OK, folks, the year is almost up, and it's time for the critics to post their list of the ten best movies of the year. Since this is subjective, everyone's list is unique, and here is my list. Feel free to comment with your own selections, or even disagreements with my choices, though I'm not so much interesting in arguing the worth of a given movie as I am in seeing what the consensus for the best movies is.
I can't think of ten really great movies this year, but I can easily come up with the 5 best, in ascending order to number 1:
5. Pandaemonium
The life of the poet's Coleridge and Wordsworth, this movie literally rocked. If you don't get poetry, see this movie and watch it come to rolicking life.
4. Ghost World
The best depiction of teen life ever, or at least a certain type of teen. If this was (or is) you, you'll know it. This movie is so good, so right, I just love it.
3. Lord of the Rings
I have my quibbles, but at its heart this is an honest effort at bringing a sprawling literary masterpiece to the screen, and the miracle is that it works. The kind of movie Hollywood is afraid to make anymore. I hope this movie inspires them to create epics again.
2. Memento
Hands down the best script (it will win the Oscar for that) of the year, in a diabolically clever story that keeps you on your toes till the end...then makes you think (hard) about it for days and weeks to come.
1. Mullholland Drive
A remarkable film, one that haunts me months after seeing it. A perfectly-described trip into the subconscious mind of one of the most fully-realized heroines I've seen on screen. A tragic, heart-rending story of life and dreams and hopes and fears. I'll never forget it, and am grateful to have seen it. Some people said that David Lynch just threw a mass of stuff on the screen and it doesn't make sense. Well, it does make sense, perfect sense, and is easily explainable, and touching to your very soul.
I also had a warm spot in my heart for:
-Shrek
-Monsters, Inc. ("Kitty!")
-A.I. (it was a Kubrick-written ending that everyone blamed on Spielberg, and I would have liked to see Gigolo Joe the way Kubrick would have directed it, but this was a movie of wonders and heart)
-Sexy Beast
-Final Fantasy (What animation!)
This final list is of those movies I have heard such good things about that they might well make my top-ten list after I see them, but I haven't yet seen them and thus cannot say:
-A Beautiful Mind (even though the hero's story is almost a fabrication, and not very true to life)
-Monster's Ball
-Gosford Park
-Black Hawk Down
-Amelie