skimpole
-
Posts
4,289 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Posts posted by skimpole
-
-
Great lines from 1999 musical version continued
Magnolia
Eyes Wide Shut
-
Great lines from 1999 Musical edition
South Park, Bigger, Longer and Uncut:
Beau Travail
-
As someone for whom ethics and morals are very important, I cannot admire a movie in which the solemn holy occasion of a christening is juxtaposed with gory scenes of murderous violence.
Well ethics and morals are very important to me as well, and I think the scene nicely demonstrates Michael's corruption.
-
5
-
-
I saw four movies last week. Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo suffers from sentimental brave soldiers and the women who love them, or at least one soldier and one pregnant wife. On the other hand Spencer Tracy is good in an unfortunately small role and the actual Dolittle raid and its aftermath are pretty good. Summer Magic is not one of Disney's most admired live action movies. But it's interesting because there is something in Disney that wishes he made Meet Me in St. Louis and this movie is an attempt to do that. So basically we're seeing a movie that is clearly inferior to that in every conceivable respect. The songs aren't memorable, the nostalgia more unequivocal and more fake, the direction, cinematography, art direction and costume design are less successful, the movie has less depth and the performances are less successful in every respect. It's odd that Hayley Mills, arguably the bright spot of the movie, doesn't sound remotely like her two brothers. And Burl Ives' character seems to act like a pathological liar. Fences has good performances by Denzel Washington and Viola Davis. It's based on a play by August Wilson who insisted on an African-American director. Maybe he should have insisted on someone who had better experience adapting plays into movies, since as a movie the movie does resemble a filmed play too much. So the movie of the week is Song to Song, whose plot was admittedly a little confused for me because I didn't realize that Natalie Portman was playing a blonde. More complex in its narrative than To the Wonder, more optimistic than Knight of Cups, I certainly admired it and will argue that this "weighless" trilogy will improve in critical reputation over the years.
-
1
-
-
Actor
Marcello Mazzarella, Time Regained
Bob Hoskins, Felicity's Journey
Ralph Fiennes, The End of the Affair
Tom Cruise, Eyes Wide Shut
Denis Lavant, Beau Travail
Runner-ups: Edward Norton (Fight Club), Tom Hanks (Toy Story 2), Forest Whitaker (Ghost Dog: the Way of the Samurai), Trey Parker (South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut), John Cusack (Being John Malkovich), Johnny Depp (The Ninth Gate), Al Pacino (The Insider), George Clooney (Three Kings), Matt Stone (South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut), Russell Crowe (The Insider), Kevin Spacey (American Beauty), Terence Stamp (The Limey), Jim Broadbent (Topsy-Turvy), Behzad Dorani (The Wind Will Carry Us), Brendan Fraser (Blast from the Past), Robert DeNiro (Analyze This), Emmanuel Schotte (Humanite), Joel Haley Osment (The Sixth Sense), Richard Farnsworth (The Straight Story), Michael C. Williams (The Blair Witch Project), Fabrizio Rongione (Rosetta), Joshua Leonard (The Blair Witch Project), Kevin Spacey (The Big Kahuna), Mathew Broderick (Election), Ralph Fiennes (Sunshine), Brad Pitt (Fight Club), Keanu Reeves (The Matrix), Bruce Willis (The Sixth Sense), Heath Ledger (10 Things I Hate About You), Rupert Everett (An Ideal Husband),
Actress
Hilary Swank, Boys Don't Cry
Emile Dequenne, Rosetta
Julianne Moore, The End of the Affair
Heather Donahue, The Blair Witch Project
Kirsten Dunst, The Virgin Suicides, Dick
Runner-ups: Elaine Cassidy (Felicity's Journey), Jennifer Aniston (The Iron Giant), Joan Cusack (Toy Story 2), Eihi Shiina (Audition), Severine Caneele (Humanite), Carrie Ann Moss (The Matrix), Cecilla Roth (All About My Mother), Mary Kay Bergman (South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut), Linda Fiorentino (Dogma), Reese Witherspoon (Election), Jennifer Jason Leigh (Existenz), Catherine Zeta-Jones (Entrapment), Alicia Silverstone (Blast from the Past), Sarah Polley (Go), Michelle Williams (Dick), Julia Stiles (10 Things I Hate About You), Gong Li (The Emperor and the Assassin), Sigourney Weaver (Galaxy Quest), Yelena Rufanova (Moloch),
Supporting Actor
John Malkovich, Time Regained, Being John Malkovich
Hugo Weaving, The Matrix
John C. Reilly, Magnolia
Tom Cruise, Magnolia
Philip Seymour Hoffman, Magnolia, The Talented Mr. Ripley
Runner-ups: Philip Baker Hall (Magnolia), Laurence Fishburne (The Matrix), Jason Robards (Magnolia), Sydney Pollack (Eyes Wide Shut), Vincent Perez (Time Regained), Pascale Gregory (Time Regained), Jeremy Blackman (Magnolia)*, Michel Subor (Beau Travail), Stephen Rea (The End of the Affair), Joe Pantoliano (The Matrix), Gregoire Colin (Beau Travail), Leon Vitali (Eyes Wide Shut), Oliver Platt (Lake Placid), Kelsey Grammer (Toy Story 2), Alan Cumming (Eyes Wide Shut), Alan Rickman (Dogma, Galaxy Quest), Christopher Plummer (The Insider), Todd Field (Eyes Wide Shut), Danny DeVito (The Big Kahuna), Chris Rock (Dogma), Jude Law (The Talented Mr Ripley), Isaac Hayes (South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut), John Tormey (Ghost Dog: the Way of the Samurai), Peter Fonda (The Limey), Rade Serbdzija (Eyes Wide Shut), Frank Langella (The Ninth Gate), Michael Caine (The Cider House Rules), Philipe Tullier (Humanite),
*Juvenile Performance of the Year
Supporting Actress
Melora Walters, Magnolia
Julianne Moore, Magnolia
Nicole Kidman, Eyes Wide Shut
Catherine Deneuve, Time Regained
Emmanuelle Beart, Time Regained
Runner-ups: Helena Bonham Carter (Fight Club), Toni Collette (The Sixth Sense), Lena Olin (The Ninth Gate), Catherine Keener (Being John Malkovich), Chloe Sevigny (Boys Don't Cry), Cameron Diaz (Being John Malkovich), Thora Birch (American Beauty), Anne Yernaux (Rosetta), Penelope Cruz (All About My Mother), Marie-France Pisier (Time Regained), Betty White (Lake Placid), Sarah Polley (Existenz), Leelee Sobieski (Eyes Wide Shut), Salma Hayek (Dogma), Chiara Mastroianni (Time Regained), Alanis Morissette (Dogma), Emmanuelle Seigner (The Ninth Gate), Barbara Jefford (The Ninth Gate),
Not seen: The Green Mile, Sweet and Lowdown, The Hurricane, Tumbleweeds, Music of the Heart, Girl, Interrupted--------This was a good year for movies in my opinion, which meant that I find the Academy's choices this year particularly irritating.
