ILX Top Films of 2000-04 RESULTS (yes, really)

49) Morvern Callar (Ramsay, 2002)

Ugh. That was not a film. That was moving pictures and sound. -- Verbal

I saw this movie alone on my second to last night in London last year in NOvember when it was freezing cold after all my friends had flown back to the states and I was stuck there knowing no-body for the next day. I didn't know anything about it but I kept seeing the ads around and was obsessed with them. It was the most heartbreaking film I'd ever seen, I was almost numb when I walked out of there parts of it were so beautiful.
-- anthony kyle monday

52 points for Sexy Beast
54 points for Morvern Callar

Requiem For A Dream (Aronofsky, 2000) 56 Points

1. It's another movie about heroin, which is like another book about heroin.
2. The film's concept and presentation of drug and sex horror were very Stabbing Westward. It seemed to try to find the cool in the wrong spots (which tends to happen more often in creative drug movies). I loved Pi but he should have stuck to nerd shit. That's just me though. --LC

i thought it was quite a stinning bit of cinema. strange this thread should come up now, as i watched it and last exit to brooklyn in a hubert selby jr tribute night shortly after his death a couple of months ago and was really moved by it, again. the photography directly mirrors selby's writing style, the content of the fil itself was amazinglty true to th novel, which is quite a feat, given the sheer density and multi-layered nature of selby's prose. it's a bleak and often upsetting journey in print or on film, but by no means a bad one to go on. -- Dave Stelfox

T48)The Good Thief (Jordan, 2002), 56 points, 1 first-place vote

actually i think one of the best-acted films I've seen in recent years was perhaps The Good Thief, in which other than Nolte, the biggest "name" star had a brief cameo and the other roles were filled with a multicultural cast that seemed to embody nu-Europe, almost playing like a slap in the face to the hollywood-isms of Oceans' 12.
-- Gear! (Ill Cajun Gunsmith), July 12th, 2005 12:44 AM. (Gear!) (link)

"It is sad that Nick Nolte has been reduced to this. Good actor in a bad, wannabe artsy flick. Horrid music choices acompany pointless transitional shots and effects. Frequently the dialog was so muttered and slurred that we had to replay the scene several times to find out what was said." - Amazon reviewer

46) Bad Education (Almodovar, 2004) 57 points, 1 first-place vote

its a bit too much like an almodovar manifesto (without knowing very much about almodovar). or rather, it just has this feeling of him going "look! abusive priests! travsvestites! gay film directors! geddit!!!!!!!!!!!!!". a sort of amalgam of loads of his other films, but its layed on a bit strong. that said, it was in spanish and although i understood about 40/50%, i didnt get hardly any of the jokes for example, so that reduced my enjoyment a lot.
the plot is a bit too convoluted, again maybe thats my language problem contributing to that.
basically, its a lot like his other films, all mashed into one, but taken a bit far.
-- ambrose

It was great. I think more people responded to "Talk to Her" because of the "high art" thrust that the Pina Bausch component put in, and because that film was less ferociously gay than this one. But this is one is still excellent. It's weird to me how carefully balanced he is able to make his soap opera plots: he can take you somewhere that looks pretty much like a totally self-indulgent porn fantasy (the tranny gets the hottest guy in the room, etc.) and then can flip the valence of why that happened plot-wise in a way that is pretty darkly critical of certain strands of gay sexuality (the exploitive director who blatantly enforces casting couch fucking, the open question of whether abuse happened or not etc.).
-- Drew Daniel

Yes, and we can read ILXors' comments in our own ILX time, so why bother posting them either?

45T) Gosford Park (Altman, 2001) 58 points

yeah, it's great. what i love is the inversion of the manor-murder setup that forms the basis of all the commentary. rather than introducing the dramatis personae clearly and showing us the lines of relation to each other, into which the murder is inserted as an unknown; the murder is obvious and pretty boring (and it's late in the movie! like 2/3rds in!) even to the characters, but the status and even identities of the characters remain foggy even at the end (ok, who is who's kid? uh, ok that guy wanted this from, wait, i think...) and old bastard getting whacked is easy to understand but class/gender/nationality are a mess.
-- g--ff

