My “favorite movie(s) of each year” for the 1990s have included a few movies about making movies: The Player (1992), Living in Oblivion (1995), Boogie Nights (1997). Now we get to the last one of the ’90s, and the only documentary of the bunch: American Movie. Here’s the trailer on YouTube (I can’t embed the video in this post because it has an age restriction).
American Movie follows Mark Borchardt as he spends years making a short movie with almost no money. As he tells it, he grew up in a dysfunctional household, and spent his youth on movies and drinking. You get the feeling he hasn’t changed much by age 30. But he’s charismatic and confident enough to persuade friends and family members to work on his movie — acting, editing, putting up flyers, anything. (He plays the main character in his own movie. Sometimes his mom operates the camera … while trying to figure out how it works.)
Borchardt’s best friend, Mike Schank, helps him make the movie, including by playing acoustic guitar for the soundtrack, which also becomes the soundtrack of American Movie. (Schank is the one on the right in the photo below, while Borchardt looks through the camera.) Schank comes across as a lovable fool whose brain has been fried by substance abuse. It’s hard to tell how much he’s helping his friend, but he’s essential to the documentary — not just because he offers comic relief, but also because his simple, serene presence takes the edge off Borchardt’s frantic, obsessive drive. The movie suggests that Schank has replaced his past addictions with playing the lottery on a daily basis — tiny gambles that parallel the big gamble of making a movie.
[Update, October 13, 2022: Mike Schank has died at age 56.]
Borchardt is working on such a small scale that we don’t see extensive equipment and crew members taking up space in the way we’re used to seeing on a professional film set. Without those obstructions, we can enjoy a clearer view of the seemingly endless absurdities surrounding this man’s passionate endeavor.
On the surface, this documentary shows us the struggles and indignities of toiling in obscurity to make a no-budget movie. But it’s also about something deeper. The title, American Movie, hints at the idea of the American dream. This movie captures the way someone whose life seems hopeless and chaotic searches for order, meaning, success, and respect.
It’s all right! It’s okay! There’s something to live for! Jesus told me so!
[German: Lola Rennt]
(Franka Potente, Moritz Bleibtreu, Herbert Knaup. Directed by Tom Tykwer.)
Lola (Franka Potente) runs and runs to find a way to get enough money to save her boyfriend … then relives the same 20 minutes over and over, making slightly different choices that could have big consequences.
Run Lola Run uses a dazzling array of techniques, including switching back and forth between film and video (low-resolution video is used whenever Lola isn’t part of the scene), animation, monochromatic flashbacks, and flash-forward sequences that reveal how Lola affects the lives of minor characters around her. This taut thriller is packed with so much excitement and meaning that it’s hard to believe the movie is only an hour and 20 minutes.
(Philip Seymour Hoffman, Dylan Baker, Jane Adams, Jon Lovitz, Lara Flynn Boyle, Cynthia Stevenson, Ben Gazzara. Directed by Todd Solondz.)
This ensemble dramedy centers on a family with three adult sisters, one of whom is married with kids, as well as the sisters’ parents. The numerous plotlines all end up being directly or indirectly connected to the same family.
What ties the various stories of Happiness together is the sad realization that the characters’ lives are empty. Some of them are well aware of that and are desperate to fill their emotional voids. Others take longer to see it, and in the meantime have convinced themselves that their lives are successful. The movie leaves you feeling that the ugly side of humanity lurks just underneath the pleasant surface visible to the outside world, and that sexual urges keep getting in the way of genuine fulfillment.
Happiness is unrated, but was originally given an NC-17 rating. This movie isn’t for everyone, and maybe it isn’t for most people. It takes an unflinching look at depression, suicide, mass shootings, domestic violence, sex offenders, and — in some particularly excruciating scenes — pedophilia.
One of the lighter scenes is at the beginning, when Joy (Jane Adams) has just broken up with Andy (Jon Lovitz) at dinner:
In the aftermath of the breakup, Joy talks to one of her sisters (Cynthia Stevenson), who then talks about it with her husband (Dylan Baker), a therapist who will later admit that he himself is “sick.” He responds to his wife with a chilling thought …
Joy came by today. Mm, how’s she doing?
