Where you in aught-two? (Patreon)

Among the long-forgotten items I've rediscovered going through ancient emails (in an effort to determine which theater or screening room I saw films at; thankfully, I frequently invited one person as a guest and he often quoted back the time/venue in his replies) is my ballot for the 2002 Village Voice poll, which was apparently automatically sent to me following submission. The votes themselves aren't all that interesting, though I've included them below; to my retroactive astonishment, though, I wrote some 1500 completely unpaid words in response to the poll's solicitation of general year-end thoughts. The penultimate paragraph on I'm Going Home is just my site review, recycled, and the Atanarjuat bit first appeared on the nerd group. But the rest of it was written expressly for the poll, and Dennis Lim only wound up quoting a small part of the Far From Heaven graf, so here's everything else, "published" for I believe the very first time. (I didn't even post it to the nerd group, which surprises me.)

(If you want to browse the actual poll, it lives on in the archive.)

My own ballot

10 Best Films of 2002. We ask you to include only films that had some kind of theatrical engagement in North America (film festival appearances don't count).

01. 25th Hour
02. Adaptation.
03. Songs from the Second Floor
04. Devils on the Doorstep
05. Spider-Man
06. Late Marriage
07. 8 Women
08. Daughter from Danang
09. What Time Is It There?
10. Intacto

5 Best Lead Performances

01. Maggie Gyllenhaal, Secretary
02. Aurélien Recoing, Time Out
03. Ronit Elkabetz, Late Marriage
04. Sylvie Testud, Murderous Maids
05. Steve Coogan, 24 Hour Party People

5 Best Supporting Performances

01. Edie Falco, Sunshine State
02. Chris Cooper, Adaptation.
03. Kagawa Teruyuki, Devils on the Doorstep
04. Bebe Neuwirth, Tadpole
05. Barry Pepper, 25th Hour

Best Director

Spike Lee, 25th Hour

Best Original Screenplay

Juan Carlos Fresnadillo & Andrés Koppel, Intacto

Best Adapted Screenplay

Charlie Kaufman, Adaptation.

Best Cinematography

Ed Lachman, Far From Heaven

Best First Film

Late Marriage

Best Documentary

Daughter from Danang

Best Undistributed Film (list up to 5; unranked).

Don's Plum (RD Robb)
Harmful Insect (Akihiko Shiota)
Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
Trilogy: On the Run; An Amazing Couple; After the Life (Lucas Belvaux)*
Turning Gate (Hong Sang-soo)

* (if you won't count the trilogy as one item, then An Amazing Couple only)

RANDOM OBSERVATIONS ON THE YEAR JUST NOT QUITE ENDED:

• If nothing else, 2002 will go down as the year that Spike Lee finally achieved transcendence with the PeopleMover shot (a gimmick so ubiquitous in his work that I half-expected to see the grieving parents in 4 Little Girls hover sorrowfully over their childrens' graves). Paquin undulates, Hoffman hyperventilates, and their twin levitations bookend a sequence of surpassing emotional volatility, investing the tired old Don't Stand So Close to Me scenario with a transportingly awkward eroticism. Not that anyone will notice, of course, since the film's post-9/11 signifiers make for much juicier copy than its thorny, multifaceted interrogation of what it means to be responsible. Does Lee push it too hard? As usual. But I'll take his brazen, reckless passion over the tasteful tedium of The Pianist or The Hours seven out of seven.

• The next person who complains in my presence that Adaptation falls apart in the third act is getting a rolled-up copy of McKee's Ten Commandments shoved straight up the meta-keister. How is it that the people who embrace Summer Phoenix's deliberately atrocious performance in Esther Kahn can't roll with this film's deliberately atrocious finale? Is the world's least convincing Hedda Gabler really more fun to watch than Meryl Streep struggling to imitate a dial tone? Come to think of it, what if Streep had played Esther Kahn and Phoenix had played Susan Orlean? Both Esther's emotional remoteness and Orlean's gnawing lack of passion might have been more convincing.

• For those of us who didn't make it to Cannes 2000, this year provided belated evidence that Luc Besson, that year's jury president, can at least recognize a good movie when he sees one. Jiang Wen's Devils on the Doorstep arrived at Film Forum shorn of roughly half an hour; all of the references to the Japanese as "turtle fuckers" are reportedly intact, though, which is all that really matters. Hectic, jagged and vinegar-soaked, it stands in stark contrast to fellow Croisette prizewinner Songs from the Second Floor, Roy Andersson's depiction of the apocalypse as a series of mordantly funny, generally static expressionistic tableaux. Both films take absurdism to fresh, giddy heights while retaining a haunting gravity; pity neither one could bill itself as the first feature ever made in the Inuit language, apparently a sure-fire attention-grabber.

• Speaking of Apichatpong: The Fastest Runner (as it's known in my circle), I loved Apichatpong's genius revenge plan, which consisted of:

(a) build an igloo
(b) invite your enemies to have dinner in your igloo*
(c) bury a stick in the snow outside the igloo
(d) during dinner, say you have to go take a piss
(e) retrieve the stick you buried
(f) go back into the igloo and hit your enemies with the stick, then bellow "The killing stops here!"

