skimpole
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Posts posted by skimpole
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Actor
Jack Lemmon, Glengarry Glen Ross
Harvey Keitel, Reservoir Dogs, Bad Lieutenant
Stephen Rea, The Crying Game
Anthony Hopkins, Howard's End
Samuel Froller, The Best Intentions
Runner-ups: Clint Eastwood (Unforgiven), Denzel Washington (Malcolm X), Tim Roth (Reservoir Dogs), Gary Oldman (Bram Stoker's Dracula), Leigh McCormack (The Long Day Closes),* Tim Robbins (The Player), Al Pacino (Glengarry Glen Ross), Benoit Poelvoorde (Man Bites Dog), Daniel Auteuil (A Heart in Winter), Mansour Diquf (Hyenes), Willem Dafoe (Light Sleeper), Tom Cruise (A Few Good Men), Frederic van den Dreissche (A Tale of Winter), Jack Nicholson (Hoffa), Woody Allen (Husbands and Wives), Joe Pesci (My Cousin Vinny), Shuichiro Moriyama (Porco Rosso), Russell Crowe (Romper Stomper), Chow Yun-Fat (Hard Boiled), Tony Leung (Hard Boiled)
*Juvenile Performance of the Year
Actress
Pernilla August, The Best Intentions
Emma Thompson, Howard's End
Tilda Swinton, Orlando
Marisa Tomei, My Cousin Vinny
Winona Ryder, Bram Stoker's Dracula
Runner-ups: Geena Davis (A League of Their Own), Emmanuelle Beart (A Heart in Winter), Charlotte Very (A Tale of Winter), Marjorie Yates (The Long Day Closes), Michelle Pfeiffer (Batman Returns), Linda Larkin (Aladdin), Ami Diakhate (Hyenes), Susan Sarandon (Light Sleeper), Meg Ryan (Prelude to a Kiss), Whoopi Goldberg (Sister Act), Meryl Streep (Death Becomes Her), Goldie Hawn (Death Becomes Her), Mia Farrow (Husbands and Wives), Sheryl Lee (Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me),
Supporting Actor
Robin Williams, Aladdin
Gene Hackman, Unforgiven
Sidney Poitier, Sneakers
Michael Madsen, Reservoir Dogs
Max Von Sydow, The Best Intentions
Runner-ups: Morgan Freeman (Unforgiven), Steve Buscemi (Reservoir Dogs), Anthony Hopkins (Bram Stoker's Dracula), Forrest Whitaker (The Crying Game), Richard Harris (Unforgiven), Jaye Davidson (The Crying Game), Jonathan Freeman (Aladdin), Chris Penn (Reservoir Dogs), Alan Arkin (Glengarry Glen Ross), Kevin Spacey (Glengarry Glen Ross), Sydney Pollack (Husbands and Wives), Lennart Hjulstrom (The Best Intentions), Adrian Dunbar (The Crying Game), Lawrence Tierney (Reservoir Dogs), Quentin Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs), Dan Aykroyd (Sneakers), Liam Neeson (Husbands and Wives), Elias Ringquist (The Best Intentions), Saul Rubinek (Unforgiven), Tom Waits (Bram Stoker's Dracula), Fred Gwynne (My Cousin Vinny), Jack Nicholson (A Few Good Men), J.A. Preston (A Few Good Men), David Strathairn (Sneakers), J.T. Walsh (Hoffa), Alec Baldwin (Glengarry Glen Ross), Bruce Rayne (Passenger 57),
Supporting Actress
Miranda Richardson, The Crying Game
Ghita Norby, The Best Intentions
Vanessa Redgrave, Howard's End
Ayse Owens, The Long Day Closes
Sadie Frost, Bram Stoker's Dracula
Runner-ups: Judy Davis (Husbands and Wives), Greta Scacchi (The Player), Maggie Smith (Sister Act), Angela Bassett (Malcolm X), Tina Malone (The Long Day Closes), Helena Bonham Carter (Howard's End), Rosie O'Donnell (A League of Their Own), Whoopi Goldberg (The Player), Madonna (A League of Their Own), Penelope Cruz (Belle Epoque), Prunella Scales (Howard's End), Elizabeth Hurley (Passenger 57),
Not seen: Chaplin, Indochine, Love Field, Passion Fish, Lorenzo's Oil, Mr. Saturday Night, Enchanted April, Damage-------And Jack Lemmon becomes the third actor to get a nomination in five consecutive decades. And for the first one to win a Best Actor award.
-------After two actors who won supporting nominations in 1991 for their voice work, we get a supporting actor winner this year for voice work, followed by a supporting actress winner next year.
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Described by J. Hoberman as an Antonioni version of West Side Story or a Wenders version of Rebel Without a Cause, A Brighter Summer Day is actually one of the most admired of nineties movies and got nominations from me in both Actor and Actress categories. From the Criterion collection essay by Godfrey Chesire:
For two decades after its making, Edward Yang’s magisterial A Brighter Summer Day was more an alluring legend than a known presence for American cinephiles. Passed over by festivals, including Cannes and New York, after its completion in 1991, the four-hour film gradually began to circulate in specialized venues and among critics, with the result that it was named one of the most important films of the nineties in polls at the decade’s end. Yet it was only with its first, limited U.S. theatrical run in 2011, following a restoration by Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation, that it was widely hailed as a masterpiece of modern cinema as well as a defining work of the New Taiwan Cinema, which enjoyed a decade-long flowering beginning in the early eighties.
Though now decades old, Yang’s fourth feature retains an inexhaustible freshness that speaks to viewers the world over. Like a Taiwanese Rebel Without a Cause made with the gravity and epic sweep of The Godfather, the film, which has more than a hundred speaking parts, is above all a vision, in terms of both place and time. The place is Taipei, Yang’s home and the setting and subject of all seven of his features. As for time, we might consider two meanings. The years depicted are 1960–61, a particular juncture in modern Taiwanese history. But the time we witness is also that of adolescence, with all its inner turmoil, outer self-consciousness, and obsessive quest for identity,
For non-Taiwanese viewers, the world Yang conjures can have the paradoxical effect of seeming foreign yet also oddly familiar. Surely the anxieties and confusions of youth give it universal emotional touchstones. Yet, especially for viewers who recall the Eisenhower/
Kennedy era, there’s also an almost dreamlike uncanniness to the ways Yang summons a time when surly young rebels were wild for American rock and roll, Japanese comic books, and John Wayne movies. Perhaps more vividly than any other movie, A Brighter Summer Day immortalizes the moment when teen pop culture went global, forging an effervescent but lasting bridge between East and West.Yang centers his film on a fourteen-year-old protagonist, Xiao Si’r (a nickname that means “Little Four,” signifying that he is the fourth of five children; his real name is Zhang Zhen, the same as the actor playing him, although the actor’s name is typically spelled Chang Chen in the West). Throughout, the story switches back and forth between the two worlds the boy inhabits: the realm of family and that of school and youth gangs. The film’s first scenes introduce this alternation. In the opening prologue (set in the summer of 1959), we see Xiao Si’r’s father (Zhang Guozhu) pleading with an offscreen school administrator about his son’s bad grades, which have resulted in the boy’s being assigned to an unprestigious night school the following year. Soon after, in a shop on their way home, boy and father listen silently as the names of current school graduates are read over the radio—a reminder of the importance placed on education in this Confucian society, and a litany that will have a melancholy echo in the film’s final scene.
