#128 Chun gwong cha sit (Happy Together) (1997)
Kar Wai Wong
Running time - 96 mins
Country of origin Hong Kong
Genre Drama / Romance
Original language Mandarin / Cantonese / Spanish

Writing Credits:
Kar Wai Wong

Cast
Leslie Cheung ... Ho Po-wing
Tony Leung Chiu Wai ... Lai Yiu-fai
Chen Chang ... Chang

Other awards
Won Cannes Film Festival - Best Director
Nominated Cannes Film Festival - Golden Palm

By Jonathan Rosenbaum Chicago Reader - 1997

At some point in the mid-90s WongKar-wai's exciting and hyperbolic style lost its moorings. Whether this happened between Days of Being Wild (1990) and Chungking Express (1994), during the two years it took to make Ashes of Time (1994), or between the latter two films and Fallen Angels (1995), Wong's powerful organic flow, which makes Days of Being Wild his only masterpiece to date, has atrophied into a slag heap of individual set pieces.

Many of these set pieces are thrilling enough in their own right. Fallen Angels has plenty of them, spaced out like showstoppers in a vaudeville revue, though their effectiveness tends to diminish, their frenetic intensity ultimately becoming monotonous. Like the mannerist tics comprising Wong's style--the use of different characters as narrators; the momentary freeze-frames punctuating Christopher Doyle's slowed, slurred, or speeded-up cinematography; the shifts between color and black and white; and the bumpy transitions between garish forms of lighting and visual texture--his set pieces always provide a lively surface activity. If your acquaintance with Wong's work is casual, that may be all the justification he needs. But when Wong tries to turn these sequences into something larger, the results are more various and uneven.

It's an issue not of subject matter but of overall method. For Happy Together (1997), Wong reduced his essential cast of characters to three and flew them halfway around the world, from Hong Kong to Buenos Aires (adding a couple of side trips to Iguacu Falls and Tierra del Fuego). The subject, moreover, is probably his boldest to date: an acrimonious and ultimately doomed gay relationship between two Hong Kong expatriates, a match that never quite becomes a triangle with a straight expatriate from Taipei. But far from concentrating or distilling his material, Wong winds up scattering it to the winds.

There are plenty of interesting aspects to this epileptic fresco. There's the passionate treatment of gay sex and romance by a straight director, featuring two of the hottest stars of Hong Kong cinema (Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung, both of whom have worked with Wong before). There's the charged and ambiguous friendship between Lai (Leung) and Chang (Chang Chen, the 14-year-old hero of Edward Yang's 1991 film A Brighter Summer Day, who's since become a big pop star in Taiwan). There's an oblique but pungent response to the end of colonial rule in Hong Kong, a sense that the characters aren't sure where or who they are as they approach the uncertainty of millennial crossover with fretful wanderlust. (A key phrase recurring in the narration and dialogue is, "We could start over.") There's also a sidelong glance at the way a particular subculture (Chinese) can reduce a dominant local culture (Buenos Aires) to a few pop staples: tangos and milongas by Astor Piazzolla, tunes by Frank Zappa, cigarettes, two sleazy bars, one lurid lava lamp. Ironically, what prevents Happy Together from becoming anything more than the sum of these parts is the same thing that keeps it alive: Wong Kar-wai's cult status.

It's not clear whether any director consciously sets out to attract a cult, but once he has one, several choices are possible. Like Quentin Tarantino--who served as distributor of Chungking Express, and who became a cult figure himself after only one feature--he can shed his skin, redirect his audience's expectations, and alter his constituency. Tarantino's new film Jackie Brown reconfigures him for friend and foe alike; after training his audience to expect certain things from his movies--cross-references to his previous films, his presence as an actor, jokey treatments of gore and violence, repeated use of the word "nigger," and unorthodox treatments of narrative chronology--Tarantino made good on only the last two, and even then he shifted the rules somewhat by allowing "nigger" to be spoken only by a black character, and by repeating a narrative sequence from different viewpoints much as Stanley Kubrick had in The Killing. (A sadder example of a filmmaker disappointing expectations is George Romero, who went from being a revered cult director to a failed mainstream director and then retreated into silence.) A less calculated redirection of expectations can be found in the last two features of David Lynch--another cult figure who became so overhyped that a critical backlash became inevitable. In contrast, cult favorites like Woody Allen and John Waters, whatever their ups and downs, usually manage to satisfy or at least placate their most ardent fans, perhaps because in their cases personality counts for more than invention.

As a cult hero, Wong Kar-wai is closer to Tarantino and Lynch than to Allen and Waters because his films are more a matter of style than personality. But his films, like Allen's, have a particular "look" that derives from his using the same collaborators again and again--Doyle and art director William Chang--and I'm beginning to wonder if these associations, for all their benefits (such as Doyle's wild, improvisatory style) may have also led to a creative impasse. Excerpts from a diary Doyle kept during the shooting of Happy Together, published in the May 1997 issue of Sight and Sound, repeatedly suggest this possibility, along with the certainty that Wong's off-the-cuff method--working with an outline, a handful of music CDs, and a few images and ideas rather than a proper script--carries enormous risks. After recounting a "story breakdown" that differs in several particulars from the one Wong finally settled on, Doyle records mainly their uncertainties:

"At first we hesitated to repeat our 'signature style' [i.e., using in-shot speed changes in the camera], but eventually it was too frustrating not to....

"Shirley Kwan [a pop singer ultimately cut from the film] and Chang Chen have arrived to join the cast--or what we're starting to call the 'casualty list.' They idle in their rooms waiting for their roles to materialize, while Wong hides in nearby coffee shops hoping for the same. We stop shooting for the umpteenth time to 'save money,' to 'acclimatize our new stars.' Now that they're here, we fret over what to do with them, and over the thematic justifications for them even to be here....

"[After shooting at Iguacu Falls] I ask William [Chang] if this is a real or imaginary part of the film. We're on our own again today; Wong's still working out whether this is a flash-forward dream sequence or the last stop on [Lai's] physical and spiritual journey and another possible ending for the film. We decide to shoot it both ways."

To the best of my knowledge this hasn't been remarked on in the Anglo-American press, but over the past few years we've seen a veritable explosion of films and videos about homosexuality and various kinds of gender-bending in the Chinese-speaking world. Starting near the present and going backward, we've now seen Chicago bookings of Happy Together, Yim Ho's Kitchen, Tsai Ming-liang's The River, Stanley Kwan's Yang + Yin: Gender in Chinese Cinema, Tsai Ming-liang's Vive l'amour, Shu Kei's Hu Du Men, Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet, and Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine (not to mention the "straight" homoeroticism of John Woo). Whether this signifies a loosening up of censorship or a more general shift in Chinese consciousness, I can't say, but as Kwan suggests in Yang + Yin, Chinese male sexuality is very much tied to a particular image of the father that is currently under siege--a fact directly and shockingly addressed in The River, which is partly about a father's unacknowledged lust for his own teenage son.

