1990s List Discussion and Suggestions (Lists Project Vol. 2)

[Mr Sheldrake]

The heck with White Elephants, I’m searching for Termite Art (and a little bit of sex), probably in all the wrong places.

Tim Roth gives a memorable performance in Bodies Rest Motion as fired tv salesman Nick who dreams of leaving Arizona for Butte Montana a town he quixotically thinks of as the City of the Future. On the way to Butte, he stops off at his boyhood home hoping to see his long estranged parents only to find an angelic young girl and a giant mute living there. “I’ve lost my parents” he mournfully tells the girl, who in fact really has lost her parents. Nick has left behind the languid sexuality of puppy dog Bridget Fonda and earthy Phoebe Cates. The movie is about a generation’s feeling of disconnect, right before a new era dawns, of cell phones, the internet and blackberrys that finally brought meaning to all our lives. The existentialist mood seems kind of quaint and cozy less than 20 years on.

L’amour fou in all it’s varieties, revelations and perversities reigns supreme in Bitter Moon. I feel at home in this genre and quite enjoyed the sexual shenanigans especially the drooling milk and perfectly timed toaster popping. Right before the typically Polanski apocalyptic ending there is a colorful NewYears Eve shipboard party, in rocky seas, featuring Emmanuelle Seigner and Kristen Scott Thomas dirty dancing in front of a played for a fool Hugh Grant, all to the poignant strains of Roxy Music’s Slave To Love. Polanski goes way over the top in Moon, decadence-wise, but I found it quite moving.

I’m a slave to cute actresses and they don’t come any cuter than Faye Wong in Chungking Express. Wong Kar-Wai and his auteurism can take second fiddle here, Fayes the show. It’s all about heartbreak and California Dreaming, really its about nothing at all, but it looks great, makes me feel good, and has my #1 spot sewn up, so far.

Reese Witherspoon, keeping with the cute refrain, who stole my heart in Man In The Moon, is the moral force in Cruel Intentions a modern version of Dangerous Liaisons set in NYC and featuring some really odd performances. Selma Blair and Sarah Michelle Gellar share a tongue wagging kiss in a glorious close up, but otherwise it’s a rather drab meditation on rich kid cynics destroyed by virtue. Reese is miscast in Best Laid Plans which features not one, but two of the most unbelievably convoluted heist plots ever hatched. Reese is in her element, however, in Alexander Payne’s Election. Her Machiavellian spunk triumphs over all obstacles, including Payne’s tendency to have his characters humiliated and reduced to uncomfortable levels of pathetic-ness. He comes dangerously close to total misanthropy here, and elsewhere. Reese brightens the gloom with her exuberant school corridor hopping when she learns she has won the Election, she thinks.

On to something more sublime. I confess to an unaccountable attachment to Eric Rohmer movies. I watch them over and over, like I used to with Hitchcock, but I lack the perception and articulateness to explain it all. I seem to suffer from a delusion that the key to life might be revealed somewhere during all the ritualistic walking and talking scenes, and, I even find this stuff, God help me, suspenseful. I placed Boyfriends and Girlfriends #1 on my 80s list and I didn’t consider anything a close second. Much to my chagrin, nobody else put it in even in their top 50 so I must be barking up the wrong tree. Nevertheless, I nominate A Summers Tale as a legitimate contender in the 90s not so much for it’s chick magnet male lead (he writes silly sea chanties, and leaves three girls in the lurch in order to pursue an 8-track machine purchase!) but rather for the amazing Amanda Langlet, who in the 80s had played Pauline, at the beach. Rohmer has a genuine talent for getting naturalistic performances out of actresses who rarely appear in anything else. Amanda and the dim hunk share many intense seaside walks, as they trod the fine line, and it’s here I most sense the sublime in Rohmer's transcendent theme, between maintaining a delicate friendship and resisting the powerful pull of what can only be called love.

[Sloper]

A film I loved as a teenager (and watched too often and got totally sick of) was Swimming With Sharks (1995). Made just before, or just after, The Usual Suspects, it marked the beginning of Kevin Spacey’s career as a leading man and, on screen at least, I don’t think he’s ever done better work than this. I remember seeing it in a special premiere screening at the NFT (which my dad got invited to for some reason), with various C-list luminaries present. Few people had ever heard of Spacey back then, but the guy introducing the film called him ‘the new Jack Nicholson’, and though he’s done disappointing things since then, at the time he was kind of a revelation. Buddy Ackerman, the Hollywood exec ‘boss from hell’, is a gloriously unsympathetic part, the likes of which Spacey has not taken on since, and with a voice like that he was born to deliver lines such as: ‘If you were in my toilet bowl I wouldn’t bother flushing it’ or, throwing some heavy object at his PA, ‘You’re happy – I hate that!’.

