You wally, but that probably only cost it 8 or 9 places.

the top picture on mitch's post is actually from "Once Upon A Time in Mexico"

You're very weird.

#160 The Secret of Roan Inish (1994)
John Sayles
Running time - 103 mins
Country of origin USA / Ireland
Genre Family / Fantasy
Original language English / Irish Gaelic

Writing Credits
Rosalie K. Fry, John Sayles

Cast
Jeni Courtney ... Fiona
Pat Slowey ... Priest
Dave Duffy ... Jim
Declan Hannigan ... Oldest brother
Mairéad Ní Ghallchóir ... Barmaid

BY ROGER EBERT / March 3, 1995

One day, many years ago, an ancestor of Fiona spied a beautiful creature sunning by the sea. She was both woman and seal. We would call her a mermaid, but on that western coast of Ireland such creatures were well-known as Selkies.

The ancestor trapped the creature and married her, and they had children together and lived happily, although she seemed to long for the sea. One day she learned where her husband had hidden her sealskin, up under the roof, and she put it back on, and returned to the sea.

Fiona (Jeni Courtney), who is 12 or 13 years old, is told this story by a relative. It is not told as a "fairy tale" but as an account of family history, to be taken quite seriously. And well might Fiona believe it, because ever since there have been dark-haired children in her family who were said to throw back to the Selkie, and whose eyes turned yearningly to the sea.

The year is about 1946. Fiona's mother has died, and her father can barely be budged from his mourning in the pub. She is sent to live with her grandparents, on a sea coast across from the island of Roan Inish, where the whole family once lived. There she learns the story of her little brother Jamie, whose cradle was carried off by the waves. And there, with her grandparents and her cousin Eamon (Richard Sheridan), she first explores Roan Inish, which means, in Gaelic, "island of the seals." The secret of John Sayles' "The Secret of Roan Inish" is that it tells of this young girl with perfect seriousness. This is not a children's movie, not a fantasy, not cute, not fanciful. It is the exhilarating account of the way Fiona rediscovers her family's history and reclaims their island. If by any chance you do not believe in Selkies, please at least keep an open mind, because in this film Selkies exist in the real world, just like you and me.

On Roan Inish, the girl sees a child's footprint. Then she sees the child - Jamie! - running on the sand. She calls to him, but he gets back into his cradle, which is borne out to sea by friendly seals. Of course it is hard to convince grownups of what she has seen.

In the meantime, her grandparents face eviction from their cottage, which is to be sold to rich folks from the city. They may have to move inland. "To move off of Roan Inish was bad enough," Fiona's grandmother says, "but to move out of sight of the sea . . ." She shakes her head, making it clear that it would kill the grandfather, who thinks of the city as "nothing but noise and dirt and people that's lost their senses!" Can Fiona and Eamon, her young cousin, restore the family's old cottages on Roan Inish? Can she reclaim Jamie from the sea? I found myself actually caring. John Sayles and Haskell Wexler, who has photographed this movie with great beauty and precision, have ennobled the material. There is a scene where a person numbed by the cold sea is warmed between two cows, and we feel close to the earth, and protected.

One can easily guess how this legend could have been simplified and jollied up in other hands - how it could have been about cute little Selkies. But legends are, after all, told by adults, not children, and usually they record something essential to the culture that produces them. What this legend says, I think, is that the people who tell it live on the land but live from the sea, so that their loyalties are forever divided.

Of course this is a wonderful "family film," if that term has not been corrupted to mean simpleminded and shallow. Children deserve not lesser films but greater ones, because their imaginations can take in larger truths and bigger ideas. "The Secret of Roan Inish" is a film for children and teenagers like Fiona, who can envision changing their family's fate. It is also for adults, of course, except for those who think they do not want to see a film about anything so preposterous as a seal-woman, and who will get what they deserve.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.3/10 (2,848 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by Citizen (#3)

#159 The Last Boy Scout (1991)
Tony Scott
Running time - 105 mins
Country of origin USA
Genre Action / Comedy / Crime / Drama / Thriller
Original language English

Writing Credits:
Shane Black, Greg Hicks

Cast
Bruce Willis ... Joseph Cornelius 'Joe' Hallenbeck
Damon Wayans ... James Alexander 'Jimmy/Jim' Dix
Chelsea Field ... Sarah Hallenbeck
Noble Willingham ... Sheldon 'Shelly' Marcone
Taylor Negron ... Milo


BY ROGER EBERT / December 13, 1991

'The Last Boy Scout" opens with a sequence of such sudden and unexpected violence that the audience is stunned into uneasy silence.

The movie never looks back. Perhaps propelled by the determination of its star, Bruce Willis, to erase the box-office curse of "Hudson Hawk," this film panders with such determination to the base instincts of the action crowd that it will, I am sure, be an enormous hit.

It was produced by Joel Silver, who has made violence toward women a key element in his films, and cheerfully expands its horizons to violence toward children - providing the Willis character with a foul-mouthed 13-year-old daughter who is hauled around by bad guys with a gun pointed at her temple. (The film is rated R, proving that violence alone cannot earn the NC-17 rating.) It is some kind of a tribute to Tony Scott, who directed the film, and especially to Shane Black and Greg Hicks, who wrote the screenplay, that this material survives its own complete cynicism and somehow actually works. Watching it, I felt like some weatherbeaten innocent from an earlier, simpler time. My distaste was irrelevant.

This movie is the future. It assumes the average audience now has no standards except those of the mob.

The only consistent theme of the film is its hatred of women. The two heroes (Willis and Damon Wayans) have a wife and a girlfriend, respectively, who cheat on them - the wife with Willis' best friend, the girlfriend by prostituting herself. Both men are at home in this screenplay, which hates women with a particular viciousness; the verbal violence begins by calling them bitches and whores and worse, over and over again, and the message is that a man can only really trust another man. The end of the movie is peculiar in the way it insists on this; the hero, reconciled with his cheating wife, embraces her and whispers vile obscenities into her ear. We are intended to read them as tender. Then he strolls off lovingly with his buddy.

I am a reporter. I must report not only the film's willingness to degrade women and children. I must also report the film's slick, clever professionalism. As I said before, this film works. Despite any objection I may have felt, it plays well with an audience (although some of the people around me seemed disturbed by an extended scene in which Willis and his child curse each other).

The movie has a lot of laughs, its action sequences are thrilling, its surprises are startling, and it shows a real ingenuity in the ways by which it gets Willis into, and out of, trouble.

The plot involves Willis as an ex-Secret Service agent (he once stopped several bullets intended for Jimmy Carter), who is now a flea-bitten private eye. He's hired to protect a stripper (Halle Berry) who is getting threats, and after she is ambushed, Willis begins an uneasy partnership with her boyfriend, a disgraced NFL star (Wayans) who was booted out of the league for gambling.

The plot leads to bigger game, all the way up to a corrupt team owner (Noble Willingham) who wants to buy legislators and legalize gambling on pro football. Willingham is surrounded by sleazy and depraved henchmen (Taylor Negron is magnificently despicable as the worst of them), and there is a plot involving high explosives, kidnappings, high-tech chases, long moments spent on the brink of death, graphic beatings, and the involvement of the young child in the most savage of the violence, to flavor it with a novel edge. The original screenplay for "The Last Boy Scout" set a record for its purchase price; that was probably because of the humor of the locker-room dialogue, since the plot itself could have been rewritten out of the "Lethal Weapon" movies by any film school grad.

The story depends heavily on the device of the Talking Killer, which I have written about elsewhere; the killer who need only pull the trigger to end the movie, but chooses instead to boast and stall until the hero can somehow outsmart him. The many ways in which Willis outsmarts Talking Killers in this film provide some of its best moments, and there is also excitement in the climactic scene inside the football stadium (although I imagine the average NFL crowd, confronted with a machinegun battle inside the stadium, would flee rather than cheer on cue).

"The Last Boy Scout" is a superb example of what it is: a glossy, skillful, cynical, smart, utterly corrupt and vilely misogynistic action thriller. How is the critic to respond? To give it a negative review would be dishonest, because it is such a skillful and well-crafted movie. To be positive is to seem to approve its sickness about women. I'll give it three stars. As for my thumb, I'll use it and my forefinger to hold my nose.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 6.5/10 (17,903 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by Castana (#3)

#158 Big Night (1996)
Campbell Scott + Stanley Tucci
Running time - 107 mins
Country of origin USA
Genre Drama
Original language English / Italian

Writing Credits:
Joseph Tropiano, Stanley Tucci

Cast
Marc Anthony ... Cristiano
Tony Shalhoub ... Primo
Stanley Tucci ... Secondo
Minnie Driver ... Phyllis
Isabella Rossellini ... Gabriella


Other awards
Won Sundance Film Festival - Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award
Nominated Sundance Film Festival - Grand Jury Prize Dramatic

BY ROGER EBERT / December 27, 1996

``Big Night'' is one of the great food movies, and yet it is so much more. It is about food not as a subject but as a language--the language by which one can speak to gods, can create, can seduce, can aspire to perfection. There is a moment in the movie when a timpano is sliced open, and the audience sighs with simple delight.

The movie exists in the real world, where you can go broke selling great food. It tells the story of two brothers, recent immigrants to America, who run a restaurant named Paradise. The older brother, named Primo (Tony Shalhoub), is a genius as a chef. The younger brother, named Secondo (Stanley Tucci), knows it. Early in the film, Primo labors all day to create a perfect seafood risotto, but a customer complains she cannot find the seafood. Then she asks for spaghetti and meatballs as a side dish.

Primo is enraged. He will not serve two starches together. Nor will he put meatballs on spaghetti in any event. ``She's a philistine!'' he cries. ``Maybe I put mashed potatoes for the other side!'' Secondo, who is keenly aware that customers are rare, tries to placate him, but keeps a certain distance: He respects Primo's talent.

Paradise, in any event, is going broke. The bank is foreclosing. Across the street, a man named Pascal (Ian Holm) runs an enormously successful Italian restaurant by giving his customers what they want. When Secondo appeals to him for advice and a loan, Pascal supplies his philosophy: ``A guy works all day, he don't want to look at his plate and ask, `What the - - - - is this?' He wants to look at his plate, see a steak, and say, `I like steak!' '' Pascal will not lend money, but he will do a favor. He is a personal friend of the great Italian-American singer Louis Prima, and will arrange for Prima and his band to visit Paradise for a great meal. The visit will be reported in all the papers, business will pick up, and the restaurant will be saved.