Then it’s the next school year, but rather than being in class, Xiao Si’r and his best friend, Cat (Wong Chi-zan), are high in the rafters of a nearby movie studio, watching a scene being filmed. After a guard appears and forces the boys into a pell-mell chase, Xiao Si’r swipes his large flashlight, which he and Cat, after escaping the premises, use to briefly glimpse two smooching lovers whose identities remain unclear and, in an unexpected way, crucial through much of the story’s remainder.
The motif of light and questions of identity continue to intertwine thereafter. Yang said that one of his chief memories of the period depicted in A Brighter Summer Day was of the spotty electricity and resulting periods of little or no light. That stolen flashlight reappears throughout the story, its use alternately aggressive and defensive. Yet perhaps the most subtly potent effect of the film’s variegated lighting is the way it allows the director’s gaze to lead ours into the chiaroscuro of a haunted past, whose images come at us with the glancing mystery of dreams.
Yang’s bygone Taipei is a zone of disquiet both culturally and politically. Taiwan had been ruled by Japan for a half century before being ceded to China at the end of World War II. Thereafter, the victory of Mao Zedong’s Communists on the mainland led to the invasion of the island in 1949 by the defeated Chiang Kai-shek and his nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) party, which then ruled as a military dictatorship until the late 1980s (when new freedoms allowed the greater historical frankness of this film and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 1989 A City of Sadness). Called the Republic of China, Taiwan under the KMT was allied with the United States, which recognized the regime as the legitimate government of China until 1979.
The new Taiwanese of this KMT era lived a mentally divided existence, trying to adapt to their adopted home while for many years also expecting to return to China once the Communists were vanquished. The kids and families in A Brighter Summer Day are mostly transplanted mainlanders (like Yang, who was born in southern China in 1947 and brought to Taiwan as a toddler). Their culture is traditional Chinese, but it’s framed by that of the native Taiwanese, who speak their own dialect, and by the lingering Japanese influence.
There are other cultural influences at work in Xiao Si’r’s household as well. His parents met in Shanghai (they speak Shanghainese when they don’t want to be understood by their Mandarin-speaking kids) and still retain a number of their pre-1949 connections, some of which will prove problematic for Mr. Zhang, a midlevel functionary in the Confucian mold. His wife (Elaine Jin), a teacher, is a Christian, as is the second of the family’s three daughters. Xiao Si’r also has an older brother, Lao Er (“Big Two,” a nickname that can be pronounced to mean “prick,” a source of recurring jokes), whose gambling debts get him into familial hot water.
If Xiao Si’r is poker-faced and withdrawn at home, in archetypal teenage fashion, at school he’s part of a roiling set of khaki-clad boys with nicknames such as Airplane, Tiger, Sex Bomb, and Deuce. Awash in Western and Japanese pop culture, the kids obey their teachers with grim acquiescence in the classroom, but there’s tension and the hint of violence at every turn; at one point, the school bans baseball bats due to their use
as weapons.Violence is also in the air because of the rivalry between two gangs that many of the boys belong to, each with its own turf, social background, and de facto headquarters. The Little Park Gang, descendants of mainland civil servants, congregates at a brightly lit, American Graffiti–style ice cream parlor, where the diminutive, Elvis-worshipping Cat sings the falsetto parts in American rock-and-roll songs with his band. The 217s, sons of mainland military personnel, hang out at a pool hall, the same one where Lao Er accrues his debts. Though he’s closer to the Little Park crew, Xiao Si’r belongs to neither gang.
He is drawn toward their antagonisms, though, by a fledgling romantic attraction, and there is nothing anomalous in this: for the boys in A Brighter Summer Day, girls are commodities to be claimed, passed around, fought over. Xiao Si’r’s troubles begin innocently enough. He’s in the school infirmary when he’s asked to escort a fellow student, a girl named Ming (Lisa Yang), back to class. They play hooky instead. At this point, Xiao Si’r may already be in the first stages of a crush, but he knows not to let it carry him away: Ming is Honey’s girl.
\For a long while, Honey isn’t so much a person as a phantom, a legend. He was the leader of the Little Park Gang but killed one of the 217s—supposedly in a fight over Ming—then went into hiding in southern Taiwan. In his absence, the gang is being led by Sly, his aptly named lieutenant, who’s undercutting Honey’s rule in various ways, including by striking a peace accord with the 217s that will allow the two gangs to mount a rock concert together.
Then one day, as Xiao Si’r and Ming exchange shy smiles in the ice cream parlor, Honey suddenly reappears, resplendent in the naval uniform he’s been using as a disguise, and the stage is set for three bravura sequences that compose the midfilm crescendo of A Brighter Summer Day. In the first, Honey, while seeming to “bequeath” Ming to Xiao S’ir, speaks of his life in terms of his favorite novel, War and Peace. In the second, the two gangs stage their rock show, but a challenge to their authority ends in a murder outside the concert hall. In the third sequence, revenge for that death is wreaked during a fierce typhoon, when a Taiwanese gang that had been allied with Honey swoops down on the 217s, resulting in a slaughter that we experience mostly as screams and clatter—the only illumination comes from candles, a careening lightbulb, and that flashlight.
The sequence just described, like the one that follows it, can provoke certain confusions in viewers. Who is attacking whom in this violent and cacophonous confrontation? It’s unclear, not only because of the darkness and rapid editing but also because we’ve not gotten to know the Taiwanese assailants, who are older criminals rather than school-age delinquents. If the film’s writers purposely left these characters shadowy and mysterious, it could be that their decision owed something to the example of Yang’s great contemporary Hou Hsiao-hsien, whose A City of Sadness, released two years before A Brighter Summer Day, evidenced a deliberate strategy of narrative opacity that included leaving certain key information and relationships unexplained.