Like a low-budget, relatively low-talent re-tread of the territory explored in The Player, it has lots of pleasures to offer movie buffs, with dialogue referencing such diverse classics as Sweet Smell of Success and Misery. It’s one of those films that’s so cynical it ends up being naive, but its vision of Hollywood – or, more generally, ambition and aspiration – is satisfyingly bleak, right up to the end.

Plus there’s a very gruesome scene involving an envelope.

[ptatler]

I really don't get the Eastwood cult in general.

I don't either, particularly the Oscar-bait stuff of the last five years or so. However, UNFORGIVEN will make my list precisely because it's Fordian/Hawksian. Can't think of too many other 90s Westerns that were as lovingly made. The only other Eastwood I might include will be PERFECT WORLD (in spite of the Laura Dern subplot).

The big exception for me is Schindler's List, which I loathe to the point of finding it offensive: Spielberg's most cynical film, which is saying something.

Hey, it's an innocent cynicism! I actually would defend LIST a little, especially Fiennes performance. But Spielberg definitely reaches his nadir with sequences like the girl in the red coat (which has its "punchline" later on when you see the disembodied coat in a pile of objects claimed from the slaughtered Jewry).

I think Spielberg's best work this decade can only be found in small excerpts from bloated films (Omaha Beach, the escape from the overhanging tram in LOST WORLD, cleansing of the ghetto in LIST, etc.) but nothing list-worthy.

My list is rather dull so far. I know DEAD MAN will make an appearance in the top five but, so far, that's all I can say is a lock.

For kicks, here are some of my plans related to the project:

Rewatch:
Blair Witch Project, Thin Red Line, Eyes Wide Shut, A Midnight Clear, Fearless, Short Cuts, Vincent and Theo, The Game, The Ice Storm, Schizopolis

Watch for the first time:
Underground, Irma Vep, La Promesse, Pialat's Van Gogh, Brighter Summer Day, Miami Blues, Dreamlife of Angels, Last Days of Disco

Definitely on the list so far:
Dead Man, eXistenZ, The Limey, American Movie, Age of Innocense, The Straight Story, Husbands and Wives, Metropolitan, Breaking the Waves, Life is Sweet, Devil's Advocate, Spanish Prisoner

My list is mostly Anglo- and narrative-centric, something I'm wanting to rectify over the next few months. I've been copying-and-pasting from the above posts and have assembled an awesome, if completely unrealistic, list of recommendations.

[zedz]

The big exception for me is Schindler's List, which I loathe to the point of finding it offensive: Spielberg's most cynical film, which is saying something.

Hey, it's an innocent cynicism! I actually would defend LIST a little, especially Fiennes performance. But Spielberg definitely reaches his nadir with sequences like the girl in the red coat (which has its "punchline" later on when you see the disembodied coat in a pile of objects claimed from the slaughtered Jewry).

I think Spielberg's best work this decade can only be found in small excerpts from bloated films (Omaha Beach, the escape from the overhanging tram in LOST WORLD, cleansing of the ghetto in LIST, etc.) but nothing list-worthy.

That's interesting. I tend to think of Spielberg as competent at creating isolated, Pavlovian sequences, but horribly deficient at building them up into interesting films, and that suspense sequence from Lost World is precisely the evidence I'd adduce: a nifty sequence, but a patchy film (with a couple of other nifty sequences in it) that's still miles better than the first Jurassic Park.

I felt a little guilty about slamming Schindler's List so perfunctorily, and just thinking about it again annoyed me so much I've decided to go into more detail about why I hate it. You have been warned!

Fundamentally, it’s a film with nothing to say (except “give me an Oscar already”). It offers no insight on the experience of the Holocaust or the psychology of its central character and simplifies everything it touches into pat cliches.

The Jews are portrayed as meek, infantilised objects, without volition, emphasised appallingly in the grotesque “oh no, you really are a very great man” scene at the end. And the Germans are portrayed in sub-Commando comics terms. The nice Germans like Schindler speak in English, the nasty ones shout “Juden Raus!” in German. If you’re going to avoid subtitles, that’s a copout (Spielberg’s pretension extends to black-and-white, but he’s not going to make his audience read, for heaven’s sake), but at least be consistent about it, and don’t use your audience’s lazy xenophobic reflexes for dramatic effect.

