Kelly, the most reverential and earnest filmic take on the Kelly legend. It recounts outlaw Kelly’s life from his earliest police altercation—as a teenager wrongfully accused of theft—to the iconic last stand at Glenrowan. Jordan, screenwriter John Michael McDonagh—later writer-director of The Guard and Calvary—and lead Heath Ledger cast Kelly as anti-establishment class warrior, bestowing quasi-sainthood on him and depicting the law & affluent in one-dimensional, predominantly unflattering lights; indeed, several of the film’s men of influence fail to satisfy their wives, who turn to the outlaws for extramarital excitement.
The film’s tone is quite different from the caustic temperament of McDonagh’s later work, and indeed Jordan’s earlier work: Two Hands and Buffalo Soldiers were small, spunky, scrappy movies, whilst Ned Kelly more closely resembles ornate, respectable prestige fare. Nonetheless, as far as ornate, respectable prestige fare goes, it’s skilfully made, handsomely composed, and arguably scratched an itch for a sincere, generously budgeted, relatively authentic treatment of the material starring an A-list Australian talent; Justin Kurzel’s later True History of the Kelly Gang, shorn of this burden, had license to go weird.
The role of Kelly proves a nexus point for various aspects of Ledger’s star persona: young Australian icon, teen heartthrob and matinee idol (Ten Things I Hate About You), new crim on the block (Two Hands), lead of historical dramas and adventures (The Patriot, A Knight’s Tale, The Four Feathers), misspent youth (Candy), counter-culture rebel (Lords of Dogtown, I’m Not There), oppressed and ostracized tragic hero (Brokeback Mountain), and gone too soon.
Much as 1985’s earnest Burke & Wills, about the doomed Australian explorers, was shadowed by a parasitic comedy take (Wills & Burke) released the same year, so too was Ned Kelly shadowed by Abe Forsythe’s Ned, released two months later. Ned was one of a cabal of daggy, brightly lit, low-budget theatrically-released Australian comedies in 2003, alongside The Wannabes (shudder), Fat Pizza (shudder), Take-away, The Honourable Wally Norman, Danny Deckchair, and You Can’t Stop the Murders. Whilst there was also a pretty good one in Bad Eggs—a witty, well-executed comedy set in the Victorian Police force—as a rule it’s probably best for the nation’s filmic repute that there aren’t half a dozen annually-released daggy, brightly lit, low-budget comedies anymore.
Forsythe's later, tonally crafty Down Under showed him to be an adroit filmmaker; such evidence is thinner in Ned—among Kelly comedies, Yahoo Serious’ Reckless Kelly is a better investment—and I don’t find the film especially funny, but I tip my hat (or Ned Kelly-esque helmet) to its DIY execution and game cast.
Another Australian biopic of 2003 was Swimming Upstream, based on the autobiographical screenplay by former swimmer Tony Fingleton (who also scripted, believe it or not, Drop Dead Fred). The film recounts Tony’s training as a competitive swimmer under his volatile father (Geoffrey Rush, also in Ned Kelly) and the rift this creates with his swimming partner and sibling. Director Russell Mulcahy curbs the excessive stylistic tendencies he’s renowned for (see Razorback, Highlander), deploying his visual skill set to service and bolster the storytelling. It’s a familiar-feeling sports biopic, but also an effective portrait of alcoholism and domestic abuse.
Paradise Found—an Australian-European co-production shot in Queensland and the Czech Republic about French painter Paul Gauguin—is also a very familiar-feeling biopic despite its dual timeline structure, going through tried and tested tropes as Gauguin—well-played by a not-especially-chameleonic Kiefer Sutherland, logging the gig between seasons of 24—faces and triumphs over adversity, rinse and repeat. Director Mario Andreacchio, whose career spans Ozploitation and talking animal movies, keeps the visuals clean and colourful and the storytelling economical, but it’s paint by numbers.
