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Friday, December 27, 2002

By Barry Paris, Post-Gazette Film Critic

The year 2002 yielded an unusually rich film crop of foreign and domestic vintage, high in artistic as well as historical and political quality. Unfortunately, for Oscar-strategic and other occult marketing reasons, the bulk of the best was not released for public viewing until the past six weeks or so (four in the past 10 days!), meaning that we must scramble to the multiplexes for condensed screening sessions before the clock strikes 2003 and we all -- reviewers and public alike -- turn into critical pumpkins.

The envelopes, please...

1. "The Pianist"
(Post-Gazette review)

The best film of 2002 is the one you've probably heard the least about, by a director, Roman Polanski, you've heard the most about in the past. It is perhaps the most devastating Holocaust story ever filmed -- an excruciating chronicle of Polish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman's nightmare journey from celebrated concert artist to hunted animal. Adrien Brody in the title role is heartbreaking, but so is every scene in the film. The first half, following the step-by-step dehumanization of Warsaw's huge Jewish population, is almost unbearable to watch. The second half --Szpilman's desperate struggle for survival, in and out of the infamous Warsaw Ghetto -- is as suspenseful and riveting as anything you'll ever see. A brilliant, difficult, shattering, hugely important film.

2. "Ivans XTC"
Not reviewed in the Post-Gazette

John Huston's son Danny stars in this picture whose postmodern title -- a phonetic rendering of "Ivan's Ecstasy" -- misleadingly suggests the designer drug. A better title would have been "The Death of Ivan," based as it is on Tolstoy's dark novella, "The Death of Ivan Ilyich." Trade 19th-century Russia for 21st-century America, where Ivan Beckman (Huston) is the hottest young talent agent in Hollywood with good reason for rapture. He's just had a grand coup in stealing big star Peter Weller away from a rival agency. Ivan is a cokehead, an alcoholic, a pill freak and a sex addict, leading us to the same erroneous conclusion of his friends when they learn of his demise: drug overdose. Director Bernard Rose shot it in High Definition Digital video -- the visual wave of the future. "Ivan" starts out as a black comedy and ends up as a definitive latterday of the locusts.

3. "Gangs Of New York"
(Post-Gazette review)

No streets were meaner than those of 1846 New York's Five Points area, a violent cesspool of crime, poverty and corruption controlled by warring Irish immigrant and "Nativist" gangs. If there was any doubt about it before, Martin Scorsese's "Gangs" proves Leonardo DiCaprio is a fine actor who's getting finer. Daniel Day-Lewis is a superb actor, getting greater: His Butcher Bill is a 7-foot-tall madman who loves to read about his crimes in Police Gazette.

Though its central action (the 1863 draft riots) is excessively violent, "Gangs" has an eerie, hypnotic "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" quality. Its release was wisely postponed for a year, in deference to 9/11 New York sensitivities. It's the most ferocious of film visions.

4. "Bowling for Columbine"
(Post-Gazette review)

Liberal gadfly Michael Moore's tract against the National Rifle Association and America's gun insanity is a vicious documentary gem, culminating in his sneak-attack interview with Charlton Heston.

5. "FAR FROM HEAVEN"
(Post-Gazette review)

You can't help falling in love with this lavish, beautifully acted, nostalgic homage to the Technicolor melodramas of the '50s -- a delight, thanks to the performances of Julianne Moore, Dennis Quaid and Patricia Clarkson, from beginning to end.

6. "Talk To Her"
Not reviewed in the Post-Gazette.

Two men have fallen in love with two women in comas! They fantasize about them, agonize over them, walk with them (comotase in their wheelchairs) -- but do they TALK to them? Gentle male nurse Javier Camara does, and makes this Pedro Almadovar picture soar.

7. "About Schmidt"
(Post-Gazette review)

Jack Nicholson is the recently widowed retiree of the title role, fitfully attempted to get in touch with his widowhood, his Winnebago and his about-to-be-married daughter -- in that order. Kathy Bates is the girl's oversexed mother-in-law-to-be in this alternately poignant and hilarious yarn, guaranteed to earn Nicholson another best-actor nomination.

8. "Just A Kiss"
(Post-Gazette review)

Labial fusion makes for sexual fission in this thoroughly delicious romantic comedy -- a dark one, written by (and co-starring) Patrick Breen as one of a half dozen thirtysomethings suffering from interconnected fidelity issues -- a chain reaction set off by a simple smooch in a European hotel room. Breen's screenplay is wonderfully amusing. Fisher Stevens' inventive direction involves the use of rotoscope, a color-drenched digital-animation overlay to "enhance" certain live-action moments. "Kiss" and its irony are over-the-top fun.

9. "Frida"
(Post-Gazette review)

A sumptuous film, ravishingly photographed, marvelously performed. It's the story of international icon Frida Kahlo (Salma Hayek), the Mexican artist-wife of muralist Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina) and lover of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky (Geoffrey Rush) before his 1940 murder in Mexico City. Gorgeously hirsute Frida -- she, of the single thick black eyebrow and fab feminine moustache -- became an artist by default, after a horrendous motor accident in 1925 left her crippled and in constant pain for life. She painted to exorcise her pain -- self-portraits of agony and ecstasy, agonizingly masochistic and ecstatically colored. Director Julie Taymor renders all as Frida did, with a magic realism worthy of Garcia-Marquez.

10. "Welcome To Collinwood"
(Post-Gazette review)

The gang that couldn't crack a safe straight has a helluva time -- and so do we -- in one of the quirkiest, funniest action comedies in years. Collinwood in rust-belt Cleveland is much like Braddock, Aliquippa and similar disaster areas in Western Pennsylvania. It's the shabby locale for a shaggy-dog story of the "perfect" jewel heist, imperfectly committed. But if the crime is far from perfection, the direction by Anthony and Joe Russo is close to it, akin to the work of another set of brothers, Joel and Ethan Coen, in "Fargo" et al. William H. Macy is the gang's most handicapped member: He can never do anything or go anywhere without holding the baby his incarcerated wife left behind. Sexy Sam Rockwell, the mastermind, keeps getting distracted by sexy Jennifer Esposito. Ancient "professional" bank burglar Michael Jeter keeps losing his pants. Not all its gags work but, "Collinwood" is a creative hoot.

Barry Paris can be reached at 412-263-3859.