A best book list would be futile, for the same reasons that Jessa noted. By my estimate (and I started logging in April), I read roughly around 97 books in 2003. But many of these were attempts to catch up with books published last year, or getting up to speed with the literary canon, or playing the read-the-precursors game with current releases (such as Robert Caro’s LBJ biographies and the Dark Tower books). The book-to-film ratio (and the media consumption-to-life experience ratio) this year dramatically shifted. Nevertheless, there were notable lapses into film geekdom (such as the Castro’s Noir City series and the San Francisco Independent Film Festival) in which I threw in the towel with fellow cinephiles and went hog wild. While I averaged about 1-2 films a week, it’s quite conceivable that I saw fewer films this year than I’ve seen in the past seven years. Despite a conscious attempt to avoid the obvious cinematic bombs (Bad Boys 2 and The Cat in the Hat to name two that come to mind), 2003 was, nevertheless, a solid movie year for the indies and an abysmal year for the Hollywood films. Oddly enough, my favorite film of the year was, in fact, a Hollywood film.

Best Films of 2003:

1. Mystic River
2. Down With Love
3. Spider
4. Teknolust
5. Spellbound
6. Lucky
7. Bad Santa
8. The Magdalene Sisters
9. Intolerable Cruelty
10. The Barbarian Invasions

Honorable Mention: American Splendor, Capturing the Fleischmans, Thirteen, The Cooler, Alien: The Director’s Cut, A Mighty Wind, Dirty Pretty Things, Irreversible

Overrated: The Return of the King, Lost in Translation, Kill Bill Vol. 1, Cremaster 3

Guilty Pleasures: The Core, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Bubba Ho-Tep

Haven’t Seen Yet: The Fog of War, The Company, 21 Grams, In America, Cold Mountain, Girl with a Pearl Earring, Master and Commander, Looney Tunes: Back in Action, The Triplets of Bellville, Monster, Shattered Glass

Worst Films of the Year (or Why Did I Pay $10 For This?):

1. Love Actually
2. The Matrix: Reloaded
3. Scary Movie 3
4. The Recruit
5. Big Fish

Well, now that I’ve seen It (It being a high-profile film release that will make many people rich this week alone), I must confess that I’m a bit disappointed. Not outright hostile towards the film, not hating it, but decidedly underwhelmed and, if it can be believed, even more ill-disposed towards the source material than I was before. The last twenty minutes of It featured more anticlimaxes than I had seen in five years of summer blockbusters. Even the effects played out like cut scenes from a crudely rendered computer game. (Here’s a tip to the boys in the editing room: When you cut directly from an overhead shot that is clearly computer-generated to a medium angle that involves real people on real horses, it sort of hinders the illusion. Also, things like rain and night, and actual build-up, help disguise visual blunders and work to your advantage, as they did so well in the Helm’s Deep battle from the last film.)

Loved the trolls, loved Howard Shore’s score (Wagner-like, the best of the three), loved the opening Smeagl-Deagol moment (and nearly every moment with Gollum). But the problem with It is utterly clear: These characters have no flaws. They are not nasty or mischevious in any way, unless frat boy nips in the weed count as intelligent behavior. (Even Indiana Jones was sardonic enough to blow away a swordsman with a gun. Even Superman sacrificed his powers for the woman he loved. Even John McClane had to pick out shards of glass from his feet. Even Luke Skywalker confronted his father to clear up a complicated domestic situation. You see where I’m going with this?) They are people wandering around a beautiful landscape, getting involved with battles, and there is every assurance that they will come back from the wars unscathed. Despite the fact that everyone else around them has been flung about by elephant-looking things.

Amused? On some basic adolescent level, yes. Will I see it again? Maybe the Extended Edition. But ultimately I’ve now come to terms with the sad reality that character no longer means a thing in an action movie. And that’s a pity.

On a somewhat related note, Tom has some thoughts on moviegoing. I must say that one of the best moviegoing experiences I ever had was seeing Rear Window at the Castro. Despite the fact that nearly everyone there had seen the movie, they remained on the edge of their seats. The oohs and aahs of Hitchcock’s suspense rippled through the crowd like magic. Years later, the film had lost none of its power to thrill.

On the Return of the King front, David Hudson has again outdone himself with some great armchair analysis. Beyond collating some ideas on what this might mean for the Oscars, he offers some hypotheses based on critical ramifications: “One wonders if there was a sense of alarm at all, and if so, what color the alert was over at New Line when, early on, the National Board of Review not only passed Rings over for Best Film but didn’t even include it in its top ten. Had they given conventional wisdom a nudge that would snowball into serious momentum away from Rings?”

Personally, I’ve recused myself from getting involved with the hype, largely because anything I put down on paper (or the Web) is pointless before I’ve seen the film in whole. I feel uncomfortable calling any opus a Great Thing (or even a Piss-Poor Thing) before I’ve experienced it (to use the PR parlance of our time). Not unlike a chowderhead who sounds off on a topic he hasn’t read one single book on. Have we truly become a culture in which we’re prepared to love every high-profile film well in advance? Is there no longer any room for an evaluation that dares to suggest There is No Santa Claus?

When I watched the supplements on the Two Towers Extended Edition, one thing that struck me was the unbearably placating tone. There seemed to me a strange amount of attention trying to explain the filmmakers’ motivations behind the much-derided changes to Faramir and Tom Bombadil. All fine and dandy. Some people need to be educated. But the supplements seemed curiously targeted, directed towards the hard-core fanboys with an almost apologetic tone. With the conveniently timed November relase, it was almost as if the boys on the fourteenth floor took the time to scour the Internet, conduct a few focus group meetings, and address everyone’s privations, thus clearing heads, assuaging nerves and gearing the audience up for an experience entirely designed for them.

The same fanboys whose mouths foamed after the Christopher Lee fiasco are now prepared to love this film no matter what. And it’s due in no small part to Jackson’s low-profile courting of illiterate fanboys like Harry Knowles and even the presence of avidity in the Gray Lady (see “journalist” Jesse McKinley working himself into a frenzy over Bombadil). But, unlike Star Wars, the Lords fanboys are more common. It’s okay to announce your love for Lords around the water cooler, and to tell everybody that you’re going to see the first show at the stroke of midnight. This wasn’t the case with Star Wars or even the Matrices. With Lords, the fanboy has suddenly acquired a mainstream legitimacy.

The marketing has been so good, so eerily transcendental and cross-demographic, that I almost expect a war room somewhere on the New Line lot containing a wall-sized blackboard, a space to project Powerpoint presentations on demand, and envelopes marked TOP SECRET revealing every known opinion on the film.

The question I have: Why do we have to see the film the first week? Or opening day? There are plenty of films out there, plenty of media to consume, and plenty of stories far superior to Tolkien that you can find in a bookstore (see Fritz Lieber, Michael Moorcock or Mervyn Peake, to name three). And more importantly, plenty of things to experience in the real world.