I think I can, with clean conscience, log a telemovie or miniseries once or twice per instalment, so I’ll shout out Bruce Beresford’s HBO telemovie And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself. Based on true events, Antonio Banderas plays Pancho Villa, a general in the Mexican Revolution who goes to Hollywood to chronicle his freedom-fighting exploits, culminating in a 1914 film (now lost) titled The Life of General Villa, produced by D.W. Griffith one year before The Birth of a Nation and starring Villa as himself.
And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself is precisely the sort of idiosyncratic, niche of subject, tonally specific, true-ish story, generously-budgeted-for-television, marquee-ish star and director-driven oddity that would not exist at the time outside of HBO. And like most HBO telemovies of a certain vintage, for all the sharpness of its screenplay and Beresford’s trademark care and clarity of direction, it looks, feels, moves, and is lit, paced, and emphatically scored like a telemovie, a symptom of the tech used, production constraints, and baked-in conventions of the medium. A film would have better served the material, but on the flip side I cannot imagine a film of this tale making much sense economically.
Side note: The Night We Called It a Day, depicting Frank Sinatra’s (import Dennis Hopper) disastrous Australian tour, was dubbed “the worst directed Australian film ever” by Beresford in his book Josh Hartnett definitely wants to do this… True stories from a life in the screen trade. I’d disagree, but it’s not a particularly memorable film.
Other overseas works from Australian directors included It Runs in the Family, an amiable comedy-drama from Fred Schepisi featuring three generations of the Douglas family on screen (Michael, Kirk, Cameron; not Kirk Cameron), and P. J. Hogan’s Peter Pan, a likeable live-action take on the story, with no wrinkles to the formula like Peter Pan growing up (Hook) or pirates singing Kurt Cobain’s ‘Nevermind’ just because (Pan).
From Australian directors on home turf came two solid but overrated flicks—Japanese Story, Gettin’ Square—and two very good and underrated flicks, Visitors and Alexandra’s Project. The former was the final feature from Richard Franklin, the skilled Antipodean craftsman of Hitchcock homages (Patrick, Roadgames) and sequels (Psycho II), returning to the genre after his 90s stage adaptations Hotel Sorrento and Brilliant Lies. The latter, from Rolf De Heer, sees a disrespected, put-upon wife (Helen Buday) enacting retribution upon her husband (Gary Sweet) via videotape. Both films are largely bound to single locations, with Franklin and De Heer effectively turning the screws within their stories’ confines.
Another Antipodean thriller, Perfect Strangers, transplants Hollywood thrills to gnarly New Zealand terrain. In this respect and in its casting of Sam Neill, the movie echoes Dead Calm, albeit with Neil essaying the Billy Zane adversarial role here, opposite Rachel Blake’s heroine. Veteran director Phillip Avalon’s Liquid Bridge is soapy and cliched, but its surfing scenes (Avalon’s forte) are impressive. Finally, zombie horror comedy Undead was an impressive threadbare-budget technical accomplishment from the Spierig Brothers, but I cannot imagine it’s aged like fine wine.
Other genre titles from 2003 include Rob Zombie’s debut House of 1000 Corpses, the impressive-until-it’s-not French thriller High Tension, Stuart Gordon’s nasty King of the Ants, the ugly remake of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, sequels Beyond Re-Animator and Final Destination 2, IP team-up Freddy vs. Jason, shark thriller Open Water, rural horror Wrong Turn, franchise-starter Underworld, the starry Gothika—with a pedigree cast (Halle Berry, Penelope Cruz, Robert Downey Jnr.) and import director (Matthieu Kassovitz) but little of interest—and House of the Dead, the notorious first video game adaptation from Uwe Boll.
