My Batman Returns quote is soooo much funnier than yours!

Lane... what are you doing?

you're complaining about remembering quotes from batman returns?

are you even fucking human!?

I'm Batman.

This movie sucked so bad it ruined my career and I haven't starred in good movie since - Michael Keaton

Yeah, me too. Although I somehow snuck into LA Confidential - Danny DeVito

It is alright if you are lesbian.

I like lesbians.

dude, seriously, lesbians are awesome.

The best friendships a guy can have are with lesbians.

Michael Keaton made a series of bad choices, agreed.

But Danny DeVito? Only about eight great movies and Always Sunny since then.

Danny Devito is a large enough pop culture icon for that not to matter.

Remember when he was drunk on The View?

He also put a good effort into Matilda, which I appreciate.

He strikes me as one of the few genuine "stars" that I'd hang out with.

Back on it tomorrow, expect a blitz.

More posts than Portsmouth v. Reading goals?

Yeah should be.

#120 Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993)
Steven Zaillian
Running time - 118 mins
Country of origin USA
Genre Drama
Original language English

Writing Credits:
Fred Waitzkin, Steven Zaillian

Cast
Max Pomeranc ... Josh Waitzkin
Joe Mantegna ... Fred Waitzkin
Joan Allen ... Bonnie Waitzkin
Ben Kingsley ... Bruce Pandolfini
Laurence Fishburne ... Vinnie

Academy Awards
Nominated : - Best Cinematography


BY ROGER EBERT / August 11, 1993

"There was a boy, a chess player, once, who revealed that his gift consisted partly in a clear inner vision of potential moves of each piece as objects with flashing or moving tails of coloured light: He saw a live possible pattern of potential moves and selected them according to which ones made the pattern strongest, the tensions greatest. His mistakes were made when he selected not the toughest, but the most beautiful lines of light." From The Virgin in the Garden, by A. S. Byatt Child prodigies are found most often in three fields: chess, mathematics and music. All three depend upon an intuitive grasp of complex relationships. None depends on social skills, maturity, or insights into human relationships. A child who is a genius at chess can look at a board and see a universe that is invisible to the wisest adult.

This is both a blessing and a curse. There is a beauty to the gift, but it does not necessarily lead to greater happiness in life as a whole.

The wonderful new film "Searching for Bobby Fischer" contains in its title a reminder of that truth. Bobby Fischer was arguably the greatest chess player of all time. As a boy, he faced and defeated the greatest players of his time. In 1972, after a prelude of countless controversies, he won the world chess championship away from the Russians for the first time in years. Then he essentially disappeared into a netherworld of rented rooms, phantom sightings, paranoid outbursts and allegiance to a religious cult. He reappeared not long ago to win a lucrative chess match in Yugoslavia, for which he was willing to lose his citizenship. His games are models of elegance and artistry. His life does not inspire envy.

"Searching for Bobby Fischer," a film of remarkable sensitivity and insight, tells a story based on fact, about a "new" Bobby Fischer - a young boy named Josh Waitzkin (Max Pomeranc) who was born with a gift for chess, which he nurtured in the rough-and-tumble world of of chess hustlers in New York's Washington Square Park. His parents are at first doubtful of his talent, then proud of it, then concerned about how he can develop it without stunting the other areas of his life.

The film is the first intelligent one I can remember seeing about chess. That is the case even though no knowledge of chess is necessary to understand it, and some of the filmmaking strategies - such as showing most of the moves at lightning speed - simply ignore the periods of inaction in games. It is intelligent because it is about the meaning of chess, a game that has been compared to war and plundered for its lurking Freudian undertones, and yet is essentially just an arrangement of logical outcomes.

In the film, Josh learns the moves by watching them played in the park. At first his parents, Fred and Bonnie Waitzkin (Joe Mantegna and Joan Allen), are even unaware he can play, and there is a sweet scene in which the boy allows his father to win a game, to spare his feelings. Josh's first teacher is a black chess hustler named Vinnie (Laurence Fishburne), who uses an in-your- face approach and advises unorthodox moves to throw an opponent off.

Eventually Fred becomes convinced his son needs more advanced tutelage, and hires the brilliant but prickly Bruce Pandolfini (Ben Kingsley), a difficult case - but then all good chess players are difficult cases.

The difference in strategy between Vinnie and Bruce is much simplified in the film, and comes down to whether you should develop your queen at an early stage in the game. For the film, the queen is just a symbol of their opposed styles; the movie is really about personalities, and how they express themselves through chess.

The screenplay by Steven Zaillian, based on Fred Waitzkin's autobiographical book, is best when it deals with the issues surrounding competitive chess. Is winning, for example, the only thing? Is chess so important that it should absorb all the attention of a young prodigy, or is his development as a normal little boy also crucial? Why does one play serious chess in the first place? There is a cautionary moment when Fred Waitzkin sees his first professional chess tournament - an ill-fitted room filled with players, mostly men, mostly silent, bending over their boards as if in prayer - and is warned that this is the world his son will inhabit.

By the end of "Searching for Bobby Fischer" we have learned something about tournament chess, and a great deal about human nature. The film's implications are many. They center around our responsibility, if any, to our gifts. If we can operate at the genius level in a given field, does that mean we must - even if the cost is the sort of endless purgatory a Bobby Fischer has inhabited? It's an interesting question, and this movie doesn't avoid it.

At the end, it all comes down to that choice faced by the young player that A. S. Byatt writes about: the choice between truth and beauty. What makes us men is that we can think logically. What makes us human is that we sometimes choose not to.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.5/10 (10,375 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by Slackmo and Kmac (#10)

You're a much better player than I was at your age.

