The best, the worst, and should we care?

• Author: Sharrett, Christopher
• Position: Reel World - Brief Article

ASSEMBLING A LIST of the year's best films is always a melancholy and distasteful project for me. It is an enterprise that seems so American, this preoccupation with who's on top, who's on the bottom, who gets the brass ring, who's the year's designated loser. It's all pretty pathological. Most disheartening of all as we play this game is confronting the ongoing bankruptcy of the entertainment media, which now scarcely has any pretense of seriousness or interest in addressing the audience as mature adults. Picking and choosing among the rubble of this industry merely reminds one how far the medium has fallen, how few intelligent voices come through, and how the cinema, that great visionary art form of the 20th century, became eye candy in the hands of the new globalized corporate culture.

There are always bright spots. Tilda Swinton was affecting as a distraught wife and mother trying to keep her dysfunctional family protected by its cloak of denial in "The Deep End." Michael Mann delivered a moving, but uneven, tribute to one of the last century's greatest athletes in the biopic "Ali." Fans of David Lynch are singing the praises of his "Mulholland Drive," but for my money, this director has long since drifted into a self-absorbed obscurantism, preoccupied more with chilly vignettes than transmitting anything like a cohesive meditation on a given subject. Much-trumpeted pictures like "A Beautiful Mind" are tearjerkers that sanitize their subject matter to create the kind of human interest story we once watched on TV's "Hallmark Hall of Fame." Such films ignore moral complexity to go for the jugular, offering audiences the cheap emotional rewards they ostensibly came for. "Moulin Rouge" is another attempt to resuscitate the musical in the postmodern age, via a slew of hip allusions to movie and music history, helped along by the sexiness of Nicole Kidman. It tries to return us to the notion of the musical as symbol of art as utopian space, but this film is too self-aware, too much involved in the hermetically sealed Hollywood history (and its exhaustion) to count for much as an enduring work once the thrill of its spectacle dies out.

Even grimmer news is obvious in the directions taken by filmmakers like the Coen brothers, often seen as symbols of the remaining fragments of the American independent tradition. Their "The Man Who Wasn't There" is another trip through cinematic yesteryear, flaunting the conventions of film noir without doing a...