Hou’s example might also be detected in the film’s visual style, which doesn’t resemble that of any other Yang work. With its concentration of long shots, avoidance of close-ups, repeated compositions in certain settings (especially in the Zhang home), use of doors and windows as framing (and obscuring) devices, and naturalistic lighting, the film recalls Hou’s A Time to Live, a Time to Die (1985) and The Puppetmaster (1993). Critics have seen in these the deliberate articulation of a Chinese or Asian cinematic style derived from models in Chinese literature and visual arts, as well as the work of Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu. Hou has responded that his style’s genesis lay in very practical matters of shooting, and Yang said the same of A Brighter Summer Day. Yet these films undeniably share a visual mood that’s contemplative and beautifully nuanced.
Another anomaly comes in a moment just after the cataclysm of gang violence: the story shifts to the Zhang home, where the secret police arrive and haul away Xiao Si’r’s father for a lengthy interrogation over his past political associations. Why does the narrative make this sudden jump, such that we never see the consequences of the big slaughter we’ve just witnessed? One answer may be that, while the paroxysm of violence gives us a vivid symbol of Xiao Si’r’s psychic turmoil (just as it anticipates a more intimate outburst later), the scenes that follow invoke the film’s more explicitly autobiographical, and historical, underpinnings: Yang’s father was subjected to a similar humiliation, with the result that he left Taiwan on the day he retired, never to return.
This split suggests that A Brighter Summer Day has, in effect, two faces, just as it has two titles. The “outward” face is a highly critical view of a society in which all proper authority—a very Confucian concern—has been eroded or undermined, so that a young man like Xiao Si’r can be hurled into the spiral of violence indicated by the film’s Chinese title, which translates as “The Youth Killing Incident on Guling Street,” referring to a notorious crime that inspired the film. The “inward” face, meanwhile, indicated by the lyrics of the 1960 Elvis Presley hit “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” which gives the film its English title, has little to do with Taiwan and much to do with a condition unbound by time or place: the loneliness, melancholy, and longing of adolescence.
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My choice for best actor was Michel Piccoli in Ls Belle Noiseuse. Piccoli stars as a painter who regains creative inspiration from painting Emmanuelle Beart. The movie won the Grand Prix at Cannes, essentially second place, losing to Barton Fink. From Jonathan Rosenbaum's review:
The fact that La belle noiseuse is four hours long makes this even more of an achievement — and, incidentally, confirms that in spite of some disapproving guff over the years about Rivette’s long running times being overly self-indulgent, his best films, with very few exceptions, are his longest. Duration and process are central to what his movies are about, and the longer they run the more disciplined and purposeful they usually turn out to be. As it happens, Rivette has also edited a two-hour version of La belle noiseuse for French TV, using completely different takes, and I’m not surprised to hear that there’s been no stateside interest in distributing it. In the two other cases where authorized shorter versions of Rivette films exist — Out 1 (cut from 12 hours to 4 hours) and Love on the Ground (cut from three hours to two) — the superiority of the longer version is indisputable...
Throughout this leisurely opening, which takes up the film’s first hour, the sense of time and place is palpable; one can almost taste the sunlight and foliage outside and feel the dampness and darkness of the studio. Piccoli’s convincing portrait of an artist in hiding from himself, gradually nudged by himself and others into action, is little short of amazing; his comic prevarications in the studio and evasive conversational manner, showing remarkable powers of observation and synthesis, suggest the weight and complexity of an entire life behind the isolated gestures
For most of the film’s second hour, Frenhofer [Piccoli's character] executes a series of tentative sketches using both pen and brushes. Here’s where Rivette’s focus on duration and process comes in, making all the essential facts of the artist’s work — the scratch of pen against paper, the hesitations and decisions of hand and brush, the progress and revision of a design taking shape — as palpable as the sense of time and place was during the first hour. (Here and throughout the remainder of the film, the hand we see in close-up belongs to a real artist, Bernard Dufour, but the matching is done so well that the effect never looks contrived. One quite sophisticated critic, who missed the reference to Dufour in the credits, was fooled completely and assumed all of the drawing and painting was done by Piccoli.) While Rivette employs real time whenever it’s appropriate to his design, it would be quite wrong to assume that he simply lets the camera run on in the manner of Warhol; jump cuts are as essential to his sense of rhythm as long takes, and he uses both with equal judiciousness...
The best scene in the film features neither nudity nor painting but a confrontational dialogue between Liz [Frenhofer/Piccoli's wife, played by Jane Birkin) and Frenhofer in their adjoining bedrooms and on a connecting terrace in the early hours of the morning. (The terrace, perhaps not coincidentally, recalls the ramparts where life-and-death struggles are waged in Norôit.) Rivette’s musical sense of mise en scène has never been more masterful or functional in charting both the literal movements of a couple and the various stations of their “passion” (in both the carnal and Christian senses of the word). This is the scene that establishes the reasons for Frenhofer’s choice of life over art. The equivalent scene in L’amour fou showed the theater director fully entering into the madness of his wife by collaborating with her in destroying their apartment — an act conceived and executed as a 60s “art gesture,” and an emblem of the artist despairingly choosing art over life.
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Catherine Deneuve
Marcello Mastroianni
Bruno Ganz (TCM should really show The Marquise of O and Eternity and a Day)
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Great quotes from 1991
The Addams Family
[when asked about her Halloween costume] This is my costume. I'm a homicidal maniac- they look just like everyone else.
Bugsy
... why don't you run outside and jerk yourself a soda.
Europa
You will now listen to my voice. My voice will help you and guide you still deeper into Europa. Every time you hear my voice, with every word and every number, you will enter into a still deeper layer, open, relaxed and receptive. I shall now count from one to ten. On the count of ten, you will be in Europa. I say: one. And as your focus and attention are entirely on my voice, you will slowly begin to relax. Two, your hands and your fingers are getting warmer and heavier. Three, the warmth is spreading through your arms, to your shoulders and your neck. Four, your feet and your legs get heavier. Five, the warmth is spreading to the whole of your body. On six, I want you to go deeper. I say: six. And the whole of your relaxed body is slowly beginning to sink. Seven, you go deeper and deeper and deeper. Eight, on every breath you take, you go deeper. Nine, you are floating. On the mental count of ten, you will be in Europa. Be there at ten. I say: ten.