I was thinking the other day about how I want to buy this movie sometime. Classic that never got its real due.

"I'm not trying to demean you, sir..."
"Oh, but you are! You ARE! You demean me, and him, and it..."

#119 To Die For (1995)
Gus Van Sant
Running time - 106 mins
Country of origin UK / USA
Genre Comedy / Drama / Thriller
Original language English

Writing Credits:
Joyce Maynard, Buck Henry

Cast
Nicole Kidman ... Suzanne Stone Maretto
Matt Dillon ... Larry Maretto
Joaquin Phoenix ... Jimmy Emmett
Casey Affleck ... Russel Hines
Illeana Douglas ... Janice Maretto

Other awards
Won: - Golden Globe Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Comedy/Musical (Nicole Kidman )
Nominated : BAFTA Film Award - Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role (Nicole Kidman )

BY ROGER EBERT / October 6, 1995

I once knew a TV interviewer who got an interview with Mother Teresa and never stopped talking about it. We will call my friend N. After listening closely, I realized that N. thought she'd given Mother Teresa a big break: After all, not everybody gets to appear on TV with N.

"To Die For" is a movie about someone uncannily like N. I make that clear because some will consider it a satire, when it mirrors a personality type not unfamiliar to those who labor in the media.

Suzanne Stone (Nicole Kidman) is a woman who lives to be on TV.

Everything else in her life is either what happens before TV, or after TV. She lives in the small town of Little Hope, N. H., but in her mind, she lives in the hyperspace of supermarket tabloids, People magazine and instant celebrity.

Even in Little Hope, Suzanne is not a big fish. She is the weather forecaster for a local cable channel, although she is always dreaming up ways to expand her role and firmly intends to be the next Barbara Walters. Why she marries Larry (Matt Dillon) is anyone's guess: He's a nice enough guy from a family who owns the local Italian eatery, but for a star of the future like Suzanne, he's too commonplace. At least when she meets him he has a certain animal appeal, but soon after their marriage, he starts sacking out on the couch and developing love handles.

Suzanne is played by Kidman as a woman who is always onstage, and seems to be reading her dialogue from a TelePrompTer that scrolls up the insides of her eyeballs. The dialogue has been written by Buck Henry, who has probably met more than a few performers just like this, and it is priceless. She doesn't want to be pregnant, she tells her mother-in-law, because "a woman in my field with a baby has two strikes against her. She can't cover a royal wedding, or a revolution in South America, and pregnancy gives her blubber, and boobs out to here. It's gross." (I'm surprised Suzanne hasn't picked up on the cachet for pregnancy on TV.) It becomes clear to Suzanne that her husband must go. He's standing in the way of her future, an insight she has on her honeymoon while cheating on him with a TV executive who might be able to help her career. To aid in disposing of her husband, she enlists three airheads from the local high school: Jimmy (Joaquin Phoenix), Russell (Casey Affleck) and Lydia (Alison Folland).

They are dazzled and flattered to be taken seriously by this glamorous cable TV personality, and soon she's necking with Jimmy and persuading them to help her commit murder. (The way she lets them down afterward has a certain cheerful brutality.) All of this could be done broadly as farce, but director Gus Van Sant uses Henry's wicked screenplay as a blueprint for quieter, crueler comedy (the movie is a spectacular comeback after his appalling "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues"). "To Die For" is the kind of movie that's merciless with its characters, and Kidman is superb at making Suzanne into someone who is not only stupid, vain and egomaniacal (we've seen that before) but also vulnerably human. She represents, on a large scale, feelings we have all had in smaller and sneakier ways. She simply lacks skill in concealing them.

The film is filled with perfect character studies. Dillon, the former teen idol whose acting has always been underrated, here turns in a sly comic performance as a man dazzled by beauty but seduced by comfort. Illeana Douglas is Janice, Suzanne's ice-skating sister-in-law, who spots her as a phony and makes life uncomfortable by calling her on it. Dan Hedaya plays the father-in-law who rules his Italian family with an ebullient hand. And Buck Henry plays a high school teacher with a vast repertory of colorful verbal threats for his students.

Finally, though, the movie is about Suzanne, and Nicole Kidman's work here is inspired. Her clothes, her makeup, her hair, her speech, her manner, even the way she carries herself (as if aware of the eyes of millions) are all brought to a perfect pitch: Her Suzanne is so utterly absorbed in being herself that there is an eerie conviction, even in the comedy. She plays Suzanne as the kind of woman who pities us - because we aren't her, and you know what? We never will be.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 6.7/10 (11,868 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by Citizen (#9)

one of the greatest closing lines ever. Geez what a great movie. How old was this kid at the time? Deserved an Oscar or a Teen Choice Award or something.

You could go at any minute

I remember reading at the time that the producers made a decision to cast a chess-playing kid who had never acted, rather than the other way 'round. Nothing like spending your first acting role ever squaring off with Ben Kingsley.

#118 Dead Man Walking (1995)
Tim Robbins
Running time - 122 mins
Country of origin UK / USA
Genre Crime / Drama
Original language English

Writing Credits:
Helen Prejean, Tim Robbins

Cast
Susan Sarandon ... Sister Helen Prejean
Sean Penn ... Matthew Poncelet
Robert Prosky ... Hilton Barber
Raymond J. Barry ... Earl Delacroix
R. Lee Ermey ... Clyde Percy

Academy awards
Won: Best Actress in a Leading Role (Susan Sarandon)
Nominated : Best Actor in a Leading Role (Sean Penn), Best Director, Best Music, Original Song (Overrated Person For the song "Dead Man Walking".)

