my favorite movies of 1994:

favorite of 1994:

(Kate Winslet, Melanie Lynskey, Sarah Peirse. Directed by Peter Jackson.)

“True crime” and “fantasy” aren’t genres that usually go together: if it’s fantasy, that means it’s not true, right? Well, Peter Jackson’s breakthrough movie manages to fit into both genres … and ends up being one of the weirdest movies I’ve ever seen!

Heavenly Creatures shows how friendship for young people can be such an intense experience that it feels more important than anything else in their lives. The teenage friends are Juliet (Kate Winslet) and Pauline (Melanie Lynskey). Pauline, a sullen introvert, feels stifled in her working-class family, when the exuberantly extraverted Juliet, who lives in luxury and has been around the world, comes from England to Pauline’s school in New Zealand. They bond over the fact that they were both often sick and bedridden as children. (Juliet assures Pauline: “All the best people have bad chests and bone diseases — it’s all frightfully romantic!”)

Eventually the two friends (lovers?) create a whole fantasy world to escape from their everyday realities. They start veering toward a thin line between imagination and insanity, as they seem to realize when Pauline, the narrator, declares both of them to be “stark raving mad,” while we see shots of the two girls dancing ecstatically. (As over the top as that line and many others in the movie are, her narration was all taken from the real-life Pauline’s diary.) In their intoxicated state, they convince each other that nothing can stand in their way of being together, and they take that idea to a shocking conclusion.

The strongest male characters in this movie are figments of the girls’ imaginations. Early on, Juliet and Pauline (who’s often called Paul, a masculine nickname) idolize the Italian-American tenor Mario Lanza, working themselves up into rapture over his passionate singing, and even consecrating a photo of him in a quasi-religious, candle-lit ritual, as if he were at least a saint or maybe their God. Later, they demonize Orson Welles, watch him being chased through a tunnel in the classic film noir The Third Man (1949),* and have a nightmarish hallucination of him pursuing them. The girls’ fixation on this duality of the wonderful man vs. the evil man seems to be sending us a message about the perils of polarization, failing to see shades of grey, or what psychologists call “splitting,” e.g. seeing each person as either pure good or pure evil.

I don’t know anywhere to stream Heavenly Creatures, so the way to watch it would be to get the DVD. (Unfortunately, the blu-ray seems to be out of print.)

* The Third Man is one of the many acclaimed movies I’ve seen but decided not to include on the list of my favorite movie(s) of each year from 1920 to 2020.

2nd favorite of 1994:

Crumb

(Documentary. Directed by Terry Zwigoff.)

This isn’t just a well-made documentary about one of the most revered cartoonists of all time, R. Crumb. It’s also a portrait of a deeply troubled family.

One of the most emotional movie experiences I’ve ever had was watching Crumb at home. Right when it ended, I unexpectedly started crying, and I struggled to explain my reaction to the person I had watched it with. I was thinking about the chasm between people who do and don’t realize their potential in life.

The whole culture’s one unified field of bought, sold, market-researched everything. … It used to be that people fermented their own culture, you know? It took hundreds of years, and it evolved over time. And that’s gone in America. People now don’t even have any concept that there ever was a culture outside of this thing that’s created to make money.

Siskel & Ebert on Crumb:

Stream Crumb on Tubi (free with ads) or these sites.

3rd favorite of 1994:

Pulp Fiction

(John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman, Bruce Willis, Ving Rhames, Tim Roth, Amanda Plummer, Harvey Keitel, Christopher Walken. Directed by Quentin Tarantino.)

What’s so great about Pulp Fiction? Ebert said:

Its greatness comes from its marriage of vividly original characters with a series of vivid and half-fanciful events and from the dialogue. The dialogue is the foundation of everything else. Watching many movies, I realize that all of the dialogue is entirely devoted to explaining or furthering the plot, and no joy is taken in the style of language and idiom for its own sake. … Most conversations in most movies are deadly boring, which is why directors with no gift for dialogue depend so heavily on action and special effects. The characters in “Pulp Fiction” are always talking, and always interesting, funny, scary or audacious.

Stream Pulp Fiction on Amazon Prime or these sites.

4th favorite of 1994:

What Happened Was…

(Karen Sillas, Tom Noonan. Directed by Noonan.)

Two co-workers on a first date, all in one apartment, all in real time. Will they ever manage to have a flirty conversation that flows well, instead of being so awkward it makes you cringe? Will they make a real connection?

I’m writing about all those lonely, damaged, crippled — you know, the people who make this country what it is.