By RUSSELL BAILLIE, GRAHAM REID and GREG DIXON
Bic penned songs, Russell boxed on, Pierce got up to spyjinks, J'Lo's making Ben B'Lo, and Jacko had to hang a baby out the window to get noticed.
The spy guys
Bond, James Bond, returned under the direction of Lee Tamahori in a film which looked more like the videogames the 40-year-old franchise had spawned in its past couple of outings.
All part of facing up to the competition he was facing from other spy-guys.
Of course, there had been a certain buck-toothed dandy and his mojo who had been pulling the carpet out from Bond for a couple of parodies. He finally ran out of laughing gas on this year's Goldmember, but it did set some sort of record for celebrity cameos and challenged 007 as the king of product placement.
And then there were the young bucks giving the big-screen cloak-and-dagger business their own spin.
The loudest and silliest of these was Vin Diesel as the extreme sports guy reluctantly turned espionage agent in XXX, which undoubtedly will become Diesel's - the new Bruce Willis - own Die Hard franchise.
Ben Affleck - or as he will soon be known, B'Lo - stepped into Harrison Ford's sensible shoes as Jack Ryan in the latest Tom Clancy technothriller The Sum of All Fears.
Ford had baulked at the nuclear terrorism storyline and chose K-19: The Widowmaker, in which he played the Soviet commander of a stricken nuclear missile sub trying to prevent a reactor meltdown and heating up the Cold War.
Meanwhile Affleck pal Matt Damon revived Jason Bourne, the amnesiac CIA assassin from Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Identity. Like Bond, and for that matter Austin Powers, half the fun in Bourne was watching how they adapted this movie spook from another age to the modern era.
And yes, it's a guy thing. Though the next biggest challenge Bond might face is from a spin-off franchise for Halle Berry's Die Another Day American spy, Jinx.
The most colourful life
Russell Crowe - you win some, you lose some. Let's see.
Won: A Bafta award for his performance in A Beautiful Mind.
Lost: His temper at the show's BBC producer for cutting his acceptance poem short in the broadcast.
Lost: A second acting Oscar, possibly because of that widely reported run-in, though it seemed that winner Denzel Washington's time had finally come.
Lost: A case against two men who had been charged with trying to extort him over a video of his involvement in a brawl outside a nightclub in Coffs Harbour, New South Wales. Much scorn was poured on his fighting ability.
Lost: A spot of fisticuffs in the gents of a London eatery with Eric Watson.
Won: The hand of long-time on-off girlfriend Danielle Spencer in marriage, some time in the future.
Lost: Our respect?
And it was a year when a couple of other expatriate actors and Shortland Street alumni started making their mark in Hollywood.
Martin Henderson seemingly has roles coming out his ears after a supporting turn in Windtalkers and horror The Ring.
While playing the Ruskie villain Yorgi in XXX, Marton Csokas' performance was its own special effect. They had something to crow about.
The grateful dead
Quite a year for dead people, wasn't it?
The resurrection of Dead Elvis was hardly surprising on the 25th anniversary of that last walk to the bathroom, but the song that did it for him was unexpected.
A Little Less Conversation was originally on the soundtrack to his appalling '68 Live a Little Love a Little movie and the soundtrack album wasn't even released in many places outside the US at the time.
Then it appeared in the remake of Oceans Eleven and a Dutch DJ with the unpromising name Junkie XL did his remix and an ad was born. The Elvis estate felt Presley - a man with a predilection for prescription pills - shouldn't be associated with "Junkie". So it was JXL who brought the King to the dance floor, and expanded his 30 No 1 Hits album to 31.
Dead Kurt made a comeback because litigation was settled to allowed the release of the scouring, emotionally fraught You Know You're Right. It was the sound of a man about to mistake his head for a flock of geese. Then there was his Journals in which he portrayed himself as seriously troubled. And that was without mentioning the missus.
The inconvenience of being dead didn't stop Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes appearing on the TLC's 3D album and a few reviewers considered Dead Harrison's album a fine body of work, but actually Brainwashed was business as usual on the Hare Georgeson front.