JFK
The first shot rings out, sounding like a backfire it misses the car completely. Frame 161, Kennedy stops waiving as he hears something. Connaly's head turns slightly to the right. Frame 193, the second shot hits Kennedy in the throat from the front. Frame 225, the President emerging from behind the road sign, you can see that he's obviously been hit, raising his arms to his throat. The third shot, frame 232, takes Kennedy in the back pulling him downward and forward. Connaly you'll notice shows no signs at all of being hit. He is visibly holding his Stetson, which is impossiable if his wrist has been shattered. Connaly is turning here now, frame 238 the fourth shot. It misses Kennedy and takes Connaly in the back. This is the shot that proves there were two rifles. Connaly yells out "My God! They are going to kill us all." Somewhere around this time another shot that misses the car completely, strikes James Tague down by the underpass. The car brakes. The sixth and fatal shot, frame 313 takes Kennedy in the head from the front. This is the key shot. The President going back and to his left. Shot from the front and right. Totally inconstant with the shot from the Book Depository.
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Greta Scacchi lead or supporting in The Player?
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Do you mean in general or as a winner at an Academy Awards ceremony?
I meant the character they're winning the oscar for performing. For all I know Janet Gaynor may have worn pants on a regular basis off the screen.
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Does anyone know the answer to this question? I don't know, that's why I'm asking. Moreover, who's the first winner to wear them as normal attire, as opposed to some odder reason?
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Has nobody thought about leads and supporting for 1992 at all?
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I saw five movies last week. Blue Sky is best known as the Tony Richardson that sat on the shelf for three years and which won Jessica Lange a best actress oscar apparently because they couldn't think of a better choice that year. It certainly didn't impress me very much with Lange acting a melodramatic fashion for much of the movie, and with a contrived plot. (The superior office trying to cover up Jones' concerns over radiation is both sleeping with Lange and the father of Lange and Jones' daughter's boyfriend.) Daughters of the Dust has a unique visual style and is certainly entrancing as it shows the world of turn of the 19/20th century South Carolinian African-Americans. It also had a distinctive, if admittedly opaque, narrative style. Billy Budd is a competent movie version of the Melville novella. Although the movie made Terrance Stamp a star, I actually think Ryan and Ustinov do a better job. Toni Erdmann perhaps shouldn't have been seen when I was suffering from insomnia. There is a genuine comedic payoff in this 150+ minute long movie, and the lead actors do a good job. And there is certainly something to be said in its portrait of Romania in the age of globalization. For much of the movie, the multinational company that the daughter works for live in a world of gilded Eurotrash. Then we see the Romania outside the high society of Bucharest and see the poverty that is just going to be worsened. Interesting, but I fear that the combination wasn't quite enough for me. Perhaps a better movie from last year was Indignation, with fine performances, especially from Tracy Letts as a passive aggressive conformist dean whose confrontation with the protagonist is the climax of the movie. One problem is the ending, which seems a bit abrupt and melodramatic.
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Actor
Michel Piccoli, La Belle Noiseuse
Jacques Dutronc, Van Gogh
Warren Beatty, Bugsy
River Phoenix, My Own Private Idaho
Chang Chen, A Brighter Summer Day*
*Juvenile Performance of the Year
Runner-ups: Farhad Kheradmand (And Life Goes On/Life and Nothing More...), Denis Lavant (The Lovers on the Bridge), Woody Allen (Shadows and Fog), Dominique Pilon (Delicatessen), Jet Li (Once Upon a Time in China), Christopher Eccleston (Let Him Have it), Robert Arkins (The Commitments), Adam Hann-Byrd (Little Man Tate), Leslie Nielsen (The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear), Kevin Kline (Soapdish), Robert Carlyle (Riff Raff), Kenneth Branagh (Dead Again), Clive Owen (Close my Eyes), Alan Rickman (Close my Eyes), Kevin Costner (JFK), Denzel Washington (Mississippi Masala), Peter Weller (Naked Lunch), Robin Williams (The Fisher King), Noah Taylor (Flirting), Steve Martin (L.A. Story)
Actress
Jodie Foster, The Silence of the Lambs
Susan Sarandon, Thelma and Louise
Annette Bening, Bugsy
Juliette Binoche, The Lovers on the Bridge
Lisa Yang, A Brighter Summer Day
Runner-ups: Gong Li (Raise the Red Lantern), Geena Davis (Thelma and Louise), Jodie Foster (Little Man Tate), Emanuelle Beart (La Belle Noiseuse), Theresa Russell (W*ore), Dianne Wiest (Little Man Tate), Mimi Rogers (The Rapture), Maggie Cheung (The Actress/Center Stage), Mia Farrow (Shadows and Fog), Jane Birkin (La Belle Noiseuse), Sally Field (Soapdish), Irene Jacob (The Double Life of Veronique), Santa Choudhury (Mississippi Masala), Judy Davis (Naked Lunch), Marie-Laure Dougnac (Delicatessen), Emma Thompson (Dead Again), Barbara Sukowa (Europa), Thandie Newton (Flirting), Saskia Reeves (Close my Eyes), Reese Witherspoon (The Man in the Moon), Teri Polo (Mystery Date), Anjelica Huston (The Addams Family),
Supporting Actor
Gary Oldman, JFK
Max von Sydow, Europa#
Anthony Hopkins, The Silence of the Lambs
Ben Kingsley, Bugsy
Andrew Strong, The Commitments
#Known in America, at least during its general release, as Zentropa, so as not to confuse it with the very different film Europa, Europa
Runner-ups: Tommy Lee Jones (JFK), Michael Rooker (JFK), Jean Claude Dreyfus (Delicatessen), Wong Chizan (A Brighter Summer Day), Chang Kuo-Cho (A Brighter Summer Day), Jay O. Sanders (JFK), Donald Sutherland (JFK), Johnny Murphy (The Commitments), Patrick Bachau (The Rapture), John Goodman (Barton Fink), Bernard Le Coq (Van Gogh), Lloyd Bridges (Hot Shots!), Robert Patrick (Terminator 2: Judgement Day), Harvey Keitel (Bugsy), Joe Pesci (JFK), Derek Jacobi (Dead Again), Paul Reynolds (Let Him Have it), Scott Glenn (The Silence of the Lambs), Robert Downey Jr., (Soapdish), Elliott Gould (Bugsy), Robin Williams (Dead Again)
Supporting Actress
Christina Ricci, The Addams Family
Angela Lansbury, Beauty and the Beast
Silvie Laguna, Delicatessen
Cathy Moriarty, Soapdish
He Caifei, Raise the Red Lantern
Runner-ups: Cora Lee Day (Daughters of the Dust), Elizabeth Shue (Soapdish), Kong Lin (Raise the Red Lantern), Maria Doyle (The Commitments), Whoopi Goldberg (Soapdish), Elaine Jin (A Brighter Summer Day), Laurie Metcalf (JFK), Karin Viard (Delicatessen), Mercedes Ruehl (The Fisher King), Amanda Plummer (The Fisher King), Cao Cuifen (Raise the Red Lantern), Nicole Kidman (Flirting)
Not seen: Rambling Rose, For the Boys, City Slickers, Fried Green Tomatoes---------Max von Sydow becomes the second actor to be nominated in five consecutive decades (James Mason being the first)
---------Two of my nominees are actually voices.
