OK house clearing first. Votes for Snapper, Drugstore Cowboy, Cinema Paradiso, Mystery Train, Spoorloos, Hotaru no Haka, Ripley, Das Boot, Bear, Forgotten Silver, And The Band Played On and Les Enfants de la cité perdue (TV Movies, wrong decade etc.) where thrown out, None of them got near to the 250 mark anyway.

714 films nominated, 407 with more than one vote. Same format as we are used to for individual films starting at 200. This will probably take me about a month I'd reckon.

Virgin Suicides did not make the top 250, it's votes will be taken forward to next time and the persons who voted for it will not be able to vote again for it. Also they must submit a 2000- list for those points to be carried forward. Ghost Dog TWOTS will be counted in this decade.

#200 Awakenings (1990)
Penny Marshall
Running time - 121 mins
Country of origin USA
Genre Drama
Original language English

Writing credits
Oliver Sacks, Steven Zaillian

Cast
Robert De Niro ... Leonard Lowe
Robin Williams ... Dr. Malcolm Sayer
Julie Kavner ... Eleanor Costello
Ruth Nelson ... Mrs. Lowe
John Heard ... Dr. Kaufman

Academy Awards
Nominated: Best Actor in a Leading Role (Robert De Niro), Best Picture, Best Writing - Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium

Other awards
Nominated: Golden Globes - Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama (Robin Williams)

BY ROGER EBERT / December 20, 1990

We do not know what we see when we look at Leonard. We think we see a human vegetable, a peculiar man who has been frozen in the same position for 30 years, who neither moves nor speaks. What goes on inside his mind? Is he thinking in there? Of course not, a neurologist says in Penny Marshall's new film "Awakenings." Why not? "Because the implications of that would be unthinkable." Ah, but the expert is wrong, and inside the immobile shell of his body, Leonard is still there. Still waiting.

Leonard is one of the patients in the "garden," a ward of a Bronx mental hospital that is so named by the staff because the patients are there simply to be fed and watered. It appears that nothing can be done for them. They were victims of the great "sleeping sickness" epidemic of the 1920s, and after a period of apparent recovery they regressed to their current states. It is 1969. They have many different symptoms, but essentially they all share the same problem: They cannot make their bodies do what their minds desire. Sometimes that blockage is manifested through bizarre physical behavior, sometimes through apparent paralysis.

One day a new doctor comes to work in the hospital. He has no experience in working with patients; indeed, his last project involved earthworms. Like those who have gone before him, he has no particular hope for these ghostly patients, who are there and yet not there. He talks without hope to one of the women, who looks blankly back at him, her head and body frozen. But then he turns away, and when he turns back she has changed her position -- apparently trying to catch her eyeglasses as they fell. He tries an experiment. He holds her glasses in front of her, and then drops them. Her hand flashes out quickly and catches them.

Yet this woman cannot move through her own will. He tries another experiment, throwing a ball at one of the patients. She catches it. "She is borrowing the will of the ball," the doctor speculates. His colleagues will not listen to this theory, which sounds suspiciously metaphysical, but he thinks he's onto something. What if these patients are not actually "frozen" at all, but victims of a stage of Parkinson's Disease so advanced that their motor impulses are cancelling each other out--what if they cannot move because all of their muscles are trying to move at the same time, and they are powerless to choose one impulse over the other? Then the falling glasses or the tossed ball might be breaking the deadlock!

This is the great discovery in the opening scenes of "Awakenings," preparing the way for sequences of enormous joy and heartbreak, as the patients are "awakened" to a personal freedom they had lost all hope of ever again experiencing -- only to find that their liberation comes with its own cruel set of conditions. The film, directed with intelligence and heart by Penny Marshall, is based on a famous 1972 book by Oliver Sacks, the British-born New York neurologist whose (ital) The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (unital) is a classic of medical literature. These were his patients, and the doctor in the film, named Malcolm Sayer and played by Robin Williams, is based on him.

What he discovered in the summer of 1969 was that L-DOPA, a new drug for the treatment of Parkinson's Disease, might in massive doses break the deadlock that had frozen his patients into a space-time lock for endless years. The film follows some 15 of those patients, particularly Leonard, who is played by Robert De Niro in a virtuoso performance. Because this movie is not a tearjerker but an intelligent examination of a bizarre human condition, it's up to De Niro to make Leonard not an object of sympathy, but a person who helps us wonder about our own tenuous grasp on the world around us.

The patients depicted in this film have suffered a fate more horrible than the one in Poe's famous story about premature burial. If we were locked in a coffin while still alive, at least we would soon suffocate. But to be locked inside a body that cannot move or speak -- to look out mutely as even our loved ones talk about us as if we were an uncomprehending piece of furniture! It is this fate that is lifted, that summer of 1969, when the doctor gives the experimental new drug to his patients, and in a miraculous rebirth their bodies thaw and they begin to move and talk once again, some of them after 30 years of self-captivity.

The movie follows Leonard through the stages of his rebirth. He was (as we saw in a prologue) a bright, likeable kid, until the disease took its toll. He has been on hold for three decades. Now, in his late 1940s, he is filled with wonder and gratitude to be able to move around freely and express himself. He cooperates with the doctors studying his case. And he finds himself attracted to a the daughter (Penelope Ann Miller) of another patient. Love and lust stir within him for the first time.

Dr. Sayer, played by Williams, is at the center of almost every scene, and his personality becomes one of the touchstones of the movie. He is shut off, too: by shyness and inexperience, and even the way he holds his arms, close to his sides, shows a man wary of contact. He really was happier working with those earthworms. This is one of Robin Williams' best performances, pure and uncluttered, without the ebullient distractions he sometimes adds -- the schtick where none is called for. He is a lovable man here, who experiences the extraordinary professional joy of seeing chronic, hopeless patients once again sing and dance and greet their loved ones.

But it is not as simple as that, not after the first weeks. The disease is not an open-and-shut case. And as the movie unfolds, we are invited to meditate on the strangeness and wonder of the human personality. Who are we, anyway? How much of the self we treasure so much is simply a matter of good luck, of being spared in a minefield of neurological chance? If one has no hope, which is better: To remain hopeless, or to be given hope and then lose it again? Oliver Sacks' original book, which has been reissued, is as much a work of philosophy as of medicine. After seeing "Awakenings," I read it, to know more about what happened in that Bronx hospital. What both the movie and the book convey is the immense courage of the patients and the profound experience of their doctors, as in a small way they reexperienced what it means to be born, to open your eyes and discover to your astonishment that "you" are alive.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.4/10 (18,361 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - N/A

Ranked highest by Asher Ford (#7)

#199 Much Ado About Nothing (1993)
Kenneth Branagh
Running time - 111 mins
Country of origin USA / UK
Genre Comedy / Romance
Original language English

Writing credits
Kenneth Branagh, William Shakespeare

Cast
Kenneth Branagh ... Benedick
Emma Thompson ... Beatrice
Richard Briers ... Signor Leonato
Keanu Reeves ... Don John
Kate Beckinsale ... Hero

Other awards
Nominated: BAFTA’s - Best Costume Design Cannes Film Festival - Golden Palm, Golden Globes - Best Motion Picture - Comedy/Musical Razzie Awards Worst Supporting Actor (Keanu Reeves)

BY ROGER EBERT / May 21, 1993

Sunshine and laughter, and merrymakers on a hillside sprinkled with flowers. In the opening scene of "Much Ado About Nothing," Kenneth Branagh insists on the tone the movie will take: These are healthy, joyful young people whose high spirits will survive anything, even the dark double-crosses of Shakespeare's plot.

The story involves two sets of lovers. The first, Claudio and Hero, are destined to be almost torn apart by the treachery of others. The second, Benedick and Beatrice, are almost kept apart by the treachery of their own hearts. The plot is driven by the kinds of misunderstandings, deceptions and cruel jokes that work only in stage comedy, or perhaps in P. G. Wodehouse, where people are always lurking in the shrubbery, eavesdropping on crucial conversations.

Branagh is nothing if not a film director of high spirits and great energy. His "Henry V" was a Shakespeare history filled with patriotism and poetry. His "Dead Again" hurtled headlong into the juiciness of the murder-and-reincarnation genre. His "Peter's Friends" was a reunion of old university chums whose youthful quirks had matured into full-blown eccentricities, for good or ill. That last film, oddly enough, has a tone somewhat in common with "Much Ado About Nothing." The play, set in Sicily and shot in Tuscany, involves a few crucial days in the lives of the followers of Don Pedro (Denzel Washington), Prince of Arragon, who returns victorious from battle with his half-brother Don John (Keanu Reeves). They are now apparently on speaking terms, but Don John, wearing a wicked black beard, mopes about the edges of the screen, casting dark looks upon the merrymakers.

Claudio (Robert Sean Leonard), Don Pedro's follower, casts eyes on the beautiful Hero (Kate Beckinsale) and is immediately possessed by love. Her eyes reveal that she reciprocates. Meanwhile, the older Benedick (Branagh) and Beatrice (Emma Thompson) feel a powerful attraction, too, but it is expressed through barbed insults and verbal sparring. Sometimes when people are frightened by the love they feel, it comes out through mock hostility.

The film's action is a progression through a series of picnics, communal bathing, dinners, banquets, dances and courtships.

Branagh sets the pace just this side of a Marx Brothers movie. While Benedick and Beatrice do their best to assure that they will never become a couple, the scheming Don John plots to destroy the love that has bloomed for Claudio and Hero. His evil plan involves the use of impostors to convince Claudio that Hero is a wanton woman, unfaithful to him with any man who comes to hand.

