Film 2001: Push the rewind button, please

[Photo: Miramax Films] Martin Sheen and Co. still enthrall 22 years later in Apocalypse Now Redux, a revamp of the original.

By STEVE PERSALL, Times Film Critic

© St. Petersburg Times
published December 23, 2001

Good movies have been few and far between in 2001, and the year's best is a reworking of a 1970s classic.

What kind of year was 2001 at the movies? Consider one critic's opinion that the year's best film was 22 years old.

Thank goodness that Francis Ford Coppola overhauled his classic Vietnam War drama, Apocalypse Now. The rest of 2001 offered little to cheer about. Only a late rush of quality productions provided enough material for a halfway respectable Top 10 list. Few of the finalists would have been serious contenders in past year-end reviews.

Filmmakers stopped taking chances this year. Audiences let them get away with it by flocking to theaters for retreads such as The Mummy Returns or larks like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Not only do moviegoers get what they pay for, but they'll pay for it again and again as Hollywood cannibalizes itself, cashing in on what succeeded before. If the quality of American cinema is declining, we have only ourselves to blame.

Here's one last salute to those few films that made us sit up and take notice, for their daring themes and imaginative panache:

1. APOCALYPSE NOW REDUX: Not merely a rerelease of Coppola's Vietnam dreamscape but a reinvention with nearly an hour of additional footage trimmed from its original release. The results were clearer themes of military frustration, a comical slant prescribed by Dr. Strangelove and sexier shenanigans in the jungle. A bona fide classic became better. What more can anyone ask?

2. MONSTER'S BALL: The best conventional filmmaking on the list. No hallucinations, flashbacks or digital effects, and the only explosions are emotional and devastating. Billy Bob Thornton plays a racist Georgia corrections officer finding himself attracted to the wife (Halle Berry) of an African-American prisoner he executed. Marc Forster's film shocks us until the most deftly accomplished happy ending of the year.

3. MEMENTO: An ingenious idea worked to near-perfection by writer-director Christopher Nolan, telling a standard murder mystery in reverse order. We're as confused as the memory-challenged hero (Guy Pearce) until the last (first?) scene, then want to see it again to confirm that the pieces fit. They do, but don't try to explain it later.

4. HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH: A tour de force by John Cameron Mitchell, adapting his gaudy stage play into a compelling rock 'n' roll operetta. Mitchell is superb as a glam rocker whose botched sex change operation leaves him/her with a hilariously bad attitude. Cinematographer Frank G. DeMarco's images are as unshakable as Stephen Trask's musical hooks.

5. AMORES PERROS: An Oscar nominee this year, outvoted by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in the best foreign language film category. Three stories are linked by two dogs: a barrio bum involved with animal brutality and his sister-in-law, an adulterous couple with a Hitchcockian twist and a homeless hit man with a heart. Breathless filmmaking from Mexico's Tarantino, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu.

6. GOSFORD PARK: On the surface, it's another Merchant-Ivory type of story that isn't my cup of tea and crumpets. But this is Robert Altman at work, so the year's best ensemble cast has plenty to do besides posing. A hunting weekend at an English mansion in 1932 begins as a comedy of manners and ends as a satisfying game of Clue. Scheduled to open locally Jan. 11.

7. NO MAN'S LAND/BLACK HAWK DOWN: Take your pick. Both deal with the follies of war, from different perspectives. The former is a multinational production, a satire of Bosnian war sensibilities boiling down the follies of war to three men in a foxhole. The latter is all-American, a true story of courage during the Somalian hunger crisis, when U.S. special forces went to root out a demagogue. Both films speak loudly to audiences while war rages in Afghanistan.

8. MOULIN ROUGE: This movie got better with repeated viewings, maybe because director Baz Luhrmann's hyperkinetic vision flies by too fast to comprehend all at once. Great music, lavish sets and costumes plus starry performances from Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor signal a new era in Hollywood musicals.

9. THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE: Billy Bob Thornton's eerily quiet performance galvanizes another far-flung trip guided by Joel and Ethan Coen. Roger Deakins' monochromatic cinematography is the year's best work, evoking the best moodiness of classic film noir.

10. MULHOLLAND DRIVE: David Lynch shook up a listless movie year with another whimsically perverse nightmare. A starry-eyed ingenue (Naomi Watts) and a foxy amnesiac (Laura Elena Harring) cross paths and switch identities, scaling the twin peaks of mobsters and Hollywood producers. Too weird at times, but Lynch constantly dares us to look away.

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