So we come to the end of the year 2000. There's one rewatch I saved for this post, for the last week of the year is always a marathon of holiday filmgoing. For me, anyway. Here is what cinemas offered - in LA and NYC, at least - from Christmas Day to the end of the year...:
Malèna
release: Christmas Day
nominations: Best Score (Ennio Morricone), Best Cinematography
dir: Giuseppe Tornatore
pr: Carlo Benasconi / Harvey Weinstein
scr: Giuseppe Tornatore & Luciano Vincenzoni
cin: Lajos Koltai
An adolescent in a Sicilian village during the reign of Mussolini falls in love-lust with a beautiful local woman - yeah, him and every other guy in the village!
Accidentally watched the original European version instead of the American cut, meaning about 20 more minutes' worth of the young protagonist's erotic dreams and fantasies of Monica Bellucci. Some of them, like him being a gladiator for her, are quite funny; some, like one where she visits him in the night and they unclothe each other, are shockingly graphic (the character is 13, played by a 16-year-old), but all of them are pretty accurate to the ridiculousness and the passion of a hormonal adolescent boy. Very Italian to build an entire movie around a wet dream you had as a boy. Everything is projection: the local women project their fears onto Malèna, the local men project their fantasies onto her, she's just a war widow trying ot mind her own business, and the town is making her a pariah because...well, what else are they going to be mad at? They certainly don't mind the fascists until the Germans come to town. Evil little village. Beautifully made movie, but there's not much meat on the bone.
Thirteen Days
release: Christmas Day
dir: Roger Donaldson
pr: Peter O. Almond / Armyan Bernstein / Kevin Costner
scr: David Self, from the book The Kennedy Tapes - Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis by Ernest R. May & Philip D. Zelikow
cin: Andrzej Bartkowiak
Docudrama about the Kennedy White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
This was a rewatch, I first saw it in the same class where we watched Pay It Forward and Remember the Titans.
This is the only rewatch that I had seen only once before, but I was very excited to revisit it because my memory of it was all positive - actually, my memory of it was Kevin Costner's accent at the breakfast table, Bruce Greenwood looking very pensive as JFK, and Michael Fairman's barn-burning performance as Adlai Stevenson giving the Soviets what-for at the United Nations. Twenty years later, I can appreciate the level of historical detail: we get the tension of those thirteen days, the resentment of the military brass towards the Kennedy administration, other personal and political factions, and the honest cock-ups on our side that led to such a crisis. I can also appreciate the performances by Robert Culp (Bobby Kennedy), Len Cariou (Dean Acheson), and Dylan Baker (Robert McNamara, a part later played by Greenwood himself in Spielberg's The Post).
But like that vivid dream you, yes you, had just thirty minutes ago, I find it ephemeral. Maybe it's the focus being on Costner and his accent (can you be racist against Massachusetts...itians?), maybe it's the fact that there is so much information conveyed and played, but it's a long sit that I can remember only emotionally, not specifically. Yet the emotions are overall good: I love a movie where men roll up their sleeves and argue around big tables for the sake of God, country, and the world at large; and, like I said, I admire the writing and love the performances. And, perhaps most promising for those of you who wonder if I'd recommend it: I have been recommending it, and I want to watch the movie again, and again. Maybe even as a double feature with the 1974 telefilm on the same subject, The Missiles of October. It wouldn't be a Top Ten for me, but it'd be nice to put on in the middle of the afternoon while ironing.
Vatel
release: Christmas Day
nominations: Best Art Direction-Set Decoration (Jean Rabasse / Françoise Benoît-Fresco)
dir: Roland Joffé
pr: Alain Goldman / Roland Joffé
scr: Jeanne Labrune and Tom Stoppard
cin: Robert Fraisse
In 17th-century France, chef and premier Master of Festivities and Pleasures François Vatel unexpectedly falls in love during a three-day visit by the King of France and his retinue to the estate of Vatel's master, the Prince of Condé.
Wrote a whole thing about this movie as a metaphor for being a filmmaker, which I think is apt: controlling all these moving parts, herding all these people including caterers, performers, set dressers, and more, to execute a single vision, treated as a mere functionary by the money people even though they can't do what you do. But is that why I love this movie? Or do I just genuinely adore a sumptuous visual feast, the ostentation essential to the narrative and its milieu, especially when contrasted with the petty, shallow crudeness of the audience it's all meant for? Can't I just love the history or the romance of it, never mind whether or not it has something More To Say about living authentically or about making movies? Can't I just say, "It's pretty and I like it!"? Well, I guess none of that's mutually exclusive, and I certainly feel everything I just said about the movie. This one surprised me with how much I was into it.
Traffic
release: December 27
wins: Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (Benicio Del Toro), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Film Editing (Stephen Mirrione)
nominations: Best Picture
dir: Steven Soderbergh
pr: Laura Bickford / Marshall Herskovitz / Edward Zwick
scr: Stephen Gaghan, from the British miniseries Traffik by Simon Moore
cin: Steven Soderbergh (as Peter Andrews)
A look at the drug trade as seen by users, dealers, manufacturers, and the politicians and lawmen both fighting against and benefiting from it all.
We'll definitely get into this one more as we talk Oscars.
Shadow of the Vampire
release: December 29
nominations: Best Supporting Actor (Willem Dafoe), Best Makeup (Ann Buchanan / Amber Sibley)
dir: E. Elias Merhige
pr: Nicolas Cage / Jeff Levine
scr: Steven Katz
cin: Lou Bogue
To ensure authenticity for his 1922 film Nosferatu, director F.W. Murnau hires obscure actor Max Schreck, a real vampire with a long-unsatiated thirst...
Watching this reminded me of reading Lobster Alice, about a Disney animator in love with his secretary during production on Alice in Wonderland, his world turned upside-down by the brief creative involvement of Salvador Dali. I thought of that play because I think I would have loved reading this as a play in high school. As a movie, it's a one-gag sketch stretched beyond its abilities. There are not very many places for it to go after the initial This Guy's Weird! jokes, which explains why it forces history to bloodily conform to its fantasy. It can't even get its stylized title cards and transitional irising-in/out to be consistent, the sizes are all wrong!
Chunhyang
release: December 31
dir: Im Kwon-taek
pr: Lee Tae-won
scr: Cho Sang-hyun / Kang Hye-yun / Kim Myung-gon
cin: Jung Il-seon
A nobleman's son and a concubine's daughter fall in love.
The source material for the film is a popular pansori, traditionally performed by a singer and a drummer. So is this movie: the entire thing is narrated by the pansori singer Cho Sang-hyun, the drum beating like the lovers' hearts throughout, and occasionally we even see the singer and drummer on a modern stage - the entire first five minutes are just the two of them together, before getting into the "proper" narrative. What more can you ask for in a film: two beautiful leads, gorgeous pastoral photography, a sensual, sweaty honeymoon sequence, political intrigue, class division, mistaken identity, plots and counter-plots, and, spoiler alert, love triumphant? A rewarding end to my 2000 film marathon.
Now that the year is over...the awards can begin! Starting tomorrow, we're looking at the Oscar films of the year 2000, as nominated by the Academy in the year 2001!
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