rules
-- s1ocki

45t) Capturing the Friedmans (Jarecki, 2003), 58 points

I just watched it yesterday. I wonder how many "victims" turned down the interview requests. It's hard to feel like you are getting all sides of the story until you hear from more of them. The most damning thing towards the police seemed to be the coerced testimonials of the victims. The most damning thing towards the Friedmans, and what convinced me of their guilt, was what their lawyer had to say.
I also felt like the bond between the brothers and their father, their relationship, was obviously strong but seemed to require or only exist in a superficial form. See: their constant need to be performing while being recorded on tape and film. Were I to be all Freudian in examining their possible dysfunction, they seem to put up quite a front of happiness i.e. their need to perform really magnifies the tip of the ice-berg. Makes you think they could very easily absorb lies into their family and continue functioning/performing, and that perhaps they try so hard to have fun because were they to stop making silly jokes for 5 minutes, the ensuing silence would be horrible.
-- bnw

43) Kill Bill 2 (Tarantino, 2004), 61 points

Momus, your Lautreamont distinction ("ambivalent" feelings toward the object of his love) is full of hot air. Or do you call De Sade unconscionable, etc.? Certainly we can agree that De Sade has no "ambivalent" feelings toward the objects of his lust: he wants them all annihilated completely in a permanently recurrent frenzy of reductio-ad-ego (vide Blanchot's intro, et al). But unless I misread your likes & dislikes, you'd take De Sade's side in a discussion of whether people ought to read/celebrate his trangressive little missives or no. I think that when your engagement with postmodern tropes collides with your cultural biases, you flinch.
I think it is imperative that you go see this movie with as open a mind as you can, and soon, too.
-- J0hn D

Obviously the reason why the Bride knows the monk's moves is because Bill SAID 'No one gets taught this' and in these types of movies from the beginning of time til now, as soon as the antagonist says 'No one knows THAT' the protagonist suddenly picks it up, cf at the end when Bill says 'He taught you that?' and Bride replies 'Of course he did' which I thought was v. funny (as funny as a scene that had me really choked up could be). Of course this is because I spent way too long as a fucking film studies major and the world would be better off to take Dan's sensible explanation that doesn't actually involve the word "homage".
The buried alive scene is one of the most unsettling, horrifying things I have ever seen in filmed arts in my entire life and is one of the only accurate artistic depictions of feeling trapped that I have ever seen (if not the only one, since I can't think of a counter-example at the mo).

I really, really like this movie. I really like it as a whole too, but I think this one stood v. well on its own two feet and I am excited to get the inevitable director's DVD special edition that I'm sure will hit stores right around November for a priced-to-own reasonable fee of around $30. Fucking bastards.
-- Allyzay

42) What Time Is It There? (Ming-Liang, 2001), 62 points

What Time Is It There? didn't make much of an impression with me. -- jaymc

Or ILX it seems.

srch Paul Schrader on KB as the apex of meaningless collage

http://www.ragtagfilm.com/archives/images/george.jpg

41T) George Washington (Green, 2000), 63 points

I received no comments on this one and can't find much on ILE other than "AWESOME" and/or "MEH."

--Nordicskillz, May 1st, 2003

http://www.hollywoodjesus.com/movie/all_real_girls/01.jpeg

41T) All The Real Girls (Green, 2003), 63 points

ok, i saw this movie on a complete fluke occurance. i was supposed to see irreversible at the gene siskel, but it was sold out. so my friend and i walked down to the esquire and hit all the real girls. i had never heard of david gordon green but my friend said that his influences were quite impressive. after i got out, alls i could do is say wow. i didnt know what hit me and i couldnt really express it in words.
i never got another chance to see it in the theaters, but it haunted me no other movie has. i looked online every day waiting for some news on its dvd release. i counted the days for it to be released for gods sake.
and when i finally watched it again, it broke my heart even more. i think i was just emotionally shocked the first time through, but the second time just broke me down to nothing. this movie is life, it is real. some people want an escape when they hit the multiplex, but that really doesnt do it for me. i want to see life. its just like brian cox says in adaptation in reply to charlie's question about movies having nothing happening in them. surely there are many movies where stuff like this occurs, look at film noir. for example, nothing really occurs in the maltese falcon, no one gets what they want, people die, and you are left with nothing. now, i am not saying that this doesnt happen in real-life, which it obviously does, but it is not the realism that i look for in a movie. i look for the tragic reality of life and human error and regret. this was shown best in the bar scene when our anti-hero was drunk and talking to mary-margaret. "have you ever seen an animal make a mistake?" god, what an amazing line. and it completely shows what paul feels... then the whole mug throwing. powerful stuff there.
surely there were some silly scenes and stuff, but that is real too. who doesnt have silly things happen to them?
dont even get me started on the format or the cinematography, because i could write a book about it. and the constant comic relief of bust-ass... sigh.
i have so musch more to say but i will stop now.
hands down, number one movie of the year for me.
-- todd swiss

