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The Best and Worst Movies of 2003?
rufey asks: "As 2003 comes to a close, I thought it would be interesting to ask Slashdot what they thought the best and worst movie of 2003 was, and why. At the beginning of the year there was excitement about parts 2 and 3 of The Matrix triology, X-Men 2, and of course, LOTR: Return of the King. In Slashdot's opinion, what did and didn't live up to the hype and expectations, and were there any surprises?"
I dont know which were the best ones..
But Gigli and Kangaroo Jack takes the cake for the worst ones..
Rapid Nirvana
I really really like the 3rd Matrix film. I'm a sucker for Dragonball Z fights.
It gets my award for best ever.
Mikey
I've always been the kinda guy to fall for the girl dressed like an eskimo.
HELLLS YEAH.
Bubba Ho-Tep is the best damn film I've seen in a long time. An instant cult classic.
Basic plot: Elvis and a black JFK take on a 10,000 year old mummy from Egypt. It's also got a great explination for Elivs's life, times, and thoughts on fame.
See this movie. Hopefully it will make it to DVD sometime soon.
Frankly, American Splendor was utterly uniteresting to me. Lost in Translation, however, was brilliant. I dont think I ever respected Murray as an actor before - though I've thought him to be a fantastic comedian - but this movie showed that he actually had the ability to evoke complex emotion. Scarlett similarly was impressive. The two of them are the movie, and I'd be shocked if they're utterly excluded from the Oscars.
"Stumble before you crawl"
This is probably the scariest movie I've ever seen. It was released in 2003, right? If not, it's *still* my pick of 2003.
At first it looks like a juvenile cross between "Conspiracy Theory" and "The Net", but then it shifts gears and scares the living shit out of you.
I'm still freaked (can you tell?), and I only saw it once.
sigs, as if you care.
I'm certainly not going to vote for any of the LOTR pics as 'best movies'. Best "emulation of a coffee table picturebook" yes. Phenomenal scenes, pretty well done compositing, amazing themes but... everything just kept running ahead without giving me a feel of the true fellowship between our adventurers.
I've not read the LOTR books, and the movies have made me want to, but I don't feel they stand strongly on their own. Large format animated picture accessories to the books, but not on their own.
Who would have guessed the X-men 2 would be so great?
I literally shed tears when I saw the way they did Nightcrawler... it was perfect. The attack at the beginning of the movie was perfect... I just wish that I hadn't seen the previews so that I would have been completely caught offguard.
The portrayal especially his religiousness was amazing.
The only minor problems that I overlooked:
1) He wasn't fuzzy (ie. Fuzzy Elf)
2) In the attack scene, he was clearly teleporting behind walls and such, something that he wouldn't be able to do properly. The only reason that I could think of that he would do that was because he was under the mind control and that forced him to do crazy things.
Finding Nemo was really fun and Kill Bill Vol.1 was very entertaining. I can't wait for volume 2.
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
The story's the thing. The Matrix started strongly, with enough subtlety and interesting ideas paired with killer wire fights and excellent effects to capture the public eye; the 2nd film, however, floundered on screen (though I thought it was still worth the price of admission) with less story and more special effects and CGI. By the end of the third film, It was like watching a hurricane, that once was beautifully coiled, rippling with power and newness, dissipate into just another tropical storm named Huey, or something similar. I still thought the third flick was worth my ten bucks but was let down, ultimately with the 2nd and 3rd, because the beginning was so strong. With the LOTR, the story's already there and strong. Tolkien knew more world mythology by rote than most people have ever heard or read. I remember in college chuckling when coming upon certain dwarf names in some obscure book of the Dead Sea Scrolls. With that background and perspicuity already in the work, Jackson had to "merely" transfer one great media work to another format (and I applaud his efforts). Did he also make use of the best CGI available? Certainly. Did it work? Yes. Of course not everyone is pleased with casting, cuts, etc., but I've found the three Tolkien films a much more pleasing crescendo when compared with the Matrix.
Ditto. I rented it a couple of weeks ago. I was expecting "dumb and fun". What I got was "stupid and excruciating."