Pascal will do this favor, it seems, out of the goodness of his heart. Although he doesn't know it, this is not the first favor he has done Secondo, who has been carrying on a secret affair with Pascal's mistress, Gabriella (Isabella Rossellini). Secondo's life is complicated; while he has steamy meetings with Gabriella, he conducts a more sedate relationship with Phyllis (Minnie Driver), his girlfriend, who has been waiting for a proposal and cannot understand Secondo's reluctance to declare his love.

``Big Night'' sees all of these people with great fascination: It is truly interested in them as individuals. When Primo and Secondo are in the kitchen, for example, notice how absorbed they are in their professional and culinary conversations. They don't seem to be acting, and they don't seem to be in a scene; they seem utterly devoted to the business at hand. There is an unbroken shot in which one prepares a perfect omelet and serves it to the other, and we are left suspecting that anyone who can make a perfect omelet can pass almost any other test life has to offer.

There is a rich feeling to the neighborhood. We meet the baker, the priest and the woman who sells flowers (Allison Janney). Primo has a crush on her, but is very shy. He feeds her a lasagna and tells her, ``To eat good food is to be close to God.'' We even meet the local Cadillac salesman (Campbell Scott), who represents the elusive goal of success, which is not merely to drive a Cadillac, but to drive next year's model this year.

The film ends with the big feast for Louis Prima. The restaurant is filled, and as the diners all wait for Prima to arrive, they begin to eat one magnificent course after another that Primo sends from his kitchen. As these dishes are presented and unveiled, the audience goes into a kind of reverie. I was reminded of other movies where food suggests the possibility of an ideal state: ``Like Water for Chocolate,'' ``Babette's Feast'' and ``Tampopo,'' in which the whole universe is reflected in a perfect bowl of noodle soup.

The movie works smoothly and deeply to achieve its effects, which have to do with more than this night or this feast. The surprises in the plot involve not only secret romance but heartbreak and long-held frustration, for if genius is great, it is nevertheless not easy to be genius' brother. By the end of the movie, we have been through an emotional and a sensual wringer, in a film of great wisdom and delight.

``Big Night'' was written by Joseph Tropiano and Stanley Tucci, and co-directed by Tucci and Campbell Scott. Tucci and Scott are familiar from many other roles (Tucci has starred in independent films and in the first season of TV's ``Murder One''; Scott was Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker's lover, in ``Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle''). To some degree this film must represent a break for them: They have been in good movies before, but not enough of them, and it is said Tucci began working on ``Big Night'' while making a film he hated.

Now here is their labor of love. Their perfect risotto. They include just what is needed and nothing else. Watching it, I reflected how many Hollywood movies these days seem to come with a side order of spaghetti and meatballs. And mashed potatoes.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.1/10 (5,795 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by Agrimorfee

#157 Bowfinger (1999)
Frank Ozi
Running time - 97 mins
Country of origin USA
Genre Comedy
Original language English

Writing Credits:
Steve Martin

Cast
Steve Martin ... Bobby Bowfinger
Eddie Murphy ... Kit Ramsey/Jeffernson 'Jiff' Ramsey
Heather Graham ... Daisy
Christine Baranski ... Carol
Jamie Kennedy ... Dave

BY ROGER EBERT / August 13, 1996

t is a plan of audacity and madness: Bowfinger, a low-rent movie producer, will make a film with a top Hollywood action star, and the star won't even know he's making the picture. "He doesn't like to see the camera, and he never talks to his fellow actors," Bowfinger (Steve Martin) tells his trusting crew. "We'll use a hidden camera." The movie, to be titled "Chubby Rain," will be about aliens in raindrops.

The big star, named Kit Ramsey (Eddie Murphy), is an ideal choice for this strategy, because he's crazy enough to believe in strange encounters. He's a member of Mind Head, a cult that recruits insecure Hollywood types, gives them little white pyramid hats to wear and pumps them full of new age babble. And Bowfinger's actors and crew want to believe him, because this is as close as they'll ever get to being in a movie.

"Bowfinger," written by Martin and directed by Frank Oz ("Little Shop of Horrors"), understands how deeply people yearn to be in the movies, and how fame can make you peculiar. Like Mel Brooks' "The Producers," it's about fringe players who strike out boldly for the big time. The shabby frame house on a dead-end street has a sign outside promoting glorious enterprises ("Bowfinger International Pictures"), but inside everything is debt, desperation and dreams.

Bowfinger is a bottom feeder with a coterie even more hapless than he is. His screenplay is by his Iranian accountant Afrim (Adam Alexi-Malle). His flunky is Dave (Jaime Kennedy), who specializes in being deceived because otherwise he would have nothing at all to believe in. His leading actress, Carol (Christine Baranski), has been kept on hold for years. "We'll hire the best crew we can afford!" Bowfinger declares, backing his vehicle up to the Mexican border and loading four illegal immigrants. And straight off the bus, swinging her suitcase, her lips parted with desire, comes Daisy (Heather Graham), an Ohio girl who's prepared to sleep her way to the top but didn't realize she'd start so close to the bottom.

All these characters are like an accident waiting to happen to Kit Ramsey, hilariously played by Eddie Murphy in his third best comic performance of recent years. The second best was in "The Nutty Professor." The best is a second role in this film: As Jiff, a hapless loser hired to be Kit's double, Murphy creates a character of such endearing cluelessness that even in a comedy he generates real affection from the audience.

Murphy makes Kit into a loudmouth image-monger with a racial chip on his shoulder; complaining about Arnold's "I'll be back" and Clint's "make my day," he whines, "The white man gets all the best catchphrases." Terrified by the smallest detail of daily living, he has frequent sessions with his Mind Head guru (Terence Stamp ), who leads him patiently through reminders of good and bad behavior (one of his problems is too funny for me to spoil with even a hint).

But it's as Jiff that Murphy gets his biggest laughs. Here is a man so grateful to be in a film, so disbelieving that he has been singled out for stardom, that he dutifully risks his life to walk across a busy expressway. Murphy shows here, as he did in "The Nutty Professor" and on "Saturday Night Live," a gift for creating new characters out of familiar materials. Yes, Jiff looks like Kit (that's why he got the job as a double), but the person inside is completely fresh and new, and has his own personality and appeal. Although Murphy is not usually referred to as a great actor (and comedians are never taken as seriously as they should be), how many other actors, however distinguished, could create Jiff out of whole cloth and make him such a convincing and funny original? Martin is also at the top of his form, especially in an early scene where he pitches his project to a powerful studio executive (Robert Downey Jr.). Martin steals a suit and a car to make an impressive entrance at the restaurant where Downey is having a power lunch, but undercuts the effect a little by ripping out the car phone and trying to use it like a cell phone--staging a fake call for Downey to overhear. Downey handles this scene perfectly, right down to his subdued double-take when he sees the cord dangling from the end of the phone. His performance is based on the truth that strange and desperate pitches are lobbed at studio suits every day, some of them no more bizarre than this one. Instead of overreacting to Martin's craziness, Downey plays the scene to humor this guy.

"Bowfinger" is one of those comedies where everything works. Where the premise is not just a hook but the starting point for a story that keeps developing and revealing new surprises. Like a lot of Steve Martin's other writing, it is also gentle and good-natured: He isn't a savage ironist or a vulgarian, and when he makes us laugh, it's usually about things that are really funny. Shell-shocked in this year of gross and grosser comedies, we can turn to "Bowfinger" with merciful relief.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 6.3/10 (22,814 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by Pavement Ist Rad

#156 Fearless (1993)
Peter Weir
Running time - 122 mins
Country of origin USA
Genre Drama
Original language English

Writing Credits:
Rafael Yglesias

Cast
Jeff Bridges ... Max Klein
Isabella Rossellini ... Laura Klein
Rosie Perez ... Carla Rodrigo
Tom Hulce ... Brillstein
John Turturro ... Dr. Bill Perlman

Academy Awards
Nominated Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Rosie Perez)

Other awards
Nominated Golden Globe - Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture (Rosie Perez)

BY ROGER EBERT / October 15, 1993

Is this, I wonder, the way it would be? The airplane has lost hydraulic pressure and is falling through the sky. Some of the passengers scream, others pray, some hold hands and exchange words of love. One man seems serenely apart from the crowd. He walks up the aisle to a small boy who is traveling alone, and tries to comfort him. The man believes his life is coming to an end, but he is at peace with that fact.

Everyone who has flown has pictured the possibility of an unsuccessful flight. The 1992 movie, "Alive!," did a masterful special effects job of showing what might happen on an airplane crash-landing onto a snowy field. Now "Fearless" is eerily convincing in its portrait of the last moments of a flight, and its aftermath.

For there is an aftermath. Not everyone is killed, and the man who is so serene is one of the survivors.

His name is Max Klein (Jeff Bridges). He is a hero, helping save the lives of others after the crash. Then he walks away from it, and checks into a motel. In a sense he is walking away from his entire life. All of the worries and cares, the hopes and responsibilities, have been wiped away.

But it is not that simple. The FBI finds him, and then he returns home to his wife (Isabella Rossellini), and the airline provides him with a psychiatrist (John Turturro), and there is a lawyer (Tom Hulce) who thinks there may be big money for Max, and for the widow of his business partner, who was killed in the crash. "Did you see him die?" the lawyer asks. "That could be worth extra money.

. . ." One person understands Max's peculiar state of mind, in these weird days of his second chance at life. Her name is Carla Rodrigo (Rosie Perez), and she also survived the crash. They feel a bond through having survived an experience that is impossible to describe for anyone who was not there. They grow so close that at times it seems they will fall in love, or have an affair, but finally it isn't that kind of closeness.

Meanwhile, Max's wife tries to understand, but grows frustrated by his distant behavior. Is it her fault that her husband nearly died? Or is still alive? "Fearless," directed by Peter Weir ("Witness," "Dead Poets Society"), was written by Rafael Yglesias, and based on his novel. It is unusual for being essentially philosophical and introspective, rather than romantic; it doesn't allow either the troubled marriage or the possible affair to distract from its real subject, which is the fragility of everyday life.

Bridges, who despite his Oscar nominations has never really been recognized for the subtle depth of his acting, is a good choice for the role of Max. He plays him matter-of-factly. There are no mystical overtones or gratuitous emotional displays in the performance, just the serious comings and goings of a man who has escaped death by such a slender chance that all of life's assumptions have come into question.

Perez, who played Woody Harrelson's girlfriend in "White Men Can't Jump" and Marisa Tomei's best friend in "Untamed Heart," is emerging as one of the great new originals in the movies. With her tough Brooklyn accent just a little softened this time, she strikes a no-nonsense, in-your-face note that makes her character quirky and unique.

