These films were released in 2003

Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl

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★★★★★[/types]]

Back when I was a lad, “Pirates of the Caribbean” was about the only cool ride left at Disneyland when the E tickets were all gone or the line for Space Mountain stretched to some time next Tuesday. It was either “Pirates,” “Small World” or head for parking lot. If you had suggested back then that the ride would be made into movie and that movie would not only not be rated G, but the lead actor would also pattern his character after a member of the Rolling Stones, Walt himself probably would have risen from the grave to personally throw your hippie ass out of the park.

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A Mighty Wind

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★★★★★[/types]]

The biggest problem with A Mighty Wind is that it gets so involved with telling its story that it occasionally forgets to be comedy. Make no mistake, it’s not a bad story, but it’s not a story of talentless but enthusiastic losers like Waiting For Guffman or of hilariously obsessive dog lovers like Best In Show. The faux-folk musicians in A Mighty Wind are actually quite good at what they do and they’re not clueless buffoons like Spinal Tap. The dramatic elements, especially the story of Mitch (Catherine O’Hara) and Mickey (Eugene Levy) take control and the outright comedic elements, especially those of Fred Willard, tend to hang in the air like a loud fart at a funeral.

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Saraband

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★★★★★[/types]]

Saraband, probably the last film from the legendary Ingmar Bergman, re-unites us with Johan and Marianne, whose divorce we watched unfold 30 years ago in 1973‘s Scenes from a Marriage. The film plays out in the form of ten extended two-handed dialogues. Bergman is able to wring an amazing amount of drama out of this deceptively simple structure.

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Runaway Jury

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★★★★★[/types]]

Be forewarned, while I normally avoid giving out plot spoilers in my reviews, I feel like it’s necessary this time to fully get my opinion across.

Runaway Jury is probably one of the more morally bankrupt mainstream movies I’ve seen. It stacks the deck completely in favor of one side in order to justify the deplorable actions of the film’s hero, which amount to no less than subverting the justice system to suit his own agenda. The fact that he is, in effect, giving the film’s villain a taste of his own medicine is completely irrelevant when our protagonist is also sinking to the same level or lower.

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The Station Agent

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★★★★★[/types]]

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At its core, Thomas McCarthy‘s The Station Agent is about a guy who makes friends despite all his best efforts to live a life free of human interaction. Fin McBride (Peter Dinklage) works in a model train store for his only friend, Henry (Paul Benjamin). After Henry dies, his will leaves Fin a dilapitated old train station in Newfoundland, New Jersey. This isolated location suits him just fine, since Fin would rather have as little to do with other people as possible. For him solitude is preferable to the curious and pitying looks that have followed him his whole life due to his dwarfism. Trains are his first and only love and a necessary escape from a taller world.

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The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill

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★★★★★[/types]]

My brother Brian, who passed away about 11 years ago, would have loved this movie. Not only is it about San Francisco, where he lived, but he knew the subject of this documentary, Mark Bittner, when Bittner was just starting out observing the parrots on Telegraph Hill. That’s not surprising, as birds fascinated Brian, too. When I was little, the side yard of our house contained quite a sizable collection of reptiles and birds, including at least one red tailed hawk at some point. Our backyard also featured a walk-in aviary.

After he moved out on his own, his apartments were rarely without at least one parrot, macaw or cockatoo, not to mention any number of other birds. I distinctly remember going into his bathroom to see the injured seagull he was helping to nurse back to health. This affinity made him somewhat of a kindred spirit to Mark Bittner.

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The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

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★★★★★[/types]]

There’s little to say about Return of the King that I haven’t already said about the first two installments in Peter Jackson’s trilogy of Lord of the Rings movies. To my mind, it inherits the same virtues of the previous two movies while bringing the cycle to an epic and satisfying conclusion.

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Lost in Translation

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★★★★★[/types]]

Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation has been a frustrating little movie for those of us who have championed it. I saw this movie in the theater when it first came out and loved it. I recommended it to friends and family members, most of whom saw it on video. Their response was almost unanimous: it sucked, nothing happened, the two main characters were a couple of passive lumps who never did anything. First I checked the obvious alternatives. Either my friends and family had all seen the wrong movie or they had been replaced by alien pod people. How could such intelligent, rational people take such a passionate dislike to this little gem of a movie.

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Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

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★★★★★[/types]]

The fans of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels are not quite as rabid as those of J.R.R. Tolkein, but they are legion. And if Peter Weir didn’t face quite the monumental task that Peter Jackson did when adapting The Lord of the Rings, the obstacles to bringing Napoleonic-era naval warfare to the screen were formidable.

Firstly, he would be filming at least partially at sea and, as Steven Speilberg could tell you from his experience filming Jaws, that’s just asking for trouble. Secondly, the built-in audience for this film would contain a lot of naval history buffs, who would be sticklers for historical detail.

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