-
2
-
-
sewhite2000, dagoldenage and TopBilled you may be interested to know that in under "Your Favorites" of Message Boards, we've been running a favorite performances thread since last year. Right now we're doing 1999 and will be doing so until Wednesday. And if you want you can post your choices for Best acting performances for 1990-1998 and they'll be included in the decade summary starting next Thursday I believe.
My choices for 1945
Actress, Actor, S. Actor: Arletty, Jean-Claude Barrault, Pierre Brassuer, Children of Paradise
S. Actress: Anna Magnani, Open City.
-
1
-
-
On Monday, I saw my first movie of 2017, Song to Song. Here is Richard Brody's review from his New Yorker blog:
Terrence Malick is a romantic idealist. His films revel in the unity of the virtues, of beauty, truth, and justice fused in an ultimate realm that leaves its glimmers on Earth and finds its ordinary place amid humanity in the form of love. Even more than his flowing, fragmentary, allusive methods, it’s his transcendental world view that renders him grandly untimely, that makes critics who are smitten with television’s cynical “darkness” repudiate the cathedral-like sublimity of his vision.
In his new film, “Song to Song,” Malick does something new with his familiar technique: he builds his cathedral from the ground up, filming mainly in his home town of Austin, Texas, and anchoring the movie on a starkly clear framework—a simple story of couples in doubt and conflict. But within his story of a shifting romantic triangle he develops both a teeming, harshly emotional web of relationships and an overwhelming, rapturous variety of visual experience. Forging under pressure a new way of telling familiar (and family) stories, Malick also displays a conspicuously painterly boldness, a sort of cinematic Impressionism that locates an indelible force of light and detail in the stuff of daily life.
It’s common practice when writing about a movie to offer at least a sketch of the plot; with “Song to Song,” that banality becomes an act of criticism—and of enthusiasm—in itself. That’s because, despite Malick’s daringly collage-like assemblage of images that only dart across the surfaces of their narrative elements, the movie has a rich, complex, thoroughly imagined plot of a novelistic amplitude. Going into detail about the story is, above all, proof that the movie has a story—that Malick is not a captive of his finely crafted style but, rather, able to deploy it to realize a dramatically engrossing world.
The names of the movie’s characters aren’t mentioned, with the exception of its protagonist, Faye (Rooney Mara), who’s pursuing a career in music and lands in a relationship with the record-company mogul (Michael Fassbender) for whom she had been working as a receptionist. With him, she has gotten used to a life of comfort, but she’s not doing much with music. At a party, Faye meets another young Austin musician (Ryan Gosling), who is something of the impresario’s protégé—he’s signed to a deal and being groomed for stardom—and she, the musician, and the mogul become something of a “Jules and Jim”-like trio, jetting off to Mexico in the rich man’s private plane and cavorting freely on the beach. But on that Mexico jaunt Faye—during a side trip to an abandoned monastery—realizes that she has fallen in love with the young man, and this becomes painfully clear to the mogul. Soon after the return to Austin, the mogul shamelessly flirts with a waitress (Natalie Portman), a former kindergarten teacher down on her luck, and eventually they marry.
On the basis of this classic setup of an unstable triangle, Malick goes on to build a wide and passionate tangle of new relationships and long-standing bonds. The mogul’s dealings with the young man fall apart, but the mogul and Faye aren’t done with each other; they still have a sexual relationship—and he offers her a record contract. Faye and the young musician break up; he meets a former girlfriend (Lykke Li) and gets involved with a socialite (Cate Blanchett), whom he meets at another fancy party. Faye gets involved with a Parisian artist (Bérénice Marlohe), whom she meets by chance. The mogul, despite being married, frequents prostitutes (one of whom, played by Jaylen Jones, speaks insightfully about her work) and drives his wife to despair. And, through the turmoil of erotic and professional distractions, Faye and the young musician (Gosling) find each other again. While the romantic entanglements tighten and slacken, the lovers’ families are woven among them. One of the movie’s strongest presences is the waitress’s mother, played by Holly Hunter, who delivers lines that ring like hammer blows: “You need money for a lawyer; the law’s no help for people who are ruined.” Linda Emond also plays a key and memorable role as the mother of the young musician, and, as Faye’s father, Brady Coleman invests just a few lines and glances with a deep, world-worn wisdom.
The music world is also woven into the story, with a sharp and self-deprecating backstage anecdote delivered by Iggy Pop, and, above all, with the recurring, majestic presence of Patti Smith, as herself, who serves as a mentor to Faye and as the movie’s tough-mindedly romantic philosophical conscience. “Song to Song” is filled with music, both applied to the soundtrack and performed onscreen by musicians and actors, and the spontaneous bursts of dance that arise, whether at parties or onstage, in a crowd or during isolated moments of flirtation and courtship, give the movie the feel of a musical, one in which the music arises from within and emerges in action.
Malick brings this mighty story to life in a copious array of images of a breathtakingly generous, gentle beauty. The cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki creates plunging, whirling, beatifically graceful, seemingly borderless images that gather light lovingly and avidly—and catch the light with which each of the film’s actors seems to glow. The filmmaker appears to allow the performances an unusual degree of freedom to create their actions in front of the camera, but the images never seem either subordinate to performance or constraining of it. Rather, the actors give freely of themselves (Gosling’s self-conscious whimsy adds some notable moments of comedy), while the camera, in sharp attention to gestures, glances, textures, and faces, and by way of some soul-shuddering closeups, gets past mere performance to the seeming core of character.