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1987
- Angel Heart
- The Princess Bride
- The Last Emperor
- The Empire of the Sun
- Hope and Glory
- My Life as a Dog
- Innerspace
- Where is the Friend’s Home?
- Full Metal Jacket
- Housekeeping
Runner-ups: Yeleen, Radio Days, House of Games, Wings of Desire
1988
- A Fish Called Wanda
- The Vanishing
- Hotel Terminus
- My Neighbor Totoro
- The Grave of the Fireflies
- Distant Voices, Still Lives
- Alice
- Landscape in the Mist
- Midnight Run
- A Short Film about Killing
Runner-ups: The Time of Gypsies, A Short Film About Love, Dead Ringers, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Story of Women, Pelle the Conqueror
1989
- Henry V
- Born on the Fourth of July
- Homework
- Crimes and Misdemeanors
- Enemies: A Love Story
- Say Anything
- Queen of Hearts
- Do the Right Thing
- City of Sadness
- Music Box
Runner-up: Jesus of Montreal
1990
- C’est la Vie
- Goodfellas
- Reversal of Fortune
- Jacob’s Ladder
- Miller’s Crossing
- Gremlins 2: the New Batch
- La Femme Nikita
- Dreams
- The Nasty Girl
- Days of Being Wild
Runner-ups: Mountains of the Moon, Close-up, To Sleep with Anger, Open Doors, Presumed Innocent, Nouvelle Vague
1991
- JFK
- Delicatassen
- Europa/Zentropa
- The Silence of the Lambs
- Shadows and Fog
- Only Yesterday
- And Life Goes On
- A Brighter Summer Day
- Bugsy
- Lovers on the Bridge
Runner-ups: My Own Private Idaho, Raise the Red Lantern, La Belle Noiseuse, Van Gogh, Daughters of the Dust, The Quince-Tree Sun
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Comparing the Oscar Winners with the poll, eighties version
Supporting Actress
Steenburgen, winner 3-1
Stapleton, winner 2-1
Lange, no votes
Hunt, defeated 2-1, six way tie for 2nd
Ashcroft, winner 2-1
Huston, no votes
Wiest, winner 3-1
Dukakis, 1 vote, six way tie for 1st
Davis, Tied 2-2
Fricker, defeated 2-1, four way tie for 2nd
Supporting Actor
Hutton, no votes
Gielgud, no votes
Gossett, no votes
Nicholson, winner 3-1
Ngor, 1 vote, six way tie for 1st, Winner Best Actor 2-1
Ameche, no votes
Caine, Tied 2-2
Connery, defeated 3-1, three way tie for 2nd
Kline, winner 2-1
Washington, defeated 2-1, four way tie for 2nd
Actress
Spacek winner 3-1
Hepburn, Tied 2-2
Streep, Tied 2-2
Maclaine, Winner 4-1
Field, no votes
Page, defeated 2-1, four way tie for 2nd
Matlin, no votes
Cher, no votes
Foster, Tied 2-2
Tandy, winner 2-1
Actor
De Niro, winner 4-1
Fonda, no votes
Kingsley, Tied 2-2
Duvall, no votes
Abraham, no votes
Hurt, no votes
Newman, no votes
Douglas, no votes
Hoffman, 1 vote, seven way tie for 1st
Day-Lewis, Tied 2-2
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More quotes from 1990
Presumed Innocent
Rusty Sabich: You think I killed her.
Det. Lipranzer: The lady was bad news.
Rusty Sabich: So that makes it okay that I killed her.
Gremlins 2: The New Batch
Dr. Catheter: All they have to do is to eat three or four children and there'd be the most appalling publicity.
"Tonight, on the Clamp Cable Classic Movie Channel, don't miss Casablanca, now in full color with a happier ending."
Creature what is it that you want?
Brain Gremlin: Fred, what we want is, I think, what everyone wants, and what you and your viewers have: civilization.
Grandpa Fred: Yes, but what sort of civilization are you speaking of?
Brain Gremlin: The niceties, Fred. The fine points: diplomacy, compassion, standards, manners, tradition... that's what we're reaching toward. Oh, we may stumble along the way, but civilization, yes. The Geneva Convention, chamber music, Susan Sontag. Everything your society has worked so hard to accomplish over the centuries, that's what we aspire to; we want to be civilized.
[a Gremlin with a beanie cap acts goofy next to Brain]
Brain Gremlin: You take a look at this fellow here.
[Brain shoots the Gremlin in the head. The Gremlins in the bar laugh. Grandpa Fred and Kujitsu leave]
Brain Gremlin: Now, was that civilized? No, clearly not. Fun, but in no sense civilized. Now, bear in mind, none of us has been in New York before. There are the Broadway shows - we'll have to find out how to get tickets. There's also a lot of street crime, but I believe we can watch that for free.
Miller's Crossing
"It's gettin' so a businessman can't expect no return from a fixed fight."
Reversal of Fortune
Raj: I agree von Bülow is guilty, but then, that's the fun -- that's the challenge.
Alan Dershowitz: Now THERE is a lawyer.
Claus von Bülow: Well, so much for the first coma. The second, of course, was much more theatrical.
Alan Dershowitz: Theatrical? What is this, a **** game? This is life and death; your wife is lying in a coma. You, you don't even make a pretense of caring, do you?
Claus von Bülow: 'Course I care, Alan. It's just, I don't wear my heart on my sleeve.