A play like "Much Ado About Nothing" is all about style. I doubt if Shakespeare's audiences at the Globe took it any more seriously than we do. It is farce and mime and wisecracks, and dastardly melodrama which all comes right in the end, of course, because this is a Comedy. The key to the film's success is in the acting, especially in the sparks that fly between Branagh and Thompson as their characters aim their insults so lovingly that we realize, sooner than they do, how much they would miss their verbal duets.

Of the others, the actor who tries the hardest, to uncertain effect, is Michael Keaton, as Dogberry, the oafish constable. One of Shakespeare's characters made of low comedy and burlesque, Dogberry here becomes a recycled grotesque modeled on Keaton's performance in "Beetlejuice." Does the approach work? Probably not as Shakespeare, because it seems to come from another universe than the one inhabited by the other characters in the play. But viewed by itself - and Dogberry is after all a self-contained character - it's quite a job of work, and Keaton gets points just for trying so hard.

Any modern film of Shakespeare must deal with the fact that many people in the audience will be unfamiliar with the play, and perhaps even with the playwright. Branagh deals with this fact by making "Much Ado" into a film that reinvents the story; this is not a film "of" a Shakespeare play, but a film that begins with the same materials and the wonderful language and finds its own reality. It is cheerful from beginning to end (since we can hardly take the moments of doom and despair seriously). It is entirely appropriate that it has been released in the springtime.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.4/10 (16,851 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - N/A

Ranked highest by SNC (#9)

#198 Pi (1998)
Darren Aronofsky
Running time - 84 mins
Country of origin USA
Genre Thriller / Sci-Fi
Original language English / Hebrew

Writing credits
Darren Aronofsky, Sean Gullette, Eric Watson

Cast
Sean Gullette ... Maximillian Cohen
Mark Margolis ... Sol Robeson
Ben Shenkman ... Lenny Meyer
Pamela Hart ... Marcy Dawson
Stephen Pearlman ... Rabbi Cohen

Other awards
Won: Sundance Film Festival -Directing Award Dramatic
Nominated: Sundance Film Festival -Grand Jury Prize Dramatic

BY ROGER EBERT / July 24, 1998

The film ``Pi'' is a study in madness and its partner, genius. A tortured, driven man believes (1) that mathematics is the language of the universe, (2) nature can be expressed in numbers, and (3) there are patterns everywhere in nature. If he can find the patterns, if he can find the key to the chaos, then he can predict anything--the stock market, for example. If the man is right, the mystery of existence is unlocked. If he is wrong, the inside of his brain begins to resemble a jammed stock ticker.

The movie, written and directed by Darren Aronofsky, is a study in mental obsession. His hero, named Maximillian Cohen, lives barricaded behind a triple-locked door, in a room filled with high-powered, customized computer equipment. He wants nothing to do with anybody. He writes programs, tests them, looks for the pattern, gets a 216-digit bug, stomps on his chips in a rage, and then begins to wonder about that bug. Exactly 216 digits. There is a theory among some Jewish scholars, he learns, that the name of God has 216 letters.

The movie is shot in rough, high-contrast black and white. Max, played by Sean Gullette, is balding, restless, paranoid and brilliant. He has debilitating headaches and nosebleeds. Symptoms of high blood pressure--or of the mental torment he's putting himself through. He's suspicious of everyone. The friendly Indian woman next door puts food by his door. He avoids her. He trusts only his old teacher, Sol (Mark Margolis). They play Go, a game deeper than chess, and Sol tells him to stop with the key to the universe business, already. He warns that he's spinning away from science and toward numerology.

Not everybody thinks so. His phone rings with the entreaties of Marcy (Pamela Hart), who works for a high-powered Wall Street analysis firm. They want to hire him as a consultant. They think he's onto something. He has predicted some prices correctly. At the deli, he runs into a Hasidic Jew named Lenny (Ben Shenkman), who seems casual and friendly but has a hidden mission: His group believes the Torah may be a code sent from God and may contain God's name.

Of course if one finds the mathematical key to everything, that would include God, stock prices, the weather, history, the future, baseball scores and the response to all moves in Go. That assumes there is a key. When you're looking for something that doesn't exist, it makes you crazier the closer you get to it.

The seductive thing about Aronofsky's film is that it is halfway plausible in terms of modern physics and math. What was numerology a century ago now has now been simplified into a very, very vast problem. Chaos theory looks for patterns where common sense says there are none. A computer might be able to give you the answer to anything, if (1) it is powerful enough, and (2) it has all the data. Of course, you might need a computer the size of the universe and containing everything in it, but we're talking theory here.

``Pi'' is a thriller. I am not very thrilled these days by whether the bad guys will get shot or the chase scene will end one way instead of another. You have to make a movie like that pretty skillfully before I care. But I am thrilled when a man risks his mind in the pursuit of a dangerous obsession. Max is out on a limb. There are hungry people circling him. He may be on to something. They want it, too. For both the stock market people and the Hasidic cabal, Max's formula represents all they believe in and everything they care about.

And then there is a level at which Max may simply be insane, or physically ill. There are people who work out complicated theories involving long, impenetrable columns of numbers. Newspapers get envelopes filled with their proofs every day. And other people who sit in their rooms, wrapping themselves in the webs of chess or numbers theory, addicted to their fixes. And game players, gamblers, horseplayers--people bewitched by the mirage of a system.

The beautiful thing about mathematics is that you can't prove it except by its own terms. There's no way to put some math in a test tube and see if it turns purple or heats up. It sits there smugly in its own perfect cocoon, letting people like Max find anything he wants in it--or to think that he has.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.5/10 (33,183 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - 145

Ranked highest by Brugel (#9)

#197 Rudy (1993)
David Anspaugh
Running time - 116 mins
Country of origin USA
Genre Biography / Drama / Sport
Original language English / Spanish

Writing credits
Angelo Pizzo

Cast
Sean Astin ... Daniel E. 'Rudy' Ruettiger
Jon Favreau ... D-Bob
Ned Beatty ... Daniel Ruettiger
Greta Lind ... Mary
Scott Benjaminson ... Frank Ruettiger

BY ROGER EBERT / October 13, 1993

Look at you. You're 5-foot-nothin' and you weigh a hundred and nothin', and with hardly a speck of athletic ability.

So says Fortune, a groundskeeper at the Notre Dame stadium, to Daniel "Rudy" Ruettiger Jr., whose dream is to play for the Fighting Irish. Rudy is not insane. He doesn't expect to start. It would fulfill his lifetime dream simply to wear the uniform and get on the field for one play during the regular season, and get his name in the tiniest print in the school archives.

Almost everyone except Fortune thinks his dream is foolish.

Rudy comes from a working-class family in Joliet, where his father (Ned Beatty) joins his family, his teachers, his neighbors and just about everybody else in assuring him that he lacks not only the brawn but also the brains to make it into a top school like Notre Dame.

But Rudy persists. And although his story reads, in outline, like an anthology of cliches from countless old rags-to-riches sports movies, "Rudy" persists, too. It has a freshness and an earnestness that gets us involved, and by the end of the film we accept Rudy's dream as more than simply sports sentiment. It's a small but powerful illustration of the human spirit.

The movie was directed by David Anspaugh, who directed another great Indiana sports movie, "Hoosiers," in 1986. Both films show an attention to detail, and a preference for close observation of the characters rather than sweeping sports sentiment. In "Rudy," Anspaugh finds a serious, affecting performance by Sean Astin, the erstwhile teen idol, as a quiet, determined kid who knows he doesn't have all the brains in the world, but is determined to do the best he can with the hand he was dealt.

To start with, he can't get into Notre Dame. He doesn't have the grades. But he's accepted across the street at Holy Cross, where an understanding priest (the benevolent Robert Prosky) offers advice and encouragement. Finally Rudy is accepted by Notre Dame, one of the few remaining big football schools that still has tryouts for "walk-ons" - kids without starring high school careers or athletic scholarships.

It's the mid-1970s. The Notre Dame coach is Ara Parseghian (Jason Miller). He doesn't know what to make of this squirt who is happy to play on a practice team and offer his body up week after week so that the big Irish linemen can batter and bruise him on their way to a Saturday victory. Rudy isn't really even good enough to be the lowliest sub, but he has great heart (something that is observed perhaps a little too often in the dialogue).

The movie is not cluttered up with extraneous subplots. A hometown girlfriend (Lili Taylor) is left behind, and for four years Rudy turns into a grind, studying nonstop to make his grades, and sometimes sleeping on a cot in the groundskeeper's room because he doesn't have money for rent. His father continues to think he's crazy. But Rudy shows him.

Underdog movies are a durable genre and never go out of style. They're fairly predictable, in the sense that few movie underdogs ever lose in the big last scene. The notion is enormously appealing, however, because everyone can identify in one way or another.

In "Rudy," Astin's performance is so self-effacing, so focused and low-key, that we lose sight of the underdog formula and begin to focus on this dogged kid who won't quit. And the last big scene is an emotional powerhouse, just the way it's supposed to be.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.2/10 (10,927 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by Velocity

#196 In The Company of Men (1997)
Neil LaBute
Running time - 97 mins
Country of origin Canada / USA
Genre Comedy
Original language English

Writing credits
Neil LaBute

Cast
Aaron Eckhart ... Chad
Stacy Edwards ... Christine
Matt Malloy ... Howard
Emily Cline ... Suzanne
Jason Dixie ... Intern

Other awards
Nominated: Sundance Film Festival - Grand Jury Prize (Dramatic)

BY ROGER EBERT / August 15, 1997

Now here is true evil: Cold, unblinking, reptilian. The character Chad in ``In the Company of Men'' makes the terrorists of the summer thrillers look like boys throwing mud-pies. And for every Chad there is a Howard, a weaker man, ready to go along, lacking the courage to disagree and half intoxicated by the stronger will of the other man. People like this are not so uncommon. Look around you.