I don’t know, and frankly, I’m concerned. She’s not like me — you know, she doesn’t have it all. She pretends to be happy, but I can see right through her. She’s miserable. … I’m afraid to have to say it, but truly, it’s what I believe: she’ll always be alone.
We’re all alone.
(Mark Wahlberg, Burt Reynolds, Julianne Moore, John C. Reilly, Heather Graham, Don Cheadle, William H. Macy, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Philip Baker Hall. Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.)
If you haven’t seen Boogie Nights and you just read the plot summary, it might not sound interesting enough to be worth spending almost two and a half hours watching. Some people will also be put off by the idea of a movie about making pornographic movies. But this ensemble dramedy isn’t particularly erotic, has very little nudity, and certainly isn’t boring. Paul Thomas Anderson’s breakthrough movie has a vibrant, electric quality that makes it feel more exciting than real life, while being intimate enough to allow you to feel like you’re really there, following the characters over the years.
The sweep and variety of the characters have brought the movie comparisons to Robert Altman’s “Nashville” and “The Player.” [my favorite of 1992] There is also some of the same appeal as “Pulp Fiction,” [one of my favorites of 1994] in scenes that balance precariously between comedy and violence. … Through all the characters and all the action, Anderson’s screenplay centers on the human qualities of the players. They may live in a disreputable world, but they have the same ambitions and in a weird way similar values as mainstream Hollywood. …
In examining the business of catering to lust, “Boogie Nights” demystifies its sex. … Mainstream movies use sex like porno films do, to turn us on. “Boogie Nights” abandons the illusion that characters are enjoying sex; in a sense, it’s about manufacturing a consumer product.
What can you expect when you’re on top, you know? It’s like Napoleon, when he was the king … people were just constantly trying to conquer him, you know, in the Roman Empire. So it’s history repeating itself all over again.
“Fargo” begins with an absolutely dead-on familiarity with smalltown life in the frigid winter landscape of Minnesota and North Dakota. Then it rotates its story through satire, comedy, suspense and violence, until it emerges as one of the best films I’ve ever seen. To watch it is to experience steadily mounting delight, as you realize the filmmakers have taken enormous risks, gotten away with them and made a movie that is completely original, and as familiar as an old shoe — or a rubbersoled hunting boot from Land’s End, more likely. … Films like “Fargo” are why I love the movies.
The hero of Fargo (Frances McDormand, in an Oscar-winning performance) is a pregnant woman whose interactions with her husband (John Carroll Lynch) are strikingly ordinary. He wakes up with her when she receives a call about a recent homicide, and he makes a quick breakfast for her before she leaves. While she’s solving crimes, the big news in his life has to do with … his painting of a mallard. The scenes focused on this married couple might seem dull, but there’s a reason the movie juxtaposes them with scenes of brutal violence.
Some of the criminals’ conversations also aren’t what we’d expect. In this scene, the two men in the car are on their way to kidnap a woman, planning to hold her for ransom:
Hey, look at that, Twin Cities! The IDS Building, the big glass one — tallest skyscraper in the Midwest, after the uh, Sears in Chicago, or John Hancock Building, whatever. You ever been to Minneapolis?
Nope.
Would it kill you to say something?
I did.
“No!” The first thing you’ve said in the last four hours. That’s a — that’s a fountain of conversation, man! That’s a geyser! … I’m sitting here driving, doing all the driving … just tryin’ to chat, you know, keep our spirits up, fight the boredom of the road — and you can’t say one fucking thing just in the way of conversation?
Watch someone react to seeing it for the first time in the video below:
I weirdly loved that movie. I want to watch it again right now, because I need to pick up on even more randomness. … I wonder if I can even explain. … Why is it so good? Because it’s half funny and half horrible?
(Woody Harrelson, Courtney Love, Edward Norton. Directed by Miloš Forman.)
Miloš Forman’s speciality was making a movie that revolves around a wild man who shakes up the system, like One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (my favorite movie of 1975). The People vs. Larry Flynt stars Woody Harrelson as Larry Flynt, who boasts: “I am the publisher of the most tasteless, sleaziest, most disgusting, greatest porn magazine on the face of the earth!”
But this movie isn’t really about pornography or sex. It’s about freedom. The person who does the most to test our beliefs about freedom might be obnoxious, but might also be a funny sort of hero.