Other awards
Nominated : Golden Globe Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama (Sean Penn), Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama (Susan Sarandon), Best Screenplay - Motion Picture

BY ROGER EBERT / January 12, 1996

After seeing "Dead Man Walking," I paused outside the screening to jot a final line on my notes: "This film ennobles filmmaking." That is exactly what it does. It demonstrates how a movie can confront a grave and controversial issue in our society and see it fairly, from all sides, not take any shortcuts, and move the audience to a great emotional experience without unfair manipulation. What is remarkable is that the film is also all the other things a movie should be: absorbing, surprising, technically superb and worth talking about for a long time afterward.

The movie begins with a Louisiana nun, Sister Helen Prejean (Susan Sarandon), who works in an inner-city neighborhood. One day she receives a letter from an inmate on Death Row, asking her to visit him. So she visits him. The prison chaplain (Scott Wilson) doesn't think much of her visit, and briefs her on the ways that prisoners can manipulate outsiders. He obviously thinks of her as a bleeding heart. Her answer is unadorned: "He wrote to me and asked me to come." The inmate, named Matthew Poncelet (Sean Penn), has been convicted, along with another man, of participating in the rape and murder of two young people on a lovers' lane. We see him first through the grating of a visitor's pen, so that his face breaks into jigsawlike pieces. In looks and appearance, he is the kind of person you would instinctively dread: He has the mousy little goatee and elaborate pompadour of a man with deep misgivings about his face. His voice is halting and his speech is ignorant. He smokes a cigarette as if sneaking puffs in a grade-school washroom. He tells her, "They got me on a greased rail to the Death House here." He wants her to help with his appeal. At one point, he mentions that they don't have anything in common. Sister Helen thinks about that, and says, "You and I have something in common. We both live with the poor." His face looks quietly stunned, as if for the first time in a long time he has been confronted with an insight about his life that is not solely ego-driven. She says that she will come to see him again and that she will help him file a last-minute appeal against his approaching execution.

Sister Helen, as played here by Sarandon and written and directed by Tim Robbins (from the memoir by the real Helen Prejean), is one of the few truly spiritual characters I have seen in the movies. Movies about "religion" are often only that - movies about secular organizations that deal in spirituality. It is so rare to find a movie character who truly does try to live according to the teachings of Jesus (or anyone else, for that matter) that it's a little disorienting: This character will behave according to what she thinks is right, not according to the needs of a plot, the requirements of a formula, or the pieties of those for whom religion, good grooming, polite manners and prosperity are all more or less the same thing.

But wait. The film is not finished with its bravery. At this point in any conventional story, we would expect developments along familiar lines. Take your choice: (1) The prisoner is really innocent, and Sister Helen leads his 11th-hour defense as justice is done; (2) They fall in love with one another, she helps him escape, and they go on a doomed flight from the law; or, less likely, (3) She converts him to her religion, and he goes to his death praising Jesus.

None of these things happen. Instead, Sister Helen experiences all of the complexities, contradictions and hard truths of the situation, and we share them. In movies like this you rarely see the loved ones of the victims, unless they are presented in hatefilled caricatures of blood lust. Here it is not like that.

Sister Helen meets the parents of the dead girl, and the father of the dead boy. (The father is seen among packing cases - moving, after a separation from his wife, who felt it was time for them to "get on with their lives," which he can never do.) She begins to understand that Matthew may indeed have been guilty. She has to face the anger of the parents, who cannot see why anyone would want to befriend a murderer ("Are you a communist?"). There is a scene of agonizing embarrassment, as the girl's parents make a basic mistake about her motives for visiting them.

And there is more. Matthew, we come to realize, is the product of an impoverished cultural background. He has been supplied with only a few cliches to serve him as a philosophy: He believes in "taking things like a man," and "showing people," and there on Death Row, he even makes a play for Sister Helen, almost as a reflex.

"Death is breathing down your neck," she tells him, "and you're playing your little man-on-the-make games." He parrots a racist statement from his prison buddies in the Aryan Nation, which does his case no good, and later, when he bitterly resents his stupidity in saying those things, we realize he didn't even think about them; nature abhors a vacuum, and racism abhors an empty mind and pours in to fill it.

The movie comes down to a drama of an entirely unexpected kind: a spiritual drama, involving Matthew's soul. Christianity teaches that all sin can be forgiven, and that no sinner is too low for God's love. Sister Helen believes that. Truly believes it, with every atom of her being. And yet she does not press Matthew for a "religious" solution to his situation. What she hopes for is that he can go to his death in reconciliation with himself and his crime. The last half-hour of this movie is overwhelmingly powerful - not the least in Matthew's strained 11th-hour visit with his family, where we see them all trapped in the threadbare cliches of a language learned from television shows and saloon jukeboxes.

The performances in this film are beyond comparison, which is to say that Sarandon and Penn find their characters and make them into exactly what they are, without reference to other movies or conventions. Penn proves again that he is the most powerful actor of his generation, and, as for Sarandon, in film after film she finds not the right technique for a character so much as the right humanity. It's as if she creates a role out of a deep understanding of the person she is playing.

