These films were released in 2002

9/11

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★★★★★[/types]]

If Tuesday, September 11, 2001 had been an ordinary day, you might have stumbled across the work of brothers Jules and Gédéon Naudet, a documentary about the first nine months in the career of a probationary firefighter, on some basic cable channel like Discovery or the The Learning Channel.

9/11

On that morning, Jules, the least experienced camera operator, was tagging along with the battalion chief, Joseph Pfeifer, as he investigated a gas leak, just to get some practice with their video camera. The sound of a low flying jet caught his attention and Jules tilted his camera up in time to see American Airlines Flight 11 plow into the side of the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

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Adaptation.

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★★★★★[/types]]

I was sorely tempted to let my imaginary twin brother, Larry, write this review, but he was partaking of one of his many philanthropic pursuits, leading a deer hunting trip for a group of kids from the Braille Institute, and hasn’t been seen since.

Adaptation has a great deal in common with the other Charlie Kaufman films, mainly in how it plays with reality like your cat played with that gopher it caught in the back yard. While it’s “officially” based on the non-fiction book The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep), the movie is actually about Charlie Kaufman’s unsuccessful effort to write a usable script from the book, as well as about the author’s relationship with the subject of the story, a self-styled botanist named John Laroche (Chris Cooper). The other storyline revolves around Charlie’s fictitious twin Donald and his attempt to become a screenwriter like his brother.

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Punch-Drunk Love

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★★★★★[/types]]

I have never been a fan of Adam Sandler. Even back in his Saturday Night Live days, I thought most of his recurring sketch characters were one-joke ponies which grew tiresome after their first appearance. His early movie choices, with a few notable exceptions, served only to give “low-brow” a bad name. His characters were uniformly infantile child-men with explosive tempers and retarded social skills. (That, however, hasn’t stopped Billy Madison from actually being referenced in recent court decision.)

The real genius of Punch Drunk Love is how writer and director Paul Thomas Anderson took that stock Sandler character, injected some real depth into it and then wove a surreal but heartfelt story around this person.

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My Big Fat Greek Wedding

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★★★★★[/types]]

After My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Nia Vardalos seemed poised for huge success. Expectations were diminished slightly when the follow-up sit-com, My Big Fat Greek Life, sank like the Titanic. No, better make that the Lusitania, since Titanic stayed afloat longer than the TV show.

The premature cratering of the series shouldn’t take anything away from what she achieved in this inspired adaptation of her one-woman stage show. Rita Wilson certainly knew what she was doing when she persuaded husband Tom Hanks to produce Vardalos’ acerbic love letter to her Greek heritage.

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Whale Rider

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★★★★★[/types]]

Whale Rider takes a premise that could have been a politically correct exercise in female empowerment and instead crafts something truly magical out of a myth-like tale of a culture in transition and a clash between two strong-willed individuals, both of whom love their people’s traditions in very different ways.

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Lost in La Mancha

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★★★★★[/types]]

Had everything gone according to plan in August of 2000, the film that became Lost in La Mancha would have been an extra on the DVD edition of a new Terry Gilliam film called The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, starring Johnny Depp. Instead, this film shows an often bizarre sequence of events that explains why there was never any such film.

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Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones

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★★★★★[/types]]

After the bitter disappointment that was Episode I, Star Wars fans were understandably leery about the release of Episode II. The good news was that the second prequel was marked improvement over the first, but there was still enough wrong with the movie to have the faithful collectively pulling their hair out.

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The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

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★★★★★[/types]]

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The middle entry in a trilogy often has the hardest job, picking up where the first story left off and leaving enough for the final part to build on. In other words, it has to hit the ground running, assuming you remember what you saw a year ago and then leave you hanging two or three hours later. I don’t count faux trilogies like the Indiana Jones movies, which are only called a “trilogy” because there just happened to be three movies. There was, however, no common narrative thread tying the films together, like there is for Lord of the Rings.

Like The Empire Strikes Back, The Two Towers successfully avoids the “middle movie” trap. Continue reading →

The Bourne Identity

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★★★★★[/types]]

Who’d have believed that Matt Damon, of all people, could provide a credible substitute for James Bond? However, with the hallowed Bond franchise in the midst of lean creative times, Damon is tautly believable as a CIA assassin with no memory of who he is and no idea why people are trying to kill him. Unlike Pierce Brosnan’s recent outings as the world famous super-spy, the writers do not let Damon down.

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