“Song to Song” offers a dazzling profusion of perspectives and angles, in some of the most radically inflected points of view since the heyday of Dziga Vertov. Malick brings his characters to a sharply varied range of places and spaces (with special attention to Austin and its surroundings), evoking a wide realm of experiences through architecture and décor. (The movie owes much to the production designer Jack Fisk, one of Malick’s key collaborators ever since his first film, “Badlands,” from 1973.) These images mesh and clash in a vast mental space that’s defined by the film’s mosaic-like editing. (No other recent film has as intricate and original an editing scheme.) The characters’ lines of dialogue are spoken, most often in voice-over, holding the narrative together and pushing it ahead while allowing the images to flow in an associative freedom that makes almost all other movies look, by comparison, like the stodgiest vestiges of filmed theatre.
As in his previous film, “Knight of Cups,” Malick makes art—his art—the subject of the film. By centering “Song to Song” on young artists struggling to find their way into the business and into their own finest vein of creation—while they’re also struggling to find their way into the world and make the intimate connections of which they dream—Malick catches life at its most dynamic and its most unstable. The boundless aspirations and ardors of young people are themselves the core of his romanticism. Without nostalgia and without sentimentality, this seventy-three-year-old filmmaker looks to the heart of his own inspiration, his own impulses, and creates a cinema that, with the creative command of his own life experience, feels more exuberantly youthful than that of most Sundance phenoms.
-
Here are the films from 1998 that were mentioned that I have not seen as yet.
Elizabeth with Cate Blanchett, Christopher Eccleston, Edward Hardwicke, Fanny Ardant and Geoffrey Rush
I'm surprised you haven't seen this, since it made Cate Blanchett a star,and got a host of nominations. As a movie it is full of anachronisms and inaccuracies, designed to push a number of conspiracies and marriage proposals covering about two decades to within the first few years of Elizabeth's reign. Even more disturbing, the movie basically copies the climax of The Godfather, but without the irony, just because ending the movies with a lot of deaths and executions is cool. The Godfather is a movie about the seductiveness of power, and Elizabeth is a movie happily seduced by it. But it does contain this dialogue with my supporting actor winner Geoffrey Rush as Walsingham (and with runner-up Christopher Eccleston as Norfolk):
Walsingham: Your Grace is arrested. You must go with these men to the Tower.
Norfolk: I must do nothing by your orders. I am Norfolk.
Walsingham: You were Norfolk. The dead have no titles. You were the most powerful man in England and could have been greater still but you had not the courage to be loyal. Only the conviction of your own vanity.
Norfolk: I think, Walsingham, a man's courage is in the manner of his death. I am content to die for my beliefs. So cut off my head and make me a martyr. The people will always remember it.
Walsingham: No... They will forget.
And indeed they did. Although certainly not meant that way by the film's makers, this bloody aristocratic quarrel symbolizes for me the many injustices and cruelties Power has successfully purged from the popular memory. The triumph of Protestantism, which in both 1553 and 1558 was very much a minority faith in England has, in the English popular imagination, been viewed as their triumph. And the Protestant/English conquest of Ireland, an act of almost genocidal violence, has not been allowed to stain the memory of the Virgin Queen. Or this movie.
-
1
-
-
Quotes from 1997
L.A. Confidential
Ed: Shut up! [leans in] A hooker cut to look like Lana Turner is still a hooker.
Johnny: Hey!
Ed: She just looks like Lana Turner.
Jack: [grinning] She is Lana Turner.
Ed: What?
Jack: She is Lana Turner. [Lana throws a drink in Ed's face]
Jack: Why in the world do you want to go digging any deeper into the Nite Owl Killings, Lieutenant?
Ed: Rollo Tomasi.
Jack: Is there more to that, or am I supposed to guess?
Ed: Rollo… was a purse snatcher. My father ran into him off duty, and he shot my father six times and got away clean. No one even knew who he was. I just made the name up to give him some personality. Rollo Tomasi's the reason I became a cop. I wanted to catch the guys who thought they could get away with it. It was supposed to be about justice. Then somewhere along the way I lost sight of that. Why'd you become a cop?
Jack:[long pause] I don't remember.
Captain Dudley Smith: Have you a valediction, boyo?
Jack Vincennes: [gasping out a name] ... Rollo Tomasi.
-
Japan’s Blue Ribbon Awards for 1998 were …
Best Actor
Takeshi Kitano, Hana-bi
Best Supporting Actor
Ren Osugi, Dog Race and Hana-bi
—————————————————————————————
Japan’s Mainichi Awards for 1998 were …
Best Supporting Actor
Ren Osugi, Dog Race and Hana-bi
Hana-bi is known better in English as Fireworks, and it's a 1997 release.
-
I've been busy for the past couple of weeks, so here are some quotable lines from 1996
The English Patient
I can still taste you.
Matilda
Lone Star
Forget the Alamo.
From Dusk til Dawn
Carlos: What were they, psychos?
Seth: Did they look like psychos? Is that what they looked like? They were vampires! Psychos do not explode when sunlight hits them...
Bound
Caesar: You don't wanna shoot me, Vi. Do ya? Do ya? I know you don't.
Violet: Caesar, you don't know ****.
Corky: You know what the difference is between you and me, Violet?
Violet: No.
Corky: Me neither.