Dead Lennon was a surprise late entry in this category when McCartney decided to reverse the attribution of that famous songwriting team for his Back in the US album.
A cynic might say the "McCartney-Lennon" switch was less to do with control over his work than drawing attention to an album which would otherwise have gone ignored at Christmas.
Death is still the stuff of life, it seems.
The chart toppers
Quite how would we read 2002 when considering the Kiwi albums which severely dented the upper reaches of the charts this year?
There would seem to be little connection between Bic Runga's Beautiful Collision, Nesian Mystik's Polysaturated and Blindspott's self-titled debut for example. But maybe that's the point.
For years we have sought to define a Kiwi sound in that anxious, "What's our culture?" way, but the fact is we speak - and sing - with many voices. We are diverse as the distance between a posthumous Prince Tui Teka album and the Goodshirt enhanced DVD edition of their debut album.
What we seem to do, however, is write interesting and sometimes angular songs, a craft handed down through Neil Finn and Don McGlashan, the Flying Nun school, and singer-songwriters such as Sharon O'Neill and Shona Laing to the Runga sisters and Anika Moa, Goldenhorse and the Brunettes.
Some might argue Blindspott come up a little short on that front, but it's all in how you define "a song". Look at the finalists for this year's Silver Scroll, admittedly drawn from last year: three were by hip-hop acts who know the value of putting in a hook and a chorus. The people who bought Blindspott found hooks aplenty.
The end of the line
He's the Incredible Melting Man. Michael Jackson seems to be literally slipping away before our eyes and his behaviour seems to suggest the late stages of some emotional implosion as well.
You don't criticise your record company for failing to promote your album when it's a dog that won't shift anyway - and that your audience has either moved on, wised up or found perfectly adequate and more prolific substitutes.
And in that latter case there seem to be any number of pretenders to the self-styled King of Pop's throne: Justin Timberlake delivered a surprisingly good ersatz Jacko album, and both Craig David and David Bedingfield are well placed to make a claim also.
The sheer force of J'Lo media presence - music, movies, red carpet moments, gossip mags - suggest she's stolen Jackson's turf too, and hasn't had
to hang a baby out a window to do it.
If Jackson's star was in decline this year, then so too were those of Courtney Love (no Hole any more, oh dear), Robbie Williams (who seems to have resigned himself to being big in Europe and adopting the Cliff Richard attitude to America), Oasis, most of the boy bands of two years ago, any former Fugee (both Wyclef Jean and the flaky Lauryn Hill released duff albums) and the Artist Formerly Known As Squiggle.
Richard Ashcroft can now claim two bad solo albums in a row and when Neil Young asked Are You Passionate? the correct answer was, "Yes, and not dumb enough to buy your lousy album". For us to be interested from now on, you might have to hang a baby out a window, Neil.
The multi-media star
Good things about Eminem's first flick 8 Mile?
Detroit looks terrific - in a run-down, dirty trailer-park, inner city-ruin kinda way, you understand. It is from this rough and rude clay that Eminem springs, a sullen white kid in a black world, ready to rage against the indignity of poverty and the rough life he's having.
Actually he doesn't do any of that in the loosely autobiographical movie, but engages in a couple of mike battles dissing the competition with the inevitable result.
In that regard 8 Mile has the same kind of wish-fulfilment and aspirational fantasy as any pop culture teen-pic, the difference here being the language, knowhumsayin'? 8 Mile has been another career high for the potty-mouthed rapper, but largely begs the question, "Can he act?". If being moody and saying very little is acting, then he's very good. If doing the day job is acting then it's also a thumbs up. But he ain't no James Dean.
As someone cruelly noted, maybe he is the Elvis of rap. Elvis couldn't act either. Whether he can or can't - Madonna can't and it hasn't stopped her - isn't the point, it's that 8 Mile is the first successful rap movie.
That it took a white boy to do it tells us something about the social climate, that this music may well account for a huge percentage of music sales in the US, but it is still a culture on the margins. Eminem is now a multimedia superstar who has done it his way.