Wong has stressed that Happy Together was inspired by contemporary Latin American fiction, Manuel Puig's The Buenos Aires Affair in particular: "I was besotted with the title and always wanted to use it for one of my pictures. Then, after the shooting in Buenos Aires, I finally realized the film is really not about the city, so my long cherished title went out of the window and I needed to come up with something new."

But the title he came up with (which alludes to the song played at the end of the picture) seems even less appropriate except as a desperate form of irony, because whatever else Lai (Leung) and Po-Wing (Cheung) are together in the movie, it isn't happy. After some energetic lovemaking in the opening moments, it's all downhill. First they split up en route to Iguacu Falls; then, after Lai gets hired as a tango bar doorman and Po-Wing drifts into prostitution, the latter gives the former a Rolex stolen from a client to help pay for his plane ticket back home. Lai is determined not to get involved with Po-Wing again, but after Po-Wing turns up on his doorstep severely beaten Lai takes him to the hospital and lets him stay in his one-room flat while his bandaged hands heal. They fight almost constantly, and Lai hides Po-Wing's passport.

Things deteriorate further, professionally as well as romantically; after Po-Wing splits, Lai becomes a waiter at a Chinese restaurant (where he meets Chang), a slaughterhouse worker, and a prostitute. "I thought I was different from Po-Wing," he muses. "It turns out that lonely people are all the same." Chang, who will eventually have to return to Taiwan for his military service (as did actor Chang Chen after playing this part), eventually takes off for "the lighthouse at the end of the world" in Tierra del Fuego. Lai goes looking for him in Taipei the same day that Deng Xiaoping dies in Beijing--finding only a snapshot of Chang at his family's noodle stall, which he steals.

Like its characters, Happy Together is less a film with a subject than a film about not being able to find one. At best it's a movie about being at loose ends, though it seems to mean something more for some Chinese viewers. Asian film specialist Tony Rayns, who subtitled the film, claims that it's "one of the most searing accounts ever made of doomed and destructive love, but also a strong and very moving affirmation of romantic folly." Presumably Wong hopes so, if only to justify all this lurching around. For me Happy Together is more like a striking mannerist style in search of content, made poignant only by the homesickness and emotional confusion underlying the effort.

Amazon.com link

IMDB link - 7.5/10 (3,935 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by Artem (#3)

#127 Natural Born Killers (1994)
Oliver Stone
Running time - 118 mins
Country of origin USA
Genre Action / Crime / Drama / Romance / Thriller
Original language English

Writing Credits:
Quentin Tarantino, David Veloz, Richard Rutowski, Oliver Stone

Cast
Woody Harrelson ... Mickey Knox
Juliette Lewis ... Mallory Knox
Tom Sizemore ... Det. Jack Scagnetti
Rodney Dangerfield ... Ed Wilson, Mallory's Dad
Robert Downey Jr. ... Wayne Gale

Other awards
Nominated Golden Globe Best Director - Motion Picture. Venice Film Festival - Pasinetti Award :Best Actress (Juliette Lewis), Special Jury Prize

BY ROGER EBERT / August 26, 1994

Oliver Stone's "Natural Born Killers" might have played even more like a demented nightmare if it hadn't been for the O.J. Simpson case. Maybe Stone meant his movie as a warning about where we were headed, but because of Simpson it plays as an indictment of the way we are now. We are becoming a society more interested in crime and scandal than in anything else - more than in politics and the arts, certainly, and maybe even more than sports, unless crime is our new national sport.

If that's true, then Stone's movie is about the latest all-Americans, Mickey and Mallory (Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis), two mass murderers who go on a killing spree across America, making sure everybody knows their names, so they get credit for their crimes. (Terrorists always claim "credit" rather than "blame.") The movie is not simply about their killings, however, but also about the way they electrify the media and exhilarate the public. (One teenager tells the TV cameras, "Mass murder is wrong. But if I were a mass murderer, I'd be Mickey and Mallory!") The boom in courtroom TV has given us long hours to study the faces of famous accused murderers; we have a better view than the jury. Looking into their faces, I sense a curious slackness, an inattention, as if the trial is a mirage, and their thoughts far away. If they're guilty, it's like they're rehearsing their excuses for the crime. If they're innocent, maybe those empty expressions mean the courtroom experience is so alien they can't process it. Not once since he was arraigned have I caught a shot of Simpson looking normal in any way I can understand. His expression always seems to be signifying, "Yes, but . . ." Oliver Stone captures this odd emptiness, this moral inattention, in the faces and behavior of Mickey and Mallory. They're on their own frequency. The casting is crucial: Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis are both capable of being frightening, both able to project amorality and disdain as easily as Jack Lemmon projects ingratiation. There is a scene where a lawman is trying to intimidate Lewis, and he throws his cigarette onto the floor of her cell. She steps on it and rubs it out with her bare foot. Set and match.

"Natural Born Killers" is not so much about the killers, however, as about the feeding frenzy they inspire. During the period of their rampage, they are the most famous people in America, and the media goes nuts. There are Mickey and Mallory fan clubs and T-shirts; tabloid TV is represented by a bloodthirsty journalist played by Robert Downey Jr., who is so thrilled by their fame he almost wants to embrace them. The people Mickey and Mallory touch in the law industry are elated to be handling the case; it gives them a brush with celebrity, and a tantalizing whiff of the brimstone that fascinates some cops.

Stone has never been a director known for understatement or subtlety. He'll do anything to get his effect, and that's one of the things I value about him. He understands that celebrity killers have achieved such a bizarre status in America that it's almost impossible to satirize the situation - to get beyond real life. But he goes for broke, in scenes of carnage like a prison riot, which is telecast live while the "host" gets caught up in the bloodlust.

Yet you do not see as much actual violence as you think you do in this movie; it's more the tone, the attitude, and the breakneck pacing that gives you that impression. Stone is not making a geek show, with closeups of blood and guts. Like all good satirists, he knows that too much realism will weaken his effect. He lets you know he's making a comedy. There's an over-the-top exuberance to the intricate crosscut editing, by Hank Corwin and Brian Berdan, and to the hyperactive camera of Robert Richardson. Stylistically, the film is a cinematic bazaar, combining color and black and white, film and video, 35mm and Super 8, sitcom style and animated cartoons, fiction and newsreels. They're throwing stuff at the screen by the gleeful handfuls.

