Belated 2003 Top Films List
My three favorite films of 2003 were, in rough order:
…which I think makes pretty clear just how much I’d rather be living in Japan or London. But seriously, they may not have been the best films of 2003, but they meant the most to me.
Kill Bill was not my favorite simply for its Tarantino-given style and sheen. It’s a masterpiece of direction, from the performance he ekes out of his actors right down to blood splatters that evoke forms in classical Japanese artwork. It’s the essential truly 21st century film: full of references to retro material without stealing; day-after-tomorrow fashionable and sexy without seeming hokey; its violence alternately powerful, cartoonish and comical, beautiful, and horrifying; its gender and racial politics acknowledged but never belabored; seamlessly moving between color and monochrome, film and anime, past and present narrative. Kill Bill embodies the best of the postmodern, embracing that intellectual flexibility to present a story that can be so many things at once without ever losing its footing. All that and plenty of Japan, Lucy Liu, and a brilliant soundtrack puts the film not just in this year’s top ranking, but in my all time tops.
Lost in Translation gets free set-in-Japan points from me too, and does far more with exploring Japanese culture. But where I see its true worth is in its essential divergence from most modern storytelling, through film or otherwise. Rather than seeking to impart a sprawling epic of the sort most artists can’t successfully convey, Sofia Coppola instead chose a tiny story of a chance meeting between two people in a odd place, and explores it just so. We never know for certain if the relationship is romantic, if the characters will even see each other again, or how it changed them. All we know is what they know, and they’re still figuring things out. it’s a wonderfully quiet and reserved film, full of the gauzy light Coppola explored in her previous film, The Virgin Suicides. If anything, I would read so far into her choice to have former My Bloody Valentine frontman Kevin Shields emerge from musical near-hermitry and say that Lost in Translation is practically a shoegazer film, a soft series of long looks. Whatever it is, it’s simple and beautiful, practically a model of modern aestheticism, and was one of the filmgoing pleasures of my year.
Last on my list but not least of the films of this past year is Dirty Pretty Things_, which proves that director Steven Frears can keep making movies about the immigrant experience in London until he dies and they’ll all be as good as "_My Beautiful Laundrette":http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091578/. It may not be as utterly sensuous as the two films above, but Dirty Pretty Things is a damn fine story backed up by superb lead performances and even better bit players, set against the engaging backdrop of London’s ethnic underbelly. It works a range of emotions, has plot twists that are actually clever, and is just altogether good in sea of weak genre-molded movies.
So there you go. And you’re not getting a top albums of the year list because I honestly have no idea when the huge mishmash of stuff I’ve been listening to this past year was released. Erm, yes, that’s why…