Claus von Bülow: I'm not afraid, Alan. Let the chips fall where they may.
Alan Dershowitz: That's what an innocent man would say.
Claus von Bülow: I know.
Sunny von Bulow: Well, just because she had all the money before I had all the money does not mean she is my lord and master.
Claus von Bülow: 'Course not. I am your lord and master.
[Sunny glares at him]
Claus von Bülow: Just kidding.
Claus von Bulow: Oh, come on, Sunny, your father worked! Do you want the children to grow up thinking a male's place is in a deck chair?
Sunny von Bülow: Claus, you marry me for my money then you demand to work! You're the prince of perversion!
Sally: He had a gorgeous mistress and he went with an ugly ****?
Raj: You know, there are some things even mistresses won't do.
Alan Dershowitz: Like what?
Raj: I am not telling.
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Let's see Lonesome Polecat has a silent version of Around the World in Eighty Days and several filmed opera. Barton Keyes has a spotlight devoted to Robert Altman, The Towering Inferno and Ghost Story. Cinema International has Clue and an evening devoted to Jacques Demy.
I vote for Barton Keyes.
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It's particularly interesting in the context of this discussion about The Leopard because while watching the film, I was wondering about that kind of strange scene toward the beginning in which the Prince makes the priest very uncomfortable by asking the priest to engage him in a conversation while the Prince is naked in his bath, even telling the priest to hand him a towel and dry him off. I wondered whether that scene was straight from the novel or was introduced for the film--and what was its intended significance.
I haven't read The Leopard in years, but I think the Prince makes the priest uncomfortable in his bath for the same reason he later makes him uncomfortable by talking him along to a rendezvous to his mistress. Because part of the aura of being a aristocrat is having the power to do that and make other people have to take it.
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Leading vs. Supporting Categories in 1991 …
I have Anthony Hopkins in the lead actor category as had Oscar for The Silence of the Lambs though there probably is an argument for this being a supporting part. Several movie critics thought so.
I have Hopkins as supporting.
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I saw seven movies over the last two weeks: six this week, one the week before. That movie Paterson, was clearly the best movie I've seen last year. It's incredibly charming and the most hopeful movie I've seen from last year, with the conceit that ordinary people working in apparently dull occupations (in this case, a bus driver), are actually aspiring poets. It also portrays a multi-racial world in a city that most American politicians have tried to leave for dead. It certainly contains the happiest marriage I've seen in a movie this decade, with Golshifteh Farahani being especially charming. As for this weeks movies, The Effects of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds has a striking title, and is certainly dour and pessimistic. But it doesn't really explain or empathize with Joanne Woodward's character, it's more like an attempt to see the life of someone we've all seen berating her children or generally being unpleasant in public, but without having more insight.The Outlaw and His Wife could be described as the original "Bonnie and Clyde" movie, made when the actual Bonnie and Clyde were small children. As such it contains a certain amount of power and is worth rewatching again. Edward, My Son is perhaps best known as the first movie Deborah Kerr got an oscar nomination. Compared to the other four nominated movies that I've seen, it's clearly the least of them. It's arguably a supporting role, with Kerr getting the nomination for a drunker mourning scene. The movie is basically Spencer Tracy's as a parent who cheats and swindles to get the best for his son, only to have a spoiled brat who dies young. Oddly enough, it's not dissimilar from Mildred Pierce, except Curtiz does a better job in showing Crawford's plight than Cukor does. Symbol of the Unconquered is an Oscar Michaux film which suffers from the fact that the decisive defeat of the Klan was apparently lost. Talking to Strangers is an interesting film about a young man who has conversations with people. Each conversation is shot in a single take, and the movie is bookended by two takes which introduce and exit the young man. The conversations include a snide talk with a priest in a confessional, a chat with a bank employee who is constantly harassed by a loved one's emotionally bullying calls, and a talk with a paramour who turns out to be a stripper. The Traveller is the first feature of the great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, or at least the first one he was happy with. The short movie, under 75 minutes, deals with a boy who by hook and by crook tries to see a soccer match in Teheran while he lives in a different town altogether. It's surprisingly tense, even though one might guess the ending from the moralistic regime of the Shah Kiarostami made it under.
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Actor
Jeremy Irons, Reversal of Fortune
Gian Maria Volonte, Open Doors
Gabriel Byrne, Miller's Crossing
Tim Robbins, Jacob's Ladder
Al Pacino, The Godfather Part III
Runner-ups: Ron Silver (Reversal of Fortune), Ray Liotta (Goodfellas), Leslie Cheung (Days of Being Wild), Harrison Ford (Presumed Innocent), Patrick Bergin (Mountains of the Moon), John Cusack (The Grifters), Marco Hofschneider (Europa Europa), Johnny Depp (Edward Scissorhands), Warren Beatty (Dick Tracy), Iain Glen (Mountains of the Moon), Tcheky Karyo (La Femme Nikita), Bill Murray (Quick Change), Clint Eastwood (White Hunter Black Heart), Alain Delon (Nouvelle Vague), Kevin Costner (Dances with Wolves), Paul Butler (To Sleep with Anger), Bob Newhart (The Rescuers Down Under), Zach Gilligan (Gremlins 2: the New Batch), Richard Gere (Pretty Woman)
Actress
Julie Bataille, C'est La Vie*
Lena Stolze, The Nasty Girl
Anne Parillaud, La Femme Nikita
Julia Roberts, Pretty Woman
Anjelica Huston, The Grifters
*Juvenile Performance of the Year
Runner-ups: Elizabeth Pena (Jacob's Ladder), Kerry Fox (An Angel at my Table), Phoebe Cates (Gremlins 2: the New Batch), Gong Li (Ju Dou), Winona Ryder (Edward Scissorhands), Nathalie Roussel (My Mother's Castle), Anjelica Huston (The Witches), Meg Ryan (Joe Versus the Volcano), Mia Farrow (Alice), Kati Outinen (The Match Factory Girl), Debra Winger (The Sheltering Sky),
Supporting Actor
Danny Glover, To Sleep with Anger
Joe Pesci, Goodfellas
John Turturro, Miller's Crossing
Raul Julia, Presumed Innocent
