2001 in film.

Top ten box-office films of 2001:

1. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
2. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
3. Monsters, Inc.
4. Shrek
5. Ocean's Eleven
6. Pearl Harbor
7. The Mummy Returns
8. Jurassic Park III
9. Planet of the Apes
10. Hannibal

What are your top three films for 2001? We will keep a running tally and eventually have some sort of bracket. For me it would be:

1. The Royal Tenenbaums
2. Fat Girl
3. What Time Is It There?

What are some of the forgotten gems from the year? What is overrated? What did you discover at a young age and what did you discover later?

YEARS IN FILM • forum.chorus.fm

 

1. Wet Hot American Summer
2. Freddy Got Fingered
3. Josie and the Pussycats

 

Some excruciating cuts: Y Tu Mama Tambien, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Ali, Zoolander, Mulholland Drive, The Piano Teacher, Trouble Every Day, Late Marriage.

The Royal Tenenbaums was my first introduction to offbeat cinema, so it will always be close to me. Fat Girl was the most shocking thing I had ever seen as a young cinephile. I don't always get Tsai Ming-liang, but What Time Is It There? really spoke to me.

 

1. Mulholland Drive
2. Fellowship of the Ring
3. Pulse

Toughest omission for me this year was probably Ali. Although the consensus is it’s one of Mann’s lesser movies I still find it to be insanely engaging and immersive, the nighttime shots with the early digital photography are so good.

Mulholland Drive was the easy #1 pick from me, Fellowship also needs no explanation. I’m due for a rewatch of Pulse, it is supremely creepy and also very prescient of the pitfalls of internet induced isolation and loneliness.

 

1. Y Tu Mama Tambien
2. Mulholland Drive
3. The Royal Tenenbaums

monstrously good top 3 and painful not to include Ocean’s Eleven or Josie and the Pussycats. Also a big LOTR fan but not sure they’d stack up with my top 3 of any year. Two Towers maybe, I haven’t looked at that year

 

1. Mulholland Drive
2. Spirited Away
3. Royal Tenenbaums

Does Spirited Away fall under 2001 or no? If not then I'll put Y Tu Mama Tambien at #3 and slide TRT up to #2

 

Spirited Away is listed as a 2001 film.

 

1. Wet Hot American Summer
2. The Royal Tenenbaums
3. Training Day

 

1. Wet Hot American Summer
2. Spirited Away
3. Fellowship

Honerable mentions: Baby Boy, Joy Ride, Saving Silverman, Training Day,

 

1. Mulholland Drive
2. Royal Tenenbaums
3. Freddy Got Fingered

Freddy Got Fingered at the time I saw it a few years after it came out was the hardest I had ever laughed as a teenager. People dismiss how important it is for art to connect with the youth of its day, from punk to grunge to emo and now we have tictoc. Tom Green was the precursor to a lot of the wild unmoderated internet humor that would rise in the 2000s eventually giving us Adult Swim and, Tim & Eric

 

1. Mulholland Drive
2. Amélie
3. Spirited Away

4. Visitor Q
5. The Piano Teacher
6. Freddy Got Fingered
7. Fellowship of the Ring
8. Y Tu Mamá También
9. Hedwig and the Angry Inch
10. Donnie Darko

Also love Ichi the Killer, The Royal Tenenbaums, Storytelling, Suicide Club, Dog Days, A Knights Tale, Tape, Not Another Teen Movie, The Happiness of the Katakuris and Fat Girl. Amazing year.

 

This is a far better year for me than the previous one while definitely representing a year in which animated films started to become something I fell in love with. My three choices are -

1. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
2. Monsters, Inc.
3. Shrek

Other favourites are in bold with the rest being at worst memorable; Donnie Darko, The Royal Tenenbaums, Ocean’s Eleven, A Beautiful Mind, The Others, The Devil’s Backbone, Pulse, Frailty, Joy Ride, The Fast and the Furious, Training Day, Hannibal, Session 9, The Mummy Returns, and Thir13en Ghosts.

 

1. Mulholland Dr.
2. The Royal Tenenbaums
3. Waking Life

Mulholland Dr. has it all, beautifully filmed, excellent acting (particularly from Watts), haunting soundtrack, and scenes that stick in your mind for weeks or in my case years.

