The Pop Culture Review

The 34 Best Movies of 2003 by Slate.com

Is there any activity more onanistic for a critic than compiling the year-end 10-best list? True, it's a service to readers who want a handy checklist. But the number 10 means nothing: As the late Stephen Jay Gould pointed out at the turn of the millennium, it has no correlative in nature. And a critic's naked opinion (thumbs up or thumbs down) is the least interesting thing about him or her. You'll learn much more from a lively writer you think is nuts (c.f., Manohla on In the Cut or Elvis Mitchell on the execrable 21 Grams) than from the 10-best list of someone with whom you agree.

But my colleagues and I do this every year because it's fun and makes us feel important. We play high-schoolish games with each other: "You guess my list, and I'll guess yours." We catch up on movies we should have seen nine months earlier. We give our lists to publicists and to columnists—there are more and more of them, it seems—who care less about individual critical voices than about statistics and consensus. We vote for our little awards and hold our breath for the Oscar nominations, which we'll invariably find dumb.

The 34 Best Movies of 2003 - Child spellers, hobbits, and the year in cinema. By David?Edelstein

Now on DVD: American Splendor

For an art movement that never cracked the mainstream and whose finest practitioners barely paid the rent, the underground comics of the 1960s and '70s have had a splattery and lasting pop-culture impact. Seminal figure Robert Crumb was the focus of the celebrated 1994 documentary ''Crumb,'' whose director, Terry Zwigoff, went on to turn Dan Clowes's graphic novel ''Ghost World'' into a biting 2000 satire. Art Spiegelman found fame with ''Maus'' and New Yorker covers; Bill Griffith's ''Zippy the Pinhead'' drops daily zen-bombs in the funny pages.

Now it's Harvey Pekar's turn, and, believe me, he's probably griping about how long it took. The longtime Cleveland file clerk, poet of the mundane, genius crank behind the ''American Splendor'' comic book, and David Letterman's holy fool finally has a film dedicated to his dyspeptic battles with the quotidian -- and it's a beauty: wise, many-layered, and funny as hell. The great joke about Pekar's work is that he can't draw to save his life, so he gets other illustrators -- notably his old friend Bob Crumb -- to ink the autobiographical rants and whimsies that fill the pages of ''American Splendor.'' The movie, written and directed by married Pekar fans Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, is an adaptation of a number of stories from the comic. (From The Boston Globe)

American Splendor (2003)

'Butch Cassidy,' 'Patton' in National Film Registry

WASHINGTON -- The Western outlaw romp "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" and the more obscure "The Chechahcos," with its frenzied dogsled pursuits in Alaska, have been added to the National Film Registry.

'Butch Cassidy,' 'Patton' in National Film Registry

First Film Since 1992 Emerges From Iraq

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Art school dropout Odai Rasheed is directing Iraq's first feature-length movie in more than a decade with film he "liberated" from Saddam Hussein's culture ministry after the dictator's fall.
The subject: the fateful spring days when the Americans invaded and the regime collapsed. It's a time of shame felt by Baghdadis over the looting of the city and joy mixed with pain from being liberated and occupied at once.

sacbee.com -- Iraq -- First film since 1992 emerges from war-battered Iraq

Coppola Receives Film, Director Awards

NEW YORK (AP) - Sofia Coppola's "Lost in Translation" wasn't lost on the New York Film Critics Online, which named it the top film of the year. Coppola also won the group's award for best director, and stars Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson were named best actor and best supporting actress...

iWon News

AFI AWARDS 2003 Names Ten Best

LOS ANGELES, December 15, 2003-The American Film Institute (AFI) today presented the jury rationales for each of the official selections of AFI AWARDS 2003 announced yesterday (Sunday, December 14, 2003) and significant moments in the world of the moving image which serve as part of AFI's almanac which documents the year's most outstanding achievements in film and television.

AFI AWARDS 2003

The New Yorker: The Critics: The Current Cinema

At the start of “Big Fish,” our friendly narrator, Edward Bloom (Ewan McGregor), delivers the first of many homilies in his spicy Southern twang. “There are some fish that cannot be caught,” he informs us. True, and there are some accents that shouldn’t be attempted by a Scotsman. Edward is a native of Alabama, and “Big Fish” purports to trace the path of his unlikely life, daring us to believe in every kink. It is the kind of movie in which a baby is not just born; it pops from the womb and slides along the hospital floor...

The New Yorker: The Critics: The Current Cinema

Life Is Good For Tom Cruise

It's good being Tom Cruise right now as his new movie, Oscar hopeful "The Last Samurai," is released in North America. And it's even better now that the movie has taken the top spot at the weekend box office.

CNN.com - Life is good for Tom Cruise - Dec. 8, 2003

Samurai Sharp In Opener

Snowstorms couldn't stop the samurai, but they did manage to slow him down. Inclement weather throughout the East Coast combined with the usual post-Thanksgiving weekend malaise to temper business at the boxoffice this weekend, as Warner Bros. Pictures' "The Last Samurai" debuted atop the field with an estimated $24.4 million in its debut. The "Samurai" opening, while below the expectations of industry observers who had predicted a bow in the $30 million range, was still good enough to easily win the weekend. The weekend's only other wide debut, Universal Pictures' dance drama "Honey," took in an estimated $14 million and finished in second place, while Buena Vista's "The Haunted Mansion," New Line Cinema's "Elf" and Universal's "Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat" rounded out the weekend's top five.
WB's 'Samurai' sharp in opener

Sean Penn: Reporting From Iraq?

The actor, who made a controversial visit to Iraq last winter, is considering going back, and this time publishing his accounts of life in the war-torn country for the San Francisco Chronicle, the paper's editor Phil Bronstein said Tuesday.

CNN.com - Sean Penn, reporting from Iraq? - Nov. 26, 2003