-
I saw six movies over the last two weeks: four this week, two the week before. I wish I could have seen the first half of An American Tragedy better instead of being distracted. Once I was able to give it my full attention it did seem to be superior to A Place in the Sun, a movie whose point was that it was such a shame Shelly Winters didn't fall down a flight of stairs and break her neck. Dr. Strange is another example of intelligent and enjoyable Marvel superhero movies. Tilda Swinton was criticized for playing a character who in the original comic was vaguely Tibetan (some Asian mountains with lots of snow at any rate). But her singular strangeness does make her memorable. Love ia a Many Splendored Thing, by contrast, asks us to believe that Jennifer Jones is half Chinese, and that basically ruins it for me. Oddly enough that leads to Loving, the movie about the couple whose case struck down the anti-miscegenation laws. As such the movie is very dignified, very competent and totally without genius. At times you can't help wondering whether the reason Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga are so quiet is that the film makers didn't know how to make a real relationship. Much better is I, Daniel Blake, a Palme D'or winner about a worker recovering from a heart attack who faces a welfare bureaucracy intent on forcing him back to work and denying him benefits. One might point out that it is not as tough minded as the Dardenne brothers, and one can guess the last two plot twists. But it does provide a rich portrait of a decent man under trying circumstances. Finally Test Pilot is not profound, but enjoyable enough with the star power of its three leads, with Myrna Loy doing the best job here.
-
2
-
-
Actor
Bruno Ganz, Eternity and a Day
Tom Hanks, Saving Private Ryan
Fele Martinez, Lovers of the Arctic Circle
George Clooney, Out of Sight
Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Flowers of Shanghai
Runner-ups: Danny Glover (Beloved), Arata (After Life), Bajram Severdzan (Black Cat, White Cat), Jeff Bridges (The Big Lebowski), Jason Schwartzman (Rushmore), Ben Stiller (There's Something About Mary), Bill Pullman (Zero Effect), Woody Allen (Antz), Dave Foley (A Bug's Life), Ian McKellen (Gods and Monsters), Robert Benigni (Life is Beautiful), Ulrich Thomsen (The Celebration), Kenneth Branagh (The Gingerbread Man), Bill Paxton (A Simple Plan), Henning Montzen (The Celebration), Joseph Fiennes (Shakespeare in Love), Sean Giulette (Pi), Ralph Fiennes (The Avengers), Rufus Sewell (Dark City),
Actress
Cameron Diaz, There's Something About Mary
Najwa Nimri, Lovers of the Arctic Circle
Gwyneth Paltrow, Shakespeare in Love
Cate Blanchett, Elizabeth
Oprah Winfrey, Beloved
Runner-ups: Sandra Bullock (Hope Floats), Catherine Zeta-Jones (The Mask of Zorro), Jennifer Lopez (Out of Sight), Erika Oda (After Life), Franka Potente (Run Lola Run), Drew Barrymore (Ever After), Kate Beckinsale (The Last Days of Disco), Neve Campbell (Wild Things), Nicolette Braschi (Life is Beautiful), Sharon Stone (Antz), Christina Ricci (The Opposite of Sex), Fernanda Montenegro (Central Station), Michiko Hada (Flowers of Shanghai), Bodil Jorgensen (The Idiots), Sandra Oh (Last Night),
Supporting Actor
Geoffrey Rush, Elizabeth
Bill Murray, Rushmore, Wild Things
Jim Caviezel, The Thin Red Line
Kiefer Sutherland, Dark City
Philip Seymour Hoffman, Happiness, The Big Lebowski
Runner-ups: John Goodman (The Big Lebowski), Harve Presnell (Saving Private Ryan), Ben Chaplin (The Thin Red Line), Matt Dillon (There's Something About Mary), Christopher Eccleston (Elizabeth), Zabit Memedov (Black Cat, White Cat), Richard O'Brien, Ian Richardson (Dark City), Steve Buscemi (The Big Lebowski), Ving Rhames, Don Cheadle (Out of Sight), Lee Evans (There's Something About Mary), Edward Burns, Matt Damon (Saving Private Ryan), Geoffrey Rush (Shakespeare in Love), Gene Hackman (Enemy of the State), Giorgio Cantarini (Life is Beautiful), Chris Elliott (There's Something About Mary), Gary Sinise (Snake Eyes), Robert Duvall (A Civil Action), Edward Hardwicke (Elizabeth), Mason Gamble (Rushmore),* Sting (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels), Nick Nolte (The Thin Red Line), Albert Brooks (Out of Sight), Seymour Cassel, Brian Cox (Rushmore), David Kelly (Waking Ned Divine), Achileas Skavis (Eternity and a Day), John Goodman (Fallen),
*Juvenile Performance of the Year
Supporting Actress
Thandie Newton, Beloved
Branka Katic, Black Cat, White Cat
Daryl Hannah, The Gingerbread Man
Michelle Reis, Flowers of Shanghai
Chloe Sevigny, The Last Days of Disco
Runner-ups: Jennifer Connelly (Dark City), Isabelle Renaud (Eternity and a Day), Olivia Williams (Rushmore), Anjelica Huston (Ever After), Judi Dench (Shakespeare in Love), Bridget Fonda (A Simple Plan), Sara Tanaka (Rushmore), Magda Subanski (Babe: Pig in the City), Kimberley Elise (Beloved), Fanny Ardant (Elizabeth),
Not seen: Affliction, One True Thing, Hilary and Jackie, Primary Colours, Little Voice-------Interesting choice, in that three of the four winners didn't make my top movies of the year.
-
5
-
-
Yes, I h
One more question:
The Mask of Zorro: Antonio Banderas is leading. Are Catherine Zeta-Jones and Anthony Hopkins supporting? I remember being disappointed that C Z-J didn't have that much screentime.
Good question. I have my Actress list sewn up, but she could make my supporting list if she has a supporting role. Supporting Actress is a bit odd this year: I haven't seen three of the nominees, I don't remember Redgrave's performance at all, and Dench's role is just too short.
-
Wild Things: Neve Campbell, Kevin Bacon and Matt Dillon are leading. Denise Richards is supporting.