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Here are my top 10 of 2003 (IMDB ratings in parentheses):
10). School of Rock (7.7)
9). Kill Bill (8.2)
8). Mystic River (8.1)
7). 21 Grams (7.9)
6). Elephant (7.6)
5). Talk to Her (8.2)
4). American Splendor (8.1)
3). Gerry (6.2)
2). Spellbound (8.5)
1). Lost in Translation (8.2)
A few movies that I've heard good things about that haven't reached us yet in Boston that may end up displacing some of the above are:
- House of Sand and Fog (?)
- Girl with the Pearl Earring (7.2)
- Japanese Story (6.5)
- The Triplets of Belleville (7.2)
Movies that I can't fathom why everyone liked:
3). Better Luck Tomorrow (7.6)
2). Swimming Pool (7.1) (I didn't understand this movie until about a week after seeing it, so maybe it is good and I'm just an idiot).
1). Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (7.5)
I'm glad I'm not the only one here on the dot that thinks kill bill was a crap flick.
I think even with all its weirdness there were really just three things that ruined it for me. The dialog, and the lack of editing, and the silly pressurized bleeding. and the dramatic pauses every 2 seconds. so I guess that was four things.
If I heard uma say "wiggle your big toe" one more time, I think I might have killed someone.
Lost in Translation is my pick with Bill Murray as the best male actor performance of the year. One of the best defining scenes has Murray as the aging unknown actor with the brief 70s moment of glory doing a photo shoot to hawk whiskey. The photographer fires off a series of thickly accented names, "Frank Sinatra, Sean Connery, Roger Moore" and with each name Murray with just a subtle shift in position, a slight change in the angle of his eyes and his body becomes a characature of Sinatra, Connery and Moore. The scene is both funny and pathetic at the same time. Murray's character riffs on all of these icons, softly cracking one-liners at the expense of his audience of very professional Japanese advertising photographers, while the eyes reveal that this is a washed-up over-the-hill actor who is being paid a million dollars to sit in a chair with a glass of ice tea and pretend to be Sinatra hawking whiskey.
And while Murray is pulling off the acting job of his career, Sophia Coppola earns a name for herself as a director by keeping the entire thing hanging together, and delivering an astonishing romance without sentiment. Johannsen does an excellent job paired with Murray. Of the movies I've seen this year, this one sticks with me the most.
> At the end of Reloaded, I was left with a lot of
> questions as to what was going on, and why Neo
> was able to stop the sentinels. I have various
> ideas about that, most of which involved Neo not
> actually returning to the same Matrix (or "real
> world") he had come from. It also seemed possible
> that even the original "real world" wasn't really
> the real world, but in fact another Matrix.
My god Eric! I thought *EXACTLY* the same thing! I was still wondering if they were going to do the matrix within a matrix thing when NEO was able to see things in Red instead of Green. I just figured that the Red was him seeing the real matrix instead of the Green matrix within a matrix. When NEO stopped those sentinels in the fake real world, I could ONLY assume it was another layer of matrix. Remember when they said there was an original matrix? I figured that this original matrix was the one where NEO saw things in Red.
I *STILL* think they could reopen the storyline using this premise. Maybe go deeper into prequel with Creation of the Matrix or further into the storyline with NEO reawakening in the Real World and remembering he's a programmer or something. Maybe everyone in the matrix is a vegetable in the Real World - people who's only means of communication and life are only possible within the matrix. There is still much material that could be developed.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
The movie I thought was the best of the year was the one I least expected to like. Kill Bill (Vol 1) was just astounding. The sense of style, the attention to detail, the outright chutzpah, the buckets of blood... Usually I hate bloodfests, but this movie was just so well executed that I got over the blood and just loved it to pieces. I guess his goal was to make a live-action anime, and as far as I'm concerned it was perfection, even down to all the names being like stupid translations from Japanese.
And you have to give QT props for dressing Uma up like Bruce for half the movie!
I guess I'll have to comment on the general negativity being expressed by people who didn't like this film, both here in this thread and elsewhere.
Most of the complaints seem to stem from a general misunderstanding of QT's intentions and motivations for this film. The film's main motifs are ACTION and REVENGE. There is nothing particularly deep or difficult to comprehend in either of these themes. Action is Hollywood's favorite device. Revenge is something that is very close to the human heart. There is no need to really look for any meaning further than this. If you do you risk missing the simplicity of this film. (And then you may not like it.)