Robert De Niro, Goodfellas
Runner-ups: Paul Sorvino (Goodfellas), Tony Randall (Gremlins 2: the New Batch), Danny Aiello (Jacob's Ladder), Andy Garcia (The Godfather Part III) Andy Lau (Days of Being Wild), Jean Reno (La Femme Nikita), Ennio Fantastichini (Open Doors), Albert Finney (Miller's Crossing), J.E. Freeman (Miller's Crossing), Paul Winfield (Presumed Innocent), Fred Dalton Thompson (Die Hard 2), Jon Polito (Miller's Crossing), Al Pacino (Dick Tracy), Eli Wallach (The Godfather Part III), Chuck Low (Goodfellas), Grahame Greene (Dances with Wolves), Joe Mantegna (Alice), William Sadler (Die Hard 2), Brian Dennehy (Presumed Innocent), Joe Mantegna (The Godfather Part III), John Amos (Die Hard 2), John Spencer (Presumed Innocent), Martin Scorsese (Dreams), Donal Donnelly (The Godfather Part III), Christopher Lee (Gremlins 2: the New Batch), Mitsunori Isaki (Dreams), Yoshitaki Zushi (Dreams), Chris Eigeman (Metropolitan), Maurice Roeves (Hidden Agenda), Bernard Hill (Mountains of the Moon), Dustin Hoffman (Dick Tracy), Tony Leung (Days of Being Wild),
Supporting Actress
Lorraine Bracco, Goodfellas
Glenn Close, Reversal of Fortune
Nathalie Baye, C'est la Vie
Maggie Cheung, Days of Being Wild
Mary Alice, To Sleep with Anger
Runner-ups: Talia Shire (The Godfather Part III), Annette Bening (The Grifters), Annabella Sciorra (Reversal of Fortune), Mary Steenburgen (Back to the Future Part III), Madonna (Dick Tracy), Whoopi Goldberg (Ghost), Haviland Morris (Gremlins 2: the New Batch), Bonnie Bedelia (Presumed Innocent), Marcia Gay Harden (Miller's Crossing), Carina Lau (Days of Being Wild), Julie Delpy (Europa Europa), Fiona Shaw (Mountains of the Moon), Dianne Wiest (Edward Scissorhands), Mary McDonell (Dances with Wolves), Diane Keaton (The Godfather Part III), Glenne Headly (Dick Tracy),
Not seen: Cyrano de Bergeac, The Field, Misery, Postcards from the Edge, Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, Longtime Companion-------1990 has some of my favorite movies of the nineties, along with 1995 and 1999. This makes the oscar choices more annoying, even the best picture nominees includes one great film, two ambitious but unsuccessful movies and two mediocre but inoffensive ones. The 1995 and 1999 choices are much less promising.
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I want to say more about Distant Voices, Still Lives for which I nominated three actors for my 1988 awards. Probably the most important British film of the eighties, here is a review from The House Next Door by Fernando Croce:
Not the least among its achievements, Terence Davies's wondrous Distant Voices, Still Lives offers a crystallization of the appeal of the musical. An odd linkage, to be sure, since the genre's trademark studio boisterousness would seem a world away from the kitchen-sink dreariness of the director's mood piece about his years growing up with his working-class family in post-WWII Liverpool, dominated by his abusive ogre of a father. Yet Davies transcends the facile trap of misery-porn by tapping into the basic notion that could make musicals so enlivening—music as direct expression, music as emotion felt. Cinema is the most unashamedly emotional of arts, and the musical feeds in no small part on repressed, frustrated sensations, the better to explode them with bursts of melodious bravura; what are musical numbers, after all, if not lyrically stylized declarations of feelings that could not be expressed any other way?
In genre terms, Davies's opening “number” consists of a languid, almost ghostly tracking shot through an empty, dark-greenish living room as “I Get The Blues When It Rains” fills the air, dissolving then to a medium shot of the main characters in funeral blacks: Mother (Freda Dowie) and her grown children, Eileen (Angela Walsh), Maisie (Lorraine Ashbourne), and Tony (Dean Williams). Posed frontally in a spare, doleful tableau, they suggest figures in a faded family album, and, indeed, the role of memory is intensely connected to the director's use of music. Songs from Davies's childhood flood the soundtrack, and throughout the film there is the feeling that each snippet heard is braided to an emotion biographically experienced and ripped, still bleeding, out of the past. When “Taking A Chance On Love” is heard while Mother sits on a windowsill polishing the glass from the outside, the lovely specificity of the moment becomes incantatory, the earthbound plainness turned as awesomely lyrical as the flashiest of Stanley Donen's showstoppers.
Pete Postlethwaite
Incarcerated in an all-too-real world, however, Davies's characters are unable to swim into the Technicolor glories of their fantasies the way Vincente Minnelli's or Tsai Ming-liang's can. Davies cuts from the kids watching Mother by the window to her being brutally beaten by Father (Pete Postlethwaite) yet lets the same piece of music play as he shifts from a fondly recalled moment to a traumatic one. The obvious point of reference would be the sardonic bitterness of Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective, though Potter's irony is completely alien to Davies. In fact, the two artists' approaches could not be more different from each other; whereas Potter sees the lies of pop culture in the chasm separating idealized fantasy and cruel realities, Davies finds in it the possibility for salvation.
Freda Dowie (in front)
No MGM glitz pierces through the film's barrage of cramped interiors, bombing shelters and abuse, yet it is through music that the characters' souls reach heavenward, even as their feet remain grounded in soot. To them, the very act of enjoying or actively performing a song constitutes defiant ecstasy, a moment of revolt against the crushing oppression all around them. Locked in the brig for briefly going AWOL to confront his father, Tony pulls out a harmonica and plays the theme from Limelight; feeling a continuation of her family's patriarchal tyranny in her own marriage, Eileen rebelliously sings “I Want To Be Around To Pick Up The Pieces” in response to her domineering husband's orders. In both cases, Davies displays a profound understanding of how art can liberate people from sorrow.
Davies's film is an act of exorcism, but also one of redemption. “I make films to come to terms with my family history,” the director has said. “If there had been no suffering, there would have been no films.” Distant Voices, Still Lives is a far darker work than The Long Day Closes, Davies's luminous 1992 follow-up, where he could freely, lyrically recall the burgeoning awareness of his homosexuality, his joy for cinema, or, simply, the stupefying play of light on a carpet; as Armond White superbly put it, the difference between the two films is the difference between “memories Davies can't get rid of and memories he won't let go.”