I'd have Bacon as supporting
-
This morning at 12:00 AM MST
A Brighter Summer Day
1991 Director Edward Yang
-
1
-
-
Actor
Kevin Spacey, L.A. Confidential
Ian Holm, The Sweet Hereafter
Aleksei Ananishnov, Mother and Son
Homayoun Ershadi, A Taste of Cherry
Michael Douglas, The Game
Runner-ups: John Cusack (Grosse Pointe Blank), Woody Allen (Deconstructing Harry), Guy Pearce (L.A. Confidential), Bruce Willis (The Fifth Element), Takeshi Kitano (Fireworks), Russell Crowe (L.A. Confidential), Mark Wahlberg (Boogie Nights), Stephen Fry (Wilde), Al Pacino (Donnie Brasco), Eamonn Owens (The Butcher Boy),* Daniel Day-Lewis (The Boxer), Kurt Russell (Breakdown), Johnny Depp (Donnie Brasco), Will Smith (Men in Black), John Cusack, Kevin Spacey (Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil), Al Pacino (The Devil's Advocate), John Travolta (Face Off), Arno Frisch (Funny Games), Kevin Kline (In & Out), Robert Downey Jr. (Two Girls and a Guy), Leslie Cheung, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai (Happy Together), Samuel L. Jackson (Jackie Brown), Tenzin Thuthob Tsarong (Kundun), Jim Carrey (Liar Liar), Bill Pullman, Balthazar Getty (Lost Highway),
*Juvenile Performance of the Year
Actress
Gudrun Geyer, Mother and Son
Sarah Polley, The Sweet Hereafter
Pam Grier, Jackie Brown
Patricia Arquette, Lost Highway
Jodie Foster, Contact
Runner-ups: Mira Sorvino, Lisa Kudrow (Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion), Neve Campbell (Scream 2), Minnie Driver (Grosse Pointe Blank), Penelope Cruz (Open your Eyes), Kate Winslet (Titanic), Joey Lauren Adams (Chasing Amy), Milla Jovovich (The Fifth Element), Julia Roberts (My Best Friend's Wedding), Natasha Gregson Wagner (Two Girls and a Guy),
Supporting Actor
Steve Martin, The Spanish Prisoner
Ian Holm, The Fifth Element
Burt Reynolds, Boogie Nights
James Cromwell, L.A. Confidential
Robert Blake, Lost Highway
Runner-ups: Rupert Everett (My Best Friend's Wedding), Chris Tucker (The Fifth Element), Robert Loggia (Lost Highway), Abdolrahman Bagheri (A Taste of Cherry), J.T. Walsh (Breakdown), Xander Berkley (Air Force One), Don Cheadle (Boogie Nights), Jamie Kennedy (Scream 2), Robert Forster (Jackie Brown), John C. Reilly (Boogie Nights), Billy Crystal (Deconstructing Harry), Philip Baker Hall (Boogie Nights), Rip Torn (Men in Black), Sean Penn (The Game), David Strathrain (L.A. Confidential), Stephen Rea (The Butcher Boy), Alfred Molina (Boogie Nights), Dan Aykroyd (Grosse Pointe Blank), Liev Schreiber (Scream 2), James Woods (Hercules), Tom Skerritt (Contact), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Boogie Nights), Danny DeVito (L.A. Confidential), Mir Hossein Noori (A Taste of Cherry), Sam Neill (Event Horizon), Robert De Niro (Jackie Brown), Safar Ali Moradi (A Taste of Cherry), Bruce Greenwood (The Sweet Hereafter),
Supporting Actress
Julianne Moore, Boogie Nights
Courtney Cox, Scream 2
Joan Cusack, In & Out
Heather Graham, Boogie Nights
Jennifer Tilly, Liar Liar
Runner-ups: Yuriko Ishida (Princess Mononoke), Kim Basinger (L.A. Confidential), Janeane Garofolo (Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion), Deborah Kara Unger (The Game), Maiween Le Besco (The Fifth Element), Bridget Fonda (Jackie Brown), Cameron Diaz (My Best Friend's Wedding), Rebecca Pidgeon (The Spanish Prisoner), Linda Fiorentino (Men in Black), Winona Ryder (Alien Resurrection),
Not seen: As Good as it Gets, Good Willing Hunting, The Apostle, Ulee's Gold, Afterglow, Mrs. Brown,-------Interesting point, at least for me. My lead actor/actress choices started out with a list I first drew up about a decade ago. (The supporting choices were mostly considered as we proceeded in this thread.) As I saw more movies, I replaced about 40 of the 160 choices. I also had to change some choices when I realized they were actually in the wrong year. But the actress choice for this year is the only one I changed while doing this thread. Earlier, it was Moore (actually a supporting choice), and then Sorvino.
-
4
-
-
Just to be clear, Cate Blanchett is the only lead in Elizabeth?
-
1
-
-
More quotes from 1995
Casino
Vinny Forlano: He won't talk. Stone is a good kid. Stand-up guy, just like his old man. That's the way I see it.
Vincent Borelli: I agree. He's solid. A ****' Marine.
Americo Capelli: He's okay. He always was. Remo, what do you think?
Remo Gaggi: Look... why take a chance?
Richard III
Heat
Neil: A guy told me one time: Don't ever let yourself get attached to anything that you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner [pause] Now, if you're on me and you gotta move when I move, how do you expect to keep a...a marriage?
Vincent: That's an interesting point. What are you, a monk?
Neil: No. [pause] I got a woman.
Vincent: What do you tell her?
Neil: I tell her that I'm a salesman.
Vincent: So, if you spot me around the corner...you gonna walk out on this woman? Not even say goodbye?
Neil: That's the discipline.
Vincent: That's pretty vacant.
Neil: It is what it is. Either that, or we better go do something else, pal.
(Later the same conversation) Vincent: You know, we're sitting here, you and I, like a coupla regular fellas. You do what you do. I do what I gotta do. Now that we've been face to face...if I am there and I got to put you away? [pause] I won't like it. But, i'll tell ya...if it's between you and some poor bastard whose wife you're going to make into a widow, brother, you are gonna go down.
Neil: There's a flip side to that coin. What if you do got me boxed in and I gotta put you down? [pause] 'Cause no matter what, you will not get in my way. We'e been face to face...yeah But I won't hesitate. Not for a second.
Vincent: [smiles] Maybe, that's the way it'll be. Or...who knows.
Neil: Or maybe, we'll never see each other again.
-
Quotes from 1995
Twelve Monkeys
Astrophysicist: You might say that *we're* the next endangered species - human beings.
Dr. Peters: I think you're right ma'am. I think you've hit the nail on the head.
Astrophysicist: Jones is my name. [Shakes his hand] I'm in insurance.
The Usual Suspects
After that my guess is that you will never hear from him again. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist. And like that... he is gone.
