Fish, Hobbits and pirates were some of the biggest attractions of the 2003 movie year, what with the huge success of Disney's Finding Nemo, back-to-back Middle-earth adventures in two Lord of the Rings movies -- The Two Towers and The Return of the King -- plus Johnny Depp as a swaggeringly fey pirate in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl and the return of Captain Hook in Peter Pan.
It was the year when Billy Bob Thornton put on a red suit and a white beard, sat on Santa's throne and wet himself . . . and more than once. A year when Mike Myers startled children and shocked their parents with his adult humor as Dr. Seuss's beloved The Cat in the Hat.
Jamie Lee Curtis found her inner child in the hilarious remake of Freaky Friday. But we discovered in the gruesome remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre that you can't always go home again . . . and that goes double for Jeepers Creepers 2.
Nor should you go looking to the past, something we sadly learned in the unfunny prequel to the Farrelly Brothers' Dumb and Dumber -- Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd -- which sorely missed the wacky touches of the Farrellys, Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels.
Director Robert Rodriguez tried to keep the momentum he had going in his two successful movie series -- Spy Kids and that one about the mariachi hit man from the films El Mariachi and Desperado. But Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over proved to be aptly titled while Once Upon a Time in Mexico showed that there is such a thing as too much mayhem.
Everyone was excited about seeing the final two chapters in the Matrix trilogy. But The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions proved that there was nothing new to say.
Jason and Freddy battled for horror movie supremacy in Freddy Vs. Jason. Colin Farrell was trapped by a sniper in Phone Booth. Jason Lee trapped an eel-like monster from another world in a toilet in Dreamcatcher, then found he couldn't get off without letting the toothy creature out.
Jack Nicholson found more success playing opposite two new co-stars -- Adam Sandler in the inane Anger Management; Diane Keaton in the cheery November-December romance Somthing's Gotta Give -- than he had as a solo act in last year's About Schmidt, even though he was nominated for an Academy Award for that film.
Woody Allen tried to revive public interest, which had been in a deep fade since at least the '80s, with a film called Anything Else, but found that people really wanted to see just about anything else.
Bruce Willis also tried with the ill-conceived Tears of the Sun, playing a tough Navy SEAL who reluctantly tries to rescue patients from a jungle mission hospital that is under fire from Muslim rebels. It proved to be a war movie looking for a war as well as being a movie looking for an audience that never showed.
Harrison Ford, in the cop-buddy movie Hollywood Homicide, looked old and weary and the box office was anemic.
Arnold Schwarzenegger went back for a third go-round in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines and not only found huge success -- $427 million worldwide -- but also got a governorship out of it.
Kevin Costner found better success than Willis, but not as much as Schwarzenegger -- with the soulful western Open Range. But despite the success of Open Range, Ron Howard discovered sadly that audiences still weren't flocking to westerns in a big way upon the release of his The Missing, even though it got good reviews.
Some of the best pictures to come along in this part of the world in 2003 were films that had been released in New York, Los Angeles and a handful of other big cities in 2002 -- Chicago, The Hours, About Schmidt. I was tempted to put them on my 10-best list this year because: A. it was tough coming up with 10 stellar films from 2003, and B. this probably will be the last time I can do this. Because the Academy Awards have been pushed to Feb. 29 this year, almost all 2003's big pictures opened before year end and not, as has been the custom, until after the Oscar nominations were announced in mid-February. (This year they'll be announced late this month).
At year's end I find that some of the films with our highest rating, have either lost some of their luster over the months or seem a bit slight to be on a 10-best list. Sorry, Freaky Friday, The Life of David Gale, Piglet's Big Movie, The Hulk, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.
Although it has received rave reviews elsewhere -- and even been named best picture of the year in several places -- I wasn't as taken with The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, even though it now seems the picture to beat at the Academy Awards. And why not? Coupled with the two previous Ring movies -- and all filmed consecutively -- it's a towering achievement for director Peter Jackson and for New Zealand filmmaking in general. But it didn't make my list.
The 10 best
What did? It includes a few films I originally didn't think were going to make it. However, while scrambling to come up with 10, they suddenly seemed pretty darned worthy after all. So, here they are:
Peter Pan. This new spin on the 99-year-old tale gets a boost from having a real boy play Peter, something that adds a new dimension of sexual tension. Plus, there are touching moments and some truly spectacular special effects. This new version of Peter Pan has little new to say, but says it very well.
Finding Nemo. Colorful undersea adventures sparked this tale of a papa clown fish looking for his little son, who has been captured and taken to a dentist's office aquarium. Ellen DeGeneres made the whole thing much funnier with her take on a fish who has a short-term memory problem.
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Johnny Depp became a one-man three-ring circus in his funny riff on the old seadog character, this time a fey swashbuckler trying to thwart an unsavory gang of pirates who turn into a skeleton crew by moonlight.