The movie takes place in the familiar habitats of the modern corporate male: Hotel corridors, airport ``courtesy lounges,'' corporate cubicles. The men's room is an invaluable refuge for private conversations. We never find out what the corporation makes, but what does it matter? Modern business administration techniques have made the corporate environment so interchangeable that an executive from Pepsi, say, can transfer seamlessly to Apple and apply the same ``management philosophy'' without missing a beat.

Chad (Aaron Eckhart) and Howard (Matt Malloy) have been assigned for six weeks to a regional office of their company. Waiting for their flight, they talk. Chad is unhappy and angry because he's been dumped by his girlfriend (``The whole fade-out thing''). He proposes a plan: ``Say we were to find some girl vulnerable as hell ... '' In their new location, they'll select a young woman who doesn't look like she has much of a social life. They'll both shower her with attention--flowers, dinner dates--until she's dizzy, and then, ``out comes the rug, both of us dropping her!'' Chad explains this plan with the blinkered, formal language of a man whose recreational reading consists of best-selling primers on excellence and wealth. ``Life is for the taking--is it not?'' he asks. And, ``Is that not ideal? To restore a little dignity to our lives?'' He hammers his plan home in the airport men's room, while Howard, invisible behind a cubicle door, says he guesses he agrees.

The ``girl'' they choose for their target turns out to be deaf--a bonus. Her name is Christine (Stacy Edwards). She is pleasant, pretty, articulate; it is easy to understand everything she says, but Chad is cruel as he describes her to Howard: ``She's got one of those voices like Flipper. You should hear her going at it, working to put the simplest sounds together.'' Howard makes a specialty of verbal brutality. Christine is not overwhelmed to be dating two men at once, but she finds it pleasant, and eventually she begins to really like Chad.

``In the Company of Men,'' directed by Neil LaBute, is a continuing series of revelations, because it isn't simply about this sick joke. Indeed, if the movie were only about what Chad and Howard do to Christine and how she reacts, it would be too easy, a one-note attack on these men as sadistic predators. The movie deals with much more and it cuts deeper, and by the end we see it's about a whole system of values in which men as well as women are victims, and monstrous selfishness is held up as the greatest good.

Environments like the one in this film are poisonous, and many people have to try to survive in them. Men like Chad and Howard are dying inside. Personal advancement is the only meaningful goal. Women and minorities are seen by white males as unfairly advantaged. White males are seen as unfairly advantaged by everyone else.

There is an incredibly painful scene in ``In the Company of Men'' where Howard tells a young black trainee, ``they asked me to recommend someone for the management training program,'' and then requires the man to humiliate himself in order to show that he qualifies. At first you see the scene as racist. Then you realize Howard and the trainee are both victims of the corporate culture they occupy, in which the power struggle is the only reality. Something forces both of them to stay in the room during that ugly scene--job insecurity.

On a more human level, the story becomes poignant. Both Howard and Chad date Christine. There is an unexpected emotional development. I will not reveal too much. We arrive at the point where we thought the story was leading us, and it keeps on going. There is another chapter. We find a level beneath the other levels. The game was more Machiavellian than we imagined. We thought we were witnessing evil, but now we look on its true face.

What is remarkable is how realistic the story is. We see a character who is depraved, selfish and evil, and he is not a bizarre eccentric, but a product of the system. It is not uncommon to know personally of behavior not unlike Chad's. Most of us, of course, are a little more like Howard, but that is small consolation. ``Can't you see?'' Howard says. ``I'm the good guy!'' In other words, I am not as bad as the bad guy, although I am certainly weaker.

Christine survives, because she knows who she is. She is deaf, but less disabled than Howard and Chad, because she can hear on frequencies that their minds and imaginations do not experience. ``In the Company of Men'' is the kind of bold, uncompromising film that insists on being thought about afterward--talked about, argued about, hated if necessary, but not ignored. ``How do you feel right now, deep down inside?'' one of the characters asks. The movie asks us the same question.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.1/10 (5,136 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by GirlWithAsprin (#9)

Your presentations look great here Mitchell. Very conscise, yet comprehensive recap of each film. Kudos - very nicely done.

Oh wow, Mitchell, out of the box we get the splash pages, even though many of us said you didn't have to. Ogh wow, this is a beaut. Glad to be the first to chime in with "you go, Mitch!". This will indeed be the best "list" yet.

Stellar. Nice start. Great quote from ICOM.

good work, Mitch! Shame about most of the films.

This movie will always be close to me, because I was in the crowd when they filmed it during halftime at a Notre Dame / Boston College game. So that's me you're hearing (among the thousands) chanting, "Rudy, Rudy, Rudy". It was exciting watching the crew run around quickly setting up the gear, changing the scoreboard to read Georgia Tech, and shooting the scene all within a span of 30 minutes.

The episode of My Name is Earl where Sean Astin and a few others from the cast spoofed the Rudy storyline was pretty good too.

Unfortunately, this is the most quoted line from the movie and the only mark that it's left on our culture.

#195 Man on the Moon (1999)
Milos Forman
Running time - 118 mins
Country of origin UK / Germany / Japan / USA
Genre Biography / Comedy / Drama
Original language English

Writing credits
Scott Alexander, Larry Karaszewski

Cast
Jim Carrey ... Andy Kaufman (also as Tony Clifton)
Danny DeVito ... George Shapiro
Courtney Love ... Lynne Margulies
Paul Giamatti ... Bob Zmuda/Tony Clifton
Vincent Schiavelli ... Maynard Smith

Other awards
Won: Golden Globes - Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Comedy/Musical (Jim Carrey)
Nominated: Golden Globes - Best Motion Picture - Comedy/Musical

BY ROGER EBERT / December 22, 1999

Our inner child embraces Andy Kaufman. We've been just like that. Who cannot remember boring our friends for hour after hour after hour with the same dumb comic idea, endlessly insisted on? Who hasn't refused to admit being wrong? ``I won't give up on this,'' we're saying, ``until you give up first. Until you laugh, or agree, or cry `uncle.' I can keep this up all night if necessary.'' That was Andy Kaufman's approach to the world. The difference was, he tried to make a living out of it, as a stand-up comedian. Audiences have a way of demanding to be entertained. Kaufman's act was essentially a meditation on the idea of entertainment. He would entertain you, but you had to cave in first. You had to laugh at something really dumb, or let him get away with something boring or outrageous. If you passed the test, he was like a little kid, delighted to be allowed into the living room at last. He'd entertain, all right. But you had to pass the entry exam.

He was not the most successful comedian of his time. The last years of his life, his biographer Bill Zehme tells me, were spent in mostly unemployed show-biz free fall. But Kaufman enjoyed that, too: He was fascinated by the relationship between entertainer and audience, which is never more sincere than when the entertainer is hated. It is poetic justice that Andy Kaufman now has his own biopic, directed by Milos Forman and starring Jim Carrey. He wins. Uncle.

What is most wonderful about ``Man on the Moon,'' a very good film, is that it remains true to Kaufman's stubborn vision. Oh, it brightens things up a little (the cookie and milk evening at Carnegie Hall wasn't his farewell concert, because by then he was far too unemployable for a Carnegie booking). But essentially it stays true to his persona: A guy who would test you, fool you, lie to you, deceive you and stage elaborate deceptions, put-ons and hoaxes. The movie doesn't turn him into a sweet, misunderstood guy. And it doesn't pander for laughs. When something is not working in Kaufman's act, it's not working in the movie, either, and it's not funny, it's painful.

The film has a heroic performance from Jim Carrey, who successfully disappears inside the character of Andy Kaufman. Carrey is as big a star as Hollywood has right now, and yet fairly early in ``Man on the Moon,'' we forget who is playing Kaufman and get involved in what is happening to him. Carrey is himself a compulsive entertainer who will do anything to get a laugh, who wants to please, whose public image is wacky and ingratiating. That he can evoke the complexities of Kaufman's comic agonies is a little astonishing. That he can suppress his own desire to please takes a kind of courage. Not only is he working without his own net--he's playing a guy who didn't use a net.

The film, and written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, begins with Kaufman as a troublesome kid in his room, refusing to go out and play, preferring to host his own TV variety program for the cameras he believed were hidden in his bedroom walls. His material was inspired by shabby nightclub and lounge acts. He understood that a live performance is rarely more fascinating than when it is going wrong.

I myself, for example, have seldom been more involved than I was one night at a 36-seat theater in London during a performance of a one-man show called ``Is It Magic--Or Is It Manilow?'' The star was a bad magician who did a bad imitation of Barry Manilow, alternating the two elements of his act. There were 12 people in the audience, and we were desperately important to him. The program notes said he had once been voted most popular entertainer on a cruise ship out of Goa. Andy Kaufman would have been in ecstasy.

The movie follows Kaufman into the L.A. standup circuit, where a talent manager (Danny DeVito) sees something in his act and signs him. Kaufman is soon a sitcom star, a regular on ``Taxi'' (we see cast veterans like Marilu Henner, Carol Kane, Christopher Lloyd and Judd Hirsch playing themselves--DeVito of course is otherwise engaged). He insists on ``guest bookings'' for his ``protege,'' an obnoxious lounge act named Tony Clifton, who is played behind impenetrable makeup by Kaufman and sometimes by his accomplice Bob Zmuda. Kaufman steadfastly refuses to admit he ``is'' Clifton, and in a way, he isn't.