Tim Robbins, Sarandon's longtime companion, has directed once before ("Bob Roberts," an intelligent political drama). With this film he leaps far beyond his earlier work and has made that rare thing, a film that is an exercise of philosophy. This is the kind of movie that spoils us for other films, because it reveals so starkly how most movies fall into conventional routine, and lull us with the reassurance that they will not look too hard, or probe too deeply, or make us think beyond the boundaries of what is comfortable. For years, critics have asked for more films that deal with the spiritual side of life. I doubt if "Dead Man Walking" was what they were thinking of, but this is exactly how such a movie looks, and feels.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.6/10 (22,773 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by Elcorazon and Castana (#15)

#117 Forrest Gump (1994)
Robert Zemeckis
Running time - 142 mins
Country of origin USA! USA!
Genre Comedy / Drama / Romance
Original language English

Writing Credits:
Winston Groom, Eric Roth

Cast
Tom Hanks ... Forrest Gump
Robin Wright Penn ... Jenny Curran
Gary Sinise ... Lt. Dan Taylor
Mykelti Williamson ... Pvt. Benjamin Buford 'Bubba' Blue
Sally Field ... Mrs. Gump

Academy awards
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109830/awards

Other awards
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109830/awards

BY ROGER EBERT / July 6, 1994

I've never met anyone like Forrest Gump in a movie before, and for that matter I've never seen a movie quite like "Forrest Gump." Any attempt to describe him will risk making the movie seem more conventional than it is, but let me try. It's a comedy, I guess. Or maybe a drama. Or a dream.

The screenplay by Eric Roth has the complexity of modern fiction, not the formulas of modern movies. Its hero, played by Tom Hanks, is a thoroughly decent man with an IQ of 75, who manages between the 1950s and the 1980s to become involved in every major event in American history. And he survives them all with only honesty and niceness as his shields.

And yet this is not a heartwarming story about a mentally retarded man. That cubbyhole is much too small and limiting for Forrest Gump. The movie is more of a meditation on our times, as seen through the eyes of a man who lacks cynicism and takes things for exactly what they are. Watch him carefully and you will understand why some people are criticized for being "too clever by half." Forrest is clever by just exactly enough.

Tom Hanks may be the only actor who could have played the role.

I can't think of anyone else as Gump, after seeing how Hanks makes him into a person so dignified, so straight-ahead. The per formance is a breathtaking balancing act between comedy and sadness, in a story rich in big laughs and quiet truths.

Forrest is born to an Alabama boardinghouse owner (Sally Field) who tries to correct his posture by making him wear braces, but who never criticizes his mind. When Forrest is called "stupid," his mother tells him, "Stupid is as stupid does," and Forrest turns out to be incapable of doing anything less than profound. Also, when the braces finally fall from his legs, it turns out he can run like the wind.

That's how he gets a college football scholarship, in a life story that eventually becomes a running gag about his good luck. Gump the football hero becomes Gump the Medal of Honor winner in Vietnam, and then Gump the Ping-Pong champion, Gump the shrimp boat captain, Gump the millionaire stockholder (he gets shares in a new "fruit company" named Apple Computer), and Gump the man who runs across America and then retraces his steps.

It could be argued that with his IQ of 75 Forrest does not quite understand everything that happens to him. Not so. He understands everything he needs to know, and the rest, the movie suggests, is just surplus. He even understands everything that's important about love, although Jenny, the girl he falls in love with in grade school and never falls out of love with, tells him, "Forrest, you don't know what love is." She is a stripper by that time.

The movie is ingenious in taking Forrest on his tour of recent American history. The director, Robert Zemeckis, is experienced with the magic that special effects can do (his credits include the "Back to the Future" movies and "Who Framed Roger Rabbit"), and here he uses computerized visual legerdemain to place Gump in historic situations with actual people.

Forrest stands next to the schoolhouse door with George Wallace, he teaches Elvis how to swivel his hips, he visits the White House three times, he's on the Dick Cavett show with John Lennon, and in a sequence that will have you rubbing your eyes with its realism, he addresses a Vietnam-era peace rally on the Mall in Washington. Special effects are also used in creating the character of Forrest's Vietnam friend Lt. Dan (Gary Sinise), a Ron Kovic type who quite convincingly loses his legs.

Using carefully selected TV clips and dubbed voices, Zemeckis is able to create some hilarious moments, as when LBJ examines the wound in what Forrest describes as "my butt-ox." And the biggest laugh in the movie comes after Nixon inquires where Forrest is staying in Washington, and then recommends the Watergate. (That's not the laugh, just the setup.) As Forrest's life becomes a guided tour of straight-arrow America, Jenny (played by Robin Wright) goes on a parallel tour of the counterculture. She goes to California, of course, and drops out, tunes in, and turns on. She's into psychedelics and flower power, antiwar rallies and love-ins, drugs and needles. Eventually it becomes clear that between them Forrest and Jenny have covered all of the landmarks of our recent cultural history, and the accommodation they arrive at in the end is like a dream of reconciliation for our society. What a magical movie.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 8.4/10 (166,359 votes) Top 250: #69

SOMB 499 rank - #116

Ranked highest by Hero (#4)

And I thought I was gonna get shit on for all my Disney & Robert Rodriguez leanings. That's courage, Hero.

117 seems about right for that movie

Much better than #69 all-time. Jeebus.

#116 Face/Off (1997)
John Woo
Running time - 138 mins
Country of origin USA
Genre Action / Crime / Drama / Romance / Sci-Fi / Thriller
Original language English / Latin

Writing Credits:
Mike Werb, Michael Colleary

Cast
John Travolta ... Sean Archer/Castor Troy
Nicolas Cage ... Castor Troy/Sean Archer
Joan Allen ... Dr. Eve Archer
Alessandro Nivola ... Pollux Troy
Gina Gershon ... Sasha Hassler

Academy awards
Nominated : Best Effects, Sound Effects Editing


BY ROGER EBERT / June 27, 19976

There is a moment in "Face/ Off" when Sean Archer (John Travolta), a member of a secret FBI anti-terrorist team, confronts the comatose body of Castor Troy (Nicolas Cage), his archenemy, in the hospital.