It's an example of imaginative casting; this same crash survivor could have been soulful, or neurotic, or weepy. By making her colorful and outspoken, the filmmakers create an unexpected dynamic; we see that she isn't Rossellini's rival for her husband's heart, but for his soul.

"Fearless" is like a short story that shines a bright light, briefly, into a corner where you usually do not look. It makes you realize how routine life can become; how it is actually possible to be bored despite the fact that a universe has evolved for eons in order to provide us with the five senses by which we perceive it. If we ever really fully perceived the cosmic situation we are in, we would drop unconscious, I imagine, from shock. That is a little of what "Fearless" is about.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.0/10 (6,657 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by Derry Dukes (#16)

Great to see Fearless make the list. I am indebted to the film for it being the source for the first time I met and flirted with my wife.

The only movie on this list that I haven't seen.

(Also, I can't remember what the topic was the first time I flirted with your wife.)

Ya dirty bastard!

The Wonderful Wizard of Ozi!

(loved this movie..."keepittogetherkeepittogetherkeepittogether..."

I can't believe someone ranked The Last Boy Scout higher than I did. Awesome.

#155 Dogma (1999)
Kevin Smith
Running time - 130 mins
Country of origin USA
Genre Adventure / Comedy / Fantasy / Romance
Original language English

Writing Credits:
Kevin Smith

Cast
Ben Affleck ... Bartleby
Matt Damon ... Loki
Linda Fiorentino ... Bethany Sloane
Jason Mewes ... Jay
Chris Rock ... Rufus

Other awards
Nominated Razzie Award Worst Supporting Actress (Salma Hayek)

BY ROGER EBERT / November 12, 1999

Kevin Smith's "Dogma" grows out of an irreverent modern Catholic sensibility, a byproduct of parochial schools, where the underlying faith is taken seriously but the visible church is fair game for kidding. For those reared in such traditions, it's no reach at all to imagine two fallen angels finding a loophole to get back into heaven. I can remember passionate debates during religion class about whether, if you missed your Easter duty, you could double back across the International Date Line and cover yourself.

Of course the faith itself does not depend on temporal rules, and "Dogma" knows it. Catholicism, like all religions, is founded on deeper mysteries than whether you will go to hell if you eat meat on Friday. I am reminded of the wonderful play "Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You," in which a pre-Vatican II nun tries to cope with changes in church law; as I recall, her advice was to eat meat once on a Friday, to show you know the pope is right--and then never eat it again.

As someone who values his parochial school education and still gets into interminable debates about church teachings, I enjoyed the "Dogma" approach, which takes church teaching jokingly and very seriously indeed--both at the same time. It reflects a mentality I'm familiar with. (For example, it's a sin to harbor an impure thought, but how many seconds counts as harboring?) I am also familiar with the types at William Donohue's small but loud Catholic League, which is protesting this film as blasphemous.

Every church has that crowd--the holier-than-thous who want to be your moral traffic cop; when they run meetings, they drive you crazy with Robert's Rules of Order. It's interesting that no official church spokesman has seconded them. You'd think the church might tell the league to stop embarrassing it, but no, that would be no better than the league attacking Smith. We are actually free in this country to disagree about religion, and blasphemy is not a crime.

What's more, I think a Catholic God might plausibly enjoy a movie like "Dogma," or at least understand the human impulses that made it, as he made them. ("He's lonely--but he's funny," an angel says in the movie.) After all, it takes Catholic theology absolutely literally, and in such detail that non-Catholics may need to be issued Catechisms on their way into the theater (not everybody knows what a plenary indulgence is). Sure, it contains a lot of four-letter words, because it has characters who use them as punctuation. But, hey, they're vulgarities, not blasphemies. Venial, not mortal. Sure, it has a flawed prophet who never gives up trying to get into the heroine's pants, but even St. Augustine has been there, done that.

The story: Matt Damon and Ben Affleck play Loki and Bartleby, two angels cast out of heaven and exiled for all eternity to Wisconsin. They hear about a trendy bishop (George Carlin) who wants to give the church an upbeat new image. He's rededicating a cathedral in New Jersey in the image of Buddy Jesus, a Christ who blesses his followers with the A-OK sign. Anyone entering the cathedral will get a plenary indulgence (which means that if you are in a state of grace, all temporal punishment for sin is remitted, and you can enter directly into heaven). Bartleby and Loki see the loophole: Walk through the church's doors, and they qualify again for heaven.

There is a problem with this plan (apart from the obvious one, which is that church rules govern men, not angels). The problem is explained by Metatron (Alan Rickman), an angel who appears inside a pillar of fire in the bedroom of Bethany (Linda Fiorentino). After she douses him with a fire extinguisher, he explains that if the angels re-enter heaven, God will be proven fallible--and all existence will therefore end. He tells Bethany that she is the last surviving relative of Jesus on Earth, that two prophets will appear to her, and that she must follow them in order to stop the angels and save the universe.

Fiorentino is a laconic, edgy actress with an attitude. That makes her perfect for this role. In an earlier draft of Smith's screenplay, the character was a bimbo, but she's much better like this, grown-up and sardonic. It's fun to watch her handle the prophets, who turn out to be a couple of slacker mall rats (Jason Mewes and Smith himself). Later she meets Rufus, the 13th apostle (Chris Rock), who has a grievance about why he was left out of the New Testament.

If the film is less than perfect, it is because Smith is too much in love with his dialogue. Like George Bernard Shaw, he loves to involve his characters in long witty conversations about matters of religion, sexuality and politics. "Dogma" is one of those rare screenplays, like a Shaw playscript, that might actually read better than it plays; Smith is a gifted comic writer who loves paradox, rhetoric and unexpected zingers from the blind side.

There is a long tradition that commercial American movies challenge conventional piety at great risk. For a long time, any movie dealing with religion had to be run past Hollywood's resident monsignors, ministers and rabbis for approval (the habits of actual orders of nuns could not even be portrayed, which led to great ingenuity in the costume department). On the other hand, nobody has any problem with a movie that treats spiritual matters on the level of the supernatural. This has led to an emerging anti-religion based on magic, ghosts, reincarnation, mediums and other new age voodoo. Talk shows allow "psychics" to answer your questions over the phone, but God forbid they would put on a clergyman to supply thoughtful spiritual advice. And if a movie dares to deal with what people actually believe, all hell, so to speak, breaks loose.

Kevin Smith has made a movie that reflects the spirit in which many Catholics regard their church. He has positioned his comedy on the balance line between theological rigidity and secular reality, which is where so many Catholics find themselves. He deals with eternal questions in terms of flawed characters who live now, today, in an imperfect world.

Those whose approach to religion is spiritual will have little trouble with "Dogma," because they will understand the characters as imperfect, sincere, clumsy seekers trying to do the right thing. Those who see religion more as a team, a club, a hobby or a pressure group are going to be upset. This movie takes theological matters out of the hands of "spokesmen" and entrusts them to--well, the unwashed. And goes so far as to suggest that God loves them. And is a Canadian.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.3/10 (68,986 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by Man Is Matter

that movie was awful.

#154 The Fisher King (1991)
Terry Gilliam
Running time - 137 mins
Country of origin USA
Genre Comedy / Drama
Original language English

Writing Credits:
Richard LaGravenese

Cast
Jeff Bridges ... Jack Lucas
Robin Williams ... Parry
Mercedes Ruehl ... Anne Napolitano
Amanda Plummer ... Lydia Sinclair
David Hyde Pierce ... Lou Rosen

Academy Awards
Won: - Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Mercedes Ruehl)
Nominated : - Best Actor in a Leading Role (Robin Williams), Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Best Music, Original Score, Best Writing - Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen

Other awards
Won: Golden Globe - Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Comedy/Musical (Robin Williams),Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture (Mercedes Ruehl) Venice Film Festival - Silver Lion
Nominated BAFTA Film Award - Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Amanda Plummer),Best Screenplay - Original Golden Globe - Best Director - Motion Picture, Best Motion Picture - Comedy/Musical, Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Comedy/Musical (Jeff Bridges) Venice Film Festival - Golden Lion

BY ROGER EBERT / September 20, 1991

"The Fisher King" is a disorganized, rambling and eccentric movie that contains some moments of truth, some moments of humor, and many moments of digression. The filmmakers are nothing if not generous; we get urban grit, show-biz angst, two love affairs, the holy grail, the homeless, an action sequence, a dance sequence, and an apocalyptic figure on a horse who rides through Central Park with flames shooting from his head. Even with such excess, at 137 minutes the movie shows signs of having been pruned of some of its quiet spots - or did they intend to have all those scenes, back to back, in which people shout at each other? The film stars Jeff Bridges as Jack, a radio talk show host whose unbalanced listener goes on a shooting spree, apparently following Jack's advice. Jack is devastated and quits his job and drops out into a long, alcoholic reverie, only to be redeemed by Parry (Robin Williams), a homeless man who is convinced the holy grail is in the possession of a Manhattan billionaire, and that together they can find it.

The screenplay, by Richard LaGravenese, seems to have been constructed like an airliner, with fail-safe redundancy. There are not only two heroes in need of redemption, but two heroines in need of love: Jack's long-suffering partner Anne (Mercedes Ruehl), and Parry's dream-woman Lydia (Amanda Plummer). And there are not only real-life problems for them to conquer, but also the supernatural possibilities of the grail, the ghost horseman, and Parry's haunting visions. Plus a section in which one of the characters disappears into a coma, and another in which the title is explained in a monologue as long as it is unedifying.

"The Fisher King" is so charming it's hard to say when we notice it has no clothes. Individual sequences are bittersweet and moving, some of William's inventions are funny, there is no denying the originality and force of the Ruehl performance - and yet there comes a time when we cannot sustain one more manic outburst, one more flight of fancy, one more arbitrary twist of plot, one more revelation that the movie tricked us into caring about subjects it eventually throws away.

There is a way in which a movie like this, which allows fantasy to be real, has to play fair with the audience. Take the matter of the holy grail. We wonder at first if it really does still exist, there in that billionaire's mansion (the Fifth Avenue Armory). Later we wonder if it matters. Later we wonder if it was a real cup, or only an idea, that the characters were seeking. Later we wonder if it made any difference if they found it.

I mentioned that some of Robin Williams' moments are funny.

They are. But he is also present at some of the movie's low points, in which a rush of verbal cleverness is allowed for its own sake, and the movie suffers. More than any other good actor now at work, Williams needs strong guidelines to reach his best performances.

Perhaps he should start avoiding roles that are "made for Robin Williams," as this one is. He's best playing against type - against his own improvisational personality. When he does, as in the better scenes of "Dead Poets Society" or all of "Awakenings," he is a master actor. When he is indulged, as he is here, he overflows.