We complain about Hollywood films being too predicable and shallow, but there is something noble in QT's quest to make a movie DELIBERATELY simple. Action is its purpose, not a device. Its plot can be implied to: Injustice, then revenge. If poetry is minimalist communication, then well... far be it from me to say spring-loaded decapitations are poetic... but it looks like I just said it anyway.
To sum up, you are DEFINEATLY allowed to not like the very graphic nature of this film. I can respect that. But otherwise you may have missed the fact that this move is intentionally simple.
One of the years best for sure.
The script for "Lost In Translation" was pure genius. If there was ever a movie that deserved a screenwriting award, it's this one--just for what he tells her at the end. (Yes, I'm trying desperately to avoid a spoiler.) That was certainly one of the greatest moments in movies this year.
Sofia Coppola deserves an Oscar for the script, and a nomination for Best Director. I'm not so sure she deserves to win, though; there were some problems with the flow and pacing, and definitely some scenes that didn't need to be there. (For example, after the nth long sequence of Scarlett Johansson wandering around, I was thinking "We get the message, already.") On the other hand, the performance that she got from Bill Murray was just incredible, so it could go either way.
It will be a shame when Bill Murray doesn't win the Oscar, because his was literally the performance of a lifetime. I was overwhelmed. There were so many moments when he could have spilled over into being "that Bill Murray character", and didn't. He showed remarkable restraint that I didn't think he was capable of. He deserves the award. I doubt he'll get it.
I agree that Kill Bill was good. The fact that they didn't use any CGI made it significantly better, IMHO. Does anybody else feel like they're overdoing it with computer graphics in some movies??? Maybe I've just seen so many well done CGI scenes that the majority of computer aided action shots just seem lame to me.....
I'm a bit puzzled that you seem to be extolling the virtues of a wire-fu flick as a pinnacle of realism. It's been a damn long time since I've seen a believable martial arts film. The wire-fu stuff is getting as overused as CGI. Seriously, if you're in a fight you don't do 10 meter backflips over your opponents. Actually, I'm not sure anyone can do flips like that regardless of whether it makes good tactical sense or not. Yes, I'm aware the capoirera contains lots of flips and cartwheel-like motions but a lot of that is built into that particular martial art because it was developed by slaves who had to disguise their practice as a dance to avoid their masters cracking down on them.
When you do a flip you are basically expending a considerable amount of effort and energy to perform a complex maneuver that temporarily blinds you, leaves you vulnerable to your opponent, and doesn't really move your center of mass very far in the horizontal direction. It's just not a wise idea to go flipping around like crazy when people armed with weapons are trying to kill you. Best just to stand your ground and block or take a step back (or to the side).
Sometimes I wonder whether the reliance on wire techniques is an attempt by Hollywood to show something outside the everyday experience of the moviegoer in the abscence of any talented martial artists. In decades past, audiences could be wowed by the superior skill of someone who could actually do martial arts well. These days, it seems like directors are insisting that the actors try to do the fight scenes and then they use wire-fu to make up for the fact that these people really can't do very much. You don't see any Bruce Lee or Jet Li types who can move incredibly fast. Instead you get Keanu Reeves or Uma Thurman doing a backflip over 3 opponents in slow motion. That just doesn't really impress me and it certainly doesn't count as realistic fighting. Why can't they hire some competant martial arts to do something REAL and just use CGI or maybe even masks to make the stunt person look like the actor?
Ah well, just my two cents. I'm just getting a little annoyed by everyone gushing over these acrobatic shows as "awesome martial arts flicks".
GMD
watch this
I'm just wondering. Why is there such a..well..harsh retribution on the movie equilivient of a hard sci-fi movie?
Why was everybody turned off by the philosophy and world building in Reloaded/Revolutions? I thought that was the best thing about the movies. Forget the fight sequences, I want more thought, more detail, more technology.
The ONLY thing that disappointed me (on an intellectual basis. On an emotional basis it made me giddy) about Revolutions, is that now after seeing the ending, and looking back on it, the story was actually written as a homage to the Final Fantasy series.
