Today’s Hollywood bites. I don’t have the energy for a third straight year of railing against the machine for giving the public such a pathetic, shoddy bunch of films. Entertainment? Humbug! Only the multiplex pod people don’t seem to have noticed. Are movies better than ever? Fifty years ago, 1951, Hollywood gave us, among 30 or 40 decent pictures, these abiding classics: Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, George Stevens’s A Place in the Sun, Vincente Minnelli’s An American in Paris, Christian Nyby & Howard Hawks’s The Thing, Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire, Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still. What from the studios will be cherished in the year 2051?

The envelope!

Best film: Richard Linklater’s walking wonderland of a movie, Waking Life. Nay-sayers complain that some of the floating conversations sound like sophomoric dorm sessions, but I think that’s Linklater’s philosophy: to segue between the profound and the inane, the perceptive and the insane, and to find a kind of wonder in all places. The animation here is genuinely eye-popping (get ready for Waking Life to be mauled by industry pics Shrek and Monsters, Inc. at the Oscars), and it’s the only transcendent, visionary movie of 2001 (though there were transcendent moments provided by the frozen NYC of the future in A.I.).

Most underrated film: John Stockwell’s crazy/beautiful, a box-office disaster despite being the most moving, deeply felt film about adolescents in several years. The amazing Kirsten Dunst, shedding her chipper, chirpy affability, plays a wild, spoiled rich girl whose indulgent, anything-goes swagger hides her self-loathing and suicidal desires. She meets her match in a sweet young Mexican boy (Jay Hernandez) who is bussed to her school and who struggles to stay on track with everyone so that he can be selected for the Naval Academy. Their cross-cultural romance is the most touching of any in film this year, and also the sexiest. Maybe it’s true, as the rumor goes, that some of their grappling was left on the cutting-room floor. What remains in crazy/beautiful is strong, courageous, and extremely potent.

The rest of the 10 best: The Others, Apocalypse Now Redux, The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein (John Gianvito’s feature is the best Boston film of the year), In the Mood for Love (best foreign-language film), Fighter (best documentary), Lantana, The Circle, Startup.com.

Plus these distinguished runners-up: Together, Faithless, Mulholland Drive, Southern Comfort, Ghost World, Code Unknown, Sexy Beast, Reconstruction (Irene Lusztig’s film is the best Boston documentary), Samia, Lisa Picard Is Famous.

And these unfairly maligned efforts: Sidewalks of New York, Lost and Delirious, The Golden Bowl, Baise-moi.

Best director: Wong Kar-wai, In the Mood for Love. Runners-up: Richard Linklater, Waking Life and Tape; Ray Lawrence, Lantana; David Lynch, Mulholland Drive; Terry Zwigoff, Ghost World.

Best newcomer (actor): Scarlett Johansson, in Ghost World and An American Rhapsody.

Best newcomer (director): Marc Forster, who made two arresting indie features, Everything Put Together and The Monsters’ Ball.

Best actor: Denzel Washington, Training Day. Runners-up: Tony Leung, In the Mood for Love; Mark Rylance, Intimacy; Haley Joel Osment, A.I. Artificial Intelligence; Jake Gyllenhaal, Donnie Darko.

Best actress: Kirsten Dunst, crazy/beautiful. Runners-up: Maggie Cheung, In the Mood for Love; Lena Endre, Faithless; Thora Birch, Ghost World; Laura Kirk, Lisa Picard Is Famous.

Best supporting actor: Stanley Tucci, Sidewalks of New York. Runners-up: Jim Broadbent, Iris; Ben Kingsley, Sexy Beast; Steve Buscemi, Ghost World; GŽrard Depardieu, The Closet.

Best supporting actress: Kate Winslet, Iris. Runners-up: Gwyneth Paltrow, The Royal Tenenbaums; Naomi Watts, Mulholland Drive; Brooke Smith, Series 7; Ana•s Reboux, Ë ma sÏur/Fat Girl.

Films I wouldn’t even dump on Gilligan’s Island: AmŽlie, Bridget Jones’ Diary, The Shipping News, The King Is Alive, Shallow Hal, The Iron Ladies, Kate & Leopold, Legally Blonde, The Luzhin Defence, My First Mister, Under the Sun.

What made Boston filmgoing better this year: The extraordinary ÒVideo BalaganÓ series in the Screening Room at the Coolidge Corner, an ongoing anthology of experimental films, many local ones, lovingly programmed by Alla Kovgan and Jeff Silva.

Distinguished runner-up: Midnight Movies, also at the Coolidge, programmed by Clinton McLung, the most lively, unapologetically non-PC cult series in Beantown.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com

Issue Date: December 28, 2001 - January 2, 2001

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