 

Yes it's a masterpiece in surreal story telling. Which were your favorite scenes?
Here are 2 that stuck with me

 

The Justin Theroux/Billy Ray Cyrus scene is also great

 

I need to watch it again, it didn’t stick with me outside of the Diner scene

 

1. Spirited Away
2. Amelie
3. Fellowship of the Ring


Honorable mentions:

Black Hawk Down
Donnie Darko
Hannibal
Monsters, Inc.
Royal Tenenbaums
Waking Life

 

So many! Those two are standouts. Scenes to me that were striking were scenes where the tone and acting suddenly shifted. This was my first Lynch film so everything was so new and unexpected the first time I watched it, and I was so impressed I rewatched it immediately. One scene that stood out was the audition scene that without context doesn’t seem that special but in the film on first view I remember realizing oh they’re being directed to act strange or inauthentic, because Naomi was so good in this scene:

Related, I can’t find the clip of the exact scene but the end of this one and the next scene where she wakes and the tone and acting completely changes was striking:

the way film can shift from scene to scene, and completely change tone from silly and jovial to serious and dramatic to surreal and creepy here:

And to Coen brothers-like comedy here:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ANVej2nGepE

there’s nothing else like it.

 

1. Mullholland Drive
2. Zoolander
3. Spirited Away

Mullholland Drive I imagine is going to sweep to a well deserved victory this year, and there are so many striking moments in the film, as has been discussed above. The Diner scene in particular, may be the best jump scare in cinema, all happening in bright daylight and moving at it's own pace. A wonderful film.

Zoolander is probably my favourite American comedy, watched it over and over again with my family when we were younger, it's absurd and ridiculous, and just consistently funny. Great comic performances from Stiller and Wilson, and a heap of fun cameos. The majority of mainstream American comedy in the last ~30 years doesn't really work for me, but this one really does.

Spirited Away is a fantastic film, that appeals to children and adults equally, but without making concessions or moments in the film that are specifically "for" either demographic. Shows a great deal of trust in the audience, and allows everyone to be swept up in the animation and imagination of it all.

For some honourable mentions;

Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher is a perfect Haneke film, about repression, and sado-masochistic violence. Extremely difficult to watch, but that's the point.

Ken Loach's The Navigators is a classic socialist Loach film, about a group of railway workers and their struggles after British Rail gets privatised. As usual, Loach uses this to look at the myths that free market capitalism makes things more efficient, and the callous way it treats the workers it deems expendable.

Satoshi Kon's Millennium Actress is a fascinating animated film about a retired actress retelling her life story, which blurs reality, fiction and cinema all together with Kon's wonderful editing and eye for visual storytelling.

You Shoot, I Shoot is a fun Hong Kong comedy from Pang Ho Cheung, about a hitman and a film-maker making snuff movies. A bit reminiscent of the super dark Man Bites Dog, but played much more for laughs.

A couple of demented Takashi Miike films, Ichi the Killer and Visitor Q - both ludicrous in their own way, over the top and violent, and made in that particular Miike style, quick and effective.

Much slower is Pulse, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's early internet horror about the isolation of modern life. It's full of moments that make your skin crawl and make you feel uncomfortable, as opposed to outright horror imagery. There's a malevolent presence in the air here, and you can really feel it.

 

1. Royal Tenenbaums
2. Oceans 11
3. Amelie

 

1. Zoolander
2. Legally Blonde
3. Millenium Actress

 

1. Passing Summer (Schanelec)
2. What Time is It There? (Tsai)
3. West Side Avenue (Diaz)
-
4. Wild Innocence (Garrel)
5. Trouble Every Day (Denis)
6. Mulholland Drive (Lynch)
7. All About Lily Chou-Chou (Iwai)
8. A.I. (Spielberg)
9. Be My Star (Grisebach)
10. Fragile as the World (Gomes)

Brutal one to narrow down for that top three, I feel like at least the top 7 are interchangeable for me and the order would look completely different any time I would make this again. Schanelec is probably the best and most underrated filmmaker of the Berlin School crew, understandably though, as her films definitely skewed towards the more difficult than someone like Petzold. The Tsai is great, top 3 of his for me and probably the easiest entry point for his work. The Diaz is quite different from much of what would follow from him (although his return to genre in his recent work circles back around a bit). A sprawling crime saga centred around the Filipino diaspora in New York. Again a work that I would call accessible in terms of the filmmaker, but the 5 hour runtime still undermines that.

HM: Hush! (Hashiguchi), R Xmas (Ferrara), Harmful Insect (Shiota), Take Care of My Cat (Jeong), Fat Girl (Breillat)

Planned to keep my honourable mentions to underseen films as I said in the last thread, but I only have one that meets the qualifier I set for this year so I’m breaking my own rule for this round

 

Visitor Q is so twisted, even by Miike standards. It might be my favourite thing by him. I don’t know if you’ve seen Pasolini’s Teorema but he basically took the core of that film and turned it into grotesque early 00s J-horror. They would make a fantastic double bill.

 

Visitor Q is so messed up but so funny. The greenhouse scene is especially hilarious.

 

I think that Visitor Q would make a fantastic double bill with Mary Poppins too - a film about the arrival of a mysterious stranger who brings a family back together again.

I haven’t seen that Pasolini film - my knowledge of him is pretty limited, but I’ll make sure to mark it down! I do need to watch more of his work, I love pretty much all the provocative filmmakers he influenced, but I need to see more of his work.