My very brief mention of Sympathy for Mr Vengeance in my previous piece did not do justice to how enamoured I was with that film and with Chan-Wook Park’s work throughout this decade. Oldboy, the second in the South Korean director’s Vengeance trilogy, sees a man mysteriously abducted and imprisoned in a hotel room for 15 years; on his equally mysterious release, he seeks to find the culprit. While many of the directors I admired at this time had crossed over into their career twilight—though some were still killing it, like De Palma with Femme Fatale—here was a brand-spanking new, stylish, muscular director in his prime that I could follow from film to film, and I was fully onboard. With the passage of time my enthusiasm for Park has dimmed, but Oldboy remains electric, morally discomforting, and formally ravishing.
Other excellent works from South Korea that year were Memories of Murder, one of director Bong Joon Ho and star Song Kang-Ho’s four acclaimed collaborations, and A Tale of Two Sisters, a chiller from another talented filmmaker, Kim Jee-woon (later of A Bittersweet Life and The Good, the Bad, the Weird).
From Thailand that year hailed Ong Bak, introducing a new martial arts star in Tony Jaa. In an exercise of premature canonisation, marketing for Ong Bak hailed Jaa in the genealogy of Bruce Lee, Jet Li, and Jackie Chan, and in seeming counter-response to the Matrix sequels heralded the film for having “No safety nets … no computer graphics … no strings attached”.
Jaa’s ascent would take a dent subsequently when he abandoned production on the Ong Bank sequels to go wandering in the forest, and he’d end up playing sixth fiddle to Vin Diesel in XXX: Return of Xander Cage. But he’s an undeniable specimen here, and his martial arts movie brethren weren’t delivering their finest works in 2003: Cradle 2 the Grave, The Medallion, Shanghai Knights (not a patch on the original), and Bulletproof Monk among them. John Woo also cashed the proverbial with Paycheck, his final Hollywood feature for a lengthy spell.
The perils of Hollywood are poignantly dramatized in Pauly Shore is Dead, which sits alongside A Star is Born in the pantheon of films about the industry chewing up and spitting out its own. I jest, but I have a soft spot for MTV’s finest Weasel and love that he wrote, produced, directed, and starred in this lower-budget venture, reclaiming the joke and no doubt exorcising some demons in the process.
Hollywood Homicide is a more benign product, a gentle ribbing of Hollywood law enforcers and their side hustles from Ron Shelton, in the wake of his less benevolent LA-set police drama Dark Blue. Much as Shelton’s sports comedies dwell on the peculiarities of athletes and sports culture and business, so too does Hollywood Homicide linger on its subjects’ eccentricities. The film pairs Harrison Ford and Josh Hartnett; though the latter has proven a resilient screen presence, the imbalance here is striking, even with Ford in relatively sleepy mode.
Other 2003 comedy releases included Scary Movie 3, with David Zucker take the reins and aiming potshots at Signs and J-Horror; the third American Pie film, American Wedding; Bruce Almighty, a return to (mediocre) comedy for Jim Carrey and director Tom Shadyac after The Majestic and Dragonfly respectively; Sandler vs. Nicholson in Anger Management; Christopher Guest’s folk music mockumentary A Mighty Wind; Johnny English, the first of Rowan Atkinson’s amiable spy comedy series; Duplex, one of Danny DeVito’s morbid comedies, albeit less antic than Death to Smoochy; the Farrelly Bros’ latest sweet-gross concoction, Stuck on You; Frat Pack breakout Old School; Steve Martin and Queen Latifah in Bringing Down the House, with an enjoyably sleazy Eugene Levy in support; unfunny flight attendant comedy A View from the Top; and from France a comedic gem in Tais Tois, or Ruby & Quentin, a return to mismatched fugitives terrain from Les Fugitivs director Francis Veber, with Gerard Depardieu once again on the lam, here alongside Jean Reno. There’s also a pair of mediocre Eddie Murphy comedies, Daddy Day Care and Haunted Mansion, the latter Disney’s second (and less successful) theme park adaptation of 2003.
Though I’m not gaga for any of these titles, there’s a quintet of films that have proven beloved generationally, three of them as Christmas staples: Bad Santa, Love Actually, Elf, School of Rock, and Freaky Friday. None my particular flavour, but I recognise their appeal and salute any film that manages to worm its way deep into the culture.