oh i don't know about this one at all - i think it's uneven and (dare i say it) BORING (and i generally like "boring" films). Paul Scneider is good and the last scene is nice -him trying to get the dog to go for a swim - but it seems to forced and strains tooo hard for meaning in those small scenes. Its seems to me to be the work of someone who has seen alot of Malick but only borrowed from the surface of his films (the dawn/dusk lighting, the loose structure) but Days of Heaven is so striking because it packs so much into such a tight running time and simultanously seems incredibly slow moving. Theres not enough in All the Real Girls plotwise and yet there are too many "meaningful" moments.
-- jed_

39) Traffic (Soderbergh, 2000), 64 points

I really liked "Traffic", and you must understand the magnitude of my Michael Douglas hatred to understand how amazing that admission is.
-- Dan Perry

I suspect Traffic will be unwatchable in a few decades. It's like Stanley Kramer + Alan Pakula.
-- Amateurist

38T) The Werckmeister Harmonies (Tarr, 2000), 66 points, 1 first-place vote

http://www.niagara.edu/neworder/graphics/24hr.jpg

38T) 24-Hour Party People (Winterbottom, 2002), 66 points

35T - Chicken Run, 70 points, 2 first-place votes

35T - Cremaster 3, 70 points, 1 first-place vote

35T - Ocean's 11, 70 points, 1 first-place vote

32T - Songs From The Second Floor, 77 points, 2 first-place votes

32T - Sympathy For Mr Vengeance, 77 points

32T - Talk To Her, 77 points

32T - I Heart Huckabee's, 77 points

32 T - Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 77 points, 1 first-place vote

26 - High Fidelity, 84 points, 1 first-place vote

25 - Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle, 85 points

24 - Ratcatcher, 86 points

23 - O Brother Where Art Thou, 92 points, 1 first-place vote

22 - Belleville Rendezvous, 93 points

21 - The Pianist, 97 points, 2 first-place votes

20 - Punch-Drunk Love, 99 points, 1 first-place vote

I had a metacomment on the '80s poll results thread that could've been blurbed here bud.

I did find, however, that I gave a point to Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise in the 80s poll.

http://www.everyticket.com/images/nascar/bristol.gif

I would have voted Yi Yi #1

The list-maker, I would imagine.

I've just trawled through my computer and found my votes. Apparently I had The Pianist as my no.1, and Memento no.3 with Eternal & Mulholland at 2 and 4. Just in case anyone was troulbed by my earlier lack of certainty - you will sleep easy now.

What the hell is Swordfish?

I just am bad about cleaning out my old sent mail. Especially since I like reading what I wrote years ago far more than I like reading what others wrote to me.

You must know by now how bad I am about e-mail. Like that crazy woman with her telephone in Sisters, I never call and I never answer.

1. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
2. All the Real Girls
3. You Can Count on Me
4. 25th Hour
5. Mulholland Dr.
6. Talk to Her
7. Together
8. Spirited Away
9. Lost in Translation
10. A.I.: Artificial Intelligence
11. Collateral
12. Before Sunset
13. Far From Heaven
14. Y Tu Mama Tambien
15. Spellbound

WORST
About Schmidt
Igby Goes Down
Waking Life

Besides, we already have Morbius to tell us the worst of The Best.

HARDLY ever.

What about the orphan votes? Where did A.I. finish with all these Uma Thurman foot fetishists?

Also, MD at least didn't exploit Richard Pryor.

Is the "Ratcatcher" here the same as the one in the 90's poll??

Yeah, it was the same film.

This was easily the most bizarre of ILX's old school film polls.

It might have been the most bizarre, but out of them all, it easily contains the highest number of films that I've actually seen.

Just noticed this. Wow, I've missed a lot of these.

whenever I see that photo upthread of All The Real Girls I think it's an ad for polio research.

I threw this one a ballot: https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/the-best-films-of-the-decade-so-far-2010-2014

I'll have to 'finish' this year before i can even think about that time frame.

*last year

Yeah, can we wait a few months? (just found out I'm going to Göteborg Film Fest so I'll get to see so many great 2014 films in a few weeks, yayyayyay!!!)