The parabolas of Kaufman's career intersect as ``Taxi'' goes off the air. He has never been more famous, or had bleaker prospects. He's crying wolf more than the public is crying uncle. He starts wrestling women in his nightclub act, not a popular decision, and gets involved in a feud with Memphis wrestling star Jerry Lawler. They fight on the Letterman show. It looks real. The movie says it was staged (Lawler plays himself). OK, so it was staged--but Lawler's blow to Kaufman's head was real enough to tumble him out of his chair. And no doubt Kaufman made Lawler vow to hit him that hard. He always wanted to leave you in doubt.

Courtney Love is back in her second Milos Forman movie in a row, playing the lover of an impossible man (she was the Hustler publisher's lover in Forman's ``The People vs. Larry Flynt''). She comes to wrestle Kaufman and stays to puzzle at him. She likes him, even loves him, but never quite knows who he is. When he tells her he's dying of cancer, her first reaction is anger that he would toy with her feelings in yet another performance piece. Love shows again here that she is a real actress and can if she wants to give up the other job.

What was it with Kaufman? The movie leaves us with a mystery, and it should. In traditional Hollywood biopics, there would be Freudian shorthand to explain everything. Nothing explains Andy Kaufman. If he had been explicable, no one would have wanted to make a movie about him.

The Chicago talk jock Steve Dahl told me the other day that Kaufman once recruited him for a performance. ``He told me I would be inside a box on the stage, and people would try to guess what was in the box,'' Dahl recalled. ``He gave me a six-pack of Heinekens to keep me company. What he didn't tell me was that I would be in the box for three hours. There I was in the dark, trying to pee back into the can.'' Dahl thought he was in the show, but from Kaufman's point of view, he was the ideal member of the audience.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.3/10 (32,307 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by Elemeno P.T.

ah...the wait is over.

thanks for doing this mitchell. love the commitment right out of the gate.

Amen. That first run is horrendous, and Mitch is doing a great job.

#194 Beavis and Butt-Head Do America (1996)
Mike Judge + Yvette Kaplan
Running time - 81 mins
Country of origin USA
Genre Animation / Adventure / Comedy / Crime / Music
Original language English

Writing credits
Mike Judge, Joe Stillman

Cast
Mike Judge ... Beavis, Butt-Head, Tom Anderson, Mr. Van Driessen, Principal McVicker (voice)
Bruce Willis ... Muddy Grimes (voice)
Demi Moore ... Dallas Grimes (voice)
Cloris Leachman ... Old Woman on Plane and Bus (voice)
Robert Stack ... ATF Agent Flemming (voice)

Other awards
Nominated: Razzie Award Worst New Star "Beavis" + "Butt-Head", Worst Screen Couple "Beavis" + "Butt-Head"

BY ROGER EBERT / December 20, 1996

It is impossible to deal with ``Beavis and Butt-Head Do America'' without first dealing with Beavis and Butt-Head themselves. The real subject of the film is attitude, because B&B are *about* attitude. What actually happens is of little importance, since Beavis and Butt-Head are so stupid and sublimely self-absorbed that the exterior world has little reality except as an annoyance or distraction.

It would be easy to attack B&B as ignorant, vulgar, depraved, repulsive slobs. Of course they are. But that would miss the point, which is that Mike Judge's characters reflect parts of the society that produced them. To study B&B is to learn about a culture of narcissism, alienation, functional illiteracy, instant gratification and television zombiehood. Those who deplore Beavis and Butt-Head are confusing the messengers with the message.

For B&B, happiness is easily defined. It consists of sitting side by side on a sofa, watching television, which they dimly perceive as containing images of food, drink, mayhem and large breasts. As long as the TV is on and they are supplied with food and drink, B&B see no need to move. They would be as happy in prison, assuming the set was working. (The movie shows an album of old photos of B&B growing up; we see them as infants, toddlers, children, teenagers, etc.--always on the couch, watching TV).

Early in Mike Judge's ``Beavis and Butt-Head Do America,'' there is a funny sequence in which their television is stolen. This becomes apparent to B&B after a time, because they realize that they are looking at the place where the TV should be, and it is not there. As this fact sinks in, they grow restless and disturbed. Beavis (or Butt-Head; I forget) tries to reconstruct the crime, and the movie shows a series of shots: (1) broken window, (2) missing TV, (3) footprints leading from window to where TV was, (4) footprints leading out the open door. Then the movie repeats this series of shots a second time, and then a third time, and then the series is broken up into closeups, for closer study. Eventually the clues are correctly deciphered: The set is not there because it has been stolen! This sequence is brilliant in the way it illustrates the mental capabilities of B&B, who between them have the I.Q. of a cork.

I said I wasn't sure if Beavis or Butt-Head deconstructed the TV theft. It is, of course, possible to tell them apart: As on the MTV series that spawned them, one wears a Metallica T-shirt, and the other wears an AC/DC T-shirt. Their haircuts differ. And one has a more-or-less permanent damp patch in his crotch. I am sure students of the TV series can describe subtle differences in their personalities, just as there are said to be viewers who can identify the individual Ninja Turtles. For practical purposes, however, B&B are one personality, split into two so that they will have somebody to talk to.

The plot of the movie involves a deadly biological weapon that comes into the possession of B&B during a trip on which they encounter normal Americans, including a retired couple touring the west in their camper. Through a series of adventures unnecessary to describe, B&B eventually end up in the Oval Office (and there is a cameo for President Clinton). In between, the health and safety of the nation has been threatened, and B&B have used the retired couple's camper and several other locations for their most inventive and ambitious pastimes, which are masturbating and passing gas. They also have completely missed the point of everything that has happened to them, everything said to them, and everything around them.

It is impossible to feel any affection for B&B. They aren't lovable goofs, like Bill and Ted (of ``Excellent Adventure'' fame). Judge has stripped them of all redeeming qualities. Why, then, did ``Beavis and Butt-Head Do America'' hold my interest, and amuse and stimulate me--why was the movie so much fun? Because B&B represent an extreme version of people we see around us every day, and because the movie is radical and uncompromising: Having identified B&B as an extreme example of grunge, disaffection and cheerfully embraced ignorance, the movie is uncompromising in its detestation of them.

I make this point because it is widely but wrongly believed that ``Beavis and Butt-Head'' celebrates its characters, and applauds their sublime lack of values, taste and intelligence. I've never thought so. I believe Mike Judge would rather die than share a taxi ride to the airport with his characters--that for him, B&B function like Dilbert's co-workers in the Scott Adams universe. They are a target for his anger against the rising tide of stupidity.

B&B share another quality with Adams' Dilbert strip: The use of what the French call the ``clear line'' approach to cartooning and animation. The master of this style, Herge, used it in his Tin Tin books to create a world of extreme simplicity, in which nothing existed except exactly what was needed to fill the next frame and further the story. (Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy strip is another good example). The movie is not ``fully animated'' in the sense that ``The Lion King'' is, but its low-rent animation disguises a sophisticated graphic style and visuals that perfectly suit the material: The movie looks the way it should.

All of this is just another way of saying that the less you're like Beavis and Butt-Head, the more you might like this movie. On the other hand, B&B would probably enjoy it, too--if it was on television. I wonder if they would notice that it was about themselves.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 6.4/10 (14,971 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - 400

Ranked highest by Pavement Ist Rad

The majority of voters prefer Awakenings to The Snapper? That's just plain wrong.

Awakenings is a great movie, but the rest of this list is

that's funny, when I saw the "Hey baby" teaser, I was disappointed that it wasn't B&BDA

#193 GoldenEye (1995)
Martin Campbell
Running time - 130 mins
Country of origin USA / UK
Genre Action / Adventure / Thriller
Original language English / Russian / Spanish

Writing credits
Ian Fleming, Michael France, Jeffrey Caine and Bruce Feirstein

Cast
Pierce Brosnan ... James Bond
Sean Bean ... Alec Trevelyan/Janus
Izabella Scorupco ... Natalya Fyodorovna Simonova
Famke Janssen ... Xenia Zirgavna Onatopp
Judi Dench ... M

Other awards
Nominated: BAFTA Film Award Best Achievement in Special Effects, Best Sound

BY ROGER EBERT / December 17, 1995

`GoldenEye" looks exactly like a James Bond film. It begins with a stunt (a bungee jump from the top of a towering dam). It tops that with an even more spectacular stunt (Bond chases an airplane heading off the side of a cliff, then jumps after it, free-falls, catches up with it, climbs aboard and flies to safety). In the Pussy Galore tradition, it has a villainess with a lubricious name: Xenia Onatopp.

And of course it involves a plan for world domination, and a madman presiding over a secret headquarters staffed with obedient hirelings.

So all of the parts are in place. And yet, in an important way, this James Bond adventure, the 18th (or 19th, if you count the non-standard "Casino Royale"), marks the passing of an era. This is the first Bond film that is self-aware, that has lost its innocence and the simplicity of its world view, and has some understanding of the absurdity and sadness of its hero.

One crucial and revealing scene takes place on a Caribbean beach, where 007 is enjoying an erotic interlude between scenes of death-defying mayhem. His companion is the lovely Natalya Simonova (Izabella Scorupco), a Russian computer programmer who has joined his quest to save the world, etc. But instead of sexy small-talk, she asks Bond: "How can you act like this? How can you be so cold?" And Bond replies not with a sophisticated wisecrack but with, "It's what keeps me alive." In the earlier Bond adventures, no woman would have asked such a question, and 007 certainly would not have provided such an answer.

