The Ten Best Films of 2001: Ten to Six
As I mentioned in my previous article, composing my top ten list this year was not an easy task. It took me over a month to come up with the list, see the last bit of films from 2001, and decide on the ultimate choice of the year's best film. Before the Oscar Nominations come out and we begin a whole new phase in the film awards season as we switch over to Oscar Season full time, I shall finally present my list of the ten best films of 2001 in two parts this weekend ... revealing the bottom five on my list, numbers 10 through 6 in this article, followed by my top five films in my next article on Monday.
But first, a recap of the 2001 film year from my perspective ...
2001 was not the most incredible year for films, but there were a few that did stand tall. For the first time in a number of years, the choice for the best film of the year was not immediately apparent to me. I had to think through a small group of films for over a month, to finally realize that Todd Field's incredible directorial debut, In The Bedroom, was the year's best film. If there was a common theme to the films I admired the most in 2001, it would be that they were films of honest realism. Realism not in the sense of true stories, but realism in their portrayals of the human condition. Half the films on my list for 2001 were in this category, from the silences between characters in In The Bedroom, to the common day dialogues between characters in the offbeat Ghost World, to the incredibly moving romance of desperation in Monster's Ball, to the haunting true story of lost teens in today's society in Bully, and to the epic drama of a man who achieved brilliance while all the while suffering with schizophrenia in A Beautiful Mind. The other half of my ten best this year mostly represent bold, epic filmmaking ... whether on the level of adapting J.R.R. Tolkien's masterpiece to a new classic adventure on screen, or a director boldly taking over another director's story to make something truly unique. Whether it was a legendary director boldly presenting a tragic yet heroic war film from just the recent past, or the boldness to take animation into a new realm, creating a fantasy making fun of fantasy animation, as we all laughed over and over again. And then there was one independent film which simply blew us away, forcing us to rethink the way we watch movies. In Memento and others on my list, we also met some incredibly fascinating characters, lived their lives in some truly unique ways (especially the way Christopher Nolan and Ron Howard told their stories to make us actually experience the same things that are happening in the minds of their characters). Characters were so deeply and richly drawn this year, that I remember the characters more often than the stories they found themselves in. Some of these ten film experiences in 2001 haunted me with images I can't forget, some inspired me to new heights of human capability, some outright entertained me, and a couple made me simply marvel with awe ... the best of what films can do.
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