Now Showing: Cole Smithey's Best and Worst of 2000

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Candid Reviews of Movies Just Hitting The Big Screen

Cole Smithey’s
Best and Worst of 2000

by Cole Smithey

Looking back at the recent year in movies is always a depressing prospect. To think that 2000 saw a movie worse than Kevin Smith’s 1999 celluloid disaster, Dogma, is bad enough. Then, to consider that there are two movies tied for the first place category of worst film for the year 2000 — that’s just plain disturbing!

The least of the top 10 worst movies was Paul Verhoeven’s (Starship Troopers) Hollow Man. Verhoeven had a terrible script to work from and he tends to skip between making mediocre movies and movies that stand out as cinematic achievements. So, watch for his next movie to be something really special.

9) Reindeer Games is a movie just as bad as its title. Thankfully you’d never make the mistake of renting a movie with the word ‘reindeer’ in the title anyway.

8) Deuce Bigelow: Male Gigolo is so evenly defective that it gives a knowing wink and a soggy limp handshake. It’s a movie that welcomes all of the pity it can get.

7) Loser was a movie that actually set out to be worse than it ended up being. All you really need to know about this movie is never, I mean NEVER, put your hand to your forehead in the shape of an ‘L.’

6) The Replacements and The Watcher tied by virtue of sharing that most misunderstood piece-of-wood actor, Keanu Reeves. Reeves is probably the most unfathomable actor in the world because no one can comprehend the flatness of his performances, and yet he continues to get work in Hollywood — more confusion.

5) Titan A.E. is an animated movie that barely could have been a Saturday afternoon television cartoon. Refer to 1999’s South Park for sloppy animation with great ideas as an animated movie that kicks serious cartoon butt.

4) Whipped was a sexually racy movie that was commercially over-hyped in a publicity disaster months before the movie finally came out. Whipped is a lesson in how not to use tasteless humor. (Again refer to South Park for the correct method.) If you ever sink so low as to rent this movie, just make sure you do it alone. I guarantee that if you make the mistake of renting it with a significant other, you will not have sex for at least a week, maybe three.

3) Play it to the Bone never struck a balance between comedy, drama, and social satire. Besides, Woody Harrelson should be condemned to only making movies with Whoopi Goldberg and Tom Hanks as fellow members of the deer-in-the-headlights actors club.

2) Lost Souls finds Winona Ryder doing what she does best: smoking endless cigarettes and drinking coffee. The movie is an insult to the horror genre and deserves only to be burned and forgotten.

1) Battlefield Earth and Bamboozled are locked in a dead tie for the two worst films of the year 2000. There are certain odd similarities between the films that sent off warning signals way before the derisive reviews came pouring in by critics who withstood screening these two abysmal dogs. The late L. Ron Hubbard and the way-too-late Spike Lee share certain incite-and-conquer philosophies that manage to insult people of every social class and nationality because they attempt to stake a claim about their own meager intelligence as being above everyone else’s. It’s the same trap that Kevin Smith fell into with Dogma, and it’s the same tragic flaw that brought down the once mighty filmmaking hand of Woody Allen. Hollywood may produce a lot of mediocre to bad movies every year, but they’re not the ones to blame for the truly reprehensibly low films that stink up big screens across the country. Those films come from a breed of writers and directors who have nothing to share, only a selfish ax to grind.

Which brings me to my choices for the 10 best films of 2000.

10) Dancer In the Dark is a problem movie. It’s meant to be a cinematic dilemma for audiences to mull over in the same way that Tim Robbins’ Dead Man Walking sat uncomfortably in audiences’ psyches. You don’t get to merely sit back and be entertained, but the effort is very much worth the price of admission.

9) One Day In September won last year’s Oscar for best documentary although the film didn’t yet have a distributor at the time. The documentary is a riveting look at the hostage crisis at the 1972 Munich Olympics and plays like the most intense action thriller you’ve ever seen. Director Kevin Macdonald pulls no punches is dissecting the German military’s role in botching the rescue mission as well as the release of the murderous Palestinian terrorists just weeks after the fiasco.

8) High Fidelity was a coup for both John Cusack and director Stephen Frears (The Grifters). This musically romanticized version of heartbreak as the ultimate self-therapy is infectious and fun. Feel free to see it alone or not alone.

7) Shadow of the Vampire. Director Elias Merhige (Begotten) shakes modern cinema by the scruff of its neck while patting it on the ass by blending homage, horror, and comedy. Willem Dafoe’s spot-on performance as actor/vampire Max Schreck looks Oscar ready.

6) American Psycho came at a perfect time before the dot com stock dive shrank the penises of the Wall Street warriors. Director Mary Harron turned Christian Bale into an overnight sensation while revamping Bret Easton Ellis’ unreadable tripe into the stuff of genius. Gleefully dark and lustily image rich, American Psycho is a clean and elegant black comedy that goes well with white Formica.

5) The Contender makes Jeff Bridges look like a much better presidential choice than either Bush or Gore and shows Joan Allen to be a shoe-in for this year’s best actress Oscar. Writer/director Rod Lurie is the man to watch for with his follow up to this brilliantly written political thriller.

4) Traffic slips in under the closing days of 2000 with a knock-out cast including Michael Douglas, Benicio Del Toro, and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Director Steven Soderbergh (Erin Brockovich) deftly uses opposing color schemes to map out perimeters of the drug war between the U.S. and Mexico. There isn’t a dull moment in the 147 minutes of this ground-breaking film.

3) 13 Days puts the Kennedy administration under a magnifying glass of the tense two-week period known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. It’s a history lesson that shows exactly why John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the last great president this country has had.

2) Sunshine. Hungarian director Istvan Szabo’s (1981 Academy Award winner for best foreign-language film, Mephisto) unravels knots of history behind a Jewish Hungarian family’s multi-generational survival that spans from the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (1867-1918), through the First and Second World Wars, and into the Soviet Communist Regime (1945-1989). There are very few truly epic films out there, and even fewer as complete as Sunshine.

1) Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon tops my list as the best film of 2000. Director Ang Lee (The Ice Storm) uses the conventions of the Hong Kong Kung-Fu movie to weave in his own sense of dramatic possibilities. It’s a movie that breaks its own mold as it reforms that very same structure right before your eyes. Like all great movies, you have to see it to believe it.