Master and Commander: Far Side of the World. More seagoing adventures, this time in the Napoleon era as a British crew faces hurricane force winds and French cannonballs. Russell Crowe was a commanding presence as the ship's captain.
Mystic River. Clint Eastwood's dramatic tale of a Boston murder and the clues that lead to the wrong man was brimming with fire, anger, passion, surprise and a lionizing performance by Sean Penn. He's certainly the front runner for this year's best actor Oscar thanks to his work here and in another emotional turn in the just-released 21 Grams.
Love Actually. A valentine to love, set at Christmas, and with an unlikely cast of characters who included the prime minister of England, a widower, a heartbroken man trying finding romance in France with his Portuguese housekeeper, a straying husband, a pair of children dressed as lobsters and a couple of porn movie actors.
Kill Bill Vol. 1. Director Quentin Tarantino came roaring back to the screen with this violent, oddball fantasy of a hit woman who survives a massacre on her wedding day, then sets out on a worldwide trek for revenge. Uma Thurman was one determined lady . . . and she has the bruises to prove it.
The Missing. Ron Howard gave the old western theme -- a hunt for the kidnapped young woman -- a new twist. Her tough-as-nails frontierwoman mother sets out to rescue her with the help of the mother's own estranged father, a craggy character who has gone native.
Seabiscuit. Hardly the best horse movie you've ever seen, given the exhaustively researched Laura Hillenbrand book on which it's based. Lots of history had to be cut to get this one down to a manageable screen time. But it's a solid film nonetheless, with fine performances from Jeff Bridges and Chris Cooper as Seabiscuit's owner and trainer respectively.
Matchstick Men. Underrated caper film revolves around a con artist and the daughter he never knew who turns up, moves in and decides she'd be his perfect partner. Clever surprises kept this one afloat right to fadeout.
The 10 worst
Coming up with the 10 worst films of the year also proved to be a chore, because there were too many candidates.
I didn't go the easy route of listing films that seemed determined to hit the lowest common denominator -- Cradle 2 the Grave, Underworld, Jeepers Creepers 2, Freddy Vs. Jason. Instead, I chose films on which the filmmakers really seemed to have made an effort for success, but which came off dismally wrongheaded when thrown on screen. Here are 10 films which should never have seen the light of a projector's lamp:
Down With Love. An attempt to revive the frothy Rock Hudson-Doris Day sex comedies of the early '60s was a charmless endeavor, even with Renee Zellweger and Ewan McGregor trying their best.
Gigli. A none-too-bright low-level mobster teams with a lesbian enforcer in a film that received so much bad press -- and so much advance hype for stars Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez that they became known as "Bennifer" -- that it earned back only a 10th of its $55 million budget.
The Human Stain. In the year's most unusual bit of casting, Welshman Anthony Hopkins, possibly the whitest man on the planet, played a black man who passed for white . . . and also a Jew, literary scholar and former champion prize fighter. Glamorous Nicole Kidman played a janitor who fell in love with him, sort of, despite the age difference. The results were as bizarre as they sound.
Dreamcatcher. Stephen King's novel, written while he was recuperating from a road accident and taking 100 pills a day, is a sometimes wacky, and often yucky, mix of Aliens, Men in Black, Independence Day, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Stnad By Me, The Blob and bathroom humor. But it was never as good as any one of them.
Beyond Borders. It's clear that the heart of Angelina Jolie, a real-life goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, was in the right place when she demanded she star as a woman who travels to crisis spots around the world to help victims of war and famine. But the plot quickly melts into a sappy, heavy-handed romantic melodrama about a woman who falls in love with the leader of a relief team and crosses continents to rescue him.
Bad Santa. Billy Bob Thornton, Jolie's ex, gave a new spin to the department store Santa character, playing him as a drunken, foul-mouthed, womanizing thief. Funny at first, the joke quickly wore out its welcome.
Hollywood Homicide. Harrison Ford took the old plot device about the experienced cop and his young partner, spiked it up with the fact that both had daytime jobs they'd rather be doing, and came up with a flat, tired looking film that nobody wanted to see.
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The plot was intriguing: famous 19th-century literary characters, from Tom Sawyer to the Invisible Man, team up to stop an evil mastermind whose weapons of mass destruction threaten world security. But the film never came close to matching any of the adventures for which its celebrated characters became legendary. Even some of the special effects looked cheesy.
House of Sand and Fog. Preposterous melodrama about an Iranian immigrant who pretends he's much wealthier than he is, buys a house that he hopes to turn around at a huge profit, but crosses swords with the angry young woman who was illegally evicted from it. Designed to be a tearjerker -- just about everyone dies in the end -- it left me feeling incredulous.
Intolerable Cruelty. Teaming George Clooney as a whiz-bang divorce lawyer with Catherine Zeta-Jones as a divorcee seeking revenge on him for having been shut out of a huge payoff, must have seemed like a terrific idea. But this Coen Brothers comedy strained at the seams and it didn't help that the stars had zero chemistry between them.