In that clip, Flynt’s lawyer (Ed Norton) makes his closing argument:
I am not trying to suggest that you should like what Larry Flynt does. I don’t like what Larry Flynt does! But what I do like is that I live in a country where you and I can make that decision for ourselves. I like that I live in a country where I can pick up Hustler magazine and read it if I want to — or throw it in the garbage can if that’s where I think it belongs. Or better yet, I can exercise my opinion and not buy it. … Because we live in a free country. You know, we say that a lot, but I think sometimes we forget really what that means. … But there is a price for that freedom, which is that sometimes, we have to tolerate things that we don’t necessarily like. … So go back in that room, where you are free to think whatever you want to think about Larry Flynt and Hustler magazine. But then ask yourselves if you want to make that decision for the rest of us. Because the freedom that everyone in this room enjoys is in a very real way in your hands. And if we start throwing up walls against what some of us think is obscene, we may very well wake up one morning and realize that walls have been thrown up in all kinds of ways that we never expected.
By the way, the actor who plays the judge in that scene is … Larry Flynt.
(Brenda Blethyn, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Timothy Spall. Directed by Mike Leigh.)
That video about this movie says:
How many films can you think of that portray day-to-day ordinary life … stories that act and feel almost like documentaries, with characters so real you’re left feeling like you just observed a two-hour family reunion, rather than witnessing a work of fiction? Whatever your answer may be, I guarantee you that few films come as close as British director Mike Leigh’s 1996 masterpiece Secrets & Lies — a film which beautifully pays tribute to the kitchen-sink genre British cinema often excels at, but one that also paints its own unique portrait of modern Britain, thanks to the beautiful souls of its class-divided characters.
The story follows Hortense, a successful, well-to-do optometrist (played by Marianne Jean-Baptiste), who decides to trace her family history after the death of her adoptive mother. Gathering the documents she needs, Hortense tracks down her birth mother, Cynthia (played by Brenda Blethyn), who lives a shabby, working-class life with her daughter, Roxanne [Claire Rushbrook]. …
There are two things I did to appreciate this movie more. One was to turn on English subtitles, because the British accents and occasional mumbling can be hard to understand. The other was, as I often do right after seeing a movie for the first time, to rewatch parts of it. It gains meaning that way, as in early scenes when Cynthia’s brother, Maurice (Timothy Spall), a professional photographer, takes one portrait photo after another of rather awkward subjects, gently encouraging people to smile — while assuring them that they’re “under no obligation” to do so, since “it’s a free world.” Later, at a family gathering, he breaks down and admits that he’s spent his life trying to make people happy, yet the people closest to him hate each other.
You gotta laugh, ain’t ya, sweetheart? Else you’d cry.
Stream Secrets & Lies on the Criterion Channel (with extras) or Max. If you don’t subscribe to the Criterion Channel, try a free trial.
(Philip Baker Hall, John C. Reilly, Gwyneth Paltrow, Samuel L. Jackson. Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.)
This unconventional neo-noir starts when an aging, poker-faced gambler, Sydney, played by the late Philip Baker Hall (1931 - 2022), finds a homeless young man named John (John C. Reilly) and, for no apparent reason, becomes a father figure to John, helping him reinvent himself and get on a path to stability — starting with a scheme to bilk free stuff from casinos. Both men seem to be spontaneously creating a new family in this sleazy, amoral world … after their real family has gone.
Eventually, Sydney also acts as a father to Clementine (Gwyneth Paltrow). When she assumes that Sydney has brought her to a hotel room to have sex in exchange for money, Sydney makes clear that he doesn’t view her that way. In a refreshing break from movies that so often pair young, attractive women with much older, plainer men, Sydney respects that she belongs to a different generation from him, and that the last thing she needs is one more person objectifying her. Later on, we’ll have a better understanding of why the morally ambiguous Sydney is treating Clementine and John with such care, but I won’t spoil that here.
This movie can be fairly criticized for leaving out some key information; it isn’t the thing to watch if you want a perfectly satisfying story. And yet I wish there were more movies with this atmosphere. It isn’t a typical crime movie — oh, there are some violent or angry scenes, but the soul of this movie is in smaller, quieter moments. Watch Hard Eight for understated but powerful acting, and a directorial debut that hints at the greater heights Paul Thomas Anderson would reach with his next movie, Boogie Nights (my favorite of 1997).
(Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy. Directed by Richard Linklater.)
Richard Linklater’s trilogy about lovers and their conversations starts here.
I always have this strange feeling that I’m this very old woman laying down, about to die — you know, that my life is just her memories or something.
That’s so wild! I mean, I always think that I’m still this 13-year-old boy … who doesn’t really know how to be an adult, pretending to live my life, taking notes for when I’ll, you know, really have to do it.
“Before Sunrise” was partly born out of Linklater’s disappointment with his previous feature, cult favorite “Dazed and Confused.”
“He was really disappointed in himself with how much better he did with the men than the women,” Hawke said. “The feeling he had ultimately when he was finished with the movie was that it was a boy movie. Its focus was on the male characters. It didn’t achieve the Chekhovian goal of being genderless, and his goal for ‘Before Sunrise’ was to invite a very strong woman and get two actors, male and female, and have them create their characters together.” …
Hawke recalled Linklater telling him the following: “I don’t want you to worry too much about the script. I’m inviting you to be a filmmaker with me. My whole life I’ve gone to the movies and there’s espionage and shootouts and helicopters, all this action. Everything that I see is all this drama, [so much so] that you would think my life, our lives, have no drama. That’s not the way I feel. My life feels very exciting to me and I’ve never been involved in a chase or a gun shootout. … And what’s the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me? Connecting with another human being. …”
Hawke continued, “Really what he is saying is that we are enough. It’s a hard thing for us, as people, to comprehend that. We are interesting. We are valuable. … At its essence, the movie is saying people witnessing each other has a huge power. Sometimes I leave ‘Harry Potter’ or ‘Avatar’ and I feel blue because I don’t have superpowers or magic. But I think Rick’s movies make you realize your life is magic.”
(Heather Matarazzo, Brendan Sexton III, Eric Mabius. Directed by Todd Solondz.)
Coming-of-age movies typically show youth as a magical time, in which all the adolescent struggles are worth it for the wild fun and personal growth. There are geeks at school, but don’t worry about them — they’re in the background, or for comic relief, or to show us that the nerd can turn out to be a cool kid.
Welcome to the Dollhouse is the opposite of all that. From start to finish, the focus stays on a 7th-grade girl named Dawn Weiner (Heather Matarazzo), who looks, acts, and feels hopelessly awkward in her every waking moment. Her time at school is spent less on learning than on being tormented by students — from mockery over her last name, to insinuations about her sexuality, to rape threats. Going home offers no respite: she’s the ugly duckling of her family too.
Dawn tries to connect with people — with her only friend, with boys she likes. But, spoiler alert: there’s no hero to save her from her plight. She doesn’t undergo any stunning transformation. The torrent of abuse doesn’t help Dawn become a better person; on the contrary, she becomes so used to the bullying that she starts emulating it. No one in her life seems to have prepared Dawn for the daily slings and arrows she endures. (In a meeting with the principal and her mom after shooting a spitball, she explains: “I was fighting back.” Her mom is aghast: “Who ever told you to fight back?!”)
Welcome to the Dollhouse is a rare movie that refuses to lie to us to make us feel better. It never assures us that Dawn’s problems have solutions. So why watch it — just to be depressed? No, to love the unloved … to see how someone who isn’t saying or doing the right things still needs kindness and understanding … to think about how someone like Dawn will see better days but needs to take a long and bumpy road to get there.
(Steve Buscemi, Catherine Keener, Dermot Mulroney, Peter Dinklage. Directed by Tom DiCillo.)
An indie comedy about making an indie drama.
At one point the director of the movie within the movie (Steve Buscemi) complains that an actor keeps missing his cue in a dream sequence, and the actor (Peter Dinklage, in his movie debut) retorts by challenging the director about why he was cast:
Why does my character have to be a dwarf?
It doesn’t have to be a dwarf.
Then why is he? Is that the only way you can make this a dream — put a dwarf in it? Have you ever had a dream with a dwarf in it? … I don’t even have dreams with dwarves in them!
(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 in the early 1950s, 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” — seeing each person as either purely good or purely bad.
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.)
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 (it left but will likely come back) or these sites.
(John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman, Bruce Willis, Ving Rhames, Tim Roth, Amanda Plummer, Harvey Keitel, Christopher Walken. Directed by Quentin Tarantino.)