And look how this film blindsided the good citizens of the MPAA classification board. The review panel threatened the film with the dreaded NC-17 rating, and after five appeals and some cutting finally granted the R rating. But read their parental warning: "For extreme violence and graphic carnage, for shocking images, and for strong language and sexuality." They've got the fever! I could point to a dozen more violent recent films that have left the MPAA unstirred, but Stone has touched a nerve here, because his film isn't about violence, it's about how we respond to violence, and that truly is shocking.

Stone's basic strategy is to find the current buzzwords and buzzideas of crime and violence, and project them through the looking glass into a wonderland of murderous satire. It is a commonplace, for example, that many violent criminals were abused as children. All right, then, Stone will give us abuse: We see Mallory's childhood, shot in the style of a lurid TV sitcom, with Rodney Dangerfield as her drunken, piggish father. As he shouts and threatens violence, as he ridicules Mallory's thoroughly cowed mother, as he grabs his daughter and makes lewd suggestions, we hear a sitcom laugh track that grinds out mechanical hilarity. Everything is funny to the "live studio audience," because Dangerfield's timing is right for the punchlines. Never mind how frightening the words are. Who really listens to sitcoms, anyway? Everything is grist for Stone's mill. Look at Tommy Lee Jones, as Warden McClusky of Batongaville State Prison. He's seen too many prison movies, and he's intoxicated by the experience of being on TV. He rants, he raves, he curses, he runs his prison like a deranged slave plantation. And then here comes Downey, as Wayne Gale, who hosts a clone of "Hard Copy" or "America's Most Wanted." Using a Robin Leach accent that makes the whole thing into showbiz, he's so thrilled to be in the same frame with these famous killers that he hardly cares what happens to him. Watch his reaction in the final bloody showdown, when he believes he is immune because, after all, he has the camera.

Seeing this movie once is not enough. The first time is for the visceral experience, the second time is for the meaning. As we coast into a long autumn where the news will be dominated by the O.J. Simpson trial, "Natural Born Killers" is like a slap in the face, waking us up to what's happening.

Watching the movie, it occurred to me that I haven't met or talked with anyone who seemed genuinely, personally, angry that Simpson (or anyone else) might have committed those sad murders.

Instead, people seem more intrigued and fascinated. The word grateful comes to mind. The case has given us all something to talk about. The barking dog. The blood tests. The ice cream that didn't melt. The matching glove. When the subject comes up at a party, you can almost feel the relief in the room, as everyone joins in: At last, a topic we can all get worked up about! Once we were shocked that the Romans threw Christians to the lions. Now we figure out a way to recycle the format into a TV show. That's what "Natural Born Killers" is all about.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 6.9/10 (43,954 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - 50

Ranked highest by Elemeno P.T. (#5)

I was mentally and physically exhausted after watching that one.

#126 Wild At Heart (1990)
David Lynch
Running time - 124 mins
Country of origin USA
Genre Adventure / Comedy / Crime / Drama / Romance / Thriller
Original language English

Writing Credits:
Barry Gifford, David Lynch

Cast
Nicolas Cage ... Sailor Ripley
Laura Dern ... Lula Fortune
Willem Dafoe ... Bobby Peru
Diane Ladd ... Marietta Fortune
Isabella Rossellini ... Perdita Durango

Academy Awards
Nominated: Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Diane Ladd)

Other awards
Nominated BAFTA Film Award Best Sound. Golden Globe Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture (Diane Ladd )

BY ROGER EBERT / August 17, 1990

There is something inside of me that resists the films of David Lynch. I am aware of it, I admit to it, but I cannot think my way around it. I sit and watch his films and am aware of his energy, his visual flair, his flashes of wit. But as the movie rolls along, something grows inside of me - an indignation, an unwillingness, a resistance. At the end of both "Blue Velvet" and "Wild at Heart," I was angry, as if a clever con-man had tried to put one over on me.

My taste is in the minority. "Blue Velvet" (1986) was hailed as one of the best films of the decade. Lynch's "Twin Peaks" is a cult hit on television. Now comes "Wild at Heart," which won the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival, to great cheers and many boos, some of the latter from me. I do not think this is the best film that played at Cannes this year (wait until you see Depardieu in "Cyrano") and, in fact, I do not even think it is a very good film. There is something repulsive and manipulative about it, and even its best scenes have the flavor of a kid in the school yard, trying to show you pictures you don't feel like looking at.

The movie is lurid melodrama, soap opera, exploitation, put-on and self-satire. It deals in several scenes of particularly offensive violence, and tries to excuse them by juvenile humor: It's all a joke, you see, and so if the violence offends you, you didn't get the joke.

Well, violence in itself doesn't offend me. But "Wild at Heart" doesn't have the nerve to just be violent - it has to build in its excuses.

Take, for example, an opening scene where the hero, Sailor Ripley (Nicolas Cage), is attacked by a black man on a staircase at a party.

The man is a killer hired by Marietta Fortune (Diane Ladd), the evil mother of Ripley's girlfriend, Lula Pace Fortune (Laura Dern). He pulls a knife on Cage, whose character is the local version of Elvis Presley crossed with James Dean and Tab Hunter. Ripley disarms him, and then smashes him to a pulp, viciously and with great thoroughness, taking the man's hair in his hand and pounding his skull violently against the marble floor until the bones crack and blood spatters and the man is dead. Then Ripley staggers to his feet, steadies himself on the handrail, lights a cigarette, and glares up from beneath lowered brows, gasping for breath, the cigarette dangling from his lip.

Some people laugh when they see this scene. They like the way the look is overplayed: Cage looks like a villain in a silent movie. I didn't laugh. I saw the payoff as Lynch's attempt to defuse the violence - to excuse a racially charged scene of unapologetic malevolence. There are other such scenes in the movie. The scene, for example, when the clerk gets his hand blown off with a shotgun, and crawls around on the floor looking for it, talking about how they can sew hands back on these days. Lynch cuts to a dog running from the building with the bloody hand in its mouth. This shot is lifted from Kurosawa's "Yojimbo," but not many people in the audience will read it as a homage.