Keaton always said, "I don't believe in God, but I'm afraid of him." Well I believe in God, and the only thing that scares me is Keyser Soze.
To a cop the explanation is never that complicated. It's always simple. There's no mystery to the street, no arch criminal behind it all. If you got a dead body and you think his brother did it, you're gonna find out you're right.
Verbal: Keaton always said, "I don't believe in God, but I'm afraid of him." Well I believe in God, and the only thing that scares me is Keyser Soze.
Cop: I can put you in Queens on the night of the hijacking.
Hockney: Really? I live in Queens! Did you put that together yourself, Einstein? Got a team of monkeys working around the clock on this?
Cop: You know what happens if you do another turn in the joint?
Hockney: Uh... I **** your father in the shower and then have a snack? Are you going to charge me, ****?
Kujan: You think he [Keaton] was a good man.
Kint: I know he was good.
Se7en
Last lines] Ernest Hemingway once wrote, "The world is a fine place and worth fighting for." I agree with the second part.
Wanting people to listen, you can't just tap them on the shoulder anymore. You have to hit them with a sledgehammer, and then you'll notice you've got their strict attention.
Nothing wrong with a man taking pleasure in his work.
David. If you kill him, he will win.
Somerset: Why don't you tell me what's really bothering you, Tracy?
Tracy: David and I are gonna have a baby.
Somerset: [baffled] Oh, Tracy... I don't think I'm the one to talk to about this...
Tracy: I hate this city. [A slightly uncomfortable moment passes]
Somerset: I had a relationship once. It was very much like a marriage. We got pregnant. This was long time ago. [sighs] I remember getting up one morning and going to work. Just another day like any other, except it was the first day after I knew about … pregnancy. And I felt this fear for the first time ever. I remember thinking, "How can I bring a child into a world like this? How can a person grow up with all this around them?" I told her I didn't want to have it, and over the next few weeks, I wore her down.
Tracy: I want to have children.
Somerset: I can tell you now that I know … I mean, I'm positive … that I made the right decision. But there's not a day that passes that I don't wish that I had made a different choice. If you don't keep the baby – I mean, if that's your decision – don't ever tell him that you were pregnant. But if you choose to have this baby, you spoil that kid every chance you get. [Tracy starts crying] That's about all the advice I can give you, Tracy.
-
And here is Kenji Fushima's appreciation of Fallen Angels at the House Next Door, for which I also nominated Michelle Reis for supporting actress:
A kaleidoscope of alienation and longing, Wong Kar-wai's 1995 film Fallen Angels remains one of Wong's least discussed and least appreciated films. Of course, compared to the sheer beauty and maturity of his latest work—his intimate In the Mood for Love (2000); his majestic 2046 (2004); even “The Hand” (2004), his relatively brief yet masterful contribution to the omnibus film Eros—-earlier films like this one and Chungking Express (1994) come off as energetic though show-offy stylistic exercises.
But Fallen Angels is no mere exercise. In some ways, it is almost as important a film in Wong's oeuvre as Happy Together (1997). If Happy Together represented a stepping stone, an emotional deepening of Wong's usual themes of love, loss and desire, Fallen Angels represents both a look back and a look forward for one of cinema's most important current directors.
Wong's first feature film was a gangster flick titled As Tears Go By (1988), a Mean Streets ripoff that seemed to take its emotional cues from the popular Hong Kong action films of the time (such as John Woo's 1986 gangster melodrama A Better Tomorrow). Tears may have been derivative and at times even dated and cheesy (on hearing the film's Cantopop rendition of Berlin's “Take My Breath Away,” a friend said, “And I thought the original was bad enough!”), but it had an operatic power, and more importantly, it laid out some of Wong's stylistic signatures, including exaggerated neon-tinted lighting, the use of pop music to underscore moods, and pixillated slow-motion action scenes.
Fallen Angels is the only other film of his that could be considered a “gangster film,” although certainly it's quite different from As Tears Go By. What Fallen Angels adds to what he was already doing visually in his first film is his experimentation with voiceover narration, allowing the characters to express their thoughts and feelings to us in ways that they are unable to articulate to each other. Also, in contrast to the linear plot of As Tears Go By, Fallen Angels pretty much disregards rules of classical storytelling. Instead of focusing on one linear plotline, it tells two interlocking stories filled with digressions and jumps in time.
In Fallen Angels, Wong takes all of those stylistic signatures to extremes. He pours on the slo-mo, the pixillated action scenes, the neon lighting and the pop music (one Canto pop song even becomes the source of a message from a killer to his assistant). In addition, the voiceovers become a dominant creative force: there's barely any dialogue, and nearly all the characters' thoughts and emotions are expressed through narration.
For all its youthful stylistic brashness and crisscrossing plots, though, one of the major themes of Fallen Angels is the idea of moving on, or at least trying to do so: moving on from an unfulfilling job, in the case of Leon Lai's assassin-for-hire; moving on from a broken heart, in the case of Michelle Reis's personal assistant; and especially, moving on from a slacker's existence, in the case of Takeshi Kaneshiro's mute He Zhiwu.
Surprisingly enough, that last instance of moving on—-part of the film's barely-related subplot rather than its main plot—-may be the key to explaining Fallen Angels' significance in the context of Wong's body of work.
Early in the movie, He, who has escaped from prison, is seen breaking into shops every night and running them after hours. In his voiceover, he reasons that because the rent has already been paid, someone should still maintain these stores after hours. In some of the film's funniest moments, He essentially hassles people into giving him money; a young man who professes to have mob connections is one of his accidental frequent “customers.” Eventually, though, he finds himself falling in love with a nutcase named Charlie (Charlie Yeung). When he discovers that his love is unrequited, he responds by trying to settle down from his older, wilder ways and reestablish a familial emotional connection, inspired by a Japanese restaurant owner who used to be a filmmaker: he decides to make a video of his widowed father, owner of the Chungking Express Mansions (one random Chungking reference among many in this film), as he goes about his everyday business.