Jeff Bridges is as dependable an actor as there is. His problem in this plot is that it takes him on too wild a journey. His own story in the movie - sardonic radio talker sinks into depression after blaming himself for deaths - suggests that he will be redeemed, and a homeless person is a reasonable instrument for his recovery.

But then he doesn't merely recover, he goes along for a manic flight through whimsy and invention, through slapstick and romance, through suspense and deathbed comebacks and Chinese dinners, until he finds himself in the position of the little old lady who had really rather not have been helped to cross the street.

Ruehl, with a deep voice and decolletage, is the most reasonable presence in the movie, a woman who loves even when it is not convenient, but can be pushed only so far. Plummer, as a hapless and incompetent waif who attracts the love and sympathy of the Williams character, is given an idea to play, not a person - and not a very good idea. The movie's double-date scene, recycled from many other movies and embarrassing here, suggests that Plummer's character was added simply because director Terry Gilliam and LaGravenese didn't want to leave out anything.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.4/10 (18,264 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by Elemeno P.T. (#2)

Alright...in the interest of full disclosure, have to say that I saw this again recently for the first time since my early 20's...not as great as I remembered it...was actually annoyed by the realiztion that the movie is trying to be and do to many things...and doesn't do any one thing beautifully. The themes of catharsis and redemption, where inspiring to me as a 22 year old...now seem more thrown together and, at times, hollow.

Damn. I'd still put it in my top 50...but #2 was a gross inflation based on such a fond memory of the film.

#153 Babe: Pig in the City (1998)
George Miller
Running time - 97 mins
Country of origin Australia
Genre Family / Fantasy / Comedy
Original language English

Writing Credits:
George Miller, Judy Morris, Mark Lamprell, Dick King-Smith

Cast
Magda Szubanski ... Mrs. Esme Cordelia Hoggett
James Cromwell ... Farmer Arthur Hoggett
Mary Stein ... The Landlady
Mickey Rooney ... Fugly Floom, the Speechless Man in Hotel
Elizabeth Daily ... Babe the Gallant Pig (voice)

Academy Awards
Nominated : - Best Music, Original Song (For the song "That'll Do" - Randy Newman)

Other awards
Nominated BAFTA Film Award - Best Special Effects

BY ROGER EBERT / November 25, 1998

The first hazard for the returning hero is fame.

So we are assured by the narrator with the opening line of "Babe: Pig in the City." And what is true of heroes is even more true of sequels. The original "Babe" was an astonishment, an unheralded family movie from Australia that was embraced and loved and nominated for an Oscar as best picture. Can the sequel possibly live up to it? It can, and does, and in many ways is more magical than the original. "Babe" (1995) was a film in which everything led up to the big sheepherding contest, in which a pig that worked like a dog turned out to be the best sheep-pig of them all. "Babe: Pig in the City" is not so plot-bound, although it has the required assortment of villains, chases and close calls. It is more of a wonderment, lolling in its enchanting images--original, delightful and funny.

It doesn't make any of the mistakes it could have. It doesn't focus more on the human characters--it focuses on them less, and there are more animals on the screen. It doesn't recycle the first story. It introduces many new characters. It outdoes itself with the sets and special effects that make up "the city." And it is still literate, humane and wicked. George Miller, who produced, directed and co-wrote the film, has improved and extended the ideas in "Babe: Pig in the City," instead of being content to copy them.

The movie begins with Babe returning in triumph to the farm with his sheep dog trophy. Alas, he soon falls into the well, setting in motion a calamitous chain of events that ends with Farmer Hoggett (James Cromwell) laid up in bed, and Mrs. Hoggett (Magda Szubanski) forced to exhibit Babe at a state fair to save the farm from foreclosure. Alas, again, Babe and Mrs. Hoggett miss their connecting flight (she is busted on suspicion of drug possession--that merry, apple-cheeked dumpling of a lady). And they are homeless in the cruel city, where hotels sniff at pigs.

What a city this is! I love imaginary cities in the movies, from "Metropolis" to "Dark City," and here is one to set beside the great ones. Using elaborate sets that surround the buildings with a canal system, Miller uses special effects to create a skyline which impudently incorporates such landmarks as the Statue of Liberty, the Sydney Opera House and the Hollywood sign. This is all cities. And in it, Babe finds himself at a boarding house whose landlady (Mary Stein) believes animals deserve rooms just like people do.

There is a large cast of animal characters, whose dialogue is lip-synched and who are colorful and individual--not at all like silly talking animals. One of my favorite scenes involves Ferdinand the duck (voice by Danny Mann), attempting to keep up with the jet taking Babe to the city; the rear view of him flapping at breakneck speed is one of the funniest moments in the movie. (He's eventually given a lift by a pelican, who intones, "Go well, noble duck!") In the boarding house, we meet chimpanzees, cats, fish and a dog paralyzed from the waist down, who propels himself on a little cart. Babe is tricked by some of his new housemates into distracting fierce dogs during a desperate raid for food; apparently facing doom, he turns, looks his enemy in the eye, and asks, "Why?" He has a close call with a bull terrier (voice by Stanley Ralph Ross, sounding like a Chicago gangster), who tries to kill him, and ends up dangling head-first in the canal. Babe saves him from drowning, and the dog becomes his fierce protector: "What the pig says, goes!" The movie is filled with wonders large and small: little gags at the side of the frame and big laughs in the center. It is in no way just a "children's movie," but one that extends the imagination of everyone who sees it, and there is a wise, grown-up sensibility to its narration, its characters and a lot of the action. (Other action is cheerfully goofy, as when Mrs. Hoggett gets involved in a weird bungee-like session of chandelier-swinging.) Here is a movie that is all made up. The world and its characters materialize out of the abyss of the imagination, and in their impossibility, they seem more real than the characters in many realistic movies. Their hearts are in the right places. And apart from what they do and say, there is the wonderment of the world they live in ("A place just a little to the left of the 20th century").

I liked "Babe" for all the usual reasons, but I like "Babe: Pig in the City" more, and not for any of the usual reasons, because here is a movie utterly bereft of usual reasons.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 6.3/10 (6,188 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by Abortion Angel

Thank the pig.

#152 The Fifth Element (1997)
Luc Besson
Running time - 127 mins
Country of origin France
Genre Action / Adventure / Romance / Sci-Fi / Thriller
Original language English / Swedish / German

Writing Credits:
Luc Besson, Robert Mark Kamen

Cast
Bruce Willis ... Korben Dallas
Gary Oldman ... Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg
Ian Holm ... Father Vito Cornelius
Milla Jovovich ... Leeloo
Chris Tucker ... Ruby Rhod

Academy Awards
Nominated : - Best Effects, Sound Effects Editing

Other awards
Won: BAFTA Film Award - Best Special Effects
Nominated Razzie Award - Worst New Star (Chris Tucker), Worst Supporting Actress (Milla Jovovich)

BY ROGER EBERT / November 25, 1998

``The Fifth Element,'' which opened the Cannes Film Festival on Thursday, is one of the great goofy movies--a film so preposterous I wasn't surprised to discover it was written by a teenage boy. That boy grew up to become Luc Besson, director of good smaller movies and bizarre big ones, and here he's spent $90 million to create sights so remarkable they really ought to be seen.

That's not to say this is a good movie, exactly. It's more of a jumble that includes greatness. Like ``Metropolis'' or ``Blade Runner,'' it offers such extraordinary visions that you put your criticisms on hold and are simply grateful to see them. If Besson had been able to link those sights with a more disciplined story and more ruthless editing, he might have really had something.

The movie begins in ``Egypt, 1914,'' that birthplace not only of civilizations but of countless horror and occult films. Inside an ancient tomb, scientists gather at the site of an event that took place (we learn) centuries earlier. Four crucial stones, representing the four elements, had been kept here until a spaceship, looking something like a hairy aerodynamic pineapple, arrived to take them away, one of its alien beings intoning in an electronically lowered voice, ``Priest, you have served us well. But war is coming. The stones are not safe on Earth anymore.'' Deep portentous opening omens almost invariably degenerate into action sequences. But ``The Fifth Element'' cuts quickly to another extraordinary scene, New York City in the mid-23rd century. The futuristic metropolis, constructed at enormous cost with big, detailed models and effects, is wondrous to behold. It looks like Flash Gordon crossed with those old Popular Mechanics covers about the flying automobiles of the future. Towers climb to the skies, but living conditions are grungy, and most people live in tiny modular cells where all the comforts of home are within arm's reach.

Meanwhile, Earth is threatened by a giant pulsating fiery object that is racing toward the planet at terrific speed. ``All we know is, it just keeps getting bigger,'' one scientist reports. Ian Holm plays an astrophysicist who significantly observes, ``It is evil--evil begets evil.'' What is this object? What rough aliens are slouching toward Earth in its wake? And how to stop it? Man's hopes may lie with Leeloo (Milla Jovovich), cloned from a single unworldly cell, who comes into existence with flaming red hair already dark at the roots (those cells remember everything). Leeloo is clad in a garment that looks improvised from Ace bandages but gets no complaints from me (the costumes are by French couturier Jean-Paul Gaultier, whose favorite strategy as a designer is to start by covering the strategic places, and then stop).

Military-industrial types want to employ Leeloo for their own ends; they observe her from behind unbreakable glass. She breaks the glass, grabs a general's privates, and dives through what looks like a wall of golden crumpled aluminum foil, racing outside to a ledge high in the clouds. She leaps, but is saved from dashing her genes out on the pavements far below by crashing through the roof of a taxi driven by Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis), who seems to have been ported directly here from the cab in ``Pulp Fiction.'' Leeloo holds unimaginable powers, but she needs help, and Korben befriends her. Soon the future of the universe is in their hands, as the movie unfolds the rest of the story. The ``fifth element'' of the title, we learn, is the life force itself--that which animates the inanimate (the other four elements are earth, air, fire and water). Leeloo represents this element. Arrayed against her is a vast anti-life force, a sort of black hole of death. Every 5,000 years, a portal opens between the universes where these two forces live; the evil force can slip through unless the five elements are correctly deployed against it. The pulsating fireball in space is the physical manifestation of the dark force.

Involved with mankind in this approaching battle are two alien races: the Mondoshawan, who live inside great clunky armored suits (that was their hairy pineapple), and the Mangalores, whose faces can be pictured by crossing a bulldog, a catfish and an alderman. The Mangalores are in the hire of the sinister Zorg (Gary Oldman), who supports the evil force despite the fact that (as nearly as I can figure) it would destroy him along with everything else.