And then there's the scene where the villain (Willem Dafoe) blows off his own head with a shotgun, and the head flies through the air and bounces along on the ground. This was the scene that got to the MPAA's film rating board, which threatened "Wild at Heart" with an X. But the movie qualifies for an R rating by adding a little gunsmoke to the shot, so that you can't see the head coming off quite so clearly. (What the wise men of the MPAA thought about the brains being pounded on the floor, I can't say. They blessed it with the R rating, which means kids of all ages are admitted if they can round up anyone who can pass as an adult guardian.) The violence aside, "Wild at Heart" also exercises the consistent streak of misogynism in Lynch's work. He has a particular knack for humiliating women in his films, and this time the primary target is Diane Ladd, as Mariette Fortune, the town seductress and vamp. The way this woman is photographed, the things she is given to do, and the dialogue she has to pronounce are equally painful to witness. Not even Hitchcock was ever this cruel to an actress. Laura Dern is Ladd's real-life daughter, and in the movie she, too, is subjected to the usual humiliations. Ever since I witnessed the humiliation of Isabella Rossellini in "Blue Velvet," I've wondered if there is an element in Lynch's art that goes beyond filmmaking; a personal factor in which he uses his power as a director to portray women in a particularly hurtful and offensive light.

All of these wounds and maimings are told within the framework of a parody, in which Dern and Cage play young lovers on the run from unspeakable secrets in the past, and the vengeance of the Dern character's mother and her hired goons. It's a road picture, with a 1950s T-Bird convertible as the chariot, and lots of throwaway gags about Ripley's snakeskin jacket, his "personal symbol of individuality." Cage does a conscious imitation of Presley in all of his dialogue, and even bursts into song a couple of times, delivering "Love Me Tender" from the hood of the car in the big climax.

I've seen the movie twice now. I liked it less the second time.

Take away the surprises and you can see the method more clearly. Like "Blue Velvet," this is a film without the courage to declare its own darkest fantasies. Lynch wraps his violence in humor, not as a style, but as a strategy. Luis Bunuel, the late and gifted Spanish surrealist, made films as cheerfully perverted and decadent as anything Lynch has ever dreamed of, but he had the courage to declare himself. Lynch seems to be doing a Bunuel script with a Jerry Lewis rewrite. He is a good director, yes. If he ever goes ahead and makes a film about what's really on his mind, instead of hiding behind sophomoric humor and the cop-out of "parody," he may realize the early promise of his "Eraserhead." But he likes the box office prizes that go along with his pop satires, so he makes dishonest movies like this one.

Understand that it's not the violence I mind. It's the sneaky excuses.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.1/10 (17,194 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by Nic (#7)

On the positive side- best casting job of Rodney Dangerfield ever. Also the actual use of Barry Adamson in the soundtrack was genius.

My film school classmate/project partner dropped out of school because he got a union gig on this show.

On the other end of things, I generally have a huge distaste for all things Oliver Stone and this thing was so f'd up like six ways to sunday. By the end, the only other thing that was less discouraging was the fact that it was over. Hardly worth repeated watching imo.

Elemeno, I'm shocked by your high ratings for this slick yet ugly flick.

yeah, this movie kinda sucked. I'll be elemeno would reevaluate it if he watched it now for the first time.

From #50 of all-time to #127 of its own decade? That's a might precipitous fall, folks.

If it's still placing above Ghost Dog, the fall was not precipitous enough.

yeah fuck NBK

it sucks so bad that natural born killers is a piece of shit because it's such a cool premise and actually seems like it would be a total american cult classic, which I guess it somehow mustered to be despite it's mediocrity.

I kind of want to see it now to revel in the genius of RDJ.

Sorry for the slowness past two days, left the USB fob at work today and didn't take it in yesterday. Will be rectified.

I may have changed my mind to a degree on Fisher King, but I stand by my vote here. Actually, I wasn't sold until I saw it a 2nd time. As Ebert said, first viewing was for the visceral experience and the second was for the meaning. This is great satire. I really can't defend it any better than Ebert does in his review...and in his book where he cited it as one of the "great films".

"Stone's basic strategy is to find the current buzzwords and buzzideas of crime and violence, and project them through the looking glass into a wonderland of murderous satire. It is a commonplace, for example, that many violent criminals were abused as children. All right, then, Stone will give us abuse: We see Mallory's childhood, shot in the style of a lurid TV sitcom, with Rodney Dangerfield as her drunken, piggish father. As he shouts and threatens violence, as he ridicules Mallory's thoroughly cowed mother, as he grabs his daughter and makes lewd suggestions, we hear a sitcom laugh track that grinds out mechanical hilarity. Everything is funny to the "live studio audience," because Dangerfield's timing is right for the punchlines. Never mind how frightening the words are. Who really listens to sitcoms, anyway? Everything is grist for Stone's mill. Look at Tommy Lee Jones, as Warden McClusky of Batongaville State Prison. He's seen too many prison movies, and he's intoxicated by the experience of being on TV. He rants, he raves, he curses, he runs his prison like a deranged slave plantation. And then here comes Downey, as Wayne Gale, who hosts a clone of "Hard Copy" or "America's Most Wanted." Using a Robin Leach accent that makes the whole thing into showbiz, he's so thrilled to be in the same frame with these famous killers that he hardly cares what happens to him. Watch his reaction in the final bloody showdown, when he believes he is immune because, after all, he has the camera."

Surprised that NBK isn't higher, actually.

Real world shit this weekend. Apologies will be aiming for at least #101 by end of week. Want to get this wrapped up and start thinking about the 2000- poll (Maybe after the 2007 film poll April next year) as we're over 75% through the decade.

#125 Beauty and the Beast (1991)
Gary Trousdale + Kirk Wise
Running time - 84 mins
Country of origin USA
Genre Animation / Family / Fantasy / Musical / Romance
Original language English / French

Writing Credits:
Roger Allers, Kelly Asbury, Brenda Chapman, Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, Tom Ellery, Kevin Harkey, Robert Lence, Burny Mattinson, Brian Pimental, Joe Ranft, Chris Sanders, Bruce Woodside, Linda Woolverton

Cast
Paige O'Hara ... Belle (voice)
Robby Benson ... Beast (voice)
Richard White ... Gaston (voice)
Jerry Orbach ... Lumiere (voice)
David Ogden Stiers ... Cogsworth/Narrator (voice)
Angela Lansbury ... Mrs. Potts (voice)

Academy Awards
Won; Best Music - Original Score, Best Music- Original Song ("Beauty and The Beast")
Nominated: Best Music- Original Song ("Be Our Guest" and "Belle"), Best Picture, Best Sound

Other awards
Won: Golden Globe Best Motion Picture - Comedy/Musical, Best Original Score - Motion Picture, Best Original Song - Motion Picture ( "Beauty and the Beast")
Nominated BAFTA Film Award Best Original Film Score, Best Special Effects Golden Globe Best Original Song - Motion Picture ( "Be our Guest")

BY ROGER EBERT / November 22, 1991

`Beauty and the Beast" slipped around all my roadblocks and penetrated directly into my strongest childhood memories, in which animation looked more real than live-action features. Watching the movie, I found myself caught up in a direct and joyous way. I wasn't reviewing an "animated film." I was being told a story, I was hearing terrific music, and I was having fun.

