“In one of the weakest years in memory, not just for performances but for great films, 2001 saw Denzel Washington and Halle Berry knock “two birds out with one stone,” as the former declared on Oscar night, as two African Americans won the top acting prizes for the first time ever. And it was difficult to argue with either”.
says John Forte in a retrospective piece over at In Contention.
Stop right John, I’m gonna have to disagree with ya right off the bat. First off, 2001, although not broadly a great year for movies, the second year of the new millenium will be remembered as the year that Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring changed the landscape of a what a fantasy, big budget, big cast spectacle could be and became a legendary film for my generation, in the same way Star Wars was to those who grew up in the late 70s.
Nobody who saw Lord of the Rings on it’s first run will ever quite forget the jaw hanging from your mouth feeling that Peter Jackson conjured up. Finally a movie that matched those illustrated fantasy stories you grew up with, or those Ray Harryhausen adventure films. Finally a movie that meant you didn’t have to compromise to say you liked something because this one actually exceeded ALL expectations you could have had.
Speechless, I think is the word that summed up my reaction when I left the cinema, and I wasn't to feel that again until The Dark Knight.
For the lack of a big bunch of great movies (and actually there was a few…A Beautiful Mind, Vanilla Sky, Amelie, Mullholland Drive, Ghost World, Spirited Away, Training Day, Enemy at the Gates, In the Bedroom, Sexy Beast), The first Lord of the Rings movie surely made up for it.
I also don’t think it’s that difficult to argue that the Academy got it wrong with their choice of Best Actor/Actress winners. 2001 was a year that contained longer lasting, historically remembered performances that I believe, were overcome by the sympathy, and dare I say it, the politically minded vote.
Denzel Washington’s crazy performance in Training Day, just isn’t quite as well remembered as that of Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind, a superior performance from a superior film. It always bugged me that A Beautiful Mind won for Best Film, Best Director (Ron Howard), Best Supporting Actress (Jennifer Connelly) and Best Writing (Akiva Goldsman) but Crowe didn’t pick up a win.
Was it Crowe's attitude and off-screen persona that cost him the win, or was it simply too soon after winning for Gladiator the previous year?
The Academy agreed it was the best movie of the year (written, directed & overall) and recognised what good performances were in the film, but the real heart of it, the man who kept it all together, was strangely left off.
Personally, I believe it’s one of the biggest mistakes of this century’s Oscars.
I’m not saying Denzel Washington isn’t an Oscar worthy actor because he himself could feel hard done by with not picking up the statue with Malcom X (when Al Pacino wrongly took the globe for Scent of a Woman… how many you guys seen that picture, eh?), and I’m sure he will be challenging again for the gold someday but that’s not his best performance, or was it the best performance, or the best remembered of that year.
It’s was Crowe’s movie and he got screwed out of it.
Onto Best Actress. Halle Berry was good in Monster’s Ball but I was never blown away by her performance, or the film for that matter. 2001 was the year of Amelie, and sadly it was a little too early for the mass media of internet Oscar pundits we have now, as the community seems more knowledgeable about what we nominate, and there’s no way that a performance as strong as Audrey Tautou, even if it was in a French movie, would be overlooked.
For Tautou not to have been nominated in 2001, well it was a crime.
Amelie was chosen as France's entry for Best Foreign Film but lost out to the Bosnian war drama No Man's Land.
And Jim Broadbent’s admittedly fine performance in Iris, overlooking the work of this guy..
Ian McKellen as Gandalf the Grey, his career defining performance in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of The Ring.
Shameful.
8 Comments
Denzel Washington was meh in Training Day…it’s not a great performance or a bad one, it’s just there. Halle Berry on the other hand gives one of the decade’s greatest unintentionally hilarious performances. From the dreadful sex scene to the sidesplitting interactions between her and her fat child, it’s just awful from start to finish. How she was even nominated is beyond me.
2001 was actually quite a strong year. LOTR, Moulin Rouge, Mulholland Drive, Donnie Darko, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Beautiful Mind, Amelie, In the Bedroom, the list goes on.
Training Day was not a great movie but had a great performance especially because it was not a great movie or a great role. It’s very easy to do a good job making the mentally ill in a great film. As for Berry, she is not a great actress but in this case had a character of Oscar
Do you proof read your articles?
Joe,
When I can. I literally had 15 minutes to turn that out this morning, I had a feeling it might not have read so well and be full of spelling errors.
Proof reading is a luxury, as is sleep these days for me!
I’ll agree on all but the LOTR. Is it really so great? Visually it was great but besides the good looks the movies sucked and I think kinda made a lot things dumber compared to the book.
Where does it say that the film should be compared to the book? I wasn’t aware that the films were intended to be companion pieces.
Visually they are obviously spectacular, but it’s also just great storytelling. Gripping drama, convincing and moving character development, wonderful performances, some of the greatest film music ever composed, I could go on all day. As individual cinematic entities of their own, they are the single greatest achievement since God knows when. How they fare in relation to the books is entirely irrelevent.
Actually they should be compared to the books because they are based off of the books. Anytime you take an existing intellectual property and make a project be it film, book, game or whatever based off of that property your work should absolutely be compared to that existing product.Otherwise you should call your project something else. If the Rings were not meant to be companioned with the books in any way then why even call it Lord of the Rings?
Now I absolutely believe they did an amazing job translating the books to film. They kept all the major plot points in, they didn’t completely mess anything up that I can recall, at least not to the point where I was like “Screw this, this is nothing like the books!” They definitely succeeded in giving it an epic fantasy feel. They truly brought Middle Earth to life. By my own opinion that seems like a damn good translation of the books to the screen.
Anyone who doesn’t think the movies were that great is being either an elitist fanboy, in which case, grow up, or they are just being a prick because its “cool” to hate on popular movies these days thanks to the internet.
Ridiculous. The two things are almost completely mutually exclusive. “Should” be compared to the books? Why? Literature and film are two entirely different mediums. Both have different rules and possibilities, as well as entirely different limitations. Why should we discredit a film because it’s “nothing like the books” even if it can stand alone as a cohesive, powerful work of art in its own right? Adapting a novel for the big screen just means that a filmmaker sees potential in a story and can envision it in the cinematic realm. It’s not translation, it’s adaptation.
If you want to play the comparison card, you’re screwed. Nothing is entirely unique, especially the Lord of the Rings. Tolkein draws heavily from Old English and Norse mythology. Do we therefore disregard his writing because it is not enough like the source? Do we disregard Joyce’s Ulysses because it strays too far from Homer? If we are just going to repeatedly copy material, what’s the point in even bothering? We’ll be stuck in an artistic dead end. If a film gets from A to B in a convincing and logical way that differs from the book, why is that “completely mess[ing] things up”? It’s storytelling in a different medium. Adapting a book for the big screen doesn’t mean that all record of the book is destroyed and the film becomes the last remaining version of the story. If you want the story the way the book told it, then read the book.
I’m not saying that we should separate artworks – it can be interesting to compare an artwork with its source. But this should never be used to demean the value of one piece of art. The moment you’re hating something because it’s “nothing like the books” is the moment you should be banned from ever encountering art.