More evidence of Bond's loss of innocence: He is now aware that his history is repeating itself. Although all the Bond films have followed a story pattern so rigid that 007 could have predicted the next scene just by looking at his watch, there has always been the fiction that each adventure is more or less unique. Bond has never used an obvious line like, "Do you realize you're no less than the 12th megalomaniacal madman striving for world domination that I've met?" There is always one absolutely obligatory scene: Bond has been captured by the madman, who needs only to kill him. But he always talks first. Explains his plans for world domination. Boasts.

Preens. Doesn't realize that his mistress will become attracted to Bond. This scene is so inevitable, indeed, that it helped give rise to the definition of the Talking Killer in Ebert's Little Movie Glossary.

In "GoldenEye," the unthinkable happens. Both Bond and the madman apparently have read the Glossary, and can no longer act unself-consciously. Bond has fallen into the clutches of an evil genius who plans to rule Earth from cyberspace, via a powerful communications satellite. He narrows his eyes and says: "How shall we kill you?" And Bond replies: "What - no small talk? No chit-chat? That's the problem with the world these days - no one takes the time to conduct the proper interrogation." Indeed. Even Bond himself has changed. As played by Pierce Brosnan, the fifth 007, he is somehow more sensitive, more vulnerable, more psychologically complete, than the Bonds played by Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton. They were all, in their various styles, cold and dispassionate. Brosnan's Bond looks at home in the casinos of Monte Carlo, but he's more knowing, more aware of relationships. I am not sure this is a good thing. Agent 007 should to some degree not be in on the joke. He should certainly never have to listen to dialogue such as the following, from Agent 006: "The vodka martinis do silence the screams of all the men you've killed. And all those women you failed to protect." Perhaps our popular conception of maleness has changed so much that James Bond can no longer exist in the old way. In "GoldenEye," we get a hybrid, a modern Bond grafted onto the formula.

The result is not uninteresting. The special effects and stunts, of course, are satisfactorily spectacular, including slick footage of the theft of a high-tech helicopter, a chase between a car and a tank, a crash between a tank and a train, and such unexpected bonuses as a Russian country & western bar, with "Stand by Your Man" in a Slavic accent.

The plot involves an Earth satellite that has been lurking in secret orbit and can disrupt Earth communications, giving the person who controls it power over governments and markets. After Xenia Onatopp (an ex-fighter pilot) and her accomplices steal a priceless Tiger helicopter that is invulnerable to the satellite, Bond traces her to St. Petersburg, Russia, where the Janus arms syndicate is located. This leads to a sex scene involving Onatopp that owes a lot to Sumo wrestling.

Watching the film, I got caught up in the special effects and the neat stunts, and I observed with a certain satisfaction Bond's belated entry into a more modern world. Brosnan was quite adequate, although all of the later Bonds suffer from the reality that no one else will ever really replace Seean Connery. I had a good enough time, I guess, although I never really got involved. I was shaken but not stirred.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.0/10 (40,404 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by Nic (#3)

That Much Ado About Nothing poster is like a far more subtle version of that Barenaked Ladies Gordon cover in terms of the lols it is bringing me. Infinite respect to Ebert for giving Ernie Bushmiller propz in the B&B review.

This is the worst possible ad for your film festival.

Well it's about time. Beavis & Butthead should be higher imo

Mitchell should've given that poster the Romancing the Bone treatment.

#192 Lost Highway (1997)
David Lynch
Running time - 135 mins
Country of origin France / USA
Genre Drama / Mystery / Thriller / Horror / Crime
Original language English

Writing credits
David Lynch, Barry Gifford

Cast
Bill Pullman ... Fred Madison
Patricia Arquette ... Renee Madison/Alice Wakefield
Balthazar Getty ... Peter Raymond Dayton
Robert Blake ... Mystery Man
Natasha Gregson Wagner ... Sheila

BY ROGER EBERT / February 27, 1997

David Lynch's ``Lost Highway'' is like kissing a mirror: You like what you see, but it's not much fun, and kind of cold. It's a shaggy ghost story, an exercise in style, a film made with a certain breezy contempt for audiences. I've seen it twice, hoping to make sense of it. There is no sense to be made of it. To try is to miss the point. What you see is all you get.

That's not to say it's without interest. Some of the images are effective, the soundtrack is strong and disturbing, and there is a moment that Alfred Hitchcock would have been proud of (although Hitchcock would not have preceded or followed it with this film). Hope is constantly fanned back to life throughout the story; we keep thinking maybe Lynch will somehow pull it off, until the shapeless final scenes, when we realize it really is all an empty stylistic facade. This movie is about design, not cinema.

It opens with two nervous people living in a cold, threatening house. They hate or fear each other, we sense. ``You don't mind if I don't go to the club tonight?'' says the wife (Patricia Arquette). She wants to stay home and read. ``Read? Read?'' he chuckles bitterly. We cut to a scene that feels inspired by a 1940s `noir' (``Detour,'' maybe), showing the husband (Bill Pullman) as a crazy hep-cat sax player. Cut back home. Next morning. An envelope is found on their steps. Inside, a videotape of their house (which, architecturally, resembles an old IBM punch card).

More tapes arrive, including one showing the wife's murdered body in bed. They go to a party and meet a disturbing little man with a white clown face (Robert Blake), who ingratiatingly tells Pullman, ``We met at your house. As a matter of fact, I'm there right now. Call me.'' He does seem to be at both ends of the line. That mirrors another nice touch in the film, which is that Pullman seems able to talk to himself over a doorbell speaker phone.

Can people be in two places at once? Why not? (Warning: plot point coming up.) Halfway through the film, Pullman is arrested for the murder of his wife and locked in solitary confinement. One morning his guard looks in the cell door, and--good God! It's not the same man inside! Now it's a teenager (Balthazar Getty). The prison officials can't explain how bodies could be switched in a locked cell, but have no reason to hold the kid. He's released, and gets his old job at the garage.

A gangster (Robert Loggia) comes in with his mistress, who is played by Patricia Arquette. Is this the same person as the murdered wife? Was the wife really murdered? Hello? The story now focuses on the relationship between Getty and Loggia, a ruthless but ingratiating man who, in a scene of chilling comic violence, pursues a tailgater and beats him senseless (``Tailgating is one thing I can't tolerate''). Arquette comes to the garage to pick up the kid (``Why don't you take me to dinner?'') and tells him a story of sexual brutality involving Loggia, who is connected to a man who makes porno films. This requires a scene where Arquette is forced to disrobe at gunpoint and stand naked in a roomful of strange men--an echo of Isabella Rossellini's humiliation in Lynch's ``Blue Velvet.'' Does this scene have a point? Does any scene in the movie have a point? ``Lost Highway'' plays like a director's idea book, in which isolated scenes and notions are jotted down for possible future use. Instead of massaging them into a finished screenplay, Lynch and collaborator Barry Gifford seem to have filmed the notes.

Is the joke on us? Is it our error to try to make sense of the film, to try to figure out why protagonists change in midstream? Let's say it is. Let's say the movie should be taken exactly as is, with no questions asked. Then what do we have? We still have just the notes for isolated scenes. There's no emotional or artistic thread running through the material to make it seem necessary that it's all in the same film together. The giveaway is that the characters have no interest apart from their situation; they exist entirely as creatures of the movie's design and conceits (except for Loggia's gangster, who has a reality, however fragmentary).

Luis Bunuel, the Spanish surrealist, once made a film in which two actresses played the same role interchangeably, in the appropriately titled ``That Obscure Object of Desire'' (1977). He made absolutely no attempt to explain this oddity. One woman would leave a room and the other would re-enter. And so on.

But when Lynch has Patricia Arquette apparently playing two women (and Bill Pullman and Balthazar Getty perhaps playing the same man), we don't feel it's a surrealistic joke. We feel--I dunno, I guess I felt jerked around. Lynch is such a talented director. Why does he pull the rug out from under his own films? I have nothing against movies of mystery, deception and puzzlement. It's just that I'd like to think the director has an idea, a purpose, an overview, beyond the arbitrary manipulation of plot elements. He knows how to put effective images on the screen, and how to use a soundtrack to create mood, but at the end of the film, our hand closes on empty air.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.4/10 (26,588 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - 369

Ranked highest by The Good Dr. Bill (#6)

#191 Leaving Las Vegas (1995)
Mike Figgis
Running time - 111 mins
Country of origin France / USA / UK
Genre Drama / Mystery / Thriller / Horror / Crime
Original language English / Russian

Writing credits
John O'Brien, Mike Figgis

Cast
Nicolas Cage ... Ben Sanderson
Elisabeth Shue ... Sera
Julian Sands ... Yuri
Richard Lewis ... Peter
Steven Weber ... Marc Nussbaum

BY ROGER EBERT / April 25, 2004

Mike Figgis' "Leaving Las Vegas" (1995) is not a love story, although it feels like one, but a story about two desperate people using love as a form of prayer and a last resort against their pain. It is also a sad, trembling portrait of the final stages of alcoholism. Those who found it too extreme were simply lucky enough never to have arrived there themselves.

Few films are more despairing and yet, curiously, so hopeful as this one, which argues that even at the very end of the road, at the final extremity, we can find some solace in the offer and acceptance of love.
The movie tells the story of Ben and Sera, played by Nicolas Cage and Elisabeth Shue. He is a Hollywood agent, she is a prostitute. Although prostitutes can be a cliche in the movies, and those with a good heart even more so, the details of their relationship leave cliches far behind, and the movie becomes the story of these specific characters and exactly who they are. There is also the truth that a man in Ben's condition would be unable to begin any relationship without paying for it.