Characterising Fiennes’ Nazi as a psychotic pantomime villain is similarly lazy and dangerous. The Holocaust didn’t happen because everyone involved in implementing it was insane and homocidal, but Spielberg eschews the darker reality for the easy road of yet another Hollywood cliché (i.e. only obvious villains commit evil acts).

Time and again, Spielberg relies on cheap effects. The most blatant one – the red-coated girl – doesn’t even work properly, since the whole texture of the filmstock (leached colour stock rather than genuine black and white) changes for her appearances. Thus, when there’s the supposedly powerful ‘reveal’ of her garment late in the film, you’re cued to the reference as soon as the shot begins. And that shoddiness of effect only reinforces the shoddiness of the empathy mechanism Spielberg is milking: it’s purely situational and mechanistic, the girl is never characterised, let alone individualised.

There are so many better films about the Holocaust around. This vanity project brings nothing of substance to the table. There are plenty of Hollywood products (no small number of them by Spielberg) with similar flaws of pandering and back-patting, but in the context of this material I find it especially odious.

[colinr0380]

Time and again, Spielberg relies on cheap effects. The most blatant one – the red-coated girl – doesn’t even work properly, since the whole texture of the filmstock (leached colour stock rather than genuine black and white) changes for her appearances. Thus, when there’s the supposedly powerful ‘reveal’ of her garment late in the film, you’re cued to the reference as soon as the shot begins. And that shoddiness of effect only reinforces the shoddiness of the empathy mechanism Spielberg is milking: it’s purely situational and mechanistic, the girl is never characterised, let alone individualised.

It does seem to suggest a pretty cynical view of the audience by the filmmakers. I get the impression that they don't trust the audience to care enough about the subject matter without the manipulation and can only assume that they considered the viewer was saying to themselves: "I really didn't care about the holocaust before but now that I know that cute young girls died too I'm suddenly incensed!" It also seems to be a terribly simplistic way of illustrating Schindler's awakening conscience.

And the less said about the overly heavy handed break down of Schindler at the end, the better. Instead of crying for his wonderful charity I'm often left thinking of the way modern employers hire and exploit illegal immigrants then try to suggest that they were performing some kind of benevolent service rather than just making the system work for them. However I think I am reading too much into it as I do not think the film itself is smart enough to draw such parallels!

I would agree on Spielberg being able to handle isolated sequences but having trouble making them work as whole films, but I would also add that sequences in his films from this decade in particular lost the repeatability of his earlier 'classic' period. Whereas individual sequences from Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Close Encounters stand up to repeat viewings, I see his modern 'individual, impressive sequences' as being true junk food - only meant to be watched once for maximum impact and then thrown away. Trying to rewatch Jurassic Park, Lost World, the Omaha Beach sequence and so on just makes the manipulations undertaken entirely in service of creating the maximum initial impact of stand alone sequences on a first time viewer more obvious and irritating. Instead of just being the impressive highlights of a film, they unbalance the rest of the film in their scale and self contained nature, and seeming lack of any obligation to supporting a wider ongoing narrative.

Beyond the set piece events, this emphasis on leaving the greatest impression on the 'one time viewer' has destroyed the structure of the films themselves. Saving Private Ryan in particular is structured around an insulting flashback, where the viewer is provided with all the signifiers of seeing the D-Day landings through the reminisces of one particular character when it is revealed to be a completely different character who is doing the reminiscing at the end! I get the impression that this was not considered to be important by the filmmakers, maybe because they wouldn't feel that the audience would remember the structure of the beginning of the film by the ending, and it may work if you just go with the flow and never rewatch the film, but it shows that impact and short term narrative twists and shocks have taken precedence over long term enjoyment of a well structured narrative and the repeatability of such (i.e. the Haute Tension effect!)

A lot of the criticisms Spielberg received for the Indiana Jones film last year have been building up for a very long time. Ironically I quite enjoyed this work since finally Spielberg made a film consisting entirely of standalone set pieces with only a minimal concession to plot - while it was not exactly a step forward, to say the least, I found it less condescending by not trying to hide its true interests behind a flimsy, but pompous, plot!

