In 2000:
AOL purchased Time Warner;
Sony released the Playstation 2;
Elián González was reunited with his father in Cuba;
The USS Cole was damaged by Al-Qaeda suicide bombers;
The New York Yankees defeated the New York Mets in the World Series;
The first resident crew entered the International Space Station;
Saturday Night Live aired the “More cowbell” sketch;
Survivor and Dora the Explorer premiered;
George W. Bush narrowly won the US Presidential election;
The final original Peanuts comic strip was released;
India’s population surpassed one billion;
Noah Cyrus, Zion Williamson, Willow Smith, and Mackenzie Foy were born;
While Bob Lemon, Hedy Lamarr, Don Budge, Roger Vadim, Charles Schulz, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Terence McKenna, Lee Petty, Claire Trevor, Edward Gorey, Larry Linville, Sir John Gielgud, Maurice Richard, Tito Puente, Walter Matthau, Sir Alec Guinness, Loretta Young, Carl Barks, Beah Richards, Curt Siodmark, Richard Mulligan, Pierre Trudeau, Gwen Verdon, Steve Allen, Ring Lardner Jr., Gwendolyn Brooks, Werner Klemperer, Billy Barty, Jason Robards, and Julius Epstein died.
The following is a list of my ten favorite films released in 2000:
Czech immigrant Selma (Bjork) has a condition causing blindness and works feverishly to raise money for a procedure to prevent her son Gene from suffering the same fate.
She lives in a trailer on property owned by Linda (Cara Seymour) and Bill (David Morse). When Bill steals her money, a confrontation turns violent and she murders him. Selma reclaims the money and uses it to pay for her son’s procedure.
Selma’s friend Kathy (Catherine Deneuve) and coworker Jeff (Peter Stormare) try to repurpose the money to use for her legal defense, but she’s adamant it go to her son.
The film ends as a hysterical Selma is set to be executed for her crime, but calms when she learns Gene’s surgery was a success.
As expected from director Lars von Trier, it’s a bleak, minimalist film, but I love his experimentation. The mixture of Dogme 95 realism with fantastic musical scenes inspired by Hollywood delusion are wonderfully jarring. David Morse is a criminally underrated performer. Peter Stormare is great, as are Joel Grey and Catherine Deneuve.
However, the movie hinges on Bjork’s role and while I know her experience with von Trier has been the subject of controversy, it produced a transcendent performance fueled by the powerful twin motivators of desperation and a mother’s love.
Desperate for money, Terry (Mark Ruffalo) temporarily moves in with his sister Sammy (Laura Linney) and her young son Rudy.
The trio forms a happy family until Terry takes Rudy to visit his biological father. After a violent confrontation with a dismissive Rudy Sr., Terry is taken to jail, where an irate Sammy is left to bail him out.
Not long after, Terry leaves, but the siblings are more aware and respectful of each other.
Kenneth Longeran’s messy debut about a dysfunctional family resonates because of the incredible performances of Linney, Ruffalo, and Matthew Broderick, as Sammy’s demented boss and lover, Brian Everett. Linney is an underrated actress and one of the highlights of every film she’s in. Ruffalo has finally gotten mainstream attention as Hulk in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but he’s more at home in small, independent films like this.
After Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung) and Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung) rent apartments close to each other in Hong Kong, they discover their spouses are having an affair. Bonding over their shared humiliation, they spend time together fantasizing about confronting their spouses and imagining how they met.
As Su secretly helps Chow write his martial arts serial, the pair grow close. While they acknowledge their burgeoning romantic feelings for each other, they never act on them (at least in part due to misunderstandings).
Wong Kar-wai has crafted a beautiful, languid film about how circumstances and social conventions can prevent us from finding happiness. It reminds me of Scorsese’s Age of Innocence in its emphatic insistence love doesn’t always lead to happily ever after, and often leads to pain and separation, but it’s worth it.
7) Snatch
Highlights include Benicio del Toro as Franky Four-Fingers, an unlucky thief with a gambling addiction; Dennis Farina as Avi a gangster / jeweler; Jason Statham as Turkish, a boxing promoter who’s sucked into the orbit of a cruel gangster, Brick Top; a funny bit with a dog who swallows a valuable stolen diamond.
However, the movie’s merits begin and end with Brad Pitt’s portrayal of Mickey O’Neill, a bare-knuckle-fighting Irish Traveler. Pitt’s revelatory performance is at times unintelligible, raucous, and electric.
Guy Ritchie’s second directorial effort, a frenetic look at London’s criminal underworld, is pure adrenaline.
6) Frequency
Thirty years after his firefighter father, Frank (Dennis Quaid) was killed in the line of duty, John Sullivan (Jim Caviezel) and his buddy Gordo (Noah Emmerich) find one of Frank’s old ham radios.
The aurora borealis effect weirdly makes it possible for John to communicate with his father via the radio in the days before his death. As father and son reconnect, John successfully warns Frank about his untimely demise. Unfortunately, this ripples into other changes: John’s mother, Julia (Elizabeth Mitchelll) is now destined to be a victim of a notorious serial killer. Father and son work together across time to prevent her death.
The time travel portions and the ensuing butterfly effects are fun, but the meat of the film is the relationship of Quaid and Caviezel. I lost my own father when I was six, so the film hits me harder than it might otherwise, but I found it to be a moving portrait of grief and loss.