Ben is in the final stages of an alcoholic meltdown. We watch as he asks a friend in a bar for a loan and is told bluntly: "Don't drink it in here." We sense his loneliness and need in his attempt to pick up a woman in a bar: "I really wish you'd come home with me. You smell great and you look great." We see him being fired from his job, and agreeing that he should be fired, and telling his boss the severance check is too generous. Then he burns all of his possessions, and there is a curling photograph in the fire, which seems to come from a failed marriage. He moves to Las Vegas with the intention of using his severance to drink himself to death.

Cage's performance in these early scenes is an acutely observed record of a man coming to pieces. He shows Ben imploding, rigid in his attempt to maintain control, to smile when he does not feel a smile, to make banter when he wants to scream. He needs a drink. During the movie, Cage will take Ben into the regions of hell. There will be times when he has the DTs, times when he must pour booze into his throat like an antidote to death, times of nausea, blackouts, cuts and bruises. There is a scene in a bank when his hands shake so badly he cannot sign a check, and we empathize with the way he tries to function, telling the bank teller whatever he can think of ("I've had brain surgery"). Yes, sometimes, he feels better, and sometimes we can sense the charm he must have had (we sense his boss' affection for him even as he's being fired). But for Ben these moments are not about pleasure but about the temporary release from pain.

Sera is seen in three ways: As Ben sees her, as her pimp and her clients see her, and as she sees herself in closeup monologues during therapy sessions. Her pimp (Julian Sands) is soon off the scene; it is bold of Figgis to establish him, to show his sadomasochistic control of Sera, and then to make him disappear in an offscreen killing. We need to know where Sera is coming from, but we don't need to linger there.
For Ben, who almost runs her down in a crosswalk, she is literally the last person in his life he will be able to focus on. He loves her with the purity of a love that has no components, except need and gratitude. He doesn't want to have sex with her, doesn't want her for companionship, isn't looking for an "experience." He is simply touched, somewhere inside his suffering where nothing else can reach, that this woman would care for him.

Why does Sera love Ben? The movie leaves that for us to intuit, and the therapy sessions do not explain her feelings, they only show her trying to discover them. There is an early monologue where she boasts about her skill as a hooker, how she can sense exactly what a client wants and provide it. That is how she wants to see herself. We also see that her pimp cuts her ("never on the face"), and we witness a night when she goes into a motel room with four drunken high-school athletes, and this is so unwise that we read it as deliberately self-destructive. Sera still has her looks, but she once had innocence and hope, and they are gone. When she looks at Ben, she feels sympathy and empathy, but more than that, I think she feels admiration for the purity of his gesture: Having arrived at the end of his road, he accepts his destiny with a certain stoic courage.

Of course, he could be saved. Alcoholics Anonymous meetings are filled with healthy, functioning people who were once living Ben's life. But most drunks are not lucky enough to find sobriety. And in Ben's case, there may be another component; he is actively committing suicide. "Is drinking a way of killing yourself?" Sera asks him, and he replies: "Or, is killing myself a way of drinking?"
Sera senses she cannot save him. "You can never, ever, ask me to stop drinking," he tells her soon after they meet. "Do you understand?" She says: "I do. I really do." As a hooker in Vegas she has met a lot of sad and desperate men and no doubt a lot of drunks, but there is something about Ben, she tells her therapist, that she can't get out of her mind. Oddly enough, we sense it, too. There are not many terminal drunks we would want to spend a movie with, but we feel tender toward Ben. Of other famous movie alcoholics, Ray Milland's in "The Lost Weekend" was a case study, seen from outside, and Albert Finney's in "Under the Volcano" lacked Ben's self-knowledge.

The movie was made quickly, inexpensively, close to ground level. Mike Figgis is a British director whose career is a litany of risk-taking and original concepts; his boldest experiment was "Timecode" (2000), filmed on video in four unbroken 90 minute shots which were simultaneously seen on a screen divided into quadrants. He shot "Leaving Las Vegas" on location, without permits or permissions, using an unobtrusive 16mm camera and sometimes sending his actors into real situations. The cinematography, by Declan Quinn, creates a high-contrast noir look, the shadows sometimes invaded by garish neon. The music reinforces it. Figgis wrote the original score, and also uses the kinds of songs ("Angel Eyes," "Come Rain or Come Shine") drunks punch into the jukebox at 3 a.m. He repeats some of the songs, which is right: A drinking session can develop its own theme song.

The film was nominated for best actor, actress, director and screenplay. Cage won, and deserved to. Shue did not win (Susan Sarandon did, for "Dead Man Walking"). It is impossible to imagine one performance without the other, and Shue is the emotional center of the film, because the Cage character is on a set trajectory and beyond the possibility of change. Shue before and since has been in mostly mainstream commercial movies; like Halle Berry with "Monster's Ball" and Charlize Theron with "Monster," she found a role that took her absolutely to the limit and went all the way, fearlessly.

The screenplay is by Figgis, based on a novel by John O'Brien, who killed himself at about the time the film went into production. He was 34. His father said the book was his suicide note. The character of Ben is certainly a man who has made his decision and will stay with it; why he kills himself with alcohol, instead of, say, shooting himself in the head as O'Brien did, may have two answers. The first, more pragmatic, is that it allows a story arc to develop, as Sera follows Ben on his final lonely journey. The second, which I feel when I watch the film, is that Ben's guilt, or despair, or self-loathing, is so great that he doesn't want a quick end. He wants to suffer all the way out.
That Sera brings him some comfort does not lessen his pain, and if he truly loved her he would not want to leave her. But perhaps he is too deranged to have such thoughts. "You are my angel," he tells her, not long before the unbearably sad and tender death scene. By then he is much more dead than alive.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.5/10 (27,074 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - 429

Ranked highest by Castana

The Snapper probably didn't get a lot of votes because people knew that it would not be counted in the list.

Me, I don't allow myself to be controlled by The Man and his facist Rules and voted for The Snapper and Das Boot (and The Vanishing if I had remembered it) anyway.

Did we disallow the Decalogue for the TV release factor? I can't remember.

Das Boot and The Snapper both got theatrical releases here.

Das Boot was #105 on the last poll.

Dekalogue was released theatrically as a theatrical version. The Snapper was shown on BBC Two in April 1993 it would have been #268 anyway.

i absolutely did not vote for this.

lol @ "ranked highest by Pavement Ist Rad."

And did you see TPC's Gordon reference! Amazing.

Should say SNC. Misred spreadsheet. Your number nine was Se7en.

Could it really have gone any other way?

Have you watched that in the last couple years? I'd be curious as to how it's holding up.

Though I really liked "Lost Highway", that Ebert review is very interesting.

Reading it, I couldn't help but think of the M.I.A. thread on the other side, which had someone complaining that you don't repspect a critic unless he agress with you. Depsite the fact I disagree with Ebert here, this is a pretty marvelous review.

Ha, I actually haven't seen it in a few years. I watched it countless times back in the day, though. And my friends and I go on B&BDA quoting sprees pretty much every week. And it's always the same quotes. "WE'RE IN WASHINGTON," "'Boot'? Someone named 'Boot'?," "This chick says there's gonna be sluts in Vegas," "I don't wanna go to school!," "Hey, baby. You wanna beer?," "I POOP TOO MUCH," etc. Shit never gets old.

How much better would it be to watch you asscobras than The Hills? Get a fucking clue, MTV.

#190 A Few Good Men (1992)
Rob Reiner
Running time - 138 mins
Country of origin USA
Genre Crime / Drama / Thriller
Original language English

Writing credits
Aaron Sorkin

Cast
Tom Cruise ... Lt. Daniel Kaffee
Jack Nicholson ... Col. Nathan R. Jessep
Demi Moore ... Lt. Cdr. JoAnne Galloway
Kevin Bacon ... Capt. Jack Ross
Kiefer Sutherland ... Lt. Jonathan Kendrick

Academy Awards
Nominated: Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Jack Nicholson), Best Film Editing, Best Picture, Best Sound

Other awards
Nominated: Golden Globes - Best Director, Best Motion Picture - Drama, Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama (Tom Cruise), Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture (Jack Nicholson), Best Screenplay - Motion Picture

BY ROGER EBERT / December 11, 1992

Rob Reiner's "A Few Good Men" is one of those movies that tells you what it's going to do, does it, and then tells you what it did.

It doesn't think the audience is very bright. There is a scene that is absolutely wrong. In it, a lawyer played by Tom Cruise previews his courtroom strategy to his friends. The strategy then works as planned - which means that an element of surprise is missing from the most important moment in the movie, and the key scene by Jack Nicholson is undermined - robbed of suspense, and made inevitable.

That's a shame, because in many ways this is a good film, with the potential to be even better than that. The flaws are mostly at the screenplay level; the film doesn't make us work, doesn't allow us to figure out things for ourselves, is afraid we'll miss things if they're not spelled out.

The story is based on fact, as transmuted into a Broadway play by Aaron Sorkin. A Marine at the Guantanamo Naval Air Station, in Cuba, dies after a hazing incident. Two young Marines are charged with the death, but a nosy Navy legal ace in Washington (Demi Moore) suspects there's more to the story, and wants to investigate. She's prodded by her own superior to assign a lazy Navy lawyer (Cruise) to the case, perhaps because he has an unblemished record of settling out of court, and can be counted on to handle the case without generating public embarrassment.

After Moore and Cruise meet with the accused young Marines, she realizes they have a sticky case on their hands, because the unwritten Marine code means that the two won't talk, even to save themselves. One of them, a black kid played by Wolfgang Bodison, is so fiercely proud of the Corps that he would rather go to prison for years. The other, a rather dim and easily impressed white farm boy, goes along.

Cruise is all for settling the case out of court and getting back to his beloved softball games. Moore won't let him. A third friend, played by Kevin Pollack, joins in strategy sessions as they gather evidence that eventually leads to a disturbing conclusion: Although hazing is officially against the law and Marine policy, the Guantanamo commander, a crusty old dog played by Jack Nicholson, may have tacitly approved the attack on the dead Marine.