He has been controversial, outrageous, cutting-edge, angry and hilarious. 8 Mile feeds the myth and mystique nicely. But he really must do something about his diction if he wants mums and dads to understand him, don't you think?
The giant killers
IN A year of sequels upon sequels, superheroes and digital wizardry, they were the little movies that could. My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Bend It Like Beckham were out-of-nowhere flicks which lit up the box office with their girls' own stories. They became international crowd-pleasers, despite their stories of specific culture clashes and trying to please your parents while being your own person.
The former made a star of Nia Vardalos while becoming the most profitable Indie box office hit of all time, having been made for just $11 million. At last count it was heading way past the $300 million profit mark. Earlier this year, Vardalos told TimeOut the film was inspired by a conversation with an agent who said she wasn't pretty enough to be a lead actress, and not fat enough to be a character actress.
"All doors had shut in my face so I thought, rather than whine about it, I'm gonna write myself a part."
Vardalos's story about a Greek gal's romance with a non-Greek long-haired vegetarian became an off-Broadway play, which so tickled Rita Wilson, the Greek-American wife of an actor called Tom Hanks, she pulled a few strings.
Next thing, the world was getting a rib-tickling lesson in growing up Greek in Chicago and trying to get hitched. Funnily enough no, they didn't break any plates. But they sure broke some records.
Meanwhile, the similarly humble Anglo-Asian flick Bend It Like Beckham became a runaway hit at home in Britain (cost $8.5 million, took more than $35 million) and here on the other side of the world, too.
Directed by Gurinder Chadha and topping off a surge of Asian screen talent in Britain, BILB told of teenage Jess Bharma's struggle between doing the right thing by her strict Punjabi parents and her love of playing the beautiful game while worshipping its most famous English star.
The reason it caught on? Maybe because it didn't think of itself as a movie for pre-teen and teenage girls, and so didn't speak down to them.
They still turned up in droves, coming away with the urge to hit the pitch or hire a couple of Bollywood musicals on video.
England may have dipped out on the World Cup, but it wins the prize for making the best football flick in a very long time.
The TV storytellers
Perhaps it's just that they don't make movies like they used to. Possibly it's that television - a medium not nearly as venerable as film - has finally discovered a respect for its power to tell stories.
Whatever it is, it became patently evident, after growing suspicions over the past couple of years, that in 2002 mainstream television is now doing for us what mainstream film used to do.
In popular primetime shows, from The Sopranos to Six Feet Under, to 24, to our own Mataku, the medium has shown a superior grasp of genre, the new idea and a sophistication of story that increasingly shades its popular big-screen competition, such as Minority Report, Spider-Man and Star Wars: Attack of the Clones.
The signs have been there for a while - compare the television series Band Of Brothers to the film Saving Private Ryan.
Both were products of Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg's wish to pay tribute to what American journalist-writer Tom Brokaw has dubbed The Greatest Generation, the citizen soldiers of WWII.
But if Ryan was rightly lauded for its graphic realism, it was the 10-part series which gave a sense of discovery. Brothers revealed that the complexity and polish of writing in the best American shows is now much better than its movies.
The potential has always been there, of course. A television series will always have more time to grow its characters, to mull issues and to test new ways of telling stories. It's just that, with notable exceptions (ER, for example), television is only now really beginning to use this advantage to full potential.
Another increasing problem for film - Hollywood film in any case - is that its now so reliant on whizz-bang special effects that story-telling has become a bit player.
Even disposable TV entertainment like Alias and Buffy The Vampire Slayer is more impressive in the kick-ass chick genre than its over-hyped movie competition such as Tomb Raider. And television comedy too - from The Office to The Osbournes - leaves its silver screen looking crude and cliched.
What does this mean for film in the future?
Hollywood mogul Samuel Goldwyn wondered, back in the mid-50s, why people should go out and pay to see bad movies when they could stay at home and see bad television for nothing.
In 2002, it became clear this ancient Tinseltown worry has only become more vexing for movie-makers. After all, with a significant amount of television now so much better than most movies, why should people pay to see movies good, bad or indifferent at all?
Top entertainment trends of 2002
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