Which came first in 2003?

“The swift decline of comedy now, emphasized by the loud and farcical on Broadway, is the result of a panicky attempt to yell down the demons of life and fear, instead of fighting them with angels.”

—James Thurber, circa 1959

Thurber’s remark from another time applies all too well to the general run of movies in 2003 and to much else in what is currently deemed popular entertainment. There’s something like an epidemic of raving clamor and absurd extravagance in much of the mass media these days, and the stench of crazed fear in movies as diverse as Bowling for Columbine, Mystic River, The Missing, Adaptation and 28 Days Later is all the more peculiar in a year in which a movie star ousted the governor of California and the American public embraced fictions rather than realities to justify the war on Iraq.

With the television networks and the Bush administration struggling ceaselessly to spin the Iraq war into a conventionally satisfying (and therefore comforting) narrative, there has been plenty of reason for pundits and curmudgeons to opine that public life itself is more and more viewed as if it were a movie. Perhaps such conspicuously poisoned times call for something other than the usual Top 10 lists at year’s end.

List, Version 1.0:

1. Duck Soup in the War Room: The declaration of war was delivered by a solitary figure in a black coat. Apparently alone in a well-lit bunker with only a podium and a TV camera for furniture, the man speaking seemed too sedate and efficient to have been an actual person. The Secretary of State (evidently played by himself) recited the party line with the contradictory body language of a man warding off a nervous breakdown by sheer acts of will. And the Secretary of Defense took the offensive with an impression of Dr. Strangelove considerably more understated than those of his predecessors in the role (Henry Kissinger and Peter Sellers).

2. Bowling for Columbine: Parts of it—the welfare-to-work story, the musings on fear in the media, the Canadian interlude, the peroration on lethal foreign policy—were first-rate film journalism, but too often Moore’s sophomoric sarcasm and self-promoting antics are merely the left-wing version of politics as celebrity entertainment. As such, it might be the film of the year, but only, alas, in a symptomatic sense.

3. Museum Without Walls: Aleksandr Sokurov’s The Russian Ark, a full-length film shot in a single take on digital video, and Chris Marker’s Immemory, a CD-ROM by a great documentary filmmaker, seize on digital technology as a means of making movies, visits to museums and explorations of memory all part of the same thing.

4. Stan Brakhage: The outpourings of praise in the obituaries for the revered experimental filmmaker, who died early in the year, were timely reminders that the cinema may sometimes dare to keep company with the most adventurous of modern poets and painters. A little later on, By Brakhage, the Criterion Collection’s double-disc DVD, made some compelling evidence of his accomplishments more readily available.

5. Box sets: A friend calls the emerging DVD era a “golden age” for serious moviegoers, and just listing some of the year’s box sets seems to prove her point: The Claude Chabrol Collection (Wellspring); the Decalogue (Facets); the Three Colors Trilogy (Sony); the Chaplin Collection (Sony) and the F. W. Murnau Collection (Kino).

6. The Red Circle: I saw the restored version of Jean-Pierre Melville’s masterful film noir, Le Cercle Rouge, this summer at a venerable movie house in Seattle’s University District. The old pal sitting across the aisle opined aloud that it was the best film of 1970. For me, it was also one of the most satisfying movie experiences of this year, and somehow it looked even better in the subsequently released Criterion DVD.

7. Angels in America: Could it be that the most significant big-budget movie of the year was … made for television??

8. Ozu 100: The centennial of the birth of the great Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu was celebrated with major retrospectives in New York and the Bay Area. A Pacific Film Archive double-bill of two early Ozu films, Passing Fancy and Story of Floating Weeds, was one of the high points of my movie year, and video revisits to such masterpieces as Late Spring and I Was Born But… made me grateful all over again for that “golden age” of home video. The new Criterion Collection DVD of his Tokyo Story (1952) is a glorious little Ozu festival in its own right.

9. Jean-Luc Godard: There was no new film from this auteur in 2003, but his most recent, the extraordinary In Praise of Love, did arrive on DVD, and the Criterion Collection released superb restored versions of two of his best from the 1960s: Contempt and Band of Outsiders. The extras on both discs give further proof that there is nothing out-dated about this old master.

10. Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: This week-long series of feature-length documentaries on PBS was uneven in quality but frequently lively and intriguing, not least because it gave a variety of auteurs (Wim Wenders, Clint Eastwood, Mike Figgis, Scorsese himself) the opportunity to do some engagingly personal work outside the stultifying demands of mainstream entertainment.

Nevertheless, it was a good enough movie year that more conventionally arranged Top 10 lists remain in order. Even limiting the choices to films that actually played in local theaters over the past 11+ months, a very respectable Top 10 is within easy reach.

List, Version 2.0:

Mystic River, L’Auberge Espagnole, Lost in Translation, Dirty Pretty Things, The Man on the Train, Winged Migration, City of God, The Quiet American, Talk To Her and 25th Hour.

And the runners-up to that list have quite a bit to offer as well: Master and Commander, Thirteen, Kill Bill Vol. 1, The Swimming Pool, American Splendor, The Secret Lives of Dentists, Seabiscuit, The Good Thief, Laurel Canyon, Far From Heaven.

Plus, you can put together a pretty impressive Top 10 just out of new films that got here only on video (indeed, I would rate the first three on this list among the best dozen or so films of the year, regardless of venue): Man Without a Past, The Russian Ark, Japon, Friday Night, Comedy of Innocence, In Praise of Love, I’m Going Home, Mostly Martha, Spider, Read My Lips, Time Out, Decasia, Merci Pour le Chocolat and Medea (von Trier).

The flavor of this moviegoer’s year, and its assorted pleasures, might also be evoked through a few categories of the miscellaneous.

List, Version 2.5:

Best Documentary: Winged Migration, followed by Spellbound, The Blues and Dickens (PBS).

Unofficial Thurber award for “…fighting them with angels": Dirty Pretty Things, Talk To Her, Man Without a Past, 25th Hour and Angels in America.

Best Mexican Film: not The Crime of Padre Amaro, but Carlos Reygadas’ Japon, a starkly Buñuelian hallucination that so far has surfaced here only on the Sundance Channel.

Best westerns (the death of which has only partly been exaggerated): Monte Walsh (TNT), Coyote Waits (PBS), Once Upon a Time in Mexico, The Missing and Open Range.

Best bootleg of the year: Muddy Waters and the Rolling Stones at the Checkerboard Lounge.

Best Director’s Commentary on DVD: Claire Denis on Friday Night, Wim Wenders on Wings of Desire and The American Friend.

Best short films among DVD extras: Tarkovsky student film on Criterion’s two-disc box of films based on Hemingway’s “The Killers,” Lynne Ramsay shorts on DVD of her debut feature Ratcatcher, complete short films of Roman Polanski on Criterion’s DVD for Knife in the Water, short films of Kieslowski on the Three Colors Trilogy box set.

Stray cats on DVD: Neil Young’s Greendale, Spike Jonze collection, Bjork’s Greatest Hits and Sun Ra’s Space Is the Place.

Hailed and neglected: Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar and the Polish Brothers’ Northfork (both of which get belated video release at year’s end).

Best Performance based on or inspired by Keith Richards: Bill Nighy in Love Actually, with close competition from Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean and Keith Richards himself in Four Flicks.

AND THE OTHER GUYS

Top fives of 2003 from the rest of the film review crew

C. Nystrom

1. Lost in Translation

2. All the Real Girls

3. School of Rock

4. Mystic River

5. Matchstick Men

Blamer’s guilty pleasures

28 Days Later

Peter Pan

Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle

Bad Santa

Kill Bill, Vol. 1