The film is as good as any Disney animated feature ever made - as magical as "Pinocchio," "Snow White," "The Little Mermaid." And it's a reminder that animation is the ideal medium for fantasy, because all of its fears and dreams can be made literal. No Gothic castle in the history of horror films, for example, has ever approached the awesome, frightening towers of the castle where the Beast lives. And no real wolves could have fangs as sharp or eyes as glowing as the wolves that prowl in the castle woods.

The movie's story, somewhat altered from the original fable, involves a beauty named Belle, who lives in the worlds of her favorite library books and is repelled by the romantic advances of Gaston, the muscle-bound cretin in her little 18th century French village. Belle's father, a dotty inventor, sets off on a journey through the forest, takes a wrong turn, and is imprisoned in the castle of the Beast. And Belle bravely sets off on a mission to rescue him.

We already know, from the film's opening narration, that the Beast is actually a handsome young prince who was transformed into a hideous monster as a punishment for being cruel. And a beast he will be forever, unless he finds someone who will love him. When Belle arrives at the castle, that life-saving romance is set into motion - although not, of course, without grave adventures to be overcome.

Like all of the best Disney animated films, "Beauty and the Beast" surrounds its central characters with a large peanut gallery of gossipy, chattering supporting players. The Beast's haunted castle contains household objects that act as his serving staff, and so we meet Lumiere, a candlestick; Cogsworth, a clock; and Mrs. Potts, a teapot with a little son named Chip. These characters are all naturally on Belle's side, because they want to see the Beast freed from his magic spell.

There are some wonderful musical numbers in the movie, and animation sets their choreography free from the laws of gravity. A hilarious number celebrates the monstrous ego of Gaston, who boasts about his hairy chest and the antlers he uses for interior decoration. "Be Our Guest" is a rollicking invitation to Belle from the castle staff, choreographed like Busby Berkeley running amok. And there is the haunting title song, sung by Mrs. Potts in the voice of Angela Lansbury.

The songs have lyrics by the late Howard Ashman and music by Alan Menken, the same team who collaborated on "The Little Mermaid," and they bubble with wit and energy ("Gaston" in particular brings down the house). Lansbury is one of a gifted cast on the soundtrack, which also includes Paige O'Hara as the plucky Belle; Robby Benson (his voice sounding electronically lowered) as Beast; Jerry Orbach as the candlestick who sounds uncannily like Maurice Chevalier; David Ogden Stiers as the cranky Cogsworth, and Richard White as the insufferable Gaston, who degenerates during the course of the film from a chauvinist pig to a sadistic monster.

"Beauty and the Beast," like 1989's "The Little Mermaid," reflects a new energy and creativity from the Disney animation people. They seem to have abandoned all notions that their feature-length cartoons are intended only for younger viewers, and these aren't children's movies but robust family entertainment.

Perhaps it is inevitable, in an age when even younger kids see high-voltage special effects films like "Die Hard" or "Terminator 2," that animation could no longer be content with jolly and innocuous fairy tales. What a movie like "Beauty and the Beast" does, however, is to give respect to its audience.

A lot of "children's movies" seem to expect people to buy tickets by default, because of what the movie doesn't contain (no sex, vulgarity, etc.). "Beauty and the Beast" reaches back to an older and healthier Hollywood tradition in which the best writers, musicians and filmmakers are gathered for a project on the assumption that a family audience deserves great entertainment, too.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.9/10 (41,112 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by Agrimorfee (#7)

#124 Primary Colors (1998)
Mike Nichols
Running time - 143 mins
Country of origin France / UK / Germany / USA / Japan
Genre Comedy / Drama
Original language English

Writing Credits:
Joe Klein, Elaine May

Cast
John Travolta ... Governor Jack Stanton
Emma Thompson ... Susan Stanton
Billy Bob Thornton ... Richard Jemmons
Kathy Bates ... Libby Holden
Adrian Lester ... Henry Burton

Academy Awards
Nominated: Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Kathy Bates), Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium

Other awards
Won: BAFTA Film Award Best Screenplay - Adapted
Nominated BAFTA Film Award Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role (Kathy Bates) Golden Globe Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Comedy/Musical (John Travolta), Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture (Kathy Bates)

BY ROGER EBERT / March 20, 1998

Here's the surprising thing: ``Primary Colors'' would seem just about as good, as tough and as smart, if there had never been a president named Bill Clinton. Of course the movie resonates with its parallels to the lives of Bill and Hillary Clinton, but it's a lot more than a disguised expose. It's a superb film--funny, insightful and very wise about the realities of political life.

The director, Mike Nichols, and the writer, his longtime collaborator Elaine May, have put an astonishing amount of information on the screen, yes, but that wasn't the hard part. Their real accomplishment is to blend so many stories and details into an observant picture that holds together. We see that Jack Stanton, the presidential candidate in the film, is a flawed charmer with a weakness for bimbos, but we also see what makes him attractive even to those who know the worst: He listens and cares, and knows how to be an effective politician.

John Travolta and Emma Thompson play Stanton and his wife, Susan, as a couple who, we feel, have spent many long hours and nights in mind-to-mind combat. Her true feelings about his infidelity remain unexpressed, but she is loyal to a larger idea of the man, and not as hurt that he fools around as that she's lied to about it. Much will be written about how much Travolta and Thompson do or do not resemble the Clintons, but their wisest choices as actors is to preserve their mystery.

By not going behind their bedroom door, by not eavesdropping on their private moments, the movie avoids having to explain what perhaps can never be understood: Why a man is driven to self-destructive behavior, and how his wife might somehow remain at his side anyway. The movie wisely stays a certain distance from the Stantons. There are no important scenes in which they are alone together in a room.

Instead, ``Primary Colors'' centers its point of view in a character named Henry Burton (Adrian Lester), grandson of a civil rights leader, who doesn't join the campaign so much as get sucked into its wake. Before he has even agreed to join Stanton's team, he finds himself on a chartered plane to New Hampshire with the candidate asleep on his shoulder. Earlier, he saw Stanton at work. At an illiteracy class, a black man (Mykelti Williamson in a powerful cameo) tells of the pain of not being able to read. Stanton empathizes with him, telling the story of his Uncle Charlie--who was a Medal of Honor winner but passed up college scholarships because he was ashamed to admit his illiteracy, and instead ``just laid down on his couch and smoked his Luckies.'' Of course, the Uncle Charlie story may not be entirely true, and later that day Henry sees Stanton emerging from a hotel bedroom with the flustered woman who runs the illiteracy program, but for Henry and the other campaign workers, it eventually comes down to this: All the candidates are flawed in one way or another, but some have good ideas, and of those only a few might be able to win.