Now if this doesn't sound like a story dreamed up by a teenager, nothing does. The ``Star Wars'' movies look deep, even philosophical, in comparison, but never mind: We are watching ``The Fifth Element'' not to think, but to be delighted.

Besson gives us one great visual conceit after another. A concert, for example, starring a towering alien diva whose skin shines with a ghostly blue light, and who has weird ropes of sinew coming out of her skull. And a space station that seems to be a sort of intergalactic Las Vegas, in which a disc jockey (Chris Tucker) prances about hosting an endless TV show. And spaceship interiors that succeed in breaking the ``Star Wars''/``Trek'' mold and imagining how an alien race might design its command deck.

The movie is a triumph of technical credits; the cinematographer is Thierry Arbogast, the production designer is Dan Weil, and the special effects are by Digital Domain, which created the futuristic Mars in ``Total Recall.'' And remember that Besson conceived of these sights, and had the audacity to believe his strange visions could make a movie.

For that I am grateful. I would not have missed seeing this film, and I recommend it for its richness of imagery. But at 127 minutes, which seems a reasonable length, it plays long. There is way too much of the tiresome disc jockey character late in the movie, when the plot should be focused on business. Sequences are allowed to drag on, perhaps because so much work and expense went into creating them. The editor, Sylvie Landra, is ultimately responsible for the pacing, but no doubt Besson hovered over her shoulder, in love with what he had wrought. A fierce trimming would preserve what makes ``The Fifth Element'' remarkable, and remove what makes it redundant. There's great stuff here, and the movie should get out of its own way.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.2/10 (85,295 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by Agrimorfee

#151 The Sandlot (1993)
David M. Evans
Running time - 101 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Comedy / Drama / Family / Sport
Original language English

Writing Credits:
David M. Evans, Robert Gunter

Cast
Tom Guiry ... Scotty Smalls
Mike Vitar ... Benjamin Franklin Rodriguez
Patrick Renna ... Hamilton 'Ham' Porter
Chauncey Leopardi ... Michael 'Squints' Palledorous
Marty York ... Alan 'Yeah-Yeah' McClennan

BY ROGER EBERT / April 7, 1993

If you have ever been lucky enough to see "A Christmas Story," you will understand what I mean when I say "The Sandlot" is a summertime version of the same vision. Both movies are about gawky young adolescents trapped in a world they never made and doing their best to fit in while beset with the most amazing vicissitudes.

Neither movie has any connection with the humdrum reality of the boring real world; both tap directly into a vein of nostalgia and memory that makes reality seem puny by comparison.

"The Sandlot" takes place in a small American town in the early 1960s. A new boy named Scott (Tom Guiry) arrives in the neighborhood and desperately wants to fit in. There is a local sandlot team with eight players, and so he could be the ninth - if only he could play baseball! He cannot. He's so out of it, he doesn't even know who Babe Ruth was. He asks his stepfather to teach him to play catch (there is a quiet poignancy in being asked to be taught such a thing), and his stepdad agrees, but puts it off, and then one day Scotty finds himself, to his horror, on the sandlot in left center field with a fly ball descending on his head, which it bounces off of.

That would be the end of his baseball career, were it not for the understanding of Benjamin Franklin Rodriguez, the best of the players, who tactfully teaches Scotty what he needs to know, thus launching the finest summer of his young life.

It is one of those summers that are hot and dusty, and the boys play baseball every day, and sometimes go to the municipal swimming pool, where they lust after the impossible vision of the beautiful lifeguard in the red swimming suit. Lust is balanced by terrors: Behind the wall at the end of their sandlot is a backyard inhabited by the Beast, a dog so large and savage that it has become a neighborhood legend. We catch glimpses of parts of it from time to time - a massive paw, slavering jowls - and from what we can see, it's about as large as a dinosaur.

One day the boys' last ball goes over the fence into the domain of the Beast. Scotty saves the day. He runs home and borrows his stepfather's ball, which happens to have been autographed by Babe Ruth, a name that means nothing to him until this ball, too, is slammed over the fence, and then the other players explain to him why his stepfather is not going to be overjoyed to learn that his trophy has become the Beast's lunch.

All of these events are told in an original, quirky, off-center, deliberately exaggerated way. This is not your standard movie about kids and baseball. It's so unconventional, it doesn't even end with the sandlot team winning the Big Game. This movie doesn't even have a Big Game. (The one game they play is a pushover.) The movie isn't about winning and losing, it's about growing up and facing your fears, and as the kids try one goofy plan after another to get the ball back, the story gently leaves the realm of the possible and ventures into the exaggerations common to all childhood legends.

The movie's director is David Mickey Evans, who wrote the script with Robert Gunter. Their tone and the voice-over narration remind me of Jean Shepherd's memories of growing up in northern Indiana.

Memories are sharper, colors are brighter, events are more important, and a life can be changed forever in the course of a sunny afternoon.

These days too many children's movies are infected by the virus of Winning, as if kids are nothing more than underage pro athletes, and the values of Vince Lombardi prevail: It's not how you play the game, but whether you win or lose. This is a movie that breaks with that tradition, that allows its kids to be kids, that shows them in the insular world of imagination and dreaming that children create entirely apart from adult domains and values. There was a moment in the film when Rodriguez hit a line drive directly at the pitcher's mound, and I ducked and held up my mitt, and then I realized I didn't have a mitt, and it was then I also realized how completely this movie had seduced me with its memories of what really matters when you are 12.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.2/10 (10,126 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by Asher Ford

^ Best kids movie ever?

Aw hell no. Not even top 10.

Great movie, but the usual handful of kid-movie cliche roles.



EDIT: Although I'll confess I read that as "Best movie kids ever?" at first.

That's part of what makes it so endearing. The cliches are done really well.

Agreed.

But it's all about the lotioning and the oiling.

One bizarre movie. Gene Siskel proclaimed it the best movie of the year before he croaked.

"You must have a very thin grasp on reality. Unless, of course, you are suicidal."

Has BOOGIE NIGHTS placed yet? Did it place at all?

Wow. Patience, it will be top 25, if not 10.

This movie is one of my favorite action movies of all times. Aggie, you're a fucking genius.

when that does place, i'd like the quote at the top to be
"i'm gonna ask you this one more time, WHERE THE FUCK IS RINGO YOU BITCH!?!?!"

If you ask for a quote at the top, you won't get it. and yes Boogie Nights is still to come.

Tyrant.

You've built up the tension, Mitchell. When's the next round starting?

#150 La Cité des Enfants Perdus (The City of Lost Children) (1995)
Marc Caro + Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Running time - 112 mins
Country of origin France / Germany / Spain
Genre Adventure / Fantasy / Sci-Fi / Drama
Original language French

Writing Credits:
Gilles Adrien, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Marc Caro, Guillaume Laurant

Cast
Ron Perlman ... One
Daniel Emilfork ... Krank
Judith Vittet ... Miette
Dominique Pinon ... le scaphandrier/les clones
Jean-Claude Dreyfus ... Marcello

Other awards
Nominated Cannes Film Festival - Golden Palm

BY ROGER EBERT / December 15, 1995

If I were to judge this film solely on its visuals, it would get an unqualified rave, no questions asked. It's only when I start to think about the story and the tone that my enthusiasm inches downward, because it's done more as an exercise than as a narrative you're meant to care about. Maybe the ultimate destination of "City of Lost Children" isn't in movie theaters at all, but on one of those video wall panels like Bill Gates is installing in his new house; you'd see an amazing image every time you walked past, and occasionally you'd linger for as many more astonishing sights as you felt capable of absorbing.

The movie is an expensive, high-tech French production, using more special effects than any other French film in history, and it is appropriate that a lot of its look seems inspired by that Parisian visionary, Jules Verne. It takes place not so much in the future (or even in the dated but vivid "future" as seen by Verne) as in a sort of parallel time zone, where there are recognizable elements of our world, violently rearranged. The co-directors, Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, created a similar visual extravaganza in their first feature, "Delicatessen," a 1991 fantasy about cannibalism.

The movie takes place mostly on an offshore rig inhabited by the terrible and tragic Krank (Daniel Emilfork). Krank is terrible because he is a monster, and he is a monster because he cannot dream, which makes him tragic. So he kidnaps children, to steal their dreams and feed off them. One of his victims is Denree (Joseph Lucien), a little boy who is almost more trouble than he is worth. Kidnapping him is a mistake because Denree's adopted brother is One (Ron Perlman, from TV's "Beauty and the Beast"), a strongman and sometime harpooner. One tracks his brother to the rig to save him.

In the way it populates this plot with grotesque and improbable characters, "City of Lost Children" can be called Felliniesque, I suppose, although Fellini never created a vision this dark or disturbing. Krank's world includes a large number of children, kidnapped for their dreams, along with a brain that lives in a sort of fish tank, several cloned orphans who cannot figure which of them is the original, some very nasty insects, and Siamese twins who control the orphans for nefarious ends.

There are also deep-sea divers, performing fleas and some Cyclops men who have one eye removed and replaced with a computerized hearing device that allows them to visualize the sound waves of others. All of these people live in a universe constructed of much brass, wood, tubing, shadows and obscure but disturbing machines.

I would be lying if I said I understood the plot. Indeed, much of what I've just told you was reconstructed from the press kit and other sources. Watching the film, I perceived no strong narrative pull to carry me through, and instead was constantly being invited to stay in the moment, to experience one visual after another, to look past the characters and their concerns and relish the set design by Jean Rabasse and the bizarre costuming, in which Jean-Paul Gaultier has truly outdone himself, and that takes some doing.

When the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" first came out, we lived in a more unabashed and experimental time, and as the movie played month after month, it began to attract nightly visits by hippies (for that was what we called certain types of young people in those far-off days, children). The movie had an intermission, during which the audience would file out onto the sidewalk for a smoke (never mind of what, children), and then file back in again. And the hippies, who had not bought tickets, would mingle with them and drift back into the theater, going right up to the front of the auditorium and lying on their backs to stare up at the screen.

Toward the end of the film there was a sequence where the space traveler was sucked into some kind of cosmic vortex of sound and light, and this is what the hippies had come to see. Although the screen was distorted from their strange point of view, that didn't matter, because the visuals were overwhelming and, from so close, they felt consumed by them. "Far out," they would mutter, along with other quaint phrases.

If "City of Lost Children" had been released then, the "2001" fans would have segued right across the street to take it in. Through the years there have been other such inspired films made for the eye: "Blade Runner," "Fantasia," "Days of Heaven," "Brazil," "El Topo," "Santa Sangre," "Akira" and indeed "Delicatessen" come to mind. I am trying to be rather precise here, because many people will probably not find themselves sympathetic to this movie's overachieving technological pretensions, while others will find it the best film in months or years. You know who you are. I am not one of you. But I have enough of you in me to pass along the word. Far out.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.8/10 (17,118 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - 272

Ranked highest by Held (#3)

I read somewhere that this is one of Terry Gilliam's favorite films.