Nothing-hero is the chosen one to take command and lead the battle against multiple enemies, only to join forces with one, to fight against an even greater threat to them both.
Then take the music during the battle between Smith/Neo, and the music during the final credits (the underbeat is the same as the Boss music from FF9).
Too easy.
But still a great movie.
Why don't people get giddy about detail like I do?
Having read the all three of the books the compromise TLOTR, I feel the need to note that:
a) the books are simply amazing, probably one of the best pieces of literature written in the 20th century.
b) the movies are are very entertaining, with some of the CG i've ever seen.
c) anyone who has seen the movies before reading the books has missed out on a truely great experience.
The movies I think are an excellent suppliment / add-on to the books. If you see the movie before you read the books, the books then become tainted, and you start seeing all the characters as they are portrayed in the movies. You also start to compare the movie to the book, instead of the more accurately book to movie view.
In closing, TLOTR:TROTK is one of the best movies created this year. I'm just depressed for all the poor people who haven't read the books first.
David Novosel "Two roads diverged, and I - I took the one less travelled by."
Kill Bill Volume 1 - Beautiful art cinema
Lilja 4-Ever - Harrowing and one of the few movies to make me cry
28 Days Later - Brilliant low budget horror
Terminator 3 - A sequel that lived up to its predecessors
The Return Of The King - The entire trilogy is a masterpiece of modern cinema
As for the rest.... well I was severely disappointed by the Matrix sequels more than anything else. Those who respond that I "just don't get it" are missing the fact that while the IDEAS were sound, the EXECUTION left everything to be desired. A movie needs STORY, PLOT and AUDIENCE EMPATHY to be successful, not just eye candy, which while great doesn't keep you coming back over and over again.
Let's hope there's better fare in 2004.
Visceral Psyche Films
I agree. I saw the second Matrix film on DVD and had to "rewind" (or whatever it is you do with DVDs) several times so I could make out what was being said. So I got a lot out of the film because I could follow what was going on.
In a cinema, I think it would all wash over you - you'd be so phazed by the fight scenes that the dialog/philosophy would pass you by.
Just my 2p
.
They will never know the simple pleasure of a monkey knife fight
It wasn't the first time that a legendary asian filmmaker has made a dud. In fact, it's not ang lee's first dud either.
Everyone is entitled to half of their films being well-intentioned failures... that shouldn't tarnish a reputation too much. Ang Lee is floating on the upper half of that equation, and is successful overall. The Wachowskis are two and two. Personally I feel Revolutions received a lot of the venom that should have been directed towards Reloaded. Forcing Keanu to act without his eyes was a stroke of brilliance, and really helped his performance.
The ______ Agenda
If you see the movie before you read the books, the books then become tainted, and you start seeing all the characters as they are portrayed in the movies
I personally have always had a hard time with books with a ton of characters. It's difficult for me to 'imagine' the appearances of a lot of different people. I tried on two separate occassions to get through the LOTR books and couldn't do it. After having seen the first two movies I sat down and read through them all and it was much easier because now I knew what the various characters looked like and it was much easier to keep track of who is who.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
Ack! Wrong, wrong, wrong! I am a firm believer that, if at all possible, you should see the movie first and read the book second. In my opinion watching the movie is like reading an abstract or cliff notes... it hits the main points and gives you a good idea of what happens without a major time investment (granted the investment for LotR is a bit higher than the norm!). Then if you like the ideas and plot you can progress to the book and find out what *really* happens.
I love the LotR book trilogy, but when watching RotK I honestly wished for a few seconds that I hadn't read the books... that all the explanations, twists and developments could have been new and surprising. Instead while I enjoyed it greatly I also caught myself thinking "Sam never put on the ring!" and "Why aren't Merry and Pippin taller from the Ent-draughts?" and "What about replanting the Shire?"
My experience with Harry Potter solidified my watch-first belief... I watched the first movie and loved it, so much so that I went out and bought the first four books (which I had been avoiding for that absurdly stupid geek reasoning "They're popular and thus must be evil."). Then I watched the second move (after reading the book) and had that same nitpicking experience. "Why is Harry falling out of the car? He never fell out of the car! That's gratuitous nonsense!"
SQUEAK, the Death of Rats explained.