John Travolta dominates the movie, in part, by his absence. Nichols and May must have decided it would be a mistake to put him into every scene: a man like Jack Stanton is important because of the way people talk, speculate and obsess about him in his absence.

Through Henry, we meet the campaign's inner circle. Richard Jemmons (Billy Bob Thornton), obviously based on Clinton's strategist James Carville, is a cynical realist who provides running commentary on the stages of the campaign. Libby Holden (Kathy Bates), the ``dust-buster,'' is a longtime Stanton confidant and recent mental patient who comes out of retirement, foul-mouthed and lusty, to dig up the dirt before the other side can. And Daisy (Maura Tierney), quiet and observant, is a scheduler who eventually finds herself in Henry's bed, not so much out of choice as default. Of the crowd, Bates is the dynamo, playing a hard-living lesbian with a secret center of idealism; it's an Oscar-caliber performance.

The movie ticks off episodes based on real life. There's a woman from the candidate's home state who claims to have had an affair with him and to have tapes to prove it. And a dramatic appearance on national TV, where Susan Stanton holds her husband's hand and defends him (her hand snaps away from his as the show goes off the air). It intercuts these with fiction, created in the novel by ``Anonymous,'' now revealed as ex-Newsweek writer Joe Klein. There's the pregnancy of the teenage daughter of Stanton's favorite barbecue chef. And the populist Florida governor (Larry Hagman) who looks good against Stanton, until his past returns to haunt him.

Much of the movie's ethical content revolves, not around sex, but around how a primary campaign should handle damaging information it turns up about its opponent. Libby argues that they shouldn't use it. Jack says that if they don't, the other side will. Better to get it out before it does more harm.

In the way ``Primary Colors'' handles this issue, it shows more insight and maturity than all but a handful of recent mainstream movies: This is a grown-up film about real issues in the real world. Among its pleasures is the way it lets us examine the full frame and observe how characters at the side or in the background react; whole characters are developed in asides.

It is also very funny at times, as when Stanton, Jemmons and others get in a ``momma-thon,'' praising their mothers into the night. Or when Susan snatches Jack's ever-present chicken drumstick out of his hand. Or when the candidate, his wife and his aides search a roadside for a cell phone thrown from a car in anger. The movie is endlessly inventive and involving: You get swept up in the political and personal suspense, and begin to understand why people are engulfed in political campaigns.

Will ``Primary Colors'' hurt or help the Clinton presidency? To some degree, neither; it's a treatment of matters that the electorate has already made up its mind about. The film has certainly not in any sense ``softened'' its portrayal of its Clintonesque hero--those rumors are exposed by its almost brutal candor. But in a strange way ``Primary Colors'' may actually work to help Clinton. While a lesser film would have felt compelled to supply an ``answer,'' this one knows that the fascination is in the complexity, in the strong and weak qualities at war with each other. The secret of what makes Jack Stanton tick is as unanswerable as the meaning of Citizen Kane's ``rosebud.'' And the resemblance doesn't stop there.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 6.7/10 (11,045 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by Johnny Bravo

that's an awful high ranking from Undo

Whoops, Undo's #2 ranking is for a film with a very close alphabetical name to that one Fixed.

#123 El Mariachi (1992)
Robert Rodriguez
Running time - 81 mins
Country of origin Mexico / USA
Genre Action / Crime / Thriller / Western
Original language Spanish

Writing Credits:
Robert Rodriguez

Cast
Carlos Gallardo ... El Mariachi
Consuelo Gómez ... Domino
Jaime de Hoyos ... Bigotón
Peter Marquardt ... Mauricio (Moco)
Reinol Martinez ... Azul


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

BY ROGER EBERT / March 12, 1993

`El Mariachi," an enormously entertaining movie, stands in danger of being upstaged by its budget, which was $7,000. Yes, $7,000, or about what it costs to cater lunch for a day on a Schwarzenegger picture. A movie's budget, no matter how high or how low, is not a reason to go to see it. "Hudson Hawk" was bad even though it cost tens of millions, and "El Mariachi" is good even though it was made for what Hollywood considers walking-around money.

The movie was written, directed, photographed and edited by Robert Rodriguez, a 23-year-old from Austin, Texas, who shot on location in a Mexican border town and tells the story of a young mariachi, or rambling guitar player, who arrives one day looking for work. He is dressed in black and carries a guitar case, and a killer arrives in the same town on the same day, dressed the same way. All the mariachi (Carlos Gallardo) wants to do is sing and play his guitar, but soon he's thrust into the middle of someone else's blood feud.

Rodriguez shoots this story in a lively visual style that brings a lot of energy even to routine shots. He probably overuses such devices as wide-angle lenses, zooms, speededup action and weird camera placements, but I'm inclined to forgive him his excesses because they add to the exuberance of the film.

Today's major films are often shot in such portentous visual styles that they fairly march to their conclusions, but Rodriguez isn't afraid to reach all the way back to silent comedy for shots that punch up the humor and the action. If it works, why knock it? The story is the stuff of pulp novels, old TV Westerns and Victorian melodrama. The mariachi is a harmless romantic who only wants to sing, but people start shooting at him. He defends himself, while trying to figure out why he is the center of attention. A sexy barmaid named Domino (Consuelo Gomez) believes his story and befriends him, and before long they are falling in love, which adds another complication: Domino is the object of the local warlord's unrequited lust, and the warlord's men have confused the mariachi with the other man in black.

This story of coincidences and mistaken identities is so obviously contrived that it's almost a parody of itself, but the film's style saves it and gives it charm. Shooting with amateur actors on real locations, plundering his surroundings for his shots and props, Rodriguez gets a gritty, sweaty, dusty feel that drips with atmosphere. Although "El Mariachi" is peopled with stereotypes and told with broad strokes, there is somehow an authenticity about it; it feels committed to its story.

The actors are all adequate for their roles, and Gallardo and Gomez, both completely inexperienced, are more than that. She has the kind of dark, flashing eyes that can dart from love to suspicion in an instant, and he is enough of a mope to seem convincing as an innocent mariachi, and enough of a hero to rise to the occasion.

(Rodriguez met Gallardo in boarding school, and has been using him as star and collaborator in home movies since they were kids.) "El Mariachi" is already gathering a legend around it, about how Rodriguez sold his body to medical science to raise money to buy film, and wrote the screenplay while working as a guinea pig for cholesterol medication. Now he is at work on another film about the mariachi, this one with such an enormous budget that it would pay for the catered lunches on an entire movie by Schwarzenegger.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.0/10 (12,127 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #257

Ranked highest by Agrimorfee (#6)

A-G-R-I-M-O-R-F-E-E.