#149 Boyz n the Hood (1991)
John Singleton
Running time - 107 mins
Country of origin USA
Genre Crime / Drama
Original language English

Writing Credits:
John Singleton

Cast
Laurence Fishburne ... Jason 'Furious' Styles
Cuba Gooding Jr. ... Tré Styles
Ice Cube ... Darin 'Doughboy' Baker
Morris Chestnut ... Ricky Baker
Nia Long ... Brandi
Angela Bassett ... Reva Devereaux

Academy Awards
Nominated : - Best Director, Best Writing - Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen

BY ROGER EBERT / July 12, 1991

There must be fewer experiences more wounding to the heart than for a parent to look at a child and fear for its future. In inner-city America, where one in every 21 young men will die of gunshot wounds, and most of them will be shot by other young men, it is not simply a question of whether the child will do well in school, or find a useful career: It is sometimes whether the child will live or die.

Watching her bright young son on the brink of his teenage years, seeing him begin to listen to his troublesome friends instead of to her, the mother in "Boyz N the Hood" decides that it is best for the boy to go live with his father. The father works as a mortgage broker, out of a storefront office. He is smart and angry, a disciplinarian, and he lays down rules for his son. And then, out in the streets of south central Los Angeles, the son learns other rules.

As he grows into his teens, his best friends are half-brothers, one an athlete, the other drifting into drugs and alcohol. They've known each other for years - and have steered clear, more or less, of the gangs which operate in the neighborhood. They go their own way. But there is always the possibility that words will lead to insults, that insults will lead to a need to "prove their manhood," that with guns everywhere, somebody will be shot dead.

These are the stark choices in John Singleton's "Boyz N the Hood," one of the best American films of recent years. The movie is a thoughtful, realistic look at a young man's coming of age, and also a human drama of rare power - Academy Award material. Singleton is a director who brings together two attributes not always found in the same film: He has a subject, and he has a style. The film is not only important, but also a joy to watch, because his camera is so confident and he wins such natural performances from his actors.

The movie's hero, who will probably excel in college and in a profession, if he lives to get that far, is an intelligent 17-year-old named Tre Styles (Cuba Gooding Jr.). His father, Furious Styles (Larry Fishburne), grew up in the neighborhood, survived it, and understands it in two different ways: as a place where young men define their territory and support themselves by violence, and as a real estate market in transition - where, when prices and lives there find their bottom, investors will be able to buy cheap and then make money with gentrification.

Furious Styles also knows the dangers for his son - of gangs, of drugs, of the wrong friends. He lays down strict rules, but he cannot be everywhere and see everything. Meanwhile, Singleton paints the individual characters of the neighborhood with the same attention to detail that Spike Lee used in "Do the Right Thing." He's particularly perceptive about the Baker family - about the mother (Tyre Ferrell) and her two sons by different fathers, Dough Boy (rap artist Ice Cube) and Ricky (Morris Chestnut). Both live at home, where it is no secret in the family that the mother prefers Ricky.

He's a gifted athlete who seems headed for a college football scholarship.

Dough Boy is not a bad person, but he is into booze and drugs and will sooner or later find bad trouble. He spends most of his days on the front steps, drinking, plotting, feeding his resentments. They live in a neighborhood where violence is a fact of life, where the searchlights from police helicopters are like the guard lights in a prison camp, where guns are everywhere, where a kid can go down to the corner store and not come home alive. In painting the cops as an occupying force, Singleton is especially hard on one self-hating black cop, who uses his authority to mishandle young black men.

In the course of one summer week or two, all of the strands of Tre's life come together to be tested: his girlfriend, his relationship with his father, his friendships, and the dangers from the street gangs of the area. Singleton's screenplay has built well; we feel we know the characters and their motivations, and so we can understand what happens, and why.

A lesser movie might have handled this material in a perfunctory way, painting the characters with broad strokes of good and evil, setting up a confrontation at the end, using a lot of violence and gunfire to reward the good and punish the rest.

Singleton cares too much about his story to kiss it off like that.

Look, for example, at the scene late in the film - the morning after scene - where Dough Boy walks across the street and speaks quietly to Tre; he knows what is likely to happen, and yet wants his friend to escape the trap, to realize his future.

"Boyz N the Hood" has maturity and emotional depth: There are no cheap shots, nothing is thrown in for effect, realism is placed ahead of easy dramatic payoffs, and the audience grows deeply involved. By the end of "Boyz N the Hood," I realized I had seen not simply a brilliant directorial debut, but an American film of enormous importance.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.8/10 (17,709 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - 241

Ranked highest by Capt. Midnight and The Good Dr Bill

#148 My Cousin Vinny (1992)
Jonathan Lynn
Running time - 120 mins
Country of origin USA
Genre Comedy / Crime
Original language English

Writing Credits:
Dale Launer

Cast
Joe Pesci ... Vincent 'Vinny' Gambini
Ralph Macchio ... William 'Billy' Gambini
Marisa Tomei ... Mona Lisa Vito
Mitchell Whitfield ... Stan Rothenstein
Fred Gwynne ... Judge Chamberlain Haller

Academy Awards
Won : - Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Marisa Tomei)


BY ROGER EBERT / March 13, 1992

`My Cousin Vinny" is a movie that meanders along going nowhere in particular, and then lightning strikes. I didn't get much involved in it, and yet individual moments and some of the performances were very funny. It's the kind of movie home video was invented for: Not worth the trip to the theater, but slam it into the VCR and you get your rental's worth.

The film stars Joe Pesci as a New Yorker who thinks a black knit shirt under a black leather jacket, if set off by a gold chain around the neck, is elegant courtroom attire. He might be right if he were a defendant in the Bronx, but the movie takes place in Alabama, and he's the defense attorney. His cousin (Ralph Macchio) and a friend (Mitchell Whitfield), two innocent college students on their way to school, have been charged with the murder of a convenience store owner. The circumstantial evidence looks damning, but the worst thing they have going against them is Pesci's sweeping lack of legal experience.

Although the film is set in the South and has an early shot of a sign that says "Free Horse Manure," this is not another one of your Dixie-bashing movies. The judge (Fred Gwynne, his face longer than ever) and prosecutor (Lane Smith) are civilized men who aren't trying to railroad anybody. It's just that after gunshots were heard, three different witnesses made a positive identification on the two suspects, fleeing the store in a distinctive late-1960s Buick convertible.

Pesci, who is the Macchio character's cousin Vinny, has finally passed the bar on his sixth attempt. He has no courtroom experience, and indeed no experience at all except with a few personal injury cases. He arrives in town with his girlfriend, named Mona Lisa Vito and played by Marisa Tomei as a woman who has a certain legal potential trapped inside a street-smart personality.

Pesci is so inexperienced he doesn't even know enough to stand when the judge enters the courtroom, and Whitfield, in desperation, hires another lawyer (Austin Pendleton) who thinks it a triumph if he can successfully complete a sentence.

The movie saves most of its best laughs for the long concluding courtroom sequence, in which one witness after another hammers together the prosecution case, and the innocent youths clearly seem headed for the electric chair. Gwynne's dour work in the courtroom scenes is especially good; in the annals of Judge Reaction Shots, which are a performance genre all their own, his work ranks high.

But we never feel much for, or about, the two accused prisoners. Macchio, who has been effective in "The Karate Kid" and "Crossroads," is used here essentially as a foil. He and Whitfield sit at the defense table and look worried, and that's about that.

Pesci and Tomei, on the other hand, create a quirky relationship that I liked. Neither one is played as a dummy. They're smart, in their own ways, but involved in a legal enterprise they are completely unprepared for. Tomei's surprise appearance as an expert witness is a high point, and left me feeling I would like to see this couple again. Maybe in a screenplay that was more focused.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.2/10 (17,781 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by Worrywort

Now this is a movie.

man BntH is low

Never saw it (like many on this list), evidently I need to.

His quote on the movie poster for the US theatrical release said:

" THE MOST ASTOUNDING VISUALS OF 1995, 1996 AND MAYBE 1982. I LOVED IT!"

This poll is lame

More progress tomorrow, I'm off and on the net at the moment. It's a big drop from #241 all-time.

The lameness is half the fun.

I think both the barrage of like-minded (and occasionally better) films that followed Boyz n The Hood's lead, it's largely afterschool-special storyline/moralizing, and Singleton's continued descent as a filmmaker have all lowered this flick in a lot of folks' estimation.

Then again...Furious Fuckin' Styles.

#147 Slacker (1991)
Richard Linklater
Running time - 97 mins
Country of origin USA
Genre Comedy / Drama
Original language English

Writing Credits:
Richard Linklater

Cast
Richard Linklater ... Should Have Stayed at Bus Station
Rudy Basquez ... Taxi Driver
Jean Caffeine ... Roadkill
Jan Hockey ... Jogger
Stephan Hockey ... Running Late

Other awards
Nominated Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize - Dramatic

BY ROGER EBERT / August 23, 1991

"Slacker" is a movie with an appeal almost impossible to describe, although the method of the director, Richard Linklater, is as clear as day. He wants to show us a certain strata of campus life at the present time - a group of people he calls "slackers," although anyone who has ever lived in a campus town will also recognize them under such older names as beatniks, hippies, bohemians, longhairs, peaceniks, weirdos or the Union Regulars (for surely every campus with a student union also has a seemingly permanent body of current and former students who hang around all day drinking free coffee refills and wondering whether life as they know it exists outside the union).

Linklater wants to watch these people and listen to them, but he does not much want to get involved in their lives, or follow them through the mechanics of a plot. So he has borrowed an excellent technique from the surrealists and pushed it to its logical conclusion. Surrealist directors such as Luis Bunuel, in moves like "The Phantom of Liberty," would follow one story for a scene or so, and then - when the characters bumped into another group of people - spin off and follow them for awhile, and so on until the end of the movie.

Linklater does the same thing at a speeded-up pace that allows him to carom through the slacker community of Austin, Texas, like a cue ball with a camera. Example: Early in the film, a taxi driver picks up a fare (Linklater), who hangs over the back seat and expounds at length on his theory that every time you think of a possibility, that possibility becomes a separate reality on some other level of existence. The taxi driver is not much interested. He drops off his fare just as a car speeds away and some passersby find a woman hit-and-run victim in the street. As help is called, the camera moves in a leisurely circle until it regards a rooming house just as the same hit-and-run car pulls up in front of it. We join the driver of this car in his flat, until he is arrested by police and charged with running down his mother. Then, outside again, we follow some passersby until they . . .