The movie's setup scenes have good energy to them. Cruise is well-cast and effective here as an untried lieutenant, the son of a great man, who has to be taught to take his job seriously and live up to his heritage. Demi Moore is attractive and determined as his superior, who tries to teach him.

Given decades of Hollywood convention, we might reasonably expect romance to blossom between them, providing a few gratuitous love scenes before the courtroom finale, but no: They're strictly business - so much so that it seems a little odd that these two good-looking, unmarried young people don't feel any mutual attraction. I have a friend, indeed, who intuits that the Demi Moore character was originally conceived of as a man, and got changed into a woman for Broadway and Hollywood box office reasons, without ever quite being rewritten into a woman.

Everything leads up, in any event, to the courtroom scene which concludes the movie, with Kevin Bacon playing the prosecutor assigned to convict the two young Marines. We have already met the Jack Nicholson character in Cuba, where he is particularly good at sexist verbal brutality, which he aims especially at Moore. We know he will turn up again, and he does, in a denouement that would have had greater power if the movie didn't telegraph it.

What happens is that the movie brings us to the brink of a courtroom breakthrough, and then we get the scene that undermines everything, as Cruise explains to his friends what he hopes to do, how he hopes to do it, and how he thinks it will work. When Nicholson's big courtroom scene develops, we realize with sinking heart that it is following the movie's scenario. That robs us of pleasure two ways: (1) We are not allowed the pleasure of discovering Cruise's strategy for ourselves, and (2) Nicholson's behavior seems scripted and inevitable, and is robbed of shock value.

The movie is reduced then, to a lesser pleasure, that of watching good actors do good work. Nicholson is always fun to watch, as he barks and snarls and improvises new obscenities. Cruise is an effective contrast, as the immature young officer who discovers himself. Bodison, the stubborn defendant, gives the most interesting performance in the movie, because we can see the battle going on inside and the movie allows it to happen almost as a separate scenario. But the movie doesn't quite make it, because it never convinces us that the drama is happening while we watch it; it's like the defense team sneaked an advance look at the script.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.5/10 (39,903 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - 437

Ranked highest by TracyJacks

Can you fill me in on this one please? Was it TV?!

Also: [pi] should be higher. Other than that, list is go! Yeah!

It's a short.

#189 Flirting with Disaster (1996)
David O. Russell
Running time - 92 mins
Country of origin USA
Genre Comedy
Original language English

Writing credits
David O. Russell

Cast
Ben Stiller ... Mel Coplin
Patricia Arquette ... Nancy Coplin
Téa Leoni ... Tina Kalb
Alan Alda ... Richard Schlichting
Mary Tyler Moore ... Pearl Coplin

BY ROGER EBERT / March 29, 1996

"Flirting with Disaster'' is a comedy about a subject usually handled more seriously: an adopted man's search for his birth parents. What triggers this quest for Mel Coplin (Ben Stiller) is the birth of his first son. He tells his wife Nancy (Patricia Arquette) that unless he knows who he really is, he doesn't feel able to name his son.

They enlist the aid of Tina (Tea Leoni), an official at the adoption agency, who wants to tag along and videotape their search for "research.'' Tina is obviously going to be trouble. She's a former dancer, lithe and shapely, and she comes along just as Mel and Nancy are experiencing a post-partum sexual crisis.

Mel's search is not as simple as first it seems. The three fly to San Diego for a rendezvous with his natural mother Valerie (Celia Weston), who, like everyone in this film, seems rotated a few degrees from normal. She makes the crucial mistake of thinking Tina is his wife and Nancy is the nanny. He meets his new twin sisters, beach volleyball bimbos. In a progression of events that seems logical at the time but is tricky to explain afterward, Mel and Tina begin by trying to fix a video camera, and end in an Indian wrestling match that knocks over the mother's china cabinet. And then it turns out Valerie is not the real mother after all. She wants to get paid for that broken china.

The movie, it becomes clear, is using the search for roots as an excuse to introduce a series of strange and eccentric characters, and the more of them we meet, the funnier it gets. The writer and director is David O. Russell, whose first feature, the independently produced "Spanking the Monkey," as yet unseen by me, won him the financing for this more ambitious and very funny film. He seems to have used a lot of his budget on the cast, assembling a large group of mostly familiar faces, who project that special joy actors emanate when they know they have a great line coming up.

Mary Tyler Moore and George Segal play Mel's adoptive parents, who hover on the edge of hysteria. During a side trip to a frozen urban setting in Michigan, we meet another prospective parent, a semi-truck driver (David Patrick Kelly), who lets his "son" drive his big rig before revealing that his former wife ran off with Mel's real father. Mel manages to steer the big rig into a small U.S. Post Office, destroying it, and leading to his arrest by two agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (Richard Jenkins and Josh Brolin).

The agents, who are lovers, volunteer to tag along on the last leg of the journey, to Antelope Springs, N.M., where Mel at last meets his real natural parents (Alan Alda and Lily Tomlin), and discovers that they gave him up for adoption because they were sentenced to prison for manufacturing "a very small amount, relatively," of LSD.

All of this is not nearly complicated enough, and so Russell stirs in their younger son (Glenn Fitzgerald), an angry punk hipster who has a quail recipe that involves LSD. Meanwhile, the sexual tension between Mel and Tina heats up, while one of the gay federal agents decides he is bisexual after all, and is attracted to Nancy.

Screwball comedy is the most difficult of all genres, I wrote just the other week (in reviewing "Two Much," which proved abundantly just how difficult).

"Flirting with Disaster'' has the sort of headlong confidence the genre requires. Russell finds the strong central line all screwball begins with, the seemingly serious mission or quest, and then throws darts at a map of the United States as he creates his characters. He is also wise enough to know that all the characters don't have to be funny all the time; there is a quiet pathos in the character of Nancy, and Patricia Arquette does a subtle job of establishing her feelings: She's a new mother who should be the center of attention, and has been blindsided by this manic quest and by the allure of Tina. "She may be attractive, but she's got a screw loose,'' Nancy warns her husband.

Among the other pleasures of "Flirting with Disaster" is the way we cannot predict the movie's next turn. There are conventions in this sort of story, and Russell seems to violate most of them. He allows the peculiarities of his characters to lead them away from the plot line and into perplexities of their own. To watch that happening is a lot of fun.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 6.7/10 (5,971 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - 437

Ranked highest by Citizen

#188 Trust (1990)
Hal Hartley
Running time - 107 mins
Country of origin USA /UK
Genre Comedy / Drama
Original language English

Writing credits
Hal Hartley

Cast
Adrienne Shelly ... Maria Coughlin
Martin Donovan ... Matthew Slaughter
Merritt Nelson ... Jean Coughlin
John MacKay ... Jim Slaughter
Edie Falco ... Peg Coughlin

BY ROGER EBERT / August 16, 1991

Hal Hartley is on his way to creating a distinctive film world, and although "Trust" is not a successful film, you can see his vision at work, and it's intriguing. Hartley has placed both this film and his last one, "The Unbelievable Truth" (1990), in a lower-middle-class world of soap opera cliches and sudden passions, and given his characters dialogue that sounds like the truisms of the desperate.

Both films star Adrienne Shelly, a diminutive, pouty Bardot type who is an ideal interpreter for Hartley's satirical goals.

"Trust" opens as Shelly, playing a Long Island high school student named Maria, puffs on a cigarette, adjusts her makeup, and informs her parents she's about to marry her no-good boyfriend, Anthony, who in her vision has his life all mapped out for himself: He'll go to school, play football, and join his father's construction company, "where he'll be pulling in a really bitchin' salary." She adds, as an afterthought, that she's pregnant. Her father dies of a heart attack seconds later, and her mother holds this against her for much of the film.

Her boyfriend is not much thrilled by her vision of their future, either. He's got his football practice to go to, and even when the season is over his plans do not include matrimony. The day goes downhill from there; her mother throws her out of the house, and then she meets a drifter named Matthew, who may not quite be a mass murderer, but perhaps only because he has not yet started. On the other hand, he may be just the sensible young man she needs in her life. It could go either way.

It's a rule of conventional fiction that readers are annoyed by arbitrary developments. This is one rule Hartley doesn't subscribe to. Events happen entirely without preparation in his world, and to a film critic who has seen whole movies that are elaborate preparations for almost nothing, that is a relief.

Hartley's universe in "Trust" seems not just arbitrary, however, but pointless. I was never sure exactly what he wanted me to think about his characters and their world, unless it was that they were absurd. He chooses easy targets such as technology, and attacks them in heavy-handed scenes such as the one where Matthew drops a computer monitor on the floor in the factory where he works, and then, when the foreman protests, shoves his head in a vise. So what? And so what when the Shelly character turns out to be infantile as well as sophisticated, and alternates between being a Lolita and being simply a child? What role does her precocious sexuality really play - and what role did it play in "The Unbelievable Truth," when her dad was proud of her job as a fashion model until he saw her ads for underwear and went berserk? And what does it mean that Matthew still lives with his father, a compulsive-obsessive who makes him clean house for hours at a time? Maybe the purpose of Hartley's films is to satirize America by taking the most ephemeral and superficial aspects of our society and treating them with utter seriousness - just as advertising inflates cans and bottles into sculptures on the scale of Mt.

Rushmore. The soap opera idiom is suited for this, and so is the arbitrary nature of his plots; when a Hartley film plays on TV, you won't be tempted to go channel-surfing because the movie will seem to be switching programming for you.