#122 Happiness (1998)
Todd Solondz
Running time - 134 mins
Country of origin USA
Genre Drama / Comedy
Original language English / Russian

Writing Credits:
Todd Solondz

Cast
Jane Adams ... Joy Jordan
Jon Lovitz ... Andy Kornbluth
Philip Seymour Hoffman ... Allen
Dylan Baker ... Bill Maplewood
Lara Flynn Boyle ... Helen Jordan


Other awards
Won: Cannes Film Festival FIPRESCI Prize Parallel Sections
Nominated Golden Globe Best Screenplay - Motion Picture

BY ROGER EBERT / October 23, 1998

Todd Solondz's ``Happiness'' is a film that perplexes its viewers, even those who admire it, because it challenges the ways we attempt to respond to it. Is it a portrait of desperate human sadness? Then why are we laughing? Is it an ironic comedy? Then why its tenderness with these lonely people? Is it about depravity? Yes, but why does it make us suspect, uneasily, that the depraved are only seeking what we all seek, but with a lack of ordinary moral vision? In a film that looks into the abyss of human despair, there is the horrifying suggestion that these characters may not be grotesque exceptions, but may in fact be part of the mainstream of humanity. Whenever a serial killer or a sex predator is arrested, we turn to the paper to find his neighbors saying that the monster ``seemed just like anyone else.'' ``Happiness'' is a movie about closed doors--apartment doors, bedroom doors and the doors of the unconscious. It moves back and forth between several stories, which often link up. It shows us people who want to be loved and who never will be--because of their emotional incompetence and arrested development. There are lots of people who do find love and fulfillment, but they are not in this movie.

We meet Joy (Jane Adams), who has just broken up with the loser she's been dating (Jon Lovitz). He gives her a present, an engraved reproduction ashtray he got through mail order, but after she thanks him (``It almost makes me want to learn to smoke'') he viciously grabs it back: ``This is for the girl who loves me for who I am.'' We meet Allen (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who describes pornographic sexual fantasies to his therapist (Dylan Baker) and then concludes that he will never realize them because he is too boring. The therapist, named Bill, is indeed bored. Later Bill buys a teen-idol magazine and masturbates while looking at the photos.

We meet Joy's two sisters, Trish (Cynthia Stevenson) and Helen (Lara Flynn Boyle). Trish is a chirpy housewife, who is married to Bill the psychiatrist but knows nothing of his pedophilia. Helen is a poet who drops names (``Salman is on the line'') and describes the countless men who lust for her. The parents of the three sisters (Louise Lasser and Ben Gazzara) have been married for years, but now Lenny wants to leave. Not to fool around. Just to be alone.

We meet Kristina (Camryn Manheim), a fat girl who lives down the hall from the solitary Allen, and knocks on his door to announce that Pedro, the doorman, has been murdered. (His body has been dismembered and put in plastic bags: ``Everyone uses Baggies. That's why we can relate to this crime.'') Allen doesn't want to know. He leafs through porno magazines, gets drunk and makes obscene phone calls. One of his calls goes to the woman he fantasies about. It is Helen, the ``popular'' sister, who enjoys his heavy breathing and calls him back.

We get the sense of warehouses of strangers--of people stacked into the sky in lonely apartments, each one hiding secrets. We watch in sadness and unease as Bill the shrink attends his son Billy's Little League game and becomes enraptured by one of his teammates. When the other boy has a ``sleep-over'' with Billy, Bill drugs his family and molests the young boy (not shown onscreen).

Later, there is a heartbreaking conversation between Billy and his father. (Billy is isolated in closeup and we assume the young actor is reading the lines without knowing what the older actor is saying.) Their talk lingers in uneasy memory. The boy has been told at school that his father is a molester. He asks his dad if it is true. His father says it is. In a scene of pain and sadness, the boy asks more questions and the father answers simply, briefly and completely honestly. A friend who saw the movie told me, ``Instead of lying, he kept telling him the truth, regardless of how hard that was for both of them. The honesty may be the one thing that saves the son from the immense damage done by the father.'' Well, I hope so.

``Happiness'' occupies the emerging genre of the New Geek Cinema, films that occupy the shadowland between tragedy and irony. Todd Solondz also made ``Welcome to the Dollhouse'' (1996), about an unpopular 11-year-old girl who defiantly improvises survival tactics. ``Happiness'' is harder to take, and yet equally attentive to the suffering of characters who see themselves outside the mainstream--geeks, if you will, whose self-image is formed by the conviction that the more people know about them, the less they'll like them.

Why see the film? ``Happiness'' is about its unhappy characters, in a way that helps us see them a little more clearly, to feel sorry for them, and at the same time to see how closely tragedy and farce come together in the messiness of sexuality. Does ``Happiness'' exploit its controversial subjects? Finally, no: It sees them as symptoms of desperation and sadness. It is more exploitative to create a child molester as a convenient villain, as many movies do; by disregarding his humanity and seeing him as an object, such movies do the same thing that a molester does.

These are the kinds of thoughts ``Happiness'' inspires. It is not a film for most people. It is certainly for adults only. But it shows Todd Solondz as a filmmaker who deserves attention, who hears the unhappiness in the air and seeks its sources.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.7/10 (18,144 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #378

Ranked highest by Girlwithaspirin (#8)

ugh. I can't decide whether Solondz was beaten regularly as a kid and wishes to just continue moping his way through life regurgitating his perverse stories of woe or if he's just royally fucked up in the head.

I'd expect him and Neil LaBute are BFF's or something. Only LaBute's stories at least carry some sense of humanity.

A_N_G_R_Y_C_O_S_M_E_N_A_M_E_S_M_I_S_S_H_A_P_E_L_Y_P_O_L_Y_F_O_R_M_O_R_F_E_E_H_O_P_I_L_S..

And the top picture on mitch's El Mariachi post is actually from "Desperado".
I detect a conceptual continuity here. If From Dusk Til Dawn Shows Up, use a pic from The Faculty instead.

#121 Batman Retunrs (1992)
Tim Burton
Running time - 126 mins
Country of origin USA / UK
Genre Action / Crime / Romance / Thriller
Original language English

Writing Credits:
Bob Kane, Daniel Waters, Sam Hamm

Cast
Michael Keaton ... Batman/Bruce Wayne
Danny DeVito ... Penguin/Oswald Cobblepot
Michelle Pfeiffer ... Catwoman/Selina Kyle
Christopher Walken ... Max Shreck
Michael Gough ... Alfred Pennyworth

Academy Awards
Nominated Best Effects - Visual Effects, Best Makeup

Other awards
Nominated BAFTA Film Award Best Make Up Artist, Best Special Effects Razzie Award Worst Supporting Actor (Danny DeVito )

BY ROGER EBERT / June 19, 1992

The gloomy undertone of the Batman movies is like a tow line, holding the movie back, keeping it from springing free into the wind.