And so on. This sounds like an annoying method, but actually it's rhythmic and soothing - and funny - as Linklater moves through an apparently unlinked assortment of people, including a thief who is buttonholed by his victim and taken for a walk; a man who "knows" that one of the moon astronauts saw an alien spacecraft, but his radio transmission was cut off by NASA; a woman who owns a vial containing the results of an intimate medical procedure carried out on Madonna, and various folk singers, strollers, diners, sleepers, paranoids, do-gooders, quarreling couples, friends, lovers, children and conspiracy theorists.

We don't get a story, but we do get a feeling. We are listening in on a whole stratum of American life that never gets paid attention to in the movies - the people who believe the things they read in magazines sold in places that smell like Vitamin B. They have special knowledge, occult beliefs, revolutionary health practices.

They know they are being lied to. Listen to them and you will learn how things really are. In a sense, Linklater has invented his whole style in order to listen to these people. He doesn't want to go anywhere with them. He doesn't need a car chase to wrap things up. He is simply amused.

The movie maybe runs on a little too long. Maybe you won't think so. The point is not really what is said, but the tone of voice, the word choices, the conversational strategies, the sense of life going on all the time, everywhere, all over town. In a conventional Hollywood movie, as the brain-dead characters repeat the few robotic phrases permitted them by the formulas of the screenplay, they walk down streets and sometimes I yearn to just peel away from them, cut across a lawn, walk through the wall of a house, and enter the spontaneous lives of the people living there. "Slacker" is a movie that grants itself that freedom.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 6.8/10 (3,518 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - 241

Ranked highest by Undo (#10)

#146 Dansu wo shimashô ka? (Shall We Dance?) (1997)
Masayuki Suo
Running time - 127 mins
Country of origin Japan
Genre Comedy
Original language Japanese

Writing Credits:
Masayuki Suo

Cast
Kôji Yakusho ... Shohei Sugiyama
Tamiyo Kusakari ... Mai Kishikawa
Naoto Takenaka ... Tomio Aoki
Eriko Watanabe ... Toyoko Takahashi
Yu Tokui ... Tokichi Hattori


BY ROGER EBERT / July 18, 1997

One night as he is taking the train home after work, a man sees a beautiful woman standing alone at a secondfloor window, lost in thought. The second night, she is there again. The sign on the window advertises ballroom dancing lessons. The third night, the man gets off the train at an unaccustomed stop and climbs the stairs to the dance studio.

With these simple and direct shots, Masayuki Suo establishes loneliness, mystery and allure. Later, all will become clear, but it is more intriguing this way: A man seeking not so much a woman as an answer to his question. Why is she sad? What is she thinking? In Japan the opening scenes would play with an even greater charge. Opening titles, probably added by the distributor, tell us, ``Ballroom dancing is regarded with great suspicion, in a country where couples don't go out hand in hand, or say `I love you.' '' The hero of ``Shall We Dance?,'' named Shohei Sugiyama (Koji Yakusyo), is married, a salaryman who works late at night in an office. For him to take dance lessons is as shocking as taking a mistress.

Japan is in some ways still a Victorian society, which makes its eroticism more intriguing. Repression, guilt and secrecy are splendid aphrodisiacs. Sugiyama creeps up the staircase like a man sneaking into a brothel, and enters a brightly lighted room where other students are already taking their lessons. He is disappointed to learn that his instructor will not be the mysterious stranger at the window (Tamiyo Kusakari), but a friendly, plump, middle-aged woman who teaches him the fundamentals of the fox trot and warns him: ``She's all the sweeter when viewed from afar.'' ``Shall We Dance?'' is not about love with a tantalizing mirage, then, but about a man losing his inhibitions and breaking out of the rut of his life. Even Sugiyama's wife thinks he should get out more. ``He's working too hard,'' she tells her daughter; we get a glimpse of the Japanese salaryman's home, where the wage earner often arrives late at night and leaves early in the morning, and may have more important relationships at work than with his own family.

The little crowd at the dance studio has its regulars, including a chubby man who will forever be uncoordinated, and a ``wild and crazy'' little guy with a mop of hair, whose identity provides one of the movie's best moments. Eventually Sugiyama learns that the beautiful woman is embittered because of a breakup with her dance partner, and slowly he is introduced to the world of ballroom dancing competitions, which seem to be the same the world over (the scenes have some of the same feel as the contests in the Australian ``Strictly Ballroom'').

There are puzzles at Sugiyama's home. His wife smells unfamiliar perfume on his shirt. His daughter catches him rehearsing alone, late at night. Is he having an affair? Not with the mysterious woman he's not: When he asks her out for dinner, she explains sternly that dancing is her life, and that she certainly hopes he didn't take lessons just in the hopes of meeting her.

The last third of ``Shall We Dance?'' provides audiencepleasing payoffs that could make this film as popular as ``Strictly Ballroom,'' and the most successful Japanese film at the western box office since ``Tampopo'' 10 years ago. But it is the opening material that fascinates. To seek out the secret of a beautiful woman in a window is much more interesting than to discover the secret. Familiarity dissipates eroticism. Of course I realize I am asking the impossible: Of course Sugiyama will mount the stairs, and so of course there must be a story.

Masayuki Suo's direction combines the psychological and intriguing with comedy bits that might be found in a lesser movie. This is often a characteristic of Japanese art; between the moments of drama and truth, lowbrow characters hustle onstage to provide counterpoint. The result is one of the more completely entertaining movies I've seen in a while--a well-crafted character study that, like a Hollywood movie with a skillful script, manipulates us but makes us like it.

As for the happy ending: Well, of course there is one. And it is happy not just for the characters in the movie, but for me, as well, because I imagine the mysterious woman will again appear at her place in the window, gazing out, lost in thought, an inspiration to us all.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.9/10 (4,502 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by TJENZ (#2)

#145 Sydney (Hard Eight) (1997)
Paul Thomas Anderson
Running time - 102 mins
Country of origin USA
Genre Crime / Drama / Thriller
Original language English

Writing Credits:
Paul Thomas Anderson

Cast
Philip Baker Hall ... Sydney
John C. Reilly ... John Finnegan
Gwyneth Paltrow ... Clementine
Samuel L. Jackson ... Jimmy
F. William Parker ... Hostage
Philip Seymour Hoffman ... Young Craps Player

BY ROGER EBERT / February 27, 1997

The man's face is sad and lined, and he lights cigarettes as if he's been living in casinos for centuries. He has a deep, precise voice: We get a quick impression that he knows what he thinks and says what be believes. His name is Sydney, and he has found an unshaven young bum dozing against the wall of a coffee shop and offered him a cup of coffee and a cigarette.

Why? The answer is the engine behind the first half of ``Hard Eight.'' I am not sure it is ever fully answered, or needs to be. Sydney (Philip Baker Hall) is a man who has been gambling for a long time, and knows a lot about the subject, and shares his knowledge with the kid because--well, maybe just because he has it to share.

The kid is named John (John C. Reilly). He needs $6,000 to bury his mother and has lost everything. Step by step, Sydney teaches him some ropes, like how to start with $150 and recycle it through the casino cashier cages until he seems to have spent $2,000 in the casino, and is given a free room. This opening sequence is quietly fascinating: I like movies that show me precisely how to get away with something. At the end of the process, it's funny how John, now that he's in his own room, becomes the genial host. ``Free movies on TV?'' he asks Sydney. ``Drink from the mini-bar?'' Two years pass. Sydney and John are still friends, John dressing like Sydney and even ordering the same drinks. We begin to understand more about the older man. He is a gentleman, with a deep courtesy. He watches the waitress Clementine (Gwyneth Paltrow) flirt with a table of drunks, asks her if she ``has'' to do that to keep her job and says, ``You don't have to do that with me.'' John and Clementine become a couple, even though it's clear Clemmie does some hooking on the side. John also makes a friend of an ominous man named Jimmy (Samuel L. Jackson), who Sydney doesn't trust. ``What do you do?'' Sydney asks him. ``I do some consulting, security, help out on busy nights,'' Jimmy says. ``Parking lot?'' says Sydney. ``No, I'm inside,'' Jimmy says, but Sydney's shot has found its target.

By this point in the film, its writer-director, Paul Thomas Anderson, has us so hooked that we're watching for the sheer pleasure of the dialogue and the acting. Anderson has a good ear. Sydney says precisely what he means. John's statements are based more on hope than reality. Clementine says what she thinks people want to hear. Jimmy likes to say things that are probably not true, and then look at you to see if you'll challenge him. All of them live in the 24-hour days of Reno, where gambling is like a drumbeat in the back of everything they do.

There turns out to be a kind of a plot (a customer doesn't pay Clementine $300, and John gets violent and then calls Sydney to help him out of a mess). There is even a secret from the past, although not the one we expect. But the movie isn't about a plot. It's about these specific people in this place and time, and that's why it's so good: It listens and sees. It observes, and in that it takes its lead from Sydney, who is a student of human nature and plays the cards of life very, very close to his vest.

Philip Baker Hall has been in the movies since 1975, and has been on a lot of TV shows, even ``Seinfeld.'' He's familiar, in a way: He looks middle-aged and a little sad. And grown up. Many Americans linger in adolescence, but Hall is the kind of man who puts on a tie before he leaves the house. In 1985, he gave one of the great performances in American movies, in a one-man show, playing Richard Nixon in Robert Altman's ``Secret Honor.'' Here is another great performance. He is a man who has been around, who knows casinos and gambling, who finds himself attached to three people he could easily have avoided, who thinks before he acts.

