While we're wafting away those assorted stenches, we may as well get a shovel and a wheelbarrow to cart off the mounds of mediocrity the industry left scattered throughout our collective consciousness. For example, who would have dreamed that a remake of Shaft could be just so-so, that an energetic director like John Singleton could reduce the popular urban icon to a chaste, witless meanie? While audiences responded favorably to nautical entertainments like U-571 and The Perfect Storm, the success of these paeans to workin'-men-who-drown must be chalked up to a simple lust for massive special effects. (Certainly we didn't show up at the box office to ogle George Clooney in a John Deere cap with Marky Mark at his side, bellowing about how much he just loves fishin'!)
And now that we're at the year's end, we get Steven Soderbergh's dope manifesto, Traffic (due in Houston on January 5), which is already the toast of many critics, but -- let's face it, boys -- the movie's a bloated bore, mostly badly tinted slop, barely rescued by edgy performances from Don Cheadle and Amy Irving, plus some exceptionally heavy mugging from Benicio Del Toro. Otherwise, it's simply the year's second round of Michael Douglas playing at sorting out family problems. Having already suffered through Curtis Hanson's flabby and interminable Wonder Boys, this punishing double shot of mopey Douglas seems particularly unfair.
Speaking of punishment, the cinematic menu for the year 2000 featured several bombastic works from young directors hooked on radical themes such as "Drugs are bad" and "Unhappy people tend to hurt each other." While James Gray's The Yards featured some gritty work from Joaquin Phoenix (who also spent the year impressing us in Ridley Scott's choppy, overrated Gladiator and Philip Kaufman's elegantly obvious Quills), Gray's formalist concerns were eclipsed by a forced, almost silly sense of grimness.
Similarly, Darren Aronofsky and Leos Carax seemed determined to ignore their own respective senses of humor and spontaneity, as the uniformly thudding Requiem for a Dream and POLA X vividly illustrated. Slightly more inventive was Jeremy Podeswa's The Five Senses, which transformed Toronto into a giant therapy session for the terminally repressed, and Lars von Trier's The Idiots, in which clever Danish youths learned to enjoy life to the fullest, naturally, by pretending to be retarded.
In an attempt to rescue us from these handicapped imaginations, Sofia Coppola helmed her adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides's novel The Virgin Suicides, which effectively transcribed seemingly conventional male angst into universal allegory. Delivering deliciously doomed young ladies and the lads who adore them, the movie valiantly attempted to sump-pump the teeming teen T&A -- represented, here and in the more lucrative Bring It On, by Kirsten Dunst -- out of our psyches. Brava for that! (It also showed that Danny DeVito, late of crackling comedies such as Drowning Mona and Screwed, is close to usurping Gene Hackman's throne for appearing onscreen in something at all times.)
As if to balance Ms. Coppola's gender exploration, Von Trier's other entry this year -- the sensational and ridiculous Dancer in the Dark -- indicated just how silly men can be when they attempt to illustrate the glory of the feminine in the form of a nearly blind, impossibly innocent chanteuse who moonlights as a martyr for no apparent reason. In Dancer, the musical segments were absolutely wonderful, but the rest made me wish I'd thought to bring some stale produce.
Of course, no great hoards of moviemakers ventured down emotionally experimental roads, and many opted instead to remind us (yawn) about the virtues of "grrrl power" (or, in the case of Jun Falkenstein's smart, whimsical The Tigger Movie, "T-I-Double-Guh-Er" power.") As the new millennium launched two movies about female boxers (the congenial Knockout and the fiercely reactionary Girlfight), it became clear that kicking ass has become a delightful new component of feminine protocol. Gina Prince-Bythewood's Love and Basketball, featuring the taut, intense presence of Sanaa Lathan, also pushed this theme, but when Lathan and Omar Epps play highly competitive bedroom one-on-one for each other's clothes, the director shows us that any victory without love is hollow and pointless.
Disregarding this advice with a voracious smile, relative newcomer Amanda Peet gladly flounced her way through the clever (if slight) The Whole Nine Yards and Whipped, but it may take a while for her look-at-me style -- possibly on loan from the equally toothy Denise Richards -- to develop enough complexity or wryness for anyone to take the kick-ass girl seriously.