Tim Burton's "Batman Returns," even more than the original "Batman," is a dark, brooding film, filled with hurt and fear, childhood wounds and festering adult resentments. It is also a most intriguing movie, great to look at, fun to talk about. There is no doubt Burton is a gifted director, but is he the right director for Batman? The film opens in cruelty and shame, as the parents of a deformed baby put him into his bassinet and drop him into the river on a cold, snowy Christmas night. The frail little craft floats downstream and into the sewers of Gotham City, where the infant is rescued and raised by the penguins who luckily happen to live there.

Arriving at adulthood, his hands like lobster claws, the Penguin (Danny DeVito) learns about the human world by peering out through sewer gratings. His soul burns with the need to discover who his parents were, and why they treated him so meanly.

Elsewhere in Gotham, the mayor (Michael Murphy) presides over the municipal Christmas tree lighting before cold crowds under sullen skies. He is joined by the vile tycoon Max Shreck (Christopher Walken), who has a scheme to build a power plant that will drain the city of its energy. His browbeaten secretary (Michelle Pfeiffer), killed after she discovers the scheme, is licked back to life by alley cats and vows vengeance, sewing herself a skintight, fetishistic costume and venturing out into the night as Catwoman.

Meanwhile, in the bat cave beneath his gloomy mansion, Batman (Michael Keaton) ponders whatever deep needs led to his own peculiar existence.

Even back in the days when Batman lived in comic books, his world was a little darker than, say, Superman's. There was a shade of film noir in Gotham City, in contrast to the deco 1930s optimism of Superman's Metropolis. The Dark Knight, a graphic novel that inspired the Batman movies, was darker still, and now Burton takes it all the way - into a movie set mostly at night, photographed on refrigerated sets, so that the actors sometimes look as if they would rather have a mug of hot chocolate than all the passion and wealth in the city.

The plot doesn't exactly unwind like a well-coiled machine. The movie proceeds in fits and starts, from one little drama to another, as the Penguin ventures out from his subterranean haunts, and a newspaper circulation war leads to scare stories about his alleged crimes.

The evil Max Shreck meanwhile directs his henchmen in a conspiracy to deliver Gotham into his own megalomaniac hands, and Murphy, as the incumbent mayor, blathers like an ineffectual nonentity while the Penguin mounts a campaign against him.

Batman is summoned by the Batsignal to the side of Police Commissioner Gordon (Pat Hingle), to do battle against the crime wave. And on his nocturnal rounds, he crosses paths with Catwoman, whose claws can draw blood, and who is as skilled as Batman in climbing high buildings, swinging through the air, and employing the martial arts. Dressed in their fetishistic costumes, they would obviously make an ideal couple - something that occurs to them more gradually than it does to us. Their few erotic moments together are, alas, so incomplete and unsatisfying they look as if they might have been trimmed for the PG-13.

Remembering the movie and contrasting it to my childhood memories of the comic books, I wonder if perhaps I cannot fully respond to this film because I was shaped in a kinder, gentler time.

I always thought it would be fun to be Batman. The movie believes it is more of a curse - that Batman is not a crime-fighting superhero but a reclusive neurotic who feels he has to prove himself to a society he does not really inhabit.

All of Tim Burton's films ("Pee Wee's Big Adventure," "Beetlejuice," "Edward Scissorhands" and the two Batmans) are about characters whose strange qualities place them outside the mainstream, and who live in worlds that owe everything to art direction and set design. Looking at these movies is a pleasure - they are not ordinary, or boring.

Perhaps I would have enjoyed Batman more if the movie had been about someone else, perhaps one of those Marvel superheroes who frankly concede their personal inadequacies. I can admire the movie on many levels, but I cannot accept it as Batman. And I was disappointed that the disjointed plot advanced so unsteadily, depriving us of the luxury of really caring about the outcome.

It is a common theory that when you have a hero, like James Bond, Superman or Batman, in a continuing series, it's the villain that gives each movie its flavor. "Batman" had the Joker, played by Jack Nicholson, to lend it energy, but the Penguin is a curiously meager and depressing creature; I pitied him, but did not fear him or find him funny. The genius of Danny DeVito is all but swallowed up in the paraphernalia of the role. "Batman Returns" is odd and sad, but not exhilarating.

I give the movie a negative review, and yet I don't think it's a bad movie; it's more of a misguided one, made with great creativity, but denying us what we more or less deserve from a Batman story. Looking back over both films, I think Burton has a vision here and is trying to shape it to the material, but it just won't fit. No matter how hard you try, superheroes and film noir don't go together; the very essence of noir is that there are no more heroes. I had a feeling by the end of this film that Batman was beginning to get the idea.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 6.7/10 (44,193 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by <will look up later>

Who knew Selena had a brain to damage?

should be higher, but it could be worse. My nose could be gushing blood.

kinda want to start a Returns quote thread now

Bottom line, she tries to blackmail me, I'll drop her out a higher window.

Selena, you're fired. And Bruce Wayne! What are you doing dressed up as Batman?

You minx! I ought to have you spayed! You gave off all the signals! AND I DON'T THINK I LIKE YOU ANYMORE!!

You know what, I mistook me for someone else.

The heat is getting to me...I'll kill you momentarily...but first I think I'll take a nice long drink...of ICE WATER...

Eat floor.

High fiber.

Must you be the only lonely man-beast in town?

"OK, intimidate me, bully me if it makes you feel big. I mean, it's not like you can just kill me..."
"Actually, it's a lot like that..........Eh? Eh?" (Both laugh)
(Pushes Selena out window)

best line of the movie

every line in that movie is the best line

Hi, Max! Remember me? I'm Fred's hand! You wanna greet any other body parts?

God, this is more tiresome than people bitching about 5 things.

what the fuck are you talking about

yeah I read that one a couple times

I feel like this is SOMB inside joke that theremin doesn't understand #4,328

Listening to (or reading) people casting lines about from Batman movies is about as interesting as being the designated driver in a room full of drunks. If you want to have a pissing contest with movie quotes, move it to another thread or head on over to the Compulsive Posting thread.

oh it's on now

Oh come on, this isn't the first time, and it certainly won't be the last. (best to let it die down as they always do...)

I know it's not going to make a bit of difference. Just venting. Please, all. Carry on with your cleverness.

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