Movies like ``Hard Eight'' remind me of what original, compelling characters the movies can sometimes give us. Like David Mamet's ``House of Games'' or Mike Figgis' ``Leaving Las Vegas,'' or the documentary ``Crumb,'' they pay attention to the people who inhabit city nights according to their own rules, who have learned from experience and don't like to make the same mistake twice. At one point, when Clementine asks him a question, Sydney says, ``You shouldn't ask a question like that unless you know the answer.'' It's not so much what he says as how he says it.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.2/10 (6,298 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by 54Cermak (#9)

#144 The Piano (1993)
Jane Campion
Running time - 121 mins
Country of origin Australia / New Zealand / France
Genre Drama / Romance
Original language English / British Sign Language / Maori

Writing Credits:
Jane Campion

Cast
Holly Hunter ... Ada McGrath
Harvey Keitel ... George Baines
Sam Neill ... Alisdair Stewart
Anna Paquin ... Flora McGrath
Kerry Walker ... Aunt Morag

Academy Awards
Won: Best Actress in a Leading Role (Holly Hunter), Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Anna Paquin), Best Writing - Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen
Nominated Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Director, Best Film Editing, Best Picture

Other awards
Won: BAFTA Film Award - Best Actress (Holly Hunter), Best Costume Design, Best Production Design Cannes Film Festival - Best Actress (Holly Hunter), Golden Palm Golden Globe - Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama (Holly Hunter)
Nominated BAFTA Film Award - Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Film, Best Score, Best Screenplay - Original, Best Sound, David Lean Award for Direction Golden Globe - Best Director - Motion Picture, Best Motion Picture - Drama, Best Original Score - Motion Picture, Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture (Anna Paquin)

Best Screenplay - Motion Picture

BY ROGER EBERT / November 19, 1993

"The Piano" is as peculiar and haunting as any film I've seen.

It tells a story of love and fierce pride, and places it on a bleak New Zealand coast where people live rudely in the rain and mud, struggling to maintain the appearance of the European society they've left behind. It is a story of shyness, repression and loneliness; of a woman who will not speak and a man who cannot listen, and of a willful little girl who causes mischief and pretends she didn't mean to.

The film opens with the arrival of a 30ish woman named Ada (Holly Hunter) and her young daughter, Flora (Anna Paquin), on a stormy gray beach. They have been rowed ashore, along with Ada's piano, to meet a local bachelor named Stewart (Sam Neill), who has arranged to marry her. "I have not spoken since I was 6 years old," Ada's voice tells us on the soundtrack. "Nobody knows why, least of all myself. This is not the sound of my voice; it is the sound of my mind." Ada communicates with the world through her piano, and through sign language, which is interpreted by her daughter. Stewart and his laborers, local Maori tribesmen, take one look at the piano crate and decide it is too much trouble to carry inland to the house, and so it stays there, on the beach, in the wind and rain. It says something that Stewart cares so little for his new bride that he does not want her to have the piano she has brought all the way from Scotland - even though it is her means of communication. He does not mind quiet women, is one way he puts it.

Ada and Flora settle in. No intimacy grows between Ada and her new husband. One day she goes down to the beach to play the piano, and the music is heard by Baines (Harvey Keitel), a roughhewn neighbor who has affected Maori tattoos on his face. He is a former whaler who lives alone, and he likes the music of the piano - so much that he trades Stewart land for the piano.

"That is MY piano - MINE!!" Ada scribbles on a note she hands to Stewart. He explains that they all make sacrifices and she must learn to, as well. Baines invites her over to play, and thus begins his singleminded seduction, as he offers to trade her the piano for intimacy. There are 88 keys. He'll give her one for taking off her jacket. Five for raising her skirt.

Jane Campion, who wrote and directed "The Piano," does not handle this situation as a man might. She understands better the eroticism of slowness and restraint, and the power that Ada gains by pretending to care nothing for Baines. The outcome of her story is much more subtle and surprising than Baines' crude original offer might predict.

Campion has never made an uninteresting or unchallenging film (her credits include "Sweetie," about a family ruled by a self-destructive sister, and "An Angel at My Table" (the autobiography of writer Janet Frame, wrongly confined for schizophrenia). Her original screenplay for "The Piano" has elements of the Gothic in it, of that Victorian sensibility that masks eroticism with fear, mystery and exotic places. It also gives us a heroine who is a genuine piece of work; Ada is not a victim here, but a woman who reads a situation and responds to it.

The performances are as original as the characters. Hunter's Ada is pale, grim and hatchetfaced at first, although she is capable of warming.

Keitel's Baines is not what he first seems, but has unexpected reserves of tenderness and imagination. Neill's taciturn husband conceals a universe of fear and sadness behind his clouded eyes. And the performance by Paquin, as the daughter, is one of the most extraordinary examples of a child's acting in movie history. She probably has more lines than anyone else in the film, and is as complex, too - able to invent lies without stopping for a breath, and filled with enough anger of her own that she tattles just to see what will happen.

Stuart Dryburgh's cinematography is not simply suited to the story, but enhances it. Look at his cold grays and browns as he paints the desolate coast, and then the warm interiors that glow when they are finally needed. And if you are oddly affected by a key shot just before the end (I will not reveal it), reflect on his strategy of shooting and printing it, not in real time, but by filming at quarter-time and then printing each frame four times, so that the movement takes on a fated, dreamlike quality.

"The Piano" is a movie people have been talking about ever since it first played at Cannes, last May, and shared the grand prix.

It is one of those rare movies that is not just about a story, or some characters, but about a whole universe of feeling - of how people can be shut off from each other, lonely and afraid, about how help can come from unexpected sources, and about how you'll never know if you never ask.

The new 1994 edition of Roger Ebert's Video Companion is now in bookstores.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.4/10 (18,539 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - 319

Ranked highest by Bird Is The Word (#4)

#143 Secrets & Lies (1996)
Mike Leigh
Running time - 142 mins
Country of origin France / UK
Genre Drama / Romance
Original language English / British Sign Language / Maori

Writing Credits:
Mike Leigh

Cast
Timothy Spall ... Maurice Purley
Phyllis Logan ... Monica Purley
Brenda Blethyn ... Cynthia Rose Purley
Claire Rushbrook ... Roxanne Purley
Marianne Jean-Baptiste ... Hortense Cumberbatch

Academy Awards
Nominated Best Actress in a Leading Role (Brenda Blethyn), Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), Best Director, Best Picture, Best Writing - Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen

Other awards
Won: BAFTA Film Award - Alexander Korda Award for Best British Film, Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role (Brenda Blethyn), Best Screenplay - Original Cannes Film Festival - Best Actress (Brenda Blethyn), Golden Palm, Prize of the Ecumenical Jury Golden Globe - Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama (Brenda Blethyn)
Nominated BAFTA Film Award - Best Film, Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) , David Lean Award for Direction Golden Globe - Best Motion Picture - Drama, Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture (Marianne Jean-Baptiste )

BY ROGER EBERT / October 25, 1996

Moment after moment, scene after scene, ``Secrets & Lies'' unfolds with the fascination of eavesdropping. We are waiting to see what these people will do next, caught up in the fear and the hope that they will bring the whole fragile network of their lives crashing down in ruin. When they prevail--when common sense and good hearts win over lies and secrets--we feel almost as relieved as if it had happened to ourselves.

Mike Leigh's best films work like that. He finds a rhythm of life--not ``real life,'' but real life as fashioned and shaped by all the art and skill his actors can bring to it--and slips into it, so that we are not particularly aware we're watching a film; he has a scene here, set at a backyard barbecue, that shows exactly how family gatherings are sometimes a process of tiptoeing through minefields. One wrong word, and the repressed resentments of decades will blow up in everyone's face.

It would be easy, but wrong, to describe the plot of ``Secrets & Lies'' as being about an adopted black woman in London who seeks out her natural birth mother, discovers the woman is white, and arranges to meet her. That would be wrong because it sidesteps the real subject of the film, which is that the mother and her family have been all but destroyed by secrets and lies. The young black woman is the catalyst to change that situation, yes, but her life was fine before the action starts and will continue on an even keel afterward.

Given the deep waters it dives into, ``Secrets & Lies'' is a good deal funnier and more entertaining than we have any right to expect. It begins with the black woman, a thirtyish optometrist with the quintessentially British name of Hortense Cumberbatch (played by Marianne Jean-Bap.tiste). After the death of her adoptive mother, she goes to an adoption agency to discover the name of her birth mother, and thinks there must have been a mistake, since the papers indicate her mother was white. There was no mistake.

We meet the mother, named Cynthia, who is played as a fearful, nervous wreck by Brenda Blethyn (who won the best actress award at Cannes for this performance). She lives in an untidy council house with her daughter Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook), who works as a street sweeper, is in a foul mood most of the time, and has a boyfriend whom she has thoroughly cowed. Cynthia mourns the fact that her beloved younger brother Maurice (Timothy Spall) hasn't called her in more than two years, and blames Maurice's wife Monica (Phyllis Logan), that ``toffee-nosed cow,'' for the long silence.

The phone rings. It is Hortense. ``Oh, no, no, no, no, no, dear--there's been some mistake!'' says Cynthia. But Hortense persists. Cynthia hangs up. The phone rings again, and she approaches it like an animal sure the trap is set to spring. But she agrees to meet Hortense, and the scene of their meeting--outside a tube station and then in a nearby cafe--is one of the great sequences in all of Mike Leigh's work, based on incredulity, disbelief, memory, embarrassment and acceptance. ``But you can't be my daughter, dearie!'' Cynthia exclaims. ``I mean . . . just look at you!'' She claims she has never even slept with a black man, and she is telling the truth, but then a moment comes when she arrives at a startling revelation, and we don't know whether to smile or hold our breaths.

Much of the film is devoted to the domestic life of Maurice and Monica. He is a photographer specializing in wedding pictures; she is a loving woman whose life becomes unbearable for herself and her husband every 28 days. Spall, whom you may remember as the proprietor of the doomed French restaurant in Leigh's ``Life Is Sweet,'' is a born conciliator, wanting to make everyone happy and usually failing.

The movie arrives at its magnificent conclusion at the family reunion, the barbecue where Cynthia brings Hortense and introduces her as a ``friend from work.'' Soon the family is trying to puzzle out why an eye doctor would be employed at a cardboard box factory. Leigh and his actors (who develop the characters and dialogue together, in collaboration) play this scene in one unbroken take, in which six characters eat, drink, talk, and stumble across secrets and lies.

I have admired the work of Mike Leigh ever since 1972, when his ``Bleak Moments'' premiered in the Chicago Film Festival. For many years he was an outcast from British cinema; it's hard to get financing when you don't have a script or even the idea for a film, but Leigh stubbornly persisted in his method of gathering actors and working with them to create the story. In the 1970s and 1980s, he worked mostly in London theater and for the BBC, and then came ``High Hopes'' (1988), ``Life Is Now ``Secrets and Lies,'' which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, is a flowering of his technique. It moves us on a human level, it keeps us guessing during scenes as unpredictable as life (the visit, for example, of the former owner of the photography studio), and it shows us how ordinary people have a chance of somehow coping with their problems, which are rather ordinary, too.

One intriguing aspect of the film is the way Leigh handles race: The daughter is black, the mother is white, the family has no idea Cynthia had another child, and yet race is not really on anybody's mind in this film. They think they have more important things to worry about, and they're right.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.8/10 (10,460 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by Elemeno P.T. (#7)

Hard Eight is a much, much better title than Sydney.