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.
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.
Stream What Happened Was … on Plex (free with ads) or these sites.
(Documentary. Directed by Chris Hegedus, D.A. Pennebaker.)
This documentary takes us behind the scenes of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, led by James Carville and George Stephanopolous. Though you know they’ll win, you feel like you’re there with them going through all the uncertainty, the ups and downs, the internal debates, the brilliant moves and the desperate ploys. You feel the frustration before the exhilaration.
It’s hard to imagine any fictional version of a political campaign inventing a character quite like Carville. The Democratic strategist says this to a roomful of campaign staffers in an emotional speech the night before Election Day:
Outside of a person’s love, the most sacred thing that they can give is their labor. … And people are gonna tell you you’re lucky. You’re not. Ben Hogan said: “Golf is a game of luck. The more I practice, the luckier I get.” The harder you work, the luckier you are.
Stream The War Room on the Criterion Channel (with bonus features) or Max. If you don’t subscribe to the Criterion Channel, try a free trial.
(Nicolas Cage, Dennis Hopper, Lara Flynn Boyle, J.T. Walsh, Dwight Yoakam. Directed by John Dahl.)
This Western neo-noir pays homage to The Postman Always Rings Twice (one of my favorite movies of 1946), starting when a down-on-his-luck drifter drifts into the wrong diner or bar, run by a man whose marriage is poisoned by greed. The atmosphere of inescapable suspicion and betrayal evokes another classic noir, Double Indemnity (my favorite movie of 1944). One twist leads to the next so relentlessly that Red Rock West could’ve come off as laughably contrived, but we’re able to take it seriously because of a well-chosen cast including Nicolas Cage as the reluctant hero, Lara Flynn Boyle as the femme fatale, Dennis Hopper as (what else?) the giddy psychopath, and country singer/songwriter Dwight Yoakam, whose career as an actor started here.
Here is a film so placid and filled with sweetness that watching it is like listening to soothing music. “The Scent of Green Papaya” takes place in Vietnam between the late 1940s and early 1960s, and is seen through the eyes of a poor young woman who is taken as a servant into the household of a merchant family. She observes everything around her in minute detail, and gradually, as she flowers into a beautiful woman, her simple goodness impresses her more hurried and cynical employers. The woman, named Mui, is an orphan — a child, when she first comes to work for the family. She learns her tasks quickly and well, and performs them so unobtrusively that sometimes she seems almost like a spirit. But she is a very real person, uncomplaining, all-seeing, and the film watches her world through her eyes. For her, there is beauty in the smallest details: A drop of water trembling on a leaf, a line of busy ants, a self-important frog in a puddle left by the rain, the sunlight through the green leaves outside the window, the scent of green papaya. …
I have seen “The Scent of Green Papaya” three times now. … It is a placid, interior, contemplative film — not plot-driven, but centered on the growth of the young woman. As such, you might think it would seem “slower” on later viewings, but I found that the opposite was true: As I understood better what the movie was, I appreciated it more, because like a piece of music it was made of subtleties that only grew deeper through familiarity.
If there is a verb meaning “to stir harmoniously,” it should be used here.
(Tim Robbins, Greta Scacchi, Cynthia Stevenson, Vincent D’Onofrio, Fred Ward, Whoopi Goldberg, Lyle Lovett, Dean Stockwell, Julia Roberts, Bruce Willis. Directed by Robert Altman.)
Altman’s neo-noir satire of the movie industry. I recommend watching this after Bicycle Thieves (one of my favorites of 1948). The Player’s movie-within-a-movie also seems to be a twist on I Want to Live! (1958), a film noir based on a true story of a woman on death row.