The one film I would make a case for would be A.I., which I think I talked about in depth in the dedicated Steven Spielberg thread, and that is because I feel that the 'heavy lifting' of structuring the story was already done for him. Then he could fuss around with the set pieces in comfort. Plus I love the conflict between cold, barren environments with robotic replication of emotions that develops into a touching facsimile of 'eternal love' (or is the character just stuck in a programming loop?) versus the warm, human environments that are always threatening to tip into hysteria, hatred and violence or sexuality - the last days of a decadent human society past its ripeness set against the dawning awakening of artificial lifeforms from being content in their 'slavery' to the creatures of the far future that David finally encounters. I think this is the perfect marriage between Kubrick and Spielberg in that their seemingly incompatible styles allow both sides of this situation to be given equal emphasis and empathy.

However that is a discussion best left until the 2000s list!

[swo17]

I felt a little guilty about slamming Schindler's List so perfunctorily, and just thinking about it again annoyed me so much I've decided to go into more detail about why I hate it. You have been warned!

I am completely with you on Spielberg. One of the things that annoys me most about being alive is how both Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan are deemed so "important" that they are occasionally allowed to air completely unedited and commercial free on U.S. broadcast television for the big war holidays, while minor riots erupt over much less salacious content in other programs. Because of course, nothing helps me honor the memory of my veteran ancestors like a scene of a soldier savoring, in graphic detail, the memory of his girlfriend-back-home's tits.

I'm curious though zedz--are there any mainstreamy type films that will have even a remote chance at making your list? You seemed to have poo-pooed every viable candidate that I can think of so far.

[zedz]

I'm curious though zedz--are there any mainstreamy type films that will have even a remote chance at making your list? You seemed to have poo-pooed every viable candidate that I can think of so far.

It's a fair cop, but I really do (really!) like the handful of films I commented on above, and some of them were indeed on my shortlist (and I think even made my list last time around). But for me they all fade away alongside the really great films of the decade. Claire Denis made at least four films in the nineties that are better than anything that was nominated for a major Oscar during the decade. Ditto Kiarostami, Wong, Hou, Rohmer, Makhmalbaf, Brakhage, Kitano. There's two-thirds of a potential top fifty already, and if you add in some less prolific or consistent masters (Yang, Ishii, Muratova, Friedrich, Erice, Tarr, Hong, McElwee, Morris, Koreeda, Pialat), it's getting mighty crowded.

The mainstream - or at least American and traditional narrative - films I've toying with include:

The Thin Red Line - Best Hollywood film of the decade in my opinion, definitely top 50 (especially since it unaccountably fell off my list entirely last time). I'm not a huge fan of Malick in general, but this one works beautifully for me.

The Winslow Boy - Very hard to explain just how perfectly realised this adaptation seems to me, and people seem to be wholeheartedly with it or violently against. Try your luck.

Safe - I suppose we're already beyond the mainstream with this choice, which is itself a pretty sad comment on the state of American filmmaking in the 90s! But wasn't Moore nominated for an Oscar? If so, that invalidates my statement above!

Buffalo 66 - Same thing, I guess. A great seventies film adrift in the wrong decade. Saw it with no baggage or foreknowledge (for me, Gallo was "that guy from Nenette et Boni"), luminous on the big screen and loved every second.

Heat - One of those rare films that represent, for me, a solid level of achievement for mainstream cinema that's pathetically rare nowadays. It's hardly perfect, but it makes you wonder why more Hollywood films with the same generic elements can't be this good.

Malcolm X - Again, a big subject tackled with far more intelligence and dedication than we're used to seeing, but no more than should be the norm for such a film. Denzel Washington seems to be the only modern actor who's a genuine star in the classical sense, and he's great here.

All of these are potential listmakers for me. There are about a half-dozen others floating around the shortlist, but I honestly don't think they'll make it. My current 'door-bitch' policy is that a film has to be better that Through the Olive Trees - which won't make the cut behind three other Kiarostamis - to warrant consideration.

[swo17]

So I take it when you say something like "Goodfellas I always enjoy and admire, but again, it's nowhere near my list," this is due less to some fault in the film, and more to the fact that you have seen 1000 times more movies than the rest of us.

Joking aside, I do genuinely appreciate all of your recommendations (and am finding many new favorites as a result). I am trying desperately to zedz up my list by exploring the works of many of the directors you mention. But I guess I'm not quite where you are yet, and I can't even fathom what radical changes would have to be made to the very structure of my DNA in order for me to find that there are 50 films that I love more than Fargo (let alone from just one decade). But that's just me I guess.