* (it helps for this stage of the plan if your main enemy has been hypnotized by a magical rabbit into thinking you are his best pal)

Granted, that's also essentially Michael Corleone's plan in The Godfather. It didn't seem quite so stupid there, though, on account of Michael was scared shitless and the killing did not stop there and there was no magical rabbit involved.

• Nothing this year was more dispiriting than the shrug of critical indifference accorded to Sam Raimi's unexpectedly glorious Spider-Man, a rare Hollywood blockbuster in which the big action set pieces feel obligatory while the tissue connecting them thrum with pure pop exultation. I was sold the moment Raimi panned directly from an ad hawking a used hot rod for $3000 to an ad (on the same page!) promising precisely $3000 to anyone who can last three minutes in the ring with a wrestler named Bonesaw McGraw. Then the costume-making montage kicked in, replete with lurid superimpositions and scribbled notations ("NEEDS MORE COLOR!"), and no amount of crummy CGI webslinging could dampen my giddy affection. Frankly, I wouldn't have minded if the big set pieces had consisted of Mattel action figures being propelled about a Lego-constructed set by clearly visible pre-adolescent hands, since the rest of the picture features more style, wit and soul than any movie of its kind since the heyday of Spielberg and Zemeckis. Not to mention that Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst make the year's most improbably fetching couple, with his halting, timorous mannerisms dovetailing beautifully with her frank self-possession. Kinda wish it had been the two of them orbiting Solaris, to be honest.

• Being quoted in ads is something critics should feel deeply ambivalent about, and believe me I do. I must confess to a sheepish pride, however, in my Kaufmanesque (Charlie, not Andy) appearance in the ads for Late Marriage, which opened in New York the same day as Attack of the Clones. Desperate to get people into the theater, fearful that the picture would vanish before word-of-mouth could start to build, I leaned ridiculously hard on the sex scene and piled encomium upon encomium, rhetorically asking myself within the review how best to persuade readers to give it a chance. "How about a blurb?" I concluded, offering a fat, juicy "one of the year's best" to the marketing team. Never expected them to actually quote the "How about a blurb?" part, though, and seeing my self-conscious pomo equivocation splashed across the pages of the Times is one of the more memorably surreal experiences of my tenure at the magazine. [2023: Though they misspelled my name, grr.]

* A movie buff's wet dream, carefully tailored (in both the literal and metaphorical sense) to inspire both nostalgic longing and self-satisfied deconstruction, Far from Heaven is a movie I find easy to admire but impossible to embrace. It makes me distrust my distrust, though I don't entirely trust that reaction. For deep feeling conveyed via extravagant artifice, I much prefer 8 Women, widely dismissed (even by admirers) as a flip, candy-colored trifle. Yes, the outlandish costumes, catty dialogue, ludicrous plot twists and cheerfully amateurish musical numbers suggest unbridled camp. But there's a mournful undercurrent, too—expressed most vividly in the final song, with the characters paired off and performing sober little minuets, but discernible throughout for those paying attention. A second viewing revealed its source: This is a film about eight prisoners. No less than Cathy and Frank Whitaker, Ozon's mademoiselles are trapped, both inside the house and in the way that they're defined by their relationship to an offscreen patriarchal male. Each character has been affixed in a specific role—symbolized by a costume and predicated upon a lack of autonomy; hence the thematic relevance of the Agatha Christie format, with its cardboard characters, reductive plotting and simplistic psychology. Even the songs are expressly performed in character, so that the traditional means of self-expression granted to characters in musicals (even an ironic Dennis Potter musical) is denied to them. In the end, all they can do is take each other's hands in a curtain call devoid of joy or satisfaction. Yeah, it's a real lark.

• "An enchanting film with a remarkable amount of humour and joy," claims the TIFF programme book. Stephen Holden: "I'm Going Home gives you the steady pulse of life in a beautiful city viewed through the eyes of a character who, in spite of tragic loss and increasing decrepitude, knows in his bones that he is one of the luckiest men alive." These are the ravings of madmen. Rarely, in fact, have I seen so many intelligent people engage in such willful misinterpretation; I can only assume that most critics were so discomfited by Oliveira's matter-of-fact pessimism that they repressed the film's blatantly defeatist disposition and mentally constructed a life-affirming worldview in its stead. Whatever the explanation, they somehow failed to notice that Gilbert spends the entire picture being alternately devastated and humiliated, with the exception of the (long, tedious) stretches when he's onstage and the (brief, repetitive) cafe interludes depicting his reliance on ritual as a means of comfort. And for heaven's sake let's have no more of this balderdash about the titular declaration representing some spiritual state of grace. Look at the way Gilbert walks home: shuffling dejectedly, obsessively muttering the lines he couldn't remember. Look at the expression on his grandson's face in the final shot. People, THIS IS A FILM ABOUT DEATH—file under "renunciation," not "acceptance." It's a septuagenarian version of Welcome to the Dollhouse, taking an innately sympathetic protagonist (misfit teen girl there, tired old man here) and proceeding to sadistically pound pound pound him into the dirt. Praise it if you must, but stop with the heartwarming adjectives. Enchanting my ass.

* Discovery of the year: Moronic Hollywood movies sound incomparably more dignified if you translate their titles into French. I can't tell you how much good-natured head-shaking I avoided simply by telling people I was off to see Les Chiens du neige.