"You're keeping him alive?" he asks incredulously. "Relax," says a medical man. "He's a turnip." To prove it, he puts out his cigarette on Troy's arm. Troy won't feel a thing when his face is surgically removed in order to be transplanted to Archer's skull, so the FBI man can enter prison disguised as Troy and get information about a deadly biological bomb.

That exchange of faces and identities is the inspiration for "Face/Off," the new John Woo action thriller, which contains enough plot for an entire series. It's a gimme, for example, that as gravely injured as he may be, Troy will snap out of his coma and force a doctor to transplant Archer's face onto his own bloody skull - so that the lawman and the outlaw end up looking exactly like the other.

This is an actor's dream, and Travolta and Cage make the most of it. They spend most of the movie acting as if they're in each other's bodies - Travolta acting like Cage, and vice versa. Through the plot device of a microchip implanted in his larynx, Travolta is allegedly able to sound more like Cage - enough, maybe, to fool the terrorist's paranoid brother, who is in prison and knows the secret of the biological weapon.

The movie is above all an action thriller. John Woo, whose previous American films include "Broken Arrow" with Travolta, likes spectacular stunts in unlikely settings, and the movie includes chases involving an airplane (which crashes into a hangar) and speedboats (which crash into piers and each other). There also are weird settings, including the high-security prison where the inmates wear magnetized boots that allow security to keep track of every footstep.

The high-tech stuff is flawlessly done, but the intriguing elements of the movie involve the performances. Travolta and Cage do not use dubbed voices, and don't try to imitate each other's speaking voices precisely when "occupying" each other's bodies. Instead, knowing that the sound of a voice is created to some degree by the larynx of his host body, they provide suggestions of each other's speech and vocal patterns, along with subtle physical characteristics. The movie's premise is that only the faces change - so each actor also finds ways to suggest that he is not the original inhabitant of his body. (Troy-as-Archer at one point refers unhappily to Archer's "ridiculous chin," and the fact that it's Travolta playing Cage criticizing Travolta is typical of the spins they put on the situation.) For the Archer character, who begins inside Travolta's body and then spends most of the movie inside Cage's, the challenge is to fool a convict brother so suspicious that even when faced with the face of his own brother, he's cautious. For Troy, it's even trickier: He goes home to Archer's family, including his wife (Joan Allen) and confused teenage daughter (Dominique Swain), and has to convince them that he's the husband and father they know. The wife in particular is surprised by the renewed ardor of a husband whose thoughts, for years, have been on revenge rather than romance. (Meanwhile, Archer as Troy is confronted by Troy's girlfriend, played by Gina Gershon).

Woo, who became famous for his Hong Kong action pictures before hiring on in Hollywood, is a director overflowing with invention. He works here with an original screenplay by Mike Werb and Michael Colleary, which explores the strange implications of the face-swap. One of the issues they touch on involves how much our appearance shapes our personality: If sweet, shaggy John Travolta looked like angular, sardonic Nicolas Cage, would he act any differently? The summers of 1996 and 1997 have both been dominated by big-budget special effects extravaganzas. It's interesting that Cage has been in three of them: "The Rock," "Con Air" and now "Face/ Off." He brings a quirkiness to the material that's useful. Given the undeniable fact that the plot of "Face/Off" is utterly absurd, it would be strange to see a traditional action hero playing it straight. Cage adds a spin. And here I was about to write: "For example, when he first sees Travolta's teenage daughter, he quips, `The plot thickens.' But of course it is Travolta who sees Travolta's teenage daughter, because it is Travolta playing the Cage character.

You see what thickets this plot constructs; it's as if Travolta adds the spin courtesy of Cage's personality, while Cage mellows in the direction of Travolta. Better to conclude that the two actors, working together, have devised a very entertaining way of being each other while being themselves.

This business of exchanged identities is of course not new to drama. Shakespeare enjoyed having characters play each other (see "Twelfth Night"), and in Chinese and Japanese plays it's common for masks to be used to suggest identity swaps. Here, using big movie stars and asking them to play each other, Woo and his writers find a terrific counterpoint to the action scenes: All through the movie, you find yourself reinterpreting every scene as you realize the "other" character is "really" playing it.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.1/10 (61,163 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #328

Ranked highest by Asher Ford (#10)

I would've ranked that higher if it wasn't for Woo's Stupid Fucking Signature Dove Shot.

um

My biggest beef with Gump is that it beat out Pulp Fiction for Best Picture.

No kidding.

And that was only a few years after Dances With Wolves beat Goodfellas for Picure and Director.
(Kevin Costner = a National treasure! )

great choice

"oh, did I say fuck? I meant make love to!"

should've been higher, IMO


hell, i think I should've even ranked it higher.

yeah I probably didn't even vote for it

but I didn't even vote for Henry Fool so myy list is totally worthless

Face/Off is great. They really took the premise to its fucked-up extreme: Sleeping with wives, hitting on daughters, etc.

#115 Bound (1996)
Andy Wachowski + Larry Wachowski
Running time - 108 mins
Country of origin USA
Genre Crime / Drama / Thriller
Original language English

Writing Credits:
Andy Wachowski, Larry Wachowski

Cast
Jennifer Tilly ... Violet
Gina Gershon ... Corky
Joe Pantoliano ... Caesar
John P. Ryan ... Micky Malnato
Christopher Meloni ... Johnnie Marzzone

BY ROGER EBERT / October 4, 1996

``Bound'' is one of those movies that works you up, wrings you out and leaves you gasping. It's pure cinema, spread over several genres. It's a caper movie, a gangster movie, a sex movie and a slapstick comedy. It's not often you think of ``The Last Seduction'' and the Marx Brothers during the same film, but I did during this one--and I also thought about ``Blood Simple'' and Woody Allen. It's amazing to discover all this virtuosity and confidence in two first-time filmmakers, Larry and Andy Wachowski, self-described college dropouts, still in their 20s, from Chicago.