[Cronenfly]

You're not alone, swo; zedz to me is the gold-standard of filmic knowledge and appreciation to which I'll always be aspiring to but will likely never reach. However, as long as I'm seeing a few more off-the-beaten path movies than I otherwise would, I consider the spirit of zedz's postings justified; that is, to not just settle for the movies I'm comfortable with, but to pursue the whole breadth of cinema past and present that's so far eluded my grasp. Admittedly, I may not like all of what I see, but in a number of cases (cf. Yang's body of work) I've been encouraged to seek out films that I connect to more deeply than those I've previously encountered and held up as favourites. And that's the great thing about zedz's posts: there's no hint of elitism, but rather a desire to help further disseminate the works of filmmakers who are underrepresented due to their country of origin, market factors, arthouse biases, or any other number of reasons. There are of course more worthwhile films beyond even zedz's scope of knowledge, but that's the great thing about cinephilia (and, by extension, list projects like this, which give one particular reason to seek more of them out): there is no bottom to the well, which is both an overwhelming and (even more so, to me) invigorating thought.

And now, so as not to be accused of gushing over zedz too much: I sincerely wish that Moore had been nominated for an Oscar for Safe, but unfortunately she was not.

[domino harvey]

As anyone who's had the pleasure of carrying on a conversation with the man, the legend off-board or on can attest, zedz really is one of the very best contributors to the forum. But I think swo's point it well-taken though, as zedz would probably be the first to admit that his current tastes swerve towards more experimental or challenging works. In ten years, maybe he'll be back to espousing the virtues of his new number one lock, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective [-o<

[colinr0380]

Absolutely agree on Safe - I'm very far behind on Todd Haynes (I still have not got around to seeing Far From Heaven yet, though I've got that and I'm Not There sitting patiently in my 'to watch' pile!), but I have seen this one. I particularly liked the small detail of one of the other members of the retreat being played by Jessica Harper. If anyone could sympathise with the feeling of psychologically tormented by your surroundings I guess it would be her after experiencing those sets from Suspiria and Phantom of the Paradise!

[zedz]

But I think swo's point it well-taken though, as zedz would probably be the first to admit that his current tastes swerve towards more experimental or challenging works. In ten years, maybe he'll be back to espousing the virtues of his new number one lock, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective [-o<

I knew I forgot one!

Actually, it's more a case of being slightly closer to senility and death than many here. I was fully film-mad all through the 90s (and half the 80s), so I saw a lot of this stuff in the small window of opportunity that it was passing through the festival circuit on its way to comparative oblivion. The American stuff from the time has all, by and large, remained in circulation ever since. It's ridiculous that much of the best filmmaking of the previous decade is all but impossible to see.

There are of course more worthwhile films beyond even zedz's scope of knowledge, but that's the great thing about cinephilia (and, by extension, list projects like this, which give one particular reason to seek more of them out): there is no bottom to the well, which is both an overwhelming and (even more so, to me) invigorating thought.

This is an absolutely crucial point, and it's one of the reasons why I hate gripes about the 'death of cinema' or (as was circulating on this board a couple of years back) complaints that Criterion had 'run out of' great films to release with all the obvious Fellinis and Bergmans spoken for. Cinema's not a bottomless well, but it might as well be given the rate any of us can sensibly process it, and there's so much randomness and capriciousness in the international distribution of films that we can never be confident that an undiscovered master hasn't been toiling away in obscurity for twenty years in Eastern Europe or India. It wasn't inevitable that Iranian cinema was 'discovered' in the late 80s: all those masterpieces could still be sitting in a warehouse awaiting rediscovery. Others probably still are.

[Binker]

You guys have me baffled with the A Midnight Clear love. I remember it as an utter disaster at the most basic levels of performance and plot coherence.

[Michael]

My hardcore faves of 1990s:

Chungking Express (now #1 ruler)
Beau Travail
Safe
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
All About My Mother
Vive l'amour
Happy Together
My Own Private Idaho
Wild Reeds
Showgirls
Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train
Time Regained

[GringoTex]

I've settled on my 1990s swapsies: Bogdanovich's The Thing Called Love or Texasville. Texasville will be placing higher on my list, but I'm guessing more have seen it than The Thing Called Love. If you watch one of mine, I'll watch one of yours.

Texasville is the most authentic portrait of rural Texas life I've seen (I was raised on a ranch about 100 miles from Archer City) and I prefer it to The Last Picture Show because it trades in the latter's cold nostalgia dream for a hot, bitter, trapped-in-time reality.