Quaid has rarely been better and Caviezel exudes charm. I’m a huge fan of Andre Braugher’s work and he’s excellent as Frank’s former partner. The film’s decision to structure the climax around memories of the 1969 World Series highlights how important sports are to our communal way of life, an essential part of our shared experience.
5) Yi Yi
Edward Yang’s final film is an intimate portrait of three generations of a Taiwanese family as they grapple with the meaning and purpose of their lives.
Middle-aged father NJ suffers an identity crisis as his business enters into a deal with a Japanese video game company and he reconnects with his first girlfriend.
His daughter Ting-Ting navigates a love a triangle with her neighbor and her neighbor’s boyfriend.
Yang-Yang, NJ’s youngest child is bullied at school, but blossoms when he discovers a love of photography, focusing on pictures of the backs of people’s heads to provide an opportunity for people to see the things they cannot see themselves.
Early in the film, NJ’s mother-in-law suffers a stroke and the main characters take care of her while dealing with their own crises.
This beautiful film demonstrates how much of our life is spent wondering about what we could have done, what we will do, what we should do, or why we do anything. We spend more time contemplating the life we’ve lived than living it.
The struggle with addiction is the same whether you’re addicted to sex, drugs, cigarettes, plastic surgery, or television.
Ellen Burstyn is fantastic as Sarah Goldfarb a mom whose obsession with looking young leads to an amphetamine addiction. Jared Leto’s work as Harry Goldfarb, her heroin addict son, is better than his Oscar-winning role in Dallas Buyers Club (2013). Marion, Harry’s junkie girlfriend, is the pinnacle of Jennifer Connelly’s career. And Marlon Wayans’s performance as Tyrone Love makes me wish he hadn’t squandered his talent on crap like Scary Movie (2000) and A Haunted House (2013).
Darren Aronofsky’s films are about people dealing with ugliness in their lives and trying to find validation outside themselves, whether it be a junkie seeking one more high, a wrestler who needs the roar of the crowd, or a ballerina striving for perfection.
Not all great movies are escapist fantasies, some are difficult works which hold a mirror up so we can see how ugly the world can be. Like a well made version of Nancy Reagan’s Just Say No ad campaign, this film shows the devastation of drugs and addiction.
Alejandro Iñarritu uses three stories intertwined by a car accident and dogs to forge a brutal look at life in Mexico City and the undercurrent of cruelty in modernity.
To raise money for a new life with his brother’s wife, Octavio gets involved in a dog fighting ring with disastrous results; an accident ends Valeria’s modeling career, creating a strain on her relationship with her boyfriend, Daniel; and assassin El Chivo struggles with his non-existent relationship with daughter, Maru.
It’s unflinching and unsentimental, showing humanity at his starkest, most bare. It’s a tough movie to watch, but demonstrates the futility of violence as a means to short circuit an unjust system.
2) Memento
Leonard was viciously attacked and now suffers from anterograde amnesia. Deprived of the ability to make new memories, every day he has to start over while the world around him changes. He can’t develop new relationships, he can’t get a job; the only thing he can do is obsess and despair over his unfortunate predicament.
Leonard finds purpose in pursuing vengeance. Every day, he leaves clues for himself to discover the next morning so he can continue to hunt his attackers.
After he finds the culprit and extracts revenge, Leonard is unable to cope without the goal of finding his attacker; the burden of a life with no memories is unbearable.
Realizing he won’t remember he found his attackers, he tricks himself into thinking they’re still on the loose. He creates an unsolvable puzzle, continuing to leave clues day after day, knowing when he wakes up, he’ll once again be comforted by his obsession.
After achieving success in Australia, Guy Pearce rose to prominence in the US with LA Confidential (1997). As Leonard, he creates a likable and accessible character, while maintaining a degree of danger and mystery. We like Leonard, but never completely trust him.
Carrie Ann-Moss is best known as Trinity from the massively successful Matrix trilogy. She’s excellent as Natalie, a woman with a murky past who uses Leonard’s condition to manipulate him for her own purposes.
Joe Pantoliano‘s career has mostly consisted of supporting roles (often as a violent criminal like Ralph Cifaretto), but his performance as Teddy is the lynchpin to making this movie work. We have to believe he could be a bad guy and simultaneously believe Leonard could trust him. It’s a difficult tightrope, which Pantoliano pulls off.
Of course, any movie with Stephen Toblowsky, is on its way to being a good movie.
This was Christopher Nolan’s first major success and may be his best movie. He doesn’t tell a story, but instead forces his audience to create a story with him. There’s a plot, but it’s so layered it’s virtually inaccessible. Much like his later film, Inception (2013), the point of the movie is to figure out the puzzle he’s created.
The movie is even structured like a puzzle: events are shown out-of-order, murdered characters show up a few scenes later. The effect is dizzying, and approximates Leonard’s condition, making the audience unsure of the reality of any moment.
This is an excellent fusion of film noir techniques and experiential storytelling. To describe what happens is simple, but watching it is a complex, rewarding experience.
Agnes Varda’s beautiful film follows gleaners at work, from people who depend on the practice for survival to hobbyists. She exposes how connected we are and shines a light on our coldness to the needs of others as she pointedly interviews jurists about the seemingly arbitrary French laws which prohibit some forms of gleaning while encouraging others.
Along the way, she gleans a few things of her own: a heart-shaped potato, a sense of her own mortality, and footage of a fervently dancing lens cap.
This simple film is a profound demonstration of art’s power to glean the beautiful from the ordinary.