I was shocked to see what a thriller it is. As in: edge-of-your-seat, suck-in-your-breath, OMG-did-that-just-happen? suspenseful. (There’s a faxed message that will make your heart stop.) I’d remembered it as a delectable, switchblade-witted vision of Hollywood — a funny, flowing Altmanesque juggling act — and I was curious to see how its portrait of the motion-picture industry had aged. (Answer: It’s aged a lot … and not at all.) …
I had remembered “The Player” as a sublime comedy. And it is. Yet for all its drop-dead tweaks of Hollywood in the blockbuster age, it’s also a movie that sucks you in like a dramatic whirlpool. It’s about a production executive, Griffin Mill (played in a devious, layered performance by Tim Robbins), who’s a ruthless backstabber and proud packager of commercial but vacant movie ideas — the kind of scoundrel who would usually be the villain in a drama of corporate malfeasance. Griffin keeps getting threats in the form of postcards from a writer he’d had a meeting with but left hanging. …
[T]he subtle beauty of Robbins’ performance is that he gets us on his side by showing us that Griffin, cold and unctuous as he is, is clawing his way through a jungle he never made. He’s a cog — a smooth utensil in a double-breasted suit. … He’s the point man in the larger war “The Player” keeps winking at: the one between reality and illusion. …
It lacked certain elements that we need to market a film successfully.
What elements?
Suspense. Laughter. Violence. Hope, heart. Nudity, sex. Happy endings. …
What about reality?
Stream The Player on the Criterion Channel (with extras including commentary by Altman and others) or Max. If you don’t subscribe to the Criterion Channel, try a free trial.
(Emma Thompson, Anthony Hopkins, Helena Bonham Carter, Vanessa Redgrave. Directed by James Ivory.)
Ebert observed that this movie, based on the 1910 novel by E.M. Forster, is “seething with anger, passion, greed and emotional violence. That the characters are generally well-behaved says less about their manners than their inhibitions.” The movie’s “buried subject,” Ebert said, “is the impossibility of two people with fundamentally different values ever being able to really communicate.”
They belong to types that can fall in love but can’t live together. I’m afraid that in nine cases out of ten, nature pulls one way and human nature the other.
This is a story (like most of E.M. Forster’s) about the injustices of class distinctions. However, with a subtlety that I missed on my first viewing, this film is also … a story of social progress. This film is set in a time when society is coming out of the Victorian age and into the Edwardian. You see contrasts of the past thinking with the progressive thinking all through the movie. A visual metaphor is repeated over and over: the turning of cranks, whether it be on a Morse code machine, a vintage car, or the wheels of a locomotive. I believe this represents both karma and progress. …
In the New York Times video below (which somewhat spoils how things end for one character), critic A.O. Scott says: “It’s because the movie is so completely about them that it succeeds in being about something much larger. … It’s a costume drama and a biting social critique — a stick of dynamite wrapped in lace.”
Stream Howards End on Tubi (free with ads) or Kanopy.
(Bridget Fonda, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Stephen Tobolowsky. Directed by Barbet Schroeder.)
Critics were sharply divided on this movie, but they agreed about its strengths and weaknesses: everyone said it’s a schlocky, formulaic thriller but the performances by Bridget Fonda and Jennifer Jason Leigh are outstanding. I wonder if the reviews would’ve been more positive if Single White Female had come out today, with its female-centered focus on two young women whose relationship as roommates starts out being played as a love story before one of them turns into the roommate from hell. There’s also a MeToo subplot about sexual harassment in the workplace.
This movie fits into the “erotic thriller” genre that peaked in the ’80s and ’90s, but the eroticism is never gratuitous; it always furthers the plot or adds to our understanding of the characters. While the movie’s climax does have some contrived moments, Single White Female has more psychological depth than you’d expect based on the reviews that dismissed it as a trashy slasher flick. Rewatching it brings out well-chosen details in the roommates’ relationship, like the way one of them catches the other going into her bedroom and trying her perfume without asking; this small crossing of boundaries seems to invite a dangerous obsession.
Single White Female repeatedly pays homage to classic Hollywood movies, with scenes inspired by Hitchcock’s Rear Window (my favorite movie of 1954) and Vertigo (my favorite of 1958). The roommates watch meaningful lines being spoken by Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak (reunited shortly after Vertigo) in Bell, Book and Candle (1958), and by Gloria Grahame in In a Lonely Place (one of my favorite movies of 1950).
Bottom line: Single White Female isn’t perfect (even the title isn’t perfect!) but it’s worthy of reconsideration.
(Albert Brooks, Meryl Streep, Rip Torn, Lee Grant. Directed by Brooks.)
In this romantic dramedy about the afterlife, purgatory has a humorously commercialized environment and a legal system that puts the life you’ve just lived on trial.
Here’s a Siskel & Ebert video that includes clips from Defending Your Life. They disagree about the ending: Siskel was disappointed by it, but I agree with Ebert that the ending is powerful and meaningful.