The Thing Called Love shouldn't work at all- a silly, sappy Nashville love letter featuring a music contest.
But the characterizations are natural and effortless a la Renoir and it shows Sandra Bullock actually acted before she became a star.

[Binker]

Internal Affairs: How can this movie possibly be this good? It's got all those 80s excesses (listen to the music cue when Gere and Garcia first meet) which normally push me towards appreciating a movie "as an 80s film" but its such superbly written material, handled with such delicacy and intelligence that I think I can say with no qualifications that this is one of the best movies I've ever seen. To my top ten with a bullet. There isn't a performance in the film that isn't outstanding. I've never seen Gere better... he was born to play this role, it's everything the Gere persona has always been, cocky, sneering, manipulative, womanizing, and utterly capable, but never written quite like this. Just a brilliant performance.

And Garcia, holy fuck, who knew he had it in him? Another perfect mesh of performer and material. I don't know if I've ever seen such a quintessentially Latino character played with such subtlety and such depth in a Hollywood film.

[Binker]

You're quite right to single out the performances of Williams and Dunst-- Williams is such a gifted comedic actress here and especially in my 00s list #1 pick, the Baxter, that it's a shame she doesn't do comedy more often. And surely this is Dunst's best performance? This is getting into subjective reactions to comedy, but there are moments that never fail to make laugh no matter how many times I watch them, like Williams and Dunst playing with the dog for the first time, capping with Dunst's brilliant line reading of "Yeah" after Williams makes her inane plea for world peace.

Very true, and I firmly believe there's no way to appreciate this film without having a profound admiration for what Williams and Dunst are able to do. This type of ditzy girl material has been absolutely done to death... but these two actresses effortlessly make it seem like you're watching it for the first time. Williams is just fascinating, with all those nervous little face scrunches, half sighs, quiet "yays!", feet shuffling, lip biting, nose wiggles, glasses adjustments... And Dunst has made a career out of playing this character (bubbly, oversexed, popular girl) with varying levels of dramatic pretensions, but I absolutely agree this is the best shes ever been, with all the constraints of realism and normality stripped away, she shows an ability to explode on the screen with personality and energy. It's nearly impossible to talk about the film without simply pointing out hilarious deliveries (one comes after Nixon tells the girls "I think we know what we're doing", Williams response "Uhuh, uhuh, uhuhhhh, I guess so"... there's another at the end of the same scene, when Fleming just keeps his camera on Williams face and lets us watch her react to Nixon) , and this is a testament to not just the girls, but, as you pointed out, the entire cast (with the exception of Gesteyer, whose career is utterly baffling in the fact that she has one). Referential material like this is so easy to make smart and so difficult to make funny... That de Gaulle joke lands because the actor playing Kissinger is note perfect.

While I agree that the actresses (and indeed, the entire supporting cast as well) put in great work here, I feel special consideration needs to be given to the script, which gives these girls intricately empty dialog that rarely ceases to be funny (and indeed might become funnier with every subsequent reviewing of the film). In a lesser film, these girls wouldn't be treated with such a novel humanist touch-- the picture has some laughs at their expense, but ultimately Fleming is obviously quite taken with his characters. Presumably this affection is due in some part to the not so subtle symbolic role they play, but still, consider how difficult a task this was to pull off. The characters aren't particularly bright, sure, but they possess such a gleeful innocence that the film never acts superior to its subjects. How many satires can say that?

This is right on, and I think it speaks to why, despite there being no effort to shy away from caricature on the part of the girls, the two characters come off as so much more. Look at the scene where Williams remarks she doesn't understand the title of that porno movie, Dunst whispers an explanation in her, and they both run to the window and scream... It's such a delightful moment, and perfectly indicative of what I said about the film being made by its execution. It's a nothing moment turned brilliant by the care and delicacy with which Fleming approaches the girls.

[zedz]

This weekend’s assault on the North Face of Mount Kevyip was an all-90s affair. Here are the holiday snapshots

THE SUSPENDED STEP OF THE STORK

I’ll go into more detail in the Angelopoulos thread, but suffice to say that I reckon this is the 90s Angelopoulos to see. The issues I have with Ulysses’ Gaze and Eternity and a Day are largely absent here, and there are some truly magnificent set pieces.

IN THAT COUNTRY

Not a case of kevyip relief, but a long overdue revisiting of a favourite film after ten years. The format was a very dodgy screener VHS – some unwelcome pre-DVD nostalgia, there – but the film’s strengths shone through.