Rom-coms of the year included How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, A Guy Thing, and Something’s Gotta Give, the latter cementing Nancy Meyers’ brand of polished, fashionably-ornamented, consumerist fantasy romantic comedy. Romantic comedies with blacker hearts that year were Intolerable Cruelty—an off-brand Coen Bros film that has its moments—and French film Love Me if You Dare, which tips from entertaining into exasperating at a certain juncture but was a great showcase for the rising Marion Cotillard.
Martin Brest’s Gigli, pairing Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, was reviled at the time for its great expense, behind-the-scenes hijinks, tabloid baggage, fluid approach to lesbianism, and questionable portrait of disability. Unlike Town & Country, another costly comedy turkey (not that turkey), it’s at least entertaining. Gigli was Brest’s final film, ignobly capping a career that had yielded action-comedy classics (Beverly Hills Cop, Midnight Run) and luxuriously-paced, overly saccharine, but agreeably weird dramas (Scent of a Woman, Meet Joe Black).
Brest was not the only veteran director to deliver his final work in 2003; also lodging their last features were Alan Parker with the morally ambivalent drama The Life of David Gale and Mike Hodges with low-key revenge thriller I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead. Robert Altman filed his penultimate work with The Company—an observational drama about the Joffrey Ballet steered into existence by star, co-producer, story creator, and former dancer Neve Campbell—as did Robert Benton with The Human Stain.
Bernardo Bertolucci penultimate film The Dreamers was also a 2003 release. It’s a swoony, erotic romance set against the French cinematheque and student scenes of the 1960s, intoxicated on both its three young stars and vintage movies. Like Love Me if You Dare, it minted a striking new talent in Eva Green. A more mainstream but equally cinephilic romance is Down with Love, Peyton Reed’s sly throwback to Rock Hudson/Doris Day-led studio rom-coms featuring Ewan McGregor and Renee Zellwegger.
Among other late works, William Friedkin issued gritty survival thriller The Hunted, while Mike Nichols wrangled Tony Kushner’s brilliant two-part stage work Angels in America to television in a tremendous HBO miniseries, with an excellent cast including Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson, Mary Louise-Parker, Patrick Wilson, and Jeffrey Wright. While I’d love to see original stage star Ron Liebman’s version of Roy Cohn onscreen, Al Pacino’s no slouch and offers juicy glazed ham playing liberal America’s nemesis. Liebman, who I hold in esteem for his work in trashy 90s soap Central Park West, shows up in character parts throughout the decade, e.g. 2002’s Auto Focus and next year’s Garden State.
Side bar: Here’s a third and final piece of television for good measure: The Second Coming, a very fine, provocative British two-parter pairing Christopher Eccleston and writer Russell T. Davies before their celebrated but contentious collaboration on Doctor Who.
Clint Eastwood and Woody Allen, nowhere near done, would release Anything Else and Mystic River and then go on to make another 16 movies apiece, putting young layabout whippersnappers like Quentin Tarantino, yet to crack his mythical 10, to shame. Tarantino, incidentally, loves Anything Else, an opinion I don’t share despite my documented appreciation of Allen. Mystic River would win both Sean Penn and Tim Robbins acting Oscars—though Kevin Bacon’s performance is superior to both—and its critical and commercial success would unburden Eastwood, for good or ill, from having to routinely headline thriller and action assignments to grease the wheels to make more dramatic fare.
Robbins delivered much better work alongside an equally strong Samantha Morton in dystopian sci-fi romance Code 46. I’m aware that ‘dystopian sci-fi romance’ evokes memories of Divergent and Hunger Games, but that’s certainly not the flavour here. Director Michael Winterbottom’s approach is smartly low-fi, utilising existing architecture and settings and augmenting slightly through production design to convey a day-after-tomorrow future milieu.