(I set up that video to start at 8:30, and the Defending Your Life review goes until 12:30.)
(River Phoenix, Lili Taylor. Directed by Nancy Savoca.)
In this coming-of-age dramedy (more drama than comedy) set in the ’60s, a group of Marines are in San Francisco the night before they ship out to Vietnam, and they’re having a sick competition over who can bring the “ugliest” date to a dance. One of the Marines, Eddie (played by River Phoenix just two years before his tragic death), starts to regret choosing Rose (Lili Taylor), a sweet girl who’s an aspiring folk singer. Of course, we’ll find out who’s truly ugly and beautiful, but more important than the plot is this movie’s well-earned charm in exploring the world of young people who haven’t figured out what they want yet.
This is a rare indie ’90s movie to be directed by a woman (Nancy Savoca), and you might sense her perspective coming through in the movie’s focus on Rose. She has less screen time than Eddie, but it’s Rose’s movie; we follow her feelings.
Oh, and watch for one scene with Brendan Fraser, in his movie debut.
(Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Robert Patrick, Edward Furlong. Directed by James Cameron.)
The sequel to The Terminator (my favorite movie of 1984) significantly drops the “The” from the title — now there’s more than just one of them. Almost everything in this movie is different from what it seems on the surface: the time-traveling cyborg played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was so terrifying in the first movie, has been “re-programmed” and can learn from humans; another cyborg (Robert Patrick) poses as a mild-mannered police officer and can turn into anyone; an affable computer engineer with a wife and kid (Joe Morton) is laying the groundwork for a nuclear apocalypse; a woman confined in the high-security section of a mental institution (Linda Hamilton) has a more clear-eyed view of the world than anyone else; and her son, a bratty juvenile delinquent (Edward Furlong), could be the best hope to save humanity …
We’re not gonna make it, are we? People, I mean.
It’s in your nature to destroy yourselves.
Yeah, major drag, huh?
(Richard Linklater, Teresa Taylor, Kalman Spelletich, Robert Pierson, Sarah Harmon, John Slate, Louis Mackey, Kim Krizan, Jerry Delony. Directed by Linklater.)
Slacker, Richard Linklater’s breakthrough movie, challenges almost all our preconceptions about what movies are supposed to be like: where’s the plot, the main characters, the theme, the message? You might also think it has no music … until it ends with music so perfectly ebullient as to color the whole feeling of the movie in retrospect.
Slacker is a world of contradictions. It’s great by not trying to be great. It’s weird, rough, flawed, frustrating … and I only wish there were more movies like it.
My thing is, a video image is much more powerful and useful than an actual event. Like … I was walking down the street, and this guy came barreling out of a bar, fell right in front of me, and he had a knife right in his back, landed right on the ground. And well, I have no reference to it now! … I can’t press rewind. I can’t put it on pause. I can’t put it on slow-mo and see all the little details. And the blood? It was all wrong. It didn’t look like blood. The hue was off! I couldn’t adjust the hue! I was seeing it for real, but it just wasn’t right.
Stream Slacker on the Criterion Channel (with extras including commentary by Linklater) or Max. If you don’t subscribe to the Criterion Channel, try a free trial.
The video below (which has spoilers) talks about how GoodFellas made a break from gangster movies of the time by showing the characters as sleazy low lifes, instead of the more dignified, elite men in The Godfather and The Godfather Part II (see my 1972 and 1974 posts about those movies).
From a New York Times retrospective (archive link):
Scorsese was 47 when it was released, but he infused the picture with the furious energy and stylistic razzle-dazzle of a film school kid: elaborate camera movements, snazzy freeze frames, hard-boiled voice-over, non-chronological storytelling and tighter needle drops than a downtown DJ set.
The filmmaking is intoxicating because it makes Hill’s life of crime seem so seductive; it draws us into his world. So Scorsese crafts a subjective experience, often literally: in the shot introducing the various gangsters and hangers-on, all of whom speak directly into the camera … or the notorious “May 11, 1980” sequence, which uses jagged cutting, jittery camerawork and battling music cues to put us directly into the head of the film’s coked-out, paranoid protagonist. Compared with the respectful distance of earlier gangster stories (even “The Godfather” movies), the immediacy of “Goodfellas” feels like an earthquake.