The filmmaker actually shot the film as two deliberately contrasting halves, each made with a different crew over a two-year phase; Distant Voices peeks through pale-sepia tones while Still Lives abounds in ominous-ethereal fades to white just as painterly stillness alternates with gliding camera movement. The title may imply the stagnation of oppressed lives, yet the picture's lasting impression is one of concentrated, purified motion, of images poetically triggering images, and, above all, of waves of feeling flowing from screen to audience and back. Never ignoring the characters' pain as the family dissolves in the course of the film, Davies brings to their gatherings a heartfelt sense of emotional community struggling with the inescapable passage of time.
Although Davies has stated that in filmmaking he has worked out his reasons for rejecting his early Catholicism, Distant Voices, Still Lives remains one of the most profoundly spiritual films in recent decades. Davies's utter faith is in human emotion, rendered through popular art; late-'40s tunes, enriched over the years with the expressive personal connections they have come to carry, are no less sacred than the baptismal liturgy that welcomes Maisei's infant into this world. “Buttons And Bows” performed at a wedding reception, the crowd at the pub warbling “Bye Bye Blackbird” as the night comes to a close: These are instances of feeling distilled to its essence, as if Davies took the musicals he loved so much growing up and zeroed in onto the tremulous heartbeats. Time, joy, and family are transitory, yet Davies knows that the camera's ability to capture them borders on the divine. I can think of few more moving expressions of this than the sublime ascending crane from the huddled umbrellas outside a theater that dissolves into a gentle pan over the rapt, weeping faces of the audience inside. From rain to tears, and set to the strains of the Love Is A Many Splendored-Thing score, Davies exults cinema's transformative powers past, present, and future.
Lorraine Ashbourne
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Leading vs. Supporting Categories in 1990 …
IMO Lorraine Bracco was the lead actress in Goodfellas. Oscar had her in the supporting category as did many other awards.
Glenn Close is the lead actress in Reversal of Fortune.I think Bracco and Close are supporting. Almost all their scenes are with Liotta and Irons, but Liotta and Irons have plenty of scenes without their wives.
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Great quotes from 1989
Say Anything
What I really want to do with my life - what I want to do for a living - is I want to be with your daughter. I'm good at it.
Crimes and Misdemeanors
Judah Rosenthal: And after the awful deed is done, he finds that he's plagued by deep-rooted guilt. Little sparks of his religious background, which he'd rejected, are suddenly stirred up. He hears his father's voice. He imagines that God is watching his every move. Suddenly, it's not an empty universe at all, but a just and moral one, and he's violated it. Now, he's panic-stricken. He's on the verge of a mental collapse, an inch away from confessing the whole thing to the police. And then one morning, he awakens. The sun is shining, his family is around him and mysteriously, the crisis has lifted. He takes his family on a vacation to Europe and as the months pass, he finds he's not punished. In fact, he prospers. The killing gets attributed to another person — a drifter who has a number of other murders to his credit, so I mean, what the hell? One more doesn't even matter. Now he's scott-free. His life is completely back to normal. Back to his protected world of wealth and privilege.
Clifford Sten: Yes, but can he ever really go back?
Judah Rosenthal: People carry sins around. Oh, maybe once in awhile he has a bad moment, but it passes. With time, it all fades.
Clifford Stern: Yeah, but now his worst beliefs are realized.
Judah Rosenthal: Well, I said it was a chilling story, didn't I?
Clifford Stern: I don't know. I think it would be tough for someone to live with that. Very few guys could live with something like that on their conscience.
Judah Rosenthal: People carry awful deeds around. What do you expect him to do, turn himself in? In reality, we rationalize, we deny, or we couldn't go on living.
Clifford Stern: Here's what I would do: I would have him turn himself in. Then your story assumes tragic proportions. I mean, in the absence of a God, or something, he's forced to assume that responsibility himself. Then you have tragedy.
Judah Rosenthal: But that's fiction, that's movies. You see too many movies. I'm talking about reality. I mean, if you want a happy ending, you should see a Hollywood movie.
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Favorite performances of the eighties
Actor: Ben Kingsley, Gandhi
Actress, Daryl Hannah, Splash
Supporting Actor, Kevin Kline, A Fish Called Wanda
Supporting Actress, Gunn Wallgren, Fanny and Alexander
Juvenile Performance, Bertil Guve, Fanny and Alexander
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I was busy last week so I couldn't include my favorite quotes from 1988
Midnight Run
So I'm finally in the presence of greatness, huh? The Duke. The guy that steals money from the scum of the earth and gives it to the unfortunates of the world. I wanted to meet you face-to-face. Did you actually think you were gonna steal my money and get away with it? I stopped by here to tell you two things. Number one is that you're gonna die tonight. Number two, I'm gonna go home, have a nice hot meal, I'm gonna find your wife, and I'm gonna kill her too.
A Fish Called Wanda
Oh look, it's K-K-Ken! C-C-Coming to k-k-kill me! How you gonna c-c-catch me, K-K-Ken?
Wanda: But you think you're an intellectual, don't you, ape?
Otto: [superior smile] Apes don't read philosophy.
Wanda: Yes they do, Otto, they just don't understand it! Now let me correct you on a couple things, okay? Aristotle was not Belgian! The central message of Buddhism is not "Every man for himself!" And the London Underground is not a political movement! Those are all mistakes, Otto. I looked 'em up.
Archie: Ms Gershwitz, do you remember where you were on the evening of the 7th?
Wanda: Yes, I was at the apartment.
Archie: And were you alone or was someone else there?
Wanda: No someone else was there.
Archie: And who was that?
Wanda: My brother.
Archie: Your brother, good and [stumbling] your brother? Are you sure it was your brother?
Judge: Mr Leach I'm sure Ms Gershwitz can recognise her own brother, after all she's had a relationship with him her whole life.
Archie: Yes, sorry your honour. Well, was anybody else there with you?
Wanda: Yes George was there. [adds] But he left about five to seven.
Archie: Wanda! [remembering himself] I wonder, how could you be sure it was five to seven?
Wanda: Because I looked at the clock. I remember looking at the clock and thinking, where could George be going with that sawn off shotgun?
Wanda: Archie? Do you speak Italian?
Archie: I am Italian! Sono italiano in spirito. Ma ho sposato una donna che preferisce lavorare in giardino a fare l'amore appassionato. Uno sbaglio grande! But it's such an ugly language. How about... Russian?
And this may be my favorite quote from the eighties:
Otto: You know your problem? You [british] don't like winners.
Archie: Winners?
Otto: Yeah, winners.
Archie: Winners, like North Vietnam?
Lead or Supporting Role?
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They're all supporting, in my opinion. I just rewatched it last week.