My Picks for Best (and Worst) Movies of 2003



Here are a few picks for the best movies of last year. Don't expect many straight dramas. As I get older I find that I don't really have the patience to sit through a movie that isn't really full of action. I guess I like the "motion" part of motion picture.

The Lord of the Ring: The Return of the King - I loved this movie. My review is right below. I don't really know what the Oscar chances for ROTK are. On one hand, the competition is really weak. On the other hand, Oscar voters traditionally don't vote for genre films. On a third hand, Oscar voters love to vote for the most financially successful movies, and ROTK qualifies. As does my next movie...

Finding Nemo - What an amazing movie. Literally the whole package. The movie is visually spectacular, and the story work. And I'm not sure if I can think of any recent movie that has had a higher percentage of jokes that work. Finding Nemo may not be my most favorite Pixar film (that would be Monsters Inc.), but it's still one of the best animated films ever made.

X2: X-Men United - This sequel improves on the original in every way. The special effects are great, the acting is uniformly good, the script is intelligent. Most of the jokiness of the first movie has been ditched (not that X-Men ever approached camp, thank goodness), replaced with more ruminations on what a world with superpowered mutants would be like. I was also amused at how many references to Hitchcock director Bryan Singer sneaked in. My only complaint is that Patrick Stewart again spends half the movie incapacitated, making it too easy for fellow Brit Ian McKellan to steal the film.

Kill Bill Vol. 1 - I enjoyed this movie immensely, though my enthusiasm was somewhat dampened because it's not a complete movie all by itself. Hopefully it will all come together when Kill Bill Vol. 2 comes out in February.

And my pick for the worst film I saw in the theater last year...

Dreamcatcher - I didn't see Gigli, but I'm not sure it could have been worse than this horrible, disgusting movie based on a Stephen King novel. It's something about an invasion by these aliens that infect people with their spawn, which then kill their hosts by exiting through their bowels. Morgan Freeman shows up as military guy who seems right to want to contain this by any means necessary before it spreads, but apparently we're supposed to think he's insane and root against him. These four buddies in a remote part of Maine run across the aliens, and one of them is actually possessed by an alien, which is indicated by his gaining a bad British accent... You know, I can't believe this movie is taking up valuable space in my memory.

Posted: Thu - January 1, 2004 at      

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