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01/16/2004 Entry: "You Say Tomato on 2003 Movies"

After a hiatus, Junio is back at You Say Tomato with talk about her favorite movies of last year.

As a person who doesn't make my living from the movies, my list is different from the pros' for reasons beyond aesthetic considerations: For one thing, I can choose not to see movies I know I won't like (for example, I can't stand to watch knife or sword play, and after suffering through Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Gangs of New York, both of which I liked but was traumatized by, I gave Kill Bill a pass). I missed some films, too. (I saw 97 films at the cinema -- well, 96, because I saw Rivers and Tides twice, but there are still some gaping holes -- I missed three of the most raved about documentaries of the year: Bus 174, Capturing the Friedmans, and Spellbound, though I TiVo'd the last, so I can rectify that very soon.) Also, some of the films I saw in 2003 are what the critics would dismiss as "2002 films," but if I saw them in 2003, they’re 2003 movies as far as I'm concerned. OK, this is bravado -- I cut films that very clearly belonged in 2002, last year’s Oscar winners and losers, for example -- but I'm holding firm on the foreign films. When you don't live in New York or Los Angeles, a foreign film (or most documentaries for that matter) is of the year it makes it into your city's movie theaters as far as I'm concerned; Oscar be damned. (The Fog of War hasn’t made it to cinephilic Seattle yet, for example.)

Posted by Jake of 8bitjoystick.com @ 01/16/2004 11:10 AM PST