Anything Else and Mystic River were both major studio releases. To harp on a theme I’ve noted before and will again … whilst the gravitational centre of Hollywood was beginning to shift towards fantastical franchises and IP like Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter and superheroes—with bigger expenditure yielding bigger profits, but also taking funds and oxygen from smaller productions—there was still solid mid-budget studio fare across a variety of genres feeding a healthy ecosystem.
To illustrate: I’ve already mentioned comedies like Bringing Down the House and Old School, rom-coms like How to Lose a Guy and Something’s Gotta Give, actioners with import stars like Cradle 2 the Grave and Shanghai Knights. Add to that dramas like Mona Lisa Smile and Matchstick Men, thrillers like Identity and Out of Time, remakes like The Italian Job, actioners with Anglo musclemen like A Man Apart and The Rundown, sci-fi movies like The Core, crime movies like Confidence, war movies like Tears of the Sun, melodramas like Beyond Borders and Seabiscuit. Some great, some good, some not so good, and some curdling the formula for all with big star salaries disproportionate to their commercial appeal, e.g. Tears of the Sun.
Ominously, the year also saw the last releases drawn from John Grisham novels (barring Christmas with the Cranks) and Michael Crichton novels (barring Jurassic Park sequels), Runaway Jury and Timeline, after those authors had provided a bountiful well of source material throughout the 1990s. The former was Gene Hackman’s penultimate film, the latter Richard Donner’s penultimate film. Both are likeably middle-of-the-road.
After her barnstorming 2001, Nicole Kidman could be seen across films of different scales, operating on different wavelengths: the aforementioned The Human Stain, Anthony Minghella’s epic Cold Mountain—very big and loud and quite disappointing from Minghella following the exquisite The English Patient and finely-honed The Talented Mr Ripley—and Lars Von Trier’s effective but characteristically nihilistic Yankee-baiting Dogville.
Two of the best projects Kidman circled in this period did not pan out with her involvement: the previous year’s Panic Room, and In the Cut. It feels like each instalment in this series highlights a seeming last gasp of the erotic thriller (see Original Sin 2001, Unfaithful 2002), so we’ll see in 2004 if In the Cut was a definite or indefinite last gasp. Either way, Jane Campion’s thriller—in which an against-type Meg Ryan is a witness to a crime and uncertain if Mark Ruffallo’s beguiling policeman is the killer—is textured and stylish and rich on a vibes level, if at times academic in its symbolism and messaging. Although the denouement of its central mystery ultimately feels obvious, that does not diminish the overall work.
Sylvia Plath is another character Kidman could feasibly have portrayed; as it stands, that assignment went to Gwyneth Paltrow, falling for Daniel Craig’s Ted Hughes in Sylvia, a good film that doesn’t quite do justice to its subject. Another tragic figure, Aileen Wuornos, was portrayed by Charlize Theron in Patty Jenkins’ Monster: a transformative, deservedly awards-minted performance.
Scarlett Johansson also made an impression in both Girl with a Pearl Earring, as the muse inspiring Vermeer’s (Colin Firth) masterwork, and Lost in Translation. Sofia Coppola’s previous film The Virgin Suicides focused empathetically on young women’s isolation and oppression in American suburbia; Lost in Translation, unfolding in high-tech, neon-lit Tokyo and soaking in its eccentricities with anthropological curiosity, is equally empathetic to the alienated and gilded-caged, here an unhappy newlywed (Johansson) and a slumming celebrity making bank shooting a liquor commercial (Bill Murray). This is a special one; Coppola is clearly a Murray acolyte, bequeathing him a feast of a role, and the actor is on fire and energised by the material.