The film is a robust chronicle of the goings-on in a remote Russian village, and ambles around through a series of loosely interrelated vignettes. It has the relaxed pace and restrained absurdism of several Czech New Wave films (e.g. Intimate Lighting, Capricious Summer), but Bobrova has a covert sharpness of her own. The film begins in winter and concludes in spring, and the first half of the film uses the snowy landscape to create a beautiful, austere black-and-white-in-colour look. Colour starts to creep in in the second half of the film, but more in details of clothing and vegetation than in rich swathes, and the brightening of the palette doesn’t signal anything so simplistic as a change for the better. If anything, the characters’ lives just become more grim and fraught.

The narrative looseness is deceptive, and Bobrova allows the straitened circumstances of life in the village to translate into thematic unities. Each scene represents a variation on a few central ideas: birth, marriage, death, animals, alcohol. The threat of alcohol underpins many of the sequences: the film is uncommonly pitiless about the social cost of alcoholism - no tipsy romanticism here.

The discrete vignettes have an interesting permeability, and Bobrova very subtly ties them together into a community portrait. Early in the film, there’s a telling shot in which the sound of an argument in an adjacent room accompanies a slow zoom in on Katya, secretary to the village chief, working at her desk, which then continues past Katya to close in on a farmworker doing his rounds in the wintry wastes through the window. It’s an elegant way of balancing three different scenes on three different scales.

That Kubrickian zoom is one of Bobrova’s signature techniques in this film (I’m continuing my tortuous exploration of the uses and abuses of the zoom lens whether you like it or not!). The slowness of Bobrova’s zooms, like those of Kubrick in Barry Lyndon, allows them to read less as the purely optical isolation of a particular detail in a tableau but more as an impassive, almost robotic journey through space. In this film, it at times suggests empirical, distanced observation, but also serves to connect different, foreground and background, bubbles of life, suggesting that, if you let your attention drift deeper into any given shot, you’ll find another story carrying on.

Some of the stories we follow are: the Sisyphean blustering of village head Arseny, trying to control his community by doling out and withholding favours; the domestic subjugation of cowherd Nikolai, who has been offered a state-paid trip to a sanatorium (in one painful scene, his obviously prompted child asks him what will happen on the trip: “will you get drunk and hit by a train?”); Raisa’s search for a husband, with mail-order convict Konstantin seeming a much better bet than any of the broken-down locals.

It’s only towards the end of the film that we realise that the film’s perambulations have quietly been leading up to a confrontation between the film’s most vulnerable character and its most dangerous one, and a sense of dread starts to cloud the final section of the film.

And then all of a sudden it’s over, with Bobrova revealing her devious brilliance in a single off-hand shot that resolves the entire film exquisitely. I’m not going to give much away about this grace-note scene, but it simultaneously resolves the film’s central narrative conflict, retrospectively explains the film’s most mysterious shot (an extremely brief insert that punctuated Bobrova’s most hypnotic slow zoom about an hour earlier), and reveals both who the film’s real hero has been all along and the unconventional nature of the character's heroism. It’s breathtaking and extremely moving, an incredibly satisfying ending.

LIVING ON THE RIVER AGANO

An interesting companion piece to Bobrova’s film, being another portrait of marginal lives in an isolated area, with many of the same concerns serving similar structural purposes. Sato Makoto’s film focusses on a loose agglomeration of villagers, with whom the filmmakers lived for three years, and it’s warm and fascinating.

Where alcoholism was the dark, dirty secret of In That Country, here it’s mercury poisoning, with the common thread uniting the various vignettes being Minamata disease. Sato has huge shoes to fill, as this particuklar ecological scandal was the subject of one of the most important documentaries of the Japanese New Wave, Tsuchimoto Noriaki’s Minamata: The Victims and Their World, and he wisely takes an oblique approach to the issue. The English version of the film offers a few explanatory intertitles (seemingly absent from the Japanese version – I suppose the whole depressing story, with government and industry conspiring to shirk as much responsibility as possible, can be taken as read over there), but generally presents the fact of the poisoning as just another component in these people’s lives.

The film is also very interesting in terms of the filmmaker / subject relationship. The filmmakers are offscreen, but freely acknowledged, and their involvement in the project extended to helping their aged and disabled subjects with the rice harvest, for example, so there’s a real sense of disruption when the project finishes.

I also watched Sato’s artier, more impressionistic ‘return’ documentary Memories of Agano, which I might have liked even more, although it’s inevitably a footnote to the earlier work.

