Best Movie: You Can Count On Me
This movie about a grown brother and sister haunted by the childhood loss of their parents shared best-picture honors with Girlfight at the 2000 Sundance festival; but it is a much more impressive achievement than Girlfight, for the same reason that it is a much more entertaining film: Kenneth Lonergan's smart, funny, humane, and powerfully sad screenplay. Writing this good is a rare luxury in contemporary American movies. The superb cast — Laura Linney, Mark Ruffalo, and Matthew Broderick — delivers complex portraits of exasperating and endearing people.
Intentionally Stupidest Movie: Charlie's Angels
Charlie's Angels does something that most action movies only dream about doing: It goes all out on the chases, explosions, cleavage, techno music, and helicopter rides, while openly throwing off all the fetters of plausibility and coherence. In this context, creating a movie perfectly devoid of sense becomes a higher goal of sorts, and Charlie's Angels realizes that goal impressively.
Unintentionally Funniest Movie: Mission Impossible 2
While watching MI2, I became disoriented in the middle of a 10-minute slow-motion sequence of Tom Cruise clenching his jaw and pursing his lips at Thandie Newton, and I thought to myself, “You know, for a shaving-cream commercial, that guy doesn't have a very heavy beard.” MI2 appears to be the result of some kind of Scientology brain-lock, through which Tom Cruise took control of John Woo's vast expressive powers and forced them into the service of Cruise's own towering vanity.
The result is the most Wagnerian James Bond movie ever made. But James Bond movies use Bond's cocked eyebrow, his English self-effacement, to enlist the audience in the movies' ludicrous enterprise. Woo and Cruise go in the other direction, giving us swooning operatics and un-ironic worship of Cruise's facial bones. The key to MI2's hilarity, though, is the extensive slow-motion sequences. These sequences operate as a sort of “making of” a film-within-a-film, an ongoing commentary on the movie's idolatry. You can almost hear the voice-over narration: “Here's where we get you to envy Tom's hair.” “Here's where we call attention to Thandie's breasts.” “Here's where we highlight Tom's fine Gucci slacks.” Maybe it's just me, but if you slow this type of schlock down too much, I'm going to have time to make up my own jokes. And I'm going to laugh and laugh.
Best Example of a Movie Justified by Its Sound Stage: The Perfect Storm
Near the end of Titanic, the back half of the boat dramatically snaps off and pitches straight up into the air before plunging into the ocean. The moment when the giant half-vessel looms over the people huddling in lifeboats and freezing in the water, the movie's raison d'être comes into view most clearly. The star of the show, the boat itself, takes a bow and disappears. The Perfect Storm tries for a similar achievement, to recreate a maritime tragedy by investing heavily in props. Instead of a boat, though, the creators of The Perfect Storm made an ocean. The movie doesn't conjure any plausible drama, but it does leave you with a distinct oceanic feeling, a lingering sense of pointlessness.
The Perfect Storm is supposed to hit on the classic man-versus-nature theme, like “To Build a Fire,” but instead it is more like a movie about a haunted house with bad plumbing. Mark Wahlberg and George Clooney are tormented, thrown about, thoroughly drenched, and forced to shout to the brink of hoarseness as water streams through their working-class facial hair and into their mouths. Then they are simply pitched upside down into the briny deep — all by some invisible, omnipotent, malevolent force. What is that force? Why does it hate them so much? Somebody call an exorcist. And a plumber.
Best Evidence of the Political Suggestibility of Film Critics: Quills
To be fair to Quills, Philip Kaufman's film about the imprisonment of the Marquis de Sade, it tackles a terribly complex topic — the tangled relationship of sex, authority, and early medical science. Unfortunately, Kaufman addresses these issues with all the subtlety of an after-school special about the evils of censorship (“Just remember, if you censor somebody else, you're really censoring yourself”). And, of course, the evils of hypocrisy.
Kaufman has indicated that he modeled the character of Royer-Collard, the, er, sadistic doctor-inquisitor who rapes his teenage wife, torments Sade, etc., on Ken Starr. This actually explains a lot. You might be surprised how a movie that centers around the systematically immoral Sade can succumb so often to such cornball preachiness. You might be even more amazed that a movie so artificial and intellectually incoherent could win one of the most prestigious critics' awards in this country (Best Picture award from the National Board of Review). But critics, along with many other people in the entertainment business, like to think of Ken Starr as someone who files his teeth at night instead of brushing them. Quills flatters them for these views, and helps them feel like warriors for the First Amendment. In exchange, they overlooked the fact that it is, at best, mediocre cinema, and named it the best picture of the year.
(This article also appears on National Review Online).
Best Evidence that for Hollywood, Secular Humanism Is a Religion: Mission to Mars
There's a brutally discomfiting moment in Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives when a brainy lawyer, who's just left his brainy wife, brings his dimwitted new trophy girlfriend to one of his brainy Upper West Side parties. He finds her explaining the deep truths of astrology to some of his friends, and, mortified, cruelly silences her. In Mission to Mars, the pretty wife of one of the astronauts, apparently drunk, starts blathering to a party full of NASA types about finding intelligent life on the red planet. Instead of telling her to take an Advil and go to bed, as a Woody Allen character would do, her husband nods silently along with his colleagues as if to say, “Yeah, finding Martians. That's what it's all about.”
But their idiotic gullibility is rewarded. When they get to Mars, they discover the Origin of Life on Earth. It turns out that evolution was teleological after all, and that the End of All Things is the Human Being. We know this because after a couple misadventurous hours on the surface of Mars, they discover a shrine of sorts. The object of worship? The glorious double helix of the human DNA molecule, whirling in place like Tara Lipinski. Over the years, movies have located the divinity of human beings in our capacity to love, to have sex, and to overthrow the government. Mission to Mars enjoins us to worship our own genetic structure.
Most Revealing Glimpse into the Hollywood Political Mind: The Contender
Like Quills, The Contender expresses Hollywood's outrage at the shoddy treatment of its president by Ken Starr. It tells the story of a female vice-presidential nominee persecuted for a sexual indiscretion committed during college. Predictably, it gives a romantic, almost erotic, portrayal of Democratic politics. Jeff Bridges plays Hollywood's idealized version of Clinton, a down-to-earth hunk who luxuriates in food and even flirts a little with his primly attractive nominee. Hollywood's ideal White House is one in which the president and vice president are sort of hot for each other.
But it isn't the starry-eyed liberalism of its ideology that is so revealing. Rather, The Contender's portrayal of the machinery and language of politics makes it worth watching for the glimpse it offers into the Hollywood political mind. It makes a real claim to gritty authenticity, but it gets almost everything wrong. It shows politicians fixated on things they don't fixate on, saying things they don't say, standing up for principles they don't even acknowledge as principles. Though it is clearly a partisan movie, it is, in a very nonpartisan sense, completely uninformed. But The Contender gives us the diorama of political life that spins inside of Barbra Streisand's head. For that reason, it helps explain some phenomena that we've all been a little curious about.