As the film opens, a tough but sexy woman is moving into a new apartment. She rides the elevator to her floor with what looks like a mobster and his ditzy girlfriend. He's a mobster, all right, but she's not as ditzy as she looks. It's more of an act that gives her immunity in a dangerous environment.

The sexy newcomer is Corky (Gina Gershon), a lesbian who has just finished serving a prison sentence. The mobster is Caesar (Joe Pantoliano), a mid-level functionary in the Chicago crime syndicate. His girlfriend is Violet (Jennifer Tilly), whose lust for their new neighbor is so obvious she might as well just turn herself in to Jerry Springer and get it over with (``Violet--afraid to tell Mafioso boyfriend she's a lesbian'').

Violet creates an excuse to meet Corky; she uses the routine about her ring falling down the sink. In old movies this was a ploy to trap men, but for about 10 years I've noticed that the only movie characters who seem to do household tasks anymore are lesbians. There's always a scene early in the movie showing them caulking something.

Passion between the two women is instantaneous, steamy and kind of funny. Gershon and Tilly are electric together, maybe because they understand the humor of their situation and play the sex for delight instead of for solemn earth-shaking gynecological drudgery. The movie seems to be shaping up as an erotic popcorn-masher, but then the plot thickens and keeps on thickening, twisting the characters and the audience ever tighter into a sticky web of murder, blood, sex and money.

Violet and Corky have secret tete-a-tetes, and vice versa, and become lovers. Violet whispers that she wants to escape Caesar so the two women can start a new life together. So far she hasn't been able to get Caesar to listen. (``Caesar, I'm leaving!'' she announces. ``Why?'' he whines. ``Did I use a good towel?'') Violet tells Corky that a bag man named Shelley (Barry Kivel) is arriving at Caesar's, with $2 million in cash. She thinks they should steal the cash, and she needs Violet's help--since as an ex-con, Violet is presumably an expert criminal.

Now the movie turns into a macabre caper comedy of clockwork virtuosity. The plot depends on split-second timing; if anything goes wrong, they could be dead. Of course everything goes wrong. Shelley arrives with the briefcase, and it appears that he's going to get his fingers cut off, one at a time. When this scene played at the Toronto Film Festival, people fled the theater, so be warned. But also know that the movie never goes as far or shows as much as it seems about to; like ``Blood Simple,'' it takes us to the edge of the unacceptable, peers over wistfully and tiptoes away.

To describe what happens in the film's brilliant and long-sustained caper sequence would be unfair. Familiar movie devices are made to feel new. Bodies stack up. The cops arrive and there is evidence of murder right in front of them if they only knew where to look. The two lovers are in constant danger of exposure and death.

All of this is somehow constructed like a perfect Marx Brothers routine; the briefcase full of money moves around like the pea in a shell game, powerful Mafia bosses arrive from the East Coast and represent certain death for the increasingly desperate Caesar, and there are little tricks involving things like the ``redial'' button on a telephone that have the audience gasping with fear and delight.

The movie is a jubilant comeback for Gina Gershon, whose career now takes a U-turn after the unsuccessful ``Showgirls.'' She brings an edge and intelligence to her character that reminded me a little of Linda Fiorentino in ``The Last Seduction.'' Jennifer Tilly takes the giggly showgirl act she introduced in Woody Allen's ``Bullets Over Broadway'' and uses it to hide a steel will. And Joe Pantoliano has some of the trickiest scenes in the movie, bouncing from paranoia to greed to lust to abject fear like a pinball in the wrong machine.

``Bound'' is shocking and violent, and will offend some audiences. It's that kind of movie. But it's skillful filmmaking, setting a puzzle that involves time, space, money and danger, and seeing how many different ways it can be solved.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.4/10 (17,265 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - 409

Ranked highest by TJENZ (#13)

^good movie

#114 La Vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful) (1997)
Roberto Benigni
Running time - 116 mins
Country of origin Italy
Genre Comedy / Drama / War
Original language Italian / German / English

Writing Credits:
Vincenzo Cerami, Roberto Benigni

Cast
Roberto Benigni ... Guido Orefice
Nicoletta Braschi ... Dora
Giorgio Cantarini ... Giosué Orefice
Giustino Durano ... Eliseo Orefice
Sergio Bini Bustric ... Ferruccio Papini

Academy awards
Won: Best Actor in a Leading Role (Roberto Benigni), Best Foreign Language Film, Best Music - Original Dramatic Score
Nominated: Best Director, Best Film Editing, Best Picture, Best Writing - Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen

Other awards
Won: BAFTA Film Award Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role (Roberto Benigni) Cannes Film Festival Grand Prize of the Jury
Nominated: BAFTA Film Award Best Film not in the English Language, Best Screenplay - Original Cannes Film Festival Golden Palm

BY ROGER EBERT / October 30, 1998

Some people become clowns; others have clownhood thrust upon them. It is impossible to regard Roberto Benigni without imagining him as a boy in school, already a cutup, using humor to deflect criticism and confuse his enemies. He looks goofy and knows how he looks. I saw him once in a line at airport customs, subtly turning a roomful of tired and impatient travelers into an audience for a subtle pantomime in which he was the weariest and most put-upon. We had to smile.

``Life Is Beautiful'' is the role he was born to play. The film falls into two parts. One is pure comedy. The other smiles through tears. Benigni, who also directed and co-wrote the movie, stars as Guido, a hotel waiter in Italy in the 1930s. Watching his adventures, we are reminded of Chaplin.

He arrives in town in a runaway car with failed brakes and is mistaken for a visiting dignitary. He falls in love instantly with the beautiful Dora (Nicoletta Braschi, Benigni's real-life wife). He becomes the undeclared rival of her fiance, the Fascist town clerk. He makes friends with the German doctor (Horst Buchholz) who is a regular guest at the hotel and shares his love of riddles. And by the fantastic manipulation of carefully planned coincidences, he makes it appear that he is fated to replace the dour Fascist in Dora's life.

All of this early material, the first long act of the movie, is comedy--much of it silent comedy involving the fate of a much-traveled hat. Only well into the movie do we even learn the crucial information that Guido is Jewish. Dora, a gentile, quickly comes to love him, and in one scene even conspires to meet him on the floor under a banquet table; they kiss, and she whispers, ``Take me away!'' In the town, Guido survives by quick improvisation. Mistaken for a school inspector, he invents a quick lecture on Italian racial superiority, demonstrating the excellence of his big ears and superb navel.

Several years pass, offscreen. Guido and Dora are married and dote on their 5-year-old son Joshua (Giorgio Cantarini). In 1945, near the end of the war, the Jews in the town are rounded up by the Fascists and shipped by rail to a death camp. Guido and Joshua are loaded into a train, and Guido instinctively tries to turn it into a game to comfort his son. He makes a big show of being terrified that somehow they will miss the train and be left behind. Dora, not Jewish, would be spared by the Fascists, but insists on coming along to be with her husband and child.

In the camp, Guido constructs an elaborate fiction to comfort and protect his son. It is all an elaborate game, he explains. The first one to get 1,000 points will win a tank--not a toy tank but a real one, which Joshua can drive all over town. Guido acts as the translator for a German who is barking orders at the inmates, freely translating them into Italian designed to quiet his son's fears. And he literally hides the child from the camp guards, with rules of the game that have the boy crouching on a high sleeping platform and remaining absolutely still.

At this year's Toronto Film Festival, Benigni told me that the movie has stirred up venomous opposition from the right wing in Italy. At Cannes, it offended some left-wing critics with its use of humor in connection with the Holocaust. What may be most offensive to both wings is its sidestepping of politics in favor of simple human ingenuity. The film finds the right notes to negotiate its delicate subject matter. And Benigni isn't really making comedy out of the Holocaust, anyway. He is showing how Guido uses the only gift at his command to protect his son. If he had a gun, he would shoot at the Fascists. If he had an army, he would destroy them. He is a clown, and comedy is his weapon.

The movie actually softens the Holocaust slightly, to make the humor possible at all. In the real death camps there would be no role for Guido. But ``Life Is Beautiful'' is not about Nazis and Fascists, but about the human spirit. It is about rescuing whatever is good and hopeful from the wreckage of dreams. About hope for the future. About the necessary human conviction, or delusion, that things will be better for our children than they are right now.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 8.4/10 (63,624 votes)) Top 250: #89

SOMB 499 rank - #191

Ranked highest by Hero (#4)

#113 Naked ( (1993)
Mike Leigh
Running time - 131 mins
Country of origin UK
Genre Drama / Comedy
Original language English

Writing Credits:
Mike Leigh

Cast
David Thewlis ... Johnny
Lesley Sharp ... Louise Clancy
Katrin Cartlidge ... Sophie
Greg Cruttwell ... Jeremy G. Smart
Claire Skinner ... Sandra


Other awards
Won: Cannes Film Festival Best Actor (David Thewlis), Best Director
Nominated: BAFTA Film Award Alexander Korda Award for Best British Filml Cannes Film Festival Golden Palm

BY ROGER EBERT / February 18, 1994

The characters in Mike Leigh's "Naked" look as if they have lived indoors all of their lives, perhaps down in a cellar. Their pale, pasty skin looks cold to the touch in the film's blue-gray lighting. The film is shot in a high-contrast style that makes everything seem a little more bleak and narrow than it must. And if you listen carefully to the soundtrack, you become aware that it lacks much of the background ambience of most movies; we are hearing voices, flat and toneless, in what sounds like an empty room.

All of these stylistic choices are right for "Naked," and so is the title, which describes characters who exist in the world without the usual layers of protection. They are clothed, but not warmly or cheerfully. But they are naked of families, relationships, homes, values and, in most cases, jobs. They exist in modern Britain with few possessions except their words.

The central character in "Naked" is Johnny (David Thewlis), who as the movie opens has rough sex with a weeping girl in an alley in some barren northern city, and then steals a car and drives down to London. From the way he talks and certain things he refers to, we gradually conclude that he has had an education - is an "intellectual," in that his opinions are mostly formed from words, not feelings.

Something has gone terribly wrong in his life, leaving him stranded without connections, employment, or hope. He goes to the flat of an old girlfriend, who is away on holiday, and moves in, establishing a rapport of the damned with her flatmate Sophie (Katrin Cartlidge), who is so spaced out on drugs that she seems barely able to make the connection between what she says and what she thinks, if anything.

The "relationship" that develops between these two people is so pathetic that it can barely be watched. The "sex" they have is such a desperate attempt to feel something in the midst of their separate wastelands that it is much like watching them wound themselves. When others appear in the flat - especially the supercilious, hurtful Jeremy (Greg Cruttwell), the landlord, they are like visitors from adjacent circles in hell.

Nor do matters improve with the arrival of Sandra (Claire Skinner), whose name is on the lease. She has a job, apparently thinks of herself as being normal and productive, and offers free advice and criticism, but the film invites us to see how precariously close she is to falling into the same abyss as her friends.

Mike Leigh's method of working is well-known. He gathers his actors, suggests a theme, and asks them to improvise situations. A screenplay develops out of their work. This method has created in "Naked" a group of characters who could not possibly have emerged from a conventional screenplay; this is the kind of film that is beyond imagining, and only observation could have created it. Are there people like this? Yes, a great many, who have the ability and intelligence to lead functioning lives but lack the will and - in particular - the opening. Somehow they have slipped out of the picture. It is not easy to slip back in.

The movie won the best director award for Leigh at last year's Cannes Film Festival, and a best actor award for Thewlis, who has also been honored by several critics' groups. His performance never steps wrong. He creates a kind of heroism in Johnny: It's not that we like him or approve of him, but that we must admire the dogged way he sticks to his guns and forges ahead through misery, anger and despair. There is a scene here that is among the best Leigh has ever done. Johnny strikes up a conversation with a night watchman, who takes him on a midnight tour of a modern office building. The subtext is that the watchman will never do what the employees in the building do in the daytime, but owes his survival to his job of guarding it for them at night, from the likes of Johnny, who lacks even that much of a toehold.

This is a painful movie to watch. But it is also exhilarating, as all good movies are, because we are watching the director and actors venturing beyond any conventional idea of what a modern movie can be about. Here there is no plot, no characters to identify with, no hope. But there is care: The filmmakers care enough about these people to observe them very closely, to note how they look and sound and what they feel.

Leigh has said in an interview that while his earlier films (including "High Hopes" and "Life Is Sweet") might have embodied a socialist view of the world, this one edges over into anarchy. I agree. It suggests a world in which the operating systems have become distant from such inhabitants as Johnny and the women in the flat.

The world is indifferent to them, and they to it. To some degree, they don't even know what's hit them. Johnny has a glimmer. His response is not hope or a plan. It is harsh, sardonic laughter.

Destruction is his only response.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.8/10 (5,406 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #277

Ranked highest by BirdIsTheWord (#9)

#112 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas ( (1998)
Terry Gilliam
Running time - 118 mins
Country of origin USA
Genre Adventure / Comedy / Crime / Drama
Original language English

Writing Credits:
Hunter S. Thompson, Terry Gilliam, Tony Grisoni, Tod Davies, Alex Cox

Cast
Johnny Depp ... Raoul Duke
Benicio Del Toro ... Dr. Gonzo / Oscar Z. Acosta
Tobey Maguire ... Hitchhiker
Ellen Barkin ... Waitress at North Star Cafe
Gary Busey ... Highway Patrolman

Other awards
Nominated: Cannes Film Festival Golden Palm

BY ROGER EBERT / May 22, 1998

Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" is a funny book by a gifted writer, who seems gifted and funny no longer. He coined the term "gonzo journalism" to describe his guerrilla approach to reporting, which consisted of getting stoned out of his mind, hurling himself at a story, and recording it in frenzied hyperbole.

Thompson's early book on the Hells Angels described motorcyclists who liked to ride as close to the line as they could without losing control. At some point after writing that book, and books on Vegas and the 1972 presidential campaign, Thompson apparently crossed his own personal line. His work became increasingly incoherent and meandering, and reports from his refuge in Woody Creek, Colorado depicted a man lost in the gloom of his pleasures.

Ah, but he was funny before he flamed out. "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" is a film based on the book of the same name, a stream-of-altered-consciousness report of his trip to Vegas with his allegedly Samoan attorney. In the trunk of their car they carried an inventory of grass, mescaline, acid, cocaine, uppers, booze, and ether. That ether, it's a wicked high. Hurtling through the desert in a gas-guzzling convertible, they hallucinated attacks by giant bats, and "speaking as your attorney," the lawyer advised him on drug ingestion.

The relationship of Thompson and his attorney was the basis of "Where the Buffalo Roam," an unsuccessful 1980 movie starring Bill Murray as the writer and Peter Boyle as his attorney. Now comes "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," with Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro. The hero here is named Duke, which was his name in the original Thompson book and is also the name of the Thompson clone in the Doonesbury comic strip. The attorney is Dr. Gonzo. Both Duke and the Doctor are one-dimensional walking chemistry sets, lacking the perspective on themselves that they have in both the book and the strip.

The result is a horrible mess of a movie, without shape, trajectory or purpose--a one joke movie, if it had one joke. The two characters wander witlessly past the bizarre backdrops of Las Vegas (some real, some hallucinated, all interchangeable) while zonked out of their minds. Humor depends on attitude. Beyond a certain point, you don't have an attitude, you simply inhabit a state. I've heard a lot of funny jokes about drunks and druggies, but these guys are stoned beyond comprehension, to the point where most of their dialog could be paraphrased as "eh?" The story: Thompson has been sent to Vegas to cover the Mint 400, a desert motorcycle race, and stays to report on a convention of district attorneys. Both of these events are dimly visible in the background; the foreground is occupied by Duke and Gonzo, staggering through increasingly hazy days. One of Duke's most incisive interviews is with the maid who arrives to clean the room he's trashed: "You must know what's going on in this hotel! What do you think's going on?" Johnny Depp has been a gifted and inventive actor in films like "Benny and Joon" and "Ed Wood." Here he's given a character with no nuances, a man whose only variable is the current degree he's out of it. He plays Duke in disguise, behind strange hats, big shades, and the ever-present cigarette holder. The decision to (ital) always (unital) use the cigarette holder was no doubt inspired by the Duke character in the comic strip, who invariably has one--but a prop in a comic is not the same thing as a prop in the movie, and here it becomes not only an affection but a handicap: Duke isn't easy to understand at the best of times, and talking through clenched teeth doesn't help. