This year was a rough one for me personally on several levels. This year I graduated from college with a BA in Psychology, I got separated, and my band broke up when the guitar player helped my ex-wife strip-mine my apartment. Most of that happened at the end of the year. The first nine months kicked off with the aftermath of my Grandma dying at the end of 2001, apartment hunting, and growing unrest.
Graduating was weird because my coursework was completed in December of 2001 but I still had to take the Upper Division Writing Proficiency Exam, which was meant to be taken before taking 400 level classes. No one I knew did that but it was required for graduation. All of them for 2001 were full when I was applying for graduation so I had to take it in January and then graduate in May. So it was an empty semester of nothing after the test, which was a bit weird.
My mom insisted that I do the graduation ceremony in which I had to wear the gown and hat and all that and then sat with my class in McKale Center. I am not a fan of graduation ceremonies. I felt nothing at my high school graduation while my classmates were losing their minds with excitement, I just didn’t feel anything. I don’t know if it was fear and nervousness about what was coming next or if I was just ready to get it all over with but I just didn’t care that much. This ceremony was much worse insofar as I just stood up with everyone else when they announced my major. It was pretty underwhelming.
My parents were there, my grandma (the one I had left), my aunt and uncle, and my cousin were there. My wife a the time was not because she could not get the day off from her job at Target. We did a graduation party after, which was much more fun. I later used some of the money and gift cards I got from graduation to buy the entirety of the Transformers cartoon on DVD. That might not have been the best use of graduation money but it was very on brand for me.
I was relieved to be done with school and somewhat terrified of what was next to come. Things had always been theoretical up to that point and now it was time to actually start life and be who I was to be and I felt pretty lost there. I wanted to be a writer and a filmmaker and my band was doing alright despite some tensions. I was taking steps toward these goals, working on a novel I had started called Sleepless, working on a screenplay with Jeff with the now cringe inducing title Searching for Fun and Trim (good lord…it later became a web comic I did for a few years), and I was still trying to make the band work. But I had a lot of fear and self-doubt and a growing sense of weight and unease.
Everything came crashing down in September, first with the separation and then of the band breaking up and a completed disengagement with the church I had been going to as I became roundly vilified for initiating the separation. I am not going to relitigate the divorce here but cascade of losses that occurred as a result absolutely broke me. I found that I was just working for my parents, and suddenly had very little else. My friend Adam ultimately moved in with me at my apartment that my ex-wife and I had picked out. That ended in its own disaster as I was struggling emotionally a lot coupled with some issues he was also going through. Heading into 2003, I was probably at my lowest point since middle school.
And then there were movies. I was still going a lot during this year and during this time and they were helpful for the most part. Rules of Attraction, in particular, was helpful when I was going through the separation and divorce but probably not in the best way possible as I identified entirely more with Sean Bateman than I probably should have.
There were a lot of movies that I watched just for the sake of it and felt numb through them. I went through the motions a lot this year after the separation. There was a certain relief to it but I was in a really dark place. There were some fun moments like when I got my cousin Zack into Jackass when he was under 17 but my roommate in his 20s was turned away because he looked 12 but most of it was really rough. I remember one particular night in which I couldn’t sleep and was flipping channels and came across Mystery Science Theater 3000 on Syfy and it was an episode I hadn’t seen, one of the new ones. I was still not on board with Bill Corbet as Crow so I didn’t watch a lot of those episodes (It is important to note I am now 100% on board with him thanks to the Film Crew and Rifftrax) but it was something that I loved and it was there for me. When Frank Coniff returned in the episode as TV’s Frank I couldn’t believe it. When Gypsy started tracking a ship coming in and docking with the Satillite of Love I cocked my head like Scooby Doo. Then Joel walked on board and I completely lost it. Here I was in the pit of despair and it felt like my friends were coming back to console me. That sounds ridiculous to type but given that I have met and talked to both Joel and Frank several times, I feel like I am on slightly more solid ground.
Movies weren’t the refuge they usually were to me this year, at least not as much because of how much I was dealing with. It is no coincidence that only one of my favorites this year released after September and that one deals with the self-loathing of a writer trying to deliver a quality movie despite hating himself. I am not going to lie, this is the beginning of a particularly rough patch in my life and we aren’t going to be coming out of it until 2008 and even then it is only about two years before things go to shit again. Fair warning. The movies are still awesome though.
Runners up in roughly release order: Count of Monte Cristo, Showtime, Blade II, Panic Room, National Lampoon’s Van Wilder, the Salton Sea, Star Wars episode II: Attack of the Clones, About a Boy, Undercover Brother, The Bourne Identity, Minority Report, Men in Black II, Reign of Fire, Road to Perdition, Signs, One Hour Photo, Spirited Away, Red Dragon, Bowling for Columbine, Knockaround Guys, The Rules of Attraction, The Ring, Jackass: the Movie, 8 Mile, Equilibrium, Lord of the Rings: the Two Towers, Gangs of New York, Narc, Catch Me If You Can, and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.
If you have not read the introduction to this exercise, I recommend you do so for context regarding what this all is. In short, be nice, these are my favorites based on how I encountered them in my life and what they mean for mean to me. This is not a list of objective best movies in their respective years and if a movie that you love or is considered great does not appear, it does not mean that I think it is shit or that I don’t love it. These are just my favorites for particular personal reasons. Feel free to let everyone know your favorite five for 2002 and why as well. It is also worth mentioning that there will be spoilers here for what are now 24-year-old movies. Let’s dig in!
1.Spider-man-Sam Raimi
Spider-man directed by the incredible Sam Raimi tells the story of teenaged nerd Peter Parker (Toby McGuire) who is bitten by a radioactive spider while on a high school field trip and gains super powers. He has a crush on his neighbor Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst), lives with his Aunt May (Rosemary Harris) and Uncle Ben (Cliff Robertson), who he loves, and is best friends with Harry Osborn (James Franco) who is the son of Norman Osborn (Willem DaFoe) the owner of tech firm Oscorp (and something of a scientist himself).
Peter finds himself with incredible spider-like powers such as the ability to climb walls, jump great distances, shoot organic webbing from his wrists (he really lucked out in the spinneret department considering where they are on an actual spider), super strength and reflexes, and a ‘spidey sense’ that warns him of danger. He uses these powers initially to try to win a professional wrestling match in order to make enough money to buy a car in order to impress Mary Jane, this after he manages to humiliate bully Flash Thompson (Joe Manganiello) when Flash tries to bully him.
Uncle Ben tries to talk sense to Peter when he is dropping him off at the ‘library’ and here is where we get ‘with great power comes great responsibility’ which is foundational text for Spider-man. Peter isn’t hearing it and argues with Ben. He leaves the car after exchanging hurtful words and goes to the wrestling match.
As these things go, after he quickly bests Bonesaw Magraw (Macho Man Randy Savage) in the ring the promoter stiffs him of the full amount he is owed because he ended the fight too quickly. When a thug robs the promoter, Peter lets him go echoing back the promoter’s dismissal to him “I missed the part where that’s my problem.”
It becomes Peter’s problem quickly when that thug murders Uncle Ben and steals his car. Peter follows him looking for revenge and has a confrontation that ultimately leads to the killer tripping out a building window to his death. Ben’s death and words of responsibility lead Peter to become Spider-man, the name given to him by the wrestling announcer (Bruce Campbell) at the match, to fight crime.
This brings him at odds with the Green Goblin, an alter ego that springs from Norman Osborn’s foolish experimentation of himself and leads him to punish anyone who has ever wronged him. The conflicts culminate in the Goblin impaling himself on his own glider and Harry blaming Spider-man for his father’s death. Peter realizes that anyone he loves will be in danger after MJ and Aunt May are both threatened by the Goblin so he walks away from MJ. We end the movie with a fully realized Spider-man and an isolated Peter Parker.
Sam Raimi’s Spider-man is the first of what is now years and years worth of Spider-man movies but at the time it felt a bit risky. Blade and X-Men had paved the way but there was a lot riding on if this could be pulled off. There had been a live action series and TV movie in the 70s and Spidey had appeared on the Electric Company but aside from that, a movie of this scale hadn’t been attempted. Well, it had been attempted several times but this was the first to make it to the screen.
As we sit here in 2026, Spider-man: Brand New Day as just broken the record for highest grossing domestic release in history (Not adjusted for inflation) so it is hard to remember a time when a Spider-man movie was ‘risky’ but it sure felt that way 24 years ago.
Toby McGuire felt like the perfect casting for Peter at the time, and he was. He was perfect for Raimi’s Spider-man, just absolutely nailing Peter Parker. James Franco was equally good as Harry, managing to be a spoiled rich kid who had a heart and genuinely liked Peter. Willem DaFoe nailed Norman so well, he really didn’t need the mask to be Green Goblin and I will forever feel somewhat cheated that we never got him to play the Joker. He is absolutely amazing. JK Simmons is such a perfect J Jonah Jameson (a character loosely based on Stan Lee) that he continues to play the role now in an entirely different cinematic universe. Rosemary Harris is basically like if they took Aunt May from the comics and put her in the movie. She is great.
The effects of the movie were also amazing at the time and it is kind of incredible how well they hold up now. Spider-man’s web slinging is no small feat to make look cool and Raimi really pulled it off here. Here we had a Spider-man uncompromised by limitations like gravity and physics and it worked really well. It just looked amazing and the action was as thrilling as anything I had ever seen up to that point.
Given the era we were in at the time, however, it wasn’t all perfect. There were some compromises and missteps that the movie made that pulled it down just slightly. The organic web shooters were an invention of the movie and while it extended the puberty metaphor Peter’s powers represented, it also undermined Peter’s genius by not having him create the web shooters and web fluid himself. The Green Goblin mask was kind of hilarious and made him look more Power Ranger than Green Goblin. Mingling MJ with aspects of Gwen Stacy undercut the drama and loss that informed Peter in the Comics. Peter had some jokes as Spider-man but not nearly enough. But you know what? Who gives a fuck. Spider-man was awesome.
I have additional casting quibbles, I was not super into Kirsten Dunst’s MJ or Cliff Robertson’s Uncle Ben, but honestly I was just happy to be getting this close to the comic accurate Spider-man as we were. There are a lot of things that Raimi included here that would have been thrown out by a lesser adaptation. We get a comic accurate origin story, an enormously comic accurate J Jonah Jameson, a comic accurate Aunt May, a fantastic Green Goblin with a death that is basically panel for panel from the comics. We get nods to different eras of the comics with even some McFarlane touches and poses. We get so much that any quibbles I might have had disappeared in the face of barely suppressed joy for seeing my favorite comic book character of all time depicted on screen and taken seriously on top of it.
I saw this so many times in the theater. My ex and I got into a fairly involved argument about it after the first time because she thought it was trying to cram too much into the movie. Even 24 years later I disagree. I feel like it was just about the most elegant an origin story we had ever gotten up to that point and it remains in the conversation to this day.
This movie was the realization of a life time of dreams for me and I had no idea how good I would be eating in the years that would follow. That this movie is not even close to my favorite Spider-man movie is something that 2002 me would not have been able to believe. Hell, I would have been gobsmacked to learn that the sequel would eat this movie’s lunch entirely.
You are going to have to read a lot about Spider-man movies moving forward. Sorry not sorry. I love that my favorite character is so popular that we now have 11 theatrically released Spider-man movies not including his appearances in team up movies. I love that we have amazing video games and cartoons. I love that we have so much merch. When I was getting picked on for being a nerd in middle school and high school, I would have loved to know that one day I would not only not get shit for wearing Spider-man gear, I would get compliments. When I bought my first Spider-man shirt from a Star Trek convention in high school, I never imagined that I would eventually be able to get them at Target. It is kind of insane to think about and I love it. And you are going to have to read about it. Once again, Sorry not Sorry. In a terrible year, Spider-man was a bright spot of unbridled joy and it makes me to smile to know that in subsequent years, Spider-man movies have been with me no matter how bad things might get. That I saw one this very year that is absolutely one of my favorites is all thanks to this movie and I will be forever grateful to Sam Raimi for giving it to me.
2. Adaptation-Spike Jonze
Adaptation is a weird movie to say the very least. Written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Spike Jonze, the same team that gave us Being John Malkovich in 1999, Adaptation is a bizarre mixture of real adaptation and meta storytelling that blends narrative and writing into a strange amalgamation of weirdness that offers insight into the writing process and obsession.
Adaptation tells the story of Charlie Kaufman (Nicholas Cage) who, after the success of Being John Malkovich, is approached by Valerie Thoms (Tilda Swinton) to adapt the Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep). The book is an expansion of Orlean’s New Yorker article about John Larroche (Chris Cooper) who is a poacher who enlists a group of Seminole men to steal Ghost Orchids from a Florida preserve with the intent of cloning and selling them. Kaufman is intent on writing a simple movie about flowers and wants to eschew typical Hollywood movie conventions to do it. This is made more difficult when his twin brother Donald (also Cage) comes to live with him and starts taking film classes in order to be a screenwriter himself.
Kaufman’s attempts at writing are stymied by writer’s block and he decends into self-loathing madness trying to break the story while his brother is writing absolute horseshit and getting attention from Kaufman’s agent (Ron Livingston) and dating a girl Kaufman has a crush on, Caroline (Maggie Gylenhall). Intercut with all of Charlie’s own struggles, are scenes from the Orchid Thief in which Susan interviews Larroche and we get a bit of real adaptation of the Orchid Thief. After Charlie decides he needs to go an meet Orlean in New York and he heeds Donald’s advice to take in a seminar from Robert McKee (Brian Cox), the movie shifts into a weird blend of meta storytelling that leads to car chases, drug use, and an exposed affair between Orlean and Larroche that culminates in the pair trying to murder Charlie and Donald and results in Larroche being killed by an alligator and Donald dying in a car accident. Holy shit.
Adaptation is the result of a very real effort by Charlie Kaufman to adapt the very real novel the Orchid Thief by a very real Susan Orlean. He had writer’s block and had difficulty cracking the book which didn’t have much of a narrative structure and decided instead to write a movie about his struggle to adapt the work and added elements to the story to exaggerate and expand the narrative up to and including a fake twin brother for himself and drug and murder plots. He thought it would end his career when he handed it in. Instead it earn Cage an Oscar nomination. When Kaufman himself was nominated for a Golden Globe for screenplay, he was nominated with his made-up twin Donald. Chris Cooper won best supporting actor for the movie.
The narrative of Adaptation is kind of insane and it is hard to believe it was made in the first place, let alone be as amazing as it actually is. Kaufman’s struggles with writing in the movie are enormously relatable as a writer and its blending of writing conventions that Kaufman wants to avoid into the third act of the movie is nothing short of brilliant. That Kaufman finds insight into life beyond just writing after talking to Robert McKee (who is also real and does not have such a militant stance on voice over) speaks directly to people like me who find meaning and truth in life through film. To quote Kevin Smith from the 4:30 Movie, ‘Movies make life make sense.’
Given the real people portrayed in the movie it is also hard to imagine anyone ever signing off on this. Orlean, in particular, takes a real narrative turn here from cheating on her husband to snorting drugs and attempted murder. It is wild that she signed off on it. In fact, she had this to say about that in 2012 “[reading the screenplay] was a complete shock. My first reaction was ‘Absolutely not!’ They had to get my permission and I just said: ‘No! Are you kidding? This is going to ruin my career!’ Very wisely, they didn’t really pressure me. They told me that everybody else had agreed and I somehow got emboldened. It was certainly scary to see the movie for the first time. It took a while for me to get over the idea that I had been insane to agree to it, but I love the movie now.”
I was in a bad place when I saw Adaptation and I was trying to write a screenplay and a novel while feeling pathetic and worthless so I identified enormously with the Charlie Kaufman character. Charlie’s bargaining with himself about whether he should have a coffee to start writing or have coffee to reward himself for writing is a mental debate I have every time I write, including this morning when I sat down to write this. The struggles he goes through in the movie with maintaining integrity while watching others find success with pandering bullshit are also relatable to an unfulfilled writer. At this point in my life I was unpublished and had only ever finished a fan fiction Crow novel that took me like five years to write.
Charlie Kaufman writes himself in a very unsympathetic way here and at times, and watching it now while in an entirely different circumstance, it is harder to relate to his self-loathing and it is subsequently harder to identify with him. But when you look at the meta narrative at play, it is remarkable that he was able to pull this off between himself and his made up brother. You could get into analysis about what parts of Kaufman’s psyche each represent but I am not sure how valuable that is to the overall narrative. He learns from his brother and his brother represents a hungrier, more outgoing version of himself but at the end of it all, it isn’t as if he has given up on his self-loathing, but maybe he understands more about what it means to live in the world and interact with others.
The obsession that he has toward finishing the screenplay is mirrored by the story at play in the original novel and he twists it all together into the meta narrative that he puts himself in. That is an incredibly tricky bit of writing to pull off and as much as everyone loves his future film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I think that Adaptation is a more impressive and more important piece of writing. I am in the minority here, I understand this, but it is a hill I am prepared to die on. This is a personal preference for me so it isn’t that I am trying to win an argument but it is just how I feel.
3. Super Troopers-Jay Chandalasekhar
The first movie to put comedy troupe Broken Lizard on the map, Super Troopers follows the antics of the Vermont State Police as they attempt to keep budget cuts from shutting them down by exposing a drug smuggling ring operated by the local police. Antics and hilarity ensues.
I had never heard of Broken Lizard when Super Troopers came out. They were formed when the members were in a fraternity together at Colgate University and they had only made one other movie at the time, Puddle Cruiser, which I still haven’t seen. The trailer looked funny so when the opportunity to see a sneak preview presented itself, Jeff and I went to see it. It was the two of us and a theater full of much older people. We were in the far left corner of the back row and the place was packed. The movie started with an enormously funny scene of kids with a bunch of drugs being stopped by two highway patrol officers who proceed to mercilessly fuck with them. Jeff and I were laughing enormously hard at this and no one else in the theater was.
This scenario played out throughout the entire film. We thought it was really funny and audibly laughed into a room of absolute silence. When we left we both loved the movie but the icy reception from the rest of the crowd made us worry that we would never hear from these dudes again. Thankfully, that did not turn out to be the case as we just got Super Troppers 3 this year (and I really dug it).
Writing about comedies is always difficult because all you can really say is if it is funny or not but Broken Lizard’s humor is right up my alley and with the exception of Club Dread, they really don’t miss for me. It is a mixture of slapstick, sight gags, word play, and just general shenanigans so they don’t really linger much on any one thing or another. This nimbleness allows them to cover a lot of ground without feeling scattered or unfocused.
The personalities of each performer really shines as does the chemistry they all have together. This is especially apparent in Super Troopers when they are all cops together and all like each other, except for Farva who they all just put up with. The fun they have together is infectious and goes a long way to get the viewer on board. Obviously, this doesn’t track for everyone as you have people like everyone in the advanced screening or people I have talked to who somehow feel like Super Troopers is stupid but think Reno 911 is a more accurate parody of police. This is no slight against Reno 911, which I also like, but it is pretty silly and stupid as well.
I have watched Super Troopers over and over again and it never gets old for me. It is the best of the three Super Troopers movies although I think both of the sequels are also great. It is one of those movies that just make me happy and I have a real affection for it. I am glad they are still out there making awesome comedy.
4. Frailty-Bill Paxton
Bill Paxton’s directorial debut, Frailty is a nasty piece of filmmaking. Written by Brent Hanley, Frailty follows a man (Matthew McConaughey) who walks into an FBI field office to tell Agent Wesley Doyle (Powers Booth) about a string of murders his father forced he and his brother to help him commit. The movie cuts back and forth between the man and Doyle and flashback scenes showing how the story unfolds. In the flashback portions we see Adam (Jeremy Sumpter) and Fenton (Matt O’Leary) as they attempt to deal with their father (Bill Paxton) who claims to have had a holy revelation that has directed him to kill demons posing as humans. What follows is a horrifying progression of murder and child abuse as the father punishes and tortures ‘demons’ and his kids when they don’t want to help. The story is more and more chilling before culminating in an insane reveal in the modern part of the story that turns everything on its head.
Frailty famously had 25 people walk out of the theater in its first test screening and it is not hard to imagine why. It is a hard watch but it is gripping and engaging the whole way through with great performances and a tremendously sure hand behind the camera. Paxton is fairly amazing in front of the camera too which is especially remarkable with him pulling double duty. The child actors turn in great performances as well which is pretty vital to this kind of movie. If they sucked, then so too would the whole endeavor.
I saw this in theaters and was blown away. I have evangelized for it ever since to somewhat muted enthusiasm. I showed it to my mom and she liked it a lot, once again providing more evidence that she was a closet horror fan. Other friends and family? Not so much. I stand by it, however, and watching it a few months ago solidified it even further. It certainly isn’t for everything but if a fucked up version of Supernatural if the Winchesters were serial killers sounds good to you then you should check it out.
5. Big Trouble-Barry Sonnenfeld
Based on the novel by Dave Barry, Big Trouble is a Miami crime comedy with the moving parts of an Elmore Leonard or Carl Hiaasen novel. The story is made up of several intersecting threads that collide at a rich guys house in the most ridiculous way possible and finds its way to the airport. It is clever, hilarious, and largely due to 9/11, almost completely invisible to most people.
Tim Allen plays Eliot Arnold, a struggling advertising guy who finds himself in a burgeoning illicit romance with Anna Herk (Rene Russo) when his son Matt (Ben Foster) and her daughter Jenny (Zooey Dechanel) get in trouble at school for playing Killer: the Assassination Game at school. Things get complicated when Anna’s husband Arthur (Stanley Tucci), who is a major scumbag, attempts to get his hand on an illicit case containing a bomb and two hitmen (Dennis Farina and Jack Kehler) are sent to kill him. Meanwhile two local thugs (Johnny Knoxville and Tom Sizemore) attempt to rob the Hurk resident. Things are further complicated by the weird guy living in the Hurk’s tree, Puggy (Jason Lee) and the Hurk’s maid Nina (Sofia Vergara) get into the mix and fall in love. Two cops (Patrick Warburton and Janeane Garofalo) and two FBI agents (Heavy D and Omar Epps) get into the mix and the whole mess culminates with a bomb on a plane detonating in the ocean. None of that should make any sense but it all connects in the movie.
As mentioned, the film was supposed to come out on 2001 but was delayed due to sensitives surrounding 9/11 and when it did come out it was more or less buried. It is a real shame because it is Barry Sonnenfeld doing great work like he did with Get Shorty with similar material.
I read the book before the movie came out and absolutely loved it. I have never really read Dave Barry’s articles or essays but I love his fiction. It is twisty crime fiction with a greater emphasis on comedy than some of his contemporaries but to my mind stands shoulder to shoulder with them. The dialogue is snappy and the plots and twists are propulsive and fun. I was a little concerned that the movie wouldn’t capture it but I had faith in Sonnenfeld and that faith was well placed. This is another movie that I have evangelized for over the years and another with mixed results. It is just one of those ‘right up my alley’ movies that I don’t expect other people to plug into as much as I do but my love for it is unwavering. The cast is awesome and the beats are just right. If you dig Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen, I recommend both the movie and the book. Dave Barry’s other fiction novels are great as well and should be checked out as well.