The Times also points out that GoodFellas highlights the idea of “mobsters having other aspects of their lives” — “everyday marital and familial woes.” Scorsese used a suggestion by Lorraine Bracco, who plays Hill’s wife (Karen), to have the couple’s young kids show up — and for them to be played by the actress’s real-life kids. Bracco explains in the DVD commentary that she was thinking about how the couple “wouldn’t always be able to get a babysitter” — the kids would get caught up in the criminal world.
(Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Mary Steenburgen, Thomas F. Wilson, Lea Thompson, Elisabeth Shue. Directed by Robert Zemeckis.)
The last Back to the Future movie is mostly a Western set in 1885. It’s been criticized for the love story between Doc (Christopher Lloyd) and Clara (Mary Steenburgen) — which, yes, isn’t too exciting at first. But I’ll defend those slow-paced early scenes as the foundation for the best parts of the movie later on, starting when Doc struggles to convince Clara of the reality of time travel.
(Alison Steadman, Timothy Spall, Jane Horrocks, Jim Broadbent. Directed by Mike Leigh.)
Life Is Sweet was the first movie to bring international attention to the British director Mike Leigh. He has an unusual process where he and the actors start developing their characters together through improvisation, before the story is written. Ebert thought this approach resulted in a different kind of movie:
Most movies begin by knowing everything about their characters. “Life is Sweet” seems to make discoveries as it goes along; it really feels as if the story is as surprising to the characters as it is to us.
Life Is Sweet revolves around a family that lives together in an ordinary middle-class house: a married couple and their fraternal twin daughters, in their early 20s. One of the twins, Nat (Claire Skinner), is polite and androgynous. She’s a plumber, which isn’t a focus of the movie but a well-chosen detail: she’s not doing the most meaningful work, but she’s a dutiful and productive member of society.
Her twin, Nicola (Jane Horrocks), is her opposite. She’s unemployed and unruly, and she seems to be going nowhere in life. She’s the most interesting character in the movie. She’s wild and individualistic … but she never leaves her parents’ house. She fancies herself a political activist … but her protests are limited to name-calling whoever’s been bothering her. (“Fascist!” “Capitalist!”) She has an eating disorder and is more interested in smoking cigarettes than having a meal with her family. When they ask her to stop smoking indoors so they can enjoy their food, she comes back with a perfectly logical solution: “Don’t eat!”
Meanwhile, their dad (Jim Broadbent) is trying to start a business out of a trailer he just bought, and their mom (Alison Steadman, who was married to Mike Leigh at the time) is working as a waitress on the opening night of a restaurant run by a bumbling, emotionally unstable friend of the family (Timothy Spall).
You can stream Life Is Sweet on the Criterion Channel, which includes the director’s commentary. At the end of his commentary, Mike Leigh reveals that it’s his least favorite movie he’s ever made! And I can understand why he’d say that: the first time I saw it, I was disappointed that most of the movie’s plotlines don’t resolve in a satisfactory way. I wanted to see more of the characters. It was like Woody Allen’s joke in Annie Hall (my favorite movie of 1977): “Boy, the food at this restaurant is really terrible … and such small portions!”
But rewatching this movie was revelatory. I sat in awe of two consecutive scenes near the end, when Nicola is confronted by her boyfriend (David Thewlis) and then by her mom. They’re some of the most honest scenes I’ve ever seen in any movie.
Then it struck me: Life Is Sweet is … like life. It feels unfinished and ambivalent. It’s too serious and sad to be an all-out comedy, but too amusing to be simply called a drama. It can be awkward, it can be painful, but it can also be sweet. And you can find enough meaning in it to make it worthwhile.
(James Caan, Kathy Bates, Richard Farnsworth, Lauren Bacall. Directed by Rob Reiner.)
A famous novelist from New York City (James Caan) is injured in a car accident in a remote area of Colorado. At first he’s rescued by a nurse (Kathy Bates), but she turns out to be a deranged fan who doesn’t want him to leave her house, or write a book that isn’t to her liking.
The perfectly cast Bates won the Oscar for Best Actress — the only time a movie based on a book by Stephen King has won an Oscar. In her acceptance speech, she gave a shout-out to Caan that winked at her refrain from the movie: “I really am your #1 fan, Jimmy.”
%20copy.jpg)