I'd like to think that this plot turn holds at least a whisper of personal confession for Wong: his way of taking stock of the kinds of films he made before while expressing a desire to move on to something different and arguably more mature. Consider some of his previous film characters: the heartless ladies' man played by Leslie Cheung in Days of Being Wild (1991), for example, or Faye Wong's free spirit in Chungking Express. Both characters express one of Wong's major cinematic preoccupations: a yearning for some kind of freedom within societal boundaries. Fallen Angels throws a wrench into his obsession by presenting a group of characters who, in their own ways, yearn for the opposite: a semblance of stability, in the case of killer; or an emotional connection to one closest to him, in He Zhiwu's case.
As it turns out (spoiler alert for anyone who hasn't seen the film) the killer ends up getting killed as he tries to do one last job for the assistant, and He returns to his aimless ways after his father dies. The personal assistant, meanwhile, having decided never again become personally involved with her partners, becomes a disheveled mess after the killer's death (an event she may have helped orchestrate, although the film only suggests it obliquely). One could understandably see these developments as regressions for these characters-—real fallen angels. But I prefer to see them as Wong taking one last pained, wistful glance at his old preoccupations with free spirits and forbidden love before finally deciding to go in a different direction.
Thus, it is fitting that the film's final image is a pixillated slo-mo of the assistant riding He's motorcycle: He has possibly made the human connection he'd sought, while the assistant has at last found some genuine “warmth.” As is typical of Wong, he leaves the ending unresolved—-the two characters' futures hang in the balance—-but emotionally and thematically it is complete and satisfying.
Of all of his early films, Fallen Angels, for all of its high style, is arguably his most outwardly deceptive. I saw it soon after Days of Being Wild, probably the earliest Wong Kar-wai film that could be said to be a spiritual precursor to In the Mood for Love and 2046. Compared to that relatively relaxed feature, Fallen Angels at first seemed a mere exercise: effectively moody, yes, but seemingly less interested in defining the characters and deeply involving us in their thoughts and emotions than in looking “cool,” playing with certain romantic notions, and revelling in changing film stocks, pixillated action sequences, and glamorous neon lighting (by Wong's regular collaborator Chris Doyle, his cinematographer on every feature after As Tears Go By,). The result at first struck me as superficially impressive but rather detached and empty; one could be easily dazzled by its MTV veneer, but was there really anything beneath the pretty surface?
These days, though, as a young film enthusiast still working out my views on cinema in general, I've become less interested in placing emphases on “well-told stories” or “three-dimensional characterizations” all the time, as many filmgoers are wont to do. Perhaps that's why, a few months after getting my first full glimpse of this film, I couldn't get its powerfully alienated feel out of my head.
And so, while I would concede that the characters in Fallen Angels are rather thinly defined, and the style at times a little too flashy—-although more subtly expressive of characters' emotions than I realized on first viewing—-the film is more important to Wong's body of work than it first seems. In pushing his visual approach and his feel for hopeless romantics to extremes, he carries his modern style to its zenith. In emphasizing the changes his characters experience, I think Wong is implicitly looking ahead in his own career: wanting to enjoy the same free-spiritedness as his characters—-a freedom reflected not only in those characters, but also in Wong's rampant technique throughout the film—-but realizing, with a wince, that even in a big city like Hong Kong, there's a price to be paid for living such a lifestyle. That Wong continued to explore similar themes of love and alienation in an equally gorgeous yet more mature and intelligent style is further proof that he is one of the most exciting and fascinating filmmakers working today.
-
1
-
-
I was on vacation last week so I couldn't make all the posts about 1995 that I wanted. So here's Jonathan Rosenbaum's review of the Vietnamese movie Cyclo, for which I nominated Tran Nu Yen Khe for best supporting actress.
Tran Anh Hung’s first feature, The Scent of Green Papaya, redefined what we mean by “inside” and “outside,” architecturally as well as socially and psychologically. The same could be said about the vastly more ambitious and even more impressive Cyclo, which was shot in Ho Chi Minh City — unlike The Scent of Green Papaya, which was shot in a studio outside Paris — and is set in the present.
The Scent of Green Papaya — the first and so far only Vietnamese film ever nominated for an Academy Award — was inspired by the filmmaker’s memories of his mother and was set in 1951 and 1961. Tran said that his next feature would be based on recollections of his father. This led me to expect another period film, which Cyclo isn’t — but there’s no question that it’s a film about patriarchy. The first and last things the 18-year-old hero (Le Van Loc) says offscreen concern his late father — a pedicab driver who was run over by a truck — and there’s the sense throughout that he’s stuck in an endless cycle of male misery passed from one generation to the next.
Tran was born in Vietnam in 1962 and moved with his family to Paris in 1975, where he’s lived ever since, so he relates to his country of birth as both an insider and an outsider. Similarly, the degree to which French culture and cinema have shaped him can’t be overlooked. (Significantly, Ton That Tiet’s modernist score ranges from a solo flute that sounds Vietnamese to the equivalent of early Stravinsky.) The problematic second section of The Scent of Green Papaya, when the heroine becomes enraptured with her well-to-do, westernized employer, seems as much a product of this background as the horrific sense of third-world squalor and cruelty that pervades Cyclo, in which Tran sometimes seems to be as much a horrified Western tourist as the majority of his viewers. Of course the fact that he wanted to shoot his first feature in Ho Chi Minh City but wound up in a French studio for budgetary reasons also has to be taken into account.
It’s a tribute to Tran’s vision that for all the radical differences in tone and texture and scale between The Scent of Green Papaya and Cyclo both emerge as essentially expressionist works — movies taking place inside the filmmaker’s head. But if the first film most often suggested a peaceful, meditative reverie, the comparably fluid Cyclo unfolds like a protracted nightmare.
All the characters in this nightmare are nameless. The hero is known as the Cyclo (Tran notes, “For me, the term refers equally to the driver and his vehicle”), but the grandfather and two sisters he lives with at the beginning of the film don’t even have colorful labels; they’re identified in the script, published last year in France, as the Grandfather, the Little Sister, and the Sister (Tran Nu Yen Khe, the filmmaker’s wife, who played the lead in The Scent of Green Papaya).