Amazon.fr link
IMDB link - 7.4/10 (2,787 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a
Ranked highest by 54cermak (#5)

#187 Smoke (1995)
Wayne Wang + Paul Auster
Running time - 112 mins
Country of origin Germany / USA / Japan
Genre Comedy / Drama
Original language English

Writing credits
Paul Auster

Cast
Giancarlo Esposito ... OTB Man #1, Tommy
José Zúñiga ... OTB Man #2, Jerry
Stephen Gevedon ... OTB Man #3, Dennis
Harvey Keitel ... Augustus 'Auggie' Wren
Jared Harris ... Jimmy Rose

BY ROGER EBERT / June 16, 1995

`Smoke" is a beguiling film about words, secrets and tobacco. It takes place among lonely men and a few women who build a little world in the middle of a big city, a world based on sadness, secrets, killing time and enjoying a good smoke. Like a few other recent, brave movies, it places trust in the power of words: These people talk, weaving pipe dreams into what they need to get by.

The center of the film is the Brooklyn Cigar Co., at the corner of Third Street and Eighth Avenue. For Auggie Wren, who owns it, the store is the center of the world - so much so that every single morning, he stands across the street from it and takes a photograph.

He shows his photo albums to Paul (William Hurt), a writer who is a regular customer: "That's my project. What you'd call my life's work." Paul observes that all the photos are the same. "They're all the same," Auggie says, "but each one is different from all the others." Then Paul sees someone he knows in one of the photos: his wife, who was pregnant when she was shot and killed one morning on the street outside the store. "It's Ellen," he says. "Look at her. Look at my sweet darling." And he begins to cry. Now all the photos do not look the same anymore.

One of the subjects of "Smoke" is the way lives are changed by small details. Auggie sometimes reflects that if Ellen hadn't given him exact change on that sad morning, if any little thing at all had slowed her by a second, she would not have walked into the path of the bullet.

Paul, too, has had his life changed. One day after buying his Te Amos at the store, he is walking absentmindedly down the street when he almost steps into the path of a truck. He is pulled back and saved by a young black man named Rashid (Harold Perrineau Jr.). Paul insists he do something for Rashid; it's a universal rule that when someone saves your life, you repay him. Rashid resists, but finally settles for a lemonade.

What with one thing and another, Rashid eventually ends up living in Paul's apartment for a few days, to the indignation of Rashid's aunt, who doesn't understand the situation.

Life goes on. Auggie's girlfriend from years ago (Stockard Channing) materializes with the news that Felicity (Ashley Judd), who may be his daughter, is pregnant. Rashid, who speaks in careful, intellectual terms, turns out to be another lost child: After his mother's death years ago, his father disappeared. Then Rashid (whose real name turns out to be Thomas Jefferson Cole) tracks his father (Forest Whitaker) down to a small-town gas station, where . . .

Well, where yet another coincidence reveals that life does not unfold by plan, but by chance, often assisted by coincidence, irony and luck - both good and bad. There are 8 million stories in the city, and "Smoke" wants to tell about eight of them. The result sometimes feels contrived, as if the next revelation is being hauled in by its heels, but the writer, Paul Auster, and the director, Wayne Wang, find such a sweetness in the material and such grace in the actors that the movie weaves a spell.

I wonder if I have seen any other actor in more movies in the last five years than Harvey Keitel. He works all the time, in big roles and small, and throughout his career, he has always made himself available for projects that are risky or experimental or just plain goofy. Here he is as the cigar store philosopher. Look back at his recent films, and he is the vile "Bad Lieutenant," a Mr. Fixit in "Pulp Fiction," the outcast neighbor in "The Piano," a crook in "Reservoir Dogs" and a con man who is a loving father in "Imaginary Crimes" - and in the upcoming "Ulysses' Gaze," the Jury Prize winner at Cannes this year, he is an exiled Greek filmmaker.

He has such an immutable face and body and voice that you'd think he'd play the same role over and over, but he never does. In "Smoke," he is the spirit that holds everything together: not only the actors, but the audience, listening to the stories of the others and wondering how it all fits in.

The movie is a delicate creation, with no big punch line or payoff. Watching it, I was in the moment: It was about these people wandering lost through their lives. Afterward, I felt good about them - good because they were likable people, but good, too, because the writer and director took care to give them dialogue that suited their needs. Of all the handicaps in life, the worst must be the inability to express how you feel.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.4/10 (11,325 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by Theremin (#5)

#186 Buffalo '66 (1998)
Vincent Gallo
Running time - 110 mins
Country of origin USA
Genre Comedy / Drama / Romance
Original language English

Writing credits
Vincent Gallo, Alison Bagnall

Cast
Vincent Gallo ... Billy Brown
Christina Ricci ... Layla
Ben Gazzara ... Jimmy Brown
Mickey Rourke ... The Bookie
Rosanna Arquette ... Wendy Balsam

Other awards
Nominations: Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize - Dramatic.

BY ROGER EBERT / August 7, 1998

Vincent Gallo's ``Buffalo '66'' plays like a collision between a lot of half-baked visual ideas and a deep and urgent need. That makes it interesting. Most movies don't bake their visual ideas at all, nor do we sense that their makers have had to choose between filming them, or imploding. Oh, and the film contains an astonishing performance by Christina Ricci, who seems to have been assigned a portion of the screen where she can do whatever she wants.

Gallo plays Billy Brown, who is being released from prison when we first see him. He waits outside a long time, and then knocks on the gates, asking a guard if he can come back in to use the john. Turned away, urgently needing to pee, he takes a bus into town, is turned away at the bus station and the restaurant, and then barges into a tap-dancing class. While he's there, he grabs one of the students, drags her out, tells her she's being kidnapped and says she has to pretend to be his wife when he goes to visit his parents.

This is Layla (Christina Ricci), who is dressed like Barbie as a hooker, and takes the kidnapping in stride: ``Are your parents vegetarians? I hope so, because I don't eat meat--ever!'' At Billy's house, we meet the parents. Dad (Ben Gazzara) glowers but doesn't speak. Mom (Anjelica Huston) has her eyes glued to the TV, where a tape of an old Buffalo Bills game is playing. She named her son for the team. The display of family photos includes Jack Kemp and O.J. Simpson. Eventually dad warms up to Layla, grabbing her clumsily and cooing, ``I love my little daughter. Daddy loves his daughter.'' Later, he mimes to a record by a Sinatra sound-alike (actually, we learn from the end titles, Gallo's father).

Gallo shot these scenes in his childhood home in Buffalo, and has said the parents are based on his own. His memories are like an open wound. Consider a flashback where his mother knows he's allergic to chocolate doughnuts, and feeds him some, anyway, and his face swells up like the Pillsbury doughboy. The movie plays like revenge time.

But that's not all. Gallo, an angular and unshaven man with a haunted look, has acted for offbeat and experimental directors such as Abel Ferrara (``The Funeral''), Bille August (``House of the Spirits''), Mika Kaurismaki (``L.A. Without a Map''), Emir Kusturica (``Arizona Dream''), Claire Denis (``Nenette and Boni''), Mira Nair (``The Perez Family'') and Kiefer Sutherland (``Truth or Consequences, N.M.''). His career is proof that it is possible to work steadily and well in challenging and original films by gifted directors and remain almost completely unknown. Now, directing his own film at last, he seems filled with ideas that he wants to realize--sequences that spring to life even though they may have precarious attachments to the rest of the film.

Consider his visit to the local bowling alley, still with Ricci as his hostage (he has named her ``Wendy Balsam'' and explained that they met ``while overseas on assignment for the CIA''). Although he was in prison for six or seven years, his old locker is still waiting for him. (When they don't change your lock after you're sent to the Big House, that's a bowling alley with a heart.) He bowls, brilliantly. She, dressed like a finalist for Little Miss Sunbeam, does a tap-dance routine right there on the hardwood, while a spotlight follows her. What's this scene doing in ``Buffalo '66''? Maybe Gallo didn't have any other movie he could put it in.

We gradually learn a little of Billy's story, although nothing of Layla's. Carried away by the family obsession with the Buffalo Bills, he bet $10,000 he didn't have and lost it on a crucial missed field goal. His bookie (Mickey Rourke) forgave the debt, on condition he do the prison time for another guy. Now he wants revenge. Not on the bookie--on the placekicker.

There's probably a dark and violent ending looming for the film, although there's a good chance, we think, that it may avoid it: The movie has stepped nimbly around all sorts of other obligatory scenes. ``Buffalo '66'' isn't really about endings, anyway. Endings are about conclusions and statements, and Gallo is obviously too much in turmoil about this material to organize it into a payoff.

What we get is more like improvisational jazz, in which themes are introduced from other movies, and this one does riffs on them. Christina Ricci is like a soloist who occasionally stands up and takes the spotlight while the other players recede into the shadows, nodding and smoking. Why does her character go along with the kidnapping? Why does she throw herself into the role of ``wife'' with such zeal--and invention? Well, it's more interesting than if she was merely frightened and trying to escape. That would be the conventional approach. There's not a thing conventional about this movie.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.2/10 (10,941 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by GirlWithAspirin (#3)

Now, is 'the children of the lost city' another film, or are we both on about Le Cité des enfants perdus? Because that's 112 mins. I know it's moot, but the film counts.

We're talking about two films, but we shouldn't be. your vote I noted for the short (Les Enfants de la cité perdue) has been added to La Cité des enfants perdus

Wow, someone had this higher than my #5?


edit: no, no they didn't.

Ranked highest by Philip Morris

You'd think I''d have learnt how to read my own spreadsheets by now, fixed ta.

"We're a couple, spanning time together"

Honey, where's the picture of Billy?