Tokyo Godfathers, one of a too-small handful of anime films from Satoshi Kon, also melds East and West, adapting the John Wayne classic 3 Godfathers with hobos who find a baby on Christmas Eve. From the Warner Bros lot, meanwhile, Joe Dante’s live-action/animation hybrid Looney Tunes: Back in Action pairs Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Brendan Fraser, and Jenna Elfman on a mission to save Timothy Dalton’s suave James Bond-esque actor-spy from Steve Martin’s Bill Gates-esque evil genius. I wouldn’t say hilarity ensues, but it’s much better than the understandably yet incredulously more-loved Space Jam, and Dante has a handful of opportunities to channel his creative and cinephile juices. The Brown Bunny, Vincent Gallo’s pretentious vanity project, is no relation to Bugs.
Speaking of the Warner Bros lot, two very different directors forever linked by their contrasting gigs on the Batman franchise, Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher, both released new movies. There’s a saying—not always borne out, but I like it anyway—that every director’s new film is in some way a reaction to their last film. That’s certainly the case with Burton’s whimsical Big Fish, a very different animal to Planet of the Apes. This tale about tall tales sees Burton on more tried and tested ground, and whilst not as special as it could or should be, it’s much more watchable than Apes.
In Schumacher’s case, it’s arguable every film after Batman & Robin was a reaction to Batman & Robin: 8mm, Flawless, Tigerland, Bad Company, and Phone Booth are all lower-budgeted, actor-orientated rather than toy- and hardware-focused, shot on locations rather than soundstages, and share a certain sweatiness, a desperation to please by displeasing studio brass, to ricochet as hard and far as possible from that reviled 1997 production. That trend continues with Veronica Guerin, the downbeat true story of a journalist (Cate Blanchett) slain while investigating the Irish drug trade.
Blanchett would have more fun than Veronica Guerin and The Missing on Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee & Cigarettes, an anthology of black & white shorts with celebrity duos and trios discussing those titular vices. The segment starring Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan as distant relations makes for especially uncomfortable comedy.
Some other uncomfortable films, albeit without any comedic sheen, are 21 Grams, Young Adam, House of Sand and Fog, Shattered Glass, and docudrama Touching the Void. All good, some very good; all skilfully made and acted, some very much capital A Acted; and all films that will elicit cringing and flinching and squirming and other physical reactions.
I don’t remember a single thing about thriller Quicksand, despite starring two exceptional Michaels in Keaton and Caine, nor historical drama The Reckoning, despite reading and liking its source novel, Barry Unsworth’s Morality Play. I remember James Spader sci-fi vehicle Alien Hunter, though it’s fairly forgettable, and Luther, about the titular reformer, despite my mild aversion to Joseph Fiennes outside some very select roles. Secondhand Lions, a small, sweet film about Michael Caine and Robert Duvall caring for grandchild/grandnephew Haley Joel Osmont one summer vacation, was a low-key release but is better remembered than I would have thought, based on conversations I’ve had with admirers in recent years.
I mentioned Tais Toi, Love Me if You Dare, and The Dreamers earlier, and I’ll close with one French-adjacent and three French titles: Le Divorce, a Parisian-set romance/comedy/drama (I don’t recall where the stress lands) from the Merchant-Ivory team; the enigmatic Swimming Pool from the oft-intriguing Francois Ozon, with excellent performances from Charlotte Rampling and Ludivine Sagnier; three-hander Nathalie, in which Fanny Ardant believes Emmanuelle Beart is having an affair with husband Gerard Depardieu; and, fittingly for this closing paragraph, classy period ensemble Bon Voyage.
For disclosure, some titles I have not seen: Thirteen (though I have seen 8 ½, Nine, and 10), The Five Obstructions (though I have seen The Three Amigos and The Four Feathers), Holes, Basic, documentaries Capturing the Friedmans and The Fog of War, and animal films Elephant, Cat in the Hat, and Finding Nemo, one of these not like the others.
Thanks for reading. In the next piece, on 2004, we’ll remember the Alamo, catch the Polar Express, take a Eurotrip, chronicle Riddick, walk tall, find Neverland (the OG), heart Huckabees, and kill Bill again. To be continued …