The boss the Cyclo works for is the Madam and her beloved **** son is the Crazy Son. The pimp who also works for her, and who takes the Cyclo under his wing after his pedicab is stolen, is known as the Poet (Tony Leung-Chiu Wai) because he writes poems, some of which we hear him recite offscreen; two of his sidekicks are called Tooth and Knife, and these labels feel like descriptions rather than nicknames. An assassin who slits people’s throats while singing to them is the Lullaby Man; two of the Sister’s clients are the Urine Fetishist and the Foot Fetishist.
The story, such as it is, doesn’t unfold within any discernible time frame; events succeed one another, but we don’t know how much time passes between them. Emotionally and thematically, some of the characters come to seem interchangeable: the Cyclo identifies himself at the outset as his father’s successor, but the Poet and the Crazy Son function as alternate versions of the Cyclo’s father.
Tran has written that both the Cyclo and the Poet “are united by innocence. The Poet had lost his innocence when he chose a life of crime in order to escape mediocrity and poverty, and is drawn to The Cyclo and the innocence he still possesses.” The Crazy Son paints himself yellow, sending the Madam into a rage against the employee who’s supposed to be taking care of him. Then, after the Crazy Son is run over by a truck, the Cyclo, ordered to commit a murder, takes drugs, goes on a rampage, then paints himself blue (like Godard’s Pierrot le fou); the Madam winds up cradling and singing to him just as if he were the Crazy Son.
Part of Cyclo‘s voluptuous mystery is that it unravels simultaneously like a documentary and an expressionist or surrealist vision. (Expressionist: a sense of inside where nothing is safe and a sense of outside where nothing is safe, where the two realms are perpetually linked by camera movements, where everything winds up feeling enclosed, malignant. Surrealist: a pervasive sense of the uncanny, so that the unexplained crash of a helicopter on a city street or fragmented close-ups of a ten-dollar bill — two of the many passing signifiers of an American invasion that’s never even alluded to in the dialogue — register as both incongruous and fantastical, and the many overhead views of the teeming streets from balconies recall shots from Un chien andalou.) It’s impossible to determine where physical reality leaves off and metaphysical unreality begins; with the camera often in continual motion, a scene can begin on one plane of reality and end on another.
I’m not trying to deny that Cyclo, for all its consummate mastery, has problems. It never tries to glorify the violence or the various kinds of degradation it shows, but it doesn’t have a discernible social agenda either, and there are times when its horrors could be said to be indulged in, perhaps even nihilistically celebrated (though never exploited as they would be in a Hollywood movie). Tran has said that he wanted to show all of the violence “with great tenderness,” and I suppose on some level he has. This is a humanist film even if it doesn’t always wear its heart on its sleeve; it never desensitizes one to cruelty the way Quentin Tarantino’s features do, and it never allows one to identify fully with any of its characters.
But it’s a movie that rubs my middle-class nose in things that frighten or appall me about the third world without ever suggesting there’s any solution, just as the second part of The Scent of Green Papaya rubbed my nose in colonialism. I have to admit that one aim of art is to force us to look at things we’d rather not know about, but I’d feel more comfortable with Tran’s baroque hell if I could define what he wanted me to see beyond a loss of innocence. I’m also less than comfortable with Tran Nu Yen Khe’s nonstop goofy grin, which was also present throughout The Scent of Green Papaya, and which her husband at times seems to employ as an all-purpose piece of decor; nor do I know what to make of his compulsive use of fish and lizards. But there’s no denying that Cyclo is a visionary piece of work, shot through with passion and poetry.
Cyclo originally ran 129 minutes, and I saw it at that length a little over a year ago. Assuming that the preview copy I recently saw is the same version as the print showing this week at the Music Box, it’s been cut by five minutes. Missing is a climactic sequence in which the Sister — a virgin the Poet has turned into a prostitute who caters to the kinky tastes of clients without having sex with them — is raped by a sadistic businessman (the Handcuff Man), who’s then murdered by the Poet. Other shots may be missing as well (the French script is clearly longer than Tran’s final cut, so it isn’t a conclusive guide).
I have no way of knowing whether the cuts in Cyclo were made with Tran’s consent, but Tony Rayns’s review of the film in the April 1996 issue of Sight and Sound implies that it showed uncut in England, which leads me to conclude that CFP, the U.S. distributor, is probably responsible for any changes. Given the present critical climate for “difficult” movies, I suppose we should be grateful that Cyclo is opening at all, and given the unpleasantness of much of the movie, I suppose one could argue that abbreviating it is doing the audience some kind of favor. But is it?
I was horrified when a valued colleague and friend at the Village Voice recently gave her blanket endorsement to Miramax’s recutting two pictures that played at the New York film festival, Billy Bob Thornton’s Sling Blade and Chen Kaige’s Temptress Moon, approving both new versions before she even saw them. And at Cannes this year an even more prominent critic from the New York Times told me she thought Harvey Weinstein would have “improved” Dead Man if Jim Jarmusch had allowed him to recut the picture. I think it’s obscene to grant critical approval to any distributor who proceeds in this fashion. In the case of Cyclo, where each character is brought to a kind of grisly apotheosis, these cuts unquestionably do harm; certainly the Sister’s role in the overall dramaturgy has been obscured and confused. Because a year has passed since I saw Cyclo complete and because I’ve seen hundreds of other movies in between, I’m ill equipped to be more specific about the damage done. But the moment critics or other spectators willingly hand over the scissors to distributors — especially if this entails taking them away from filmmakers of the caliber of Thornton, Chen, or Tran — they might as well hand over their voices and brains too.
-
1
-
-
Actor
Runner-ups: Jeremie Renier (La Promesse),
If you haven't seen La Promesse, it will be on tonight on TCM at 8 PM MST.
-
2
-
-
Just to be clear, we are all on the same page that Mark Wahlberg is the only lead in Boogie Nights?
-
5
-
September Schedule is Up-- Jennifer Jones SOTM
in General Discussions
Posted
So we get to see both Aguirre: the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, among a night of Herzog movie, plus the short Herzog eats his shoe. We also see the premiere of Charulata. Yay! Interestingly, we also get to see The Awakening a critically derided 1980 horror film that I remembered being advertised at the time. The last 1980 critically derided movie starring Charlton Heston I saw on TCM, The Mountain Men, was not very good, and I doubt this one is either. But I'll see it anyway.