REGARDE LA MER

Francois Ozon’s always struck me as a glib, vaguely annoying filmmaker, though my encounters with his features have been haphazard, so I was hoping that looking at his well-regarded early shorts might explain his appeal.

No dice. What I see here is a flashy and accomplished manifestation of many of the worst characteristics of short filmmaking of the last 20 years (the ‘calling card’ era, if you will). This very long short, or very short feature, is so gimmicky and sensationalistic I became quite disengaged from the stick-figure characters before the halfway mark, so the impact of the film became purely mechanistic and generic.

For all Ozon’s tiresome “me so edgy” posing, the film is ultimately crushingly conservative, with the heroine gleefully punished for her desires. Ozon’s other films of the period, also on the BFI disc, all had the same problem of empty modishness, though some didn’t even have the modicum of visual interest of this film to recommend them.

FACE VALUE

A sprawling, impressionistic documentary by Johan Van Der Keuken that jumps all over Europe, juxtaposing interview footage – generally not synchronised with the close-ups of the people whose voices we hear – and reportage that covers a wide range of experiences: deaf kids, Algerian migrants, polo snobs, people at a market, a disabled rock band that sounds like the Velvet Underground, childbirth.

Some of the juxtapositions are pointed – a scary LePen rally (is there any other kind?) with a visit to the Jewish cemetery in Prague – but most often the film has a free-associating drift that never dissolves into indifference because the individual components are generally compelling.

I can see in Van Der Keuken’s curiosity and observational flair the antecedent of the great Dutch documentarist Heddy Honigmann (Crazy, Forever, The Underground Orchestra), though Honigmann is probably an even better listener, and she can get deep into her subject’s lives with extraordinary directness and sensitivity. Van Der Keulen can also be flashier, and Face Value includes sections of rapid, disjunctive montage and audio layering.

[Binker]

2) Any feature film, documentary, experimental film, short film, music video, TV miniseries, TV movie or TV special released in the 1990s is eligible.
3) Television series or seasons / episodes of television series are not eligible.

I wonder if someone might expand on the reasoning behind this or maybe link me to where the discussion took place, if the page is still around. I can find the cutoff point between features, experimentals, shorts, and TV movies, and all the rest of them, but if music videos, TV miniseries, and TV specials are eligible, it seems utterly arbitrary to exclude all regular television. The list is obviously open to all forms of filmmaking, and the only reasonable defense I can think of for excluding TV is length, but even that doesn't hold up if miniseries are allowed.

[domino harvey]

It seems pretty arbitrary to me as well. I mean, there are certainly great shows from this decade and the next that could be said to resemble a long-form miniseries more than a traditional episodic television series model and it's a shame to not be able to include some of these alongside the best film work of the decade.

[Perkins Cobb]

Because television is a totally different medium: different commercial vs. artistic considerations, financial limitations, technical realities, etc., etc. I'd make the argument for excluding TV movies & specials rather than waving in episodic.

And that's not snobbery -- I'd probably rank Picket Fences over any American feature film from the 90s -- but they're apples and oranges.

[ptatler]

It seems pretty arbitrary to me as well. I mean, there are certainly great shows from this decade and the next that could be said to resemble a long-form miniseries more than a traditional episodic television series model and it's a shame to not be able to include some of these alongside the best film work of the decade.

Especially stuff with a clear arc, like TWIN PEAKS or HOMICIDE. Is THE KINGDOM eligible?

[souvenir]

A television series has no defined end point, for one thing. It's indefinite and subject to outside concerns which would never impact a film, music video or even a miniseries. I don't think changing rules now, after we've done it one way for literally a few years, would be a good idea. Make an independent list of television shows if you're really itching to share how much you really love that one program that only aired a few episodes and was totally misunderstood by mainstream audiences.

[domino harvey]

A television series has no defined end point, for one thing.

Most documentaries don't begin shooting with a defined stopping point either, so I guess we should disqualify those as well.

[souvenir]

A television series has no defined end point, for one thing.

Most documentaries don't begin shooting with a defined stopping point either, so I guess we should disqualify those as well.

You can't believe it's the same thing, though. A documentary is self-contained and, by the time it's released, it does have an end. The qualifier that they "don't begin shooting with" is hardly unimportant. Fiction features can be filmed over a great period of time too. The difference between television shows and films, videos, etc. is that the former relies on external factors far more (and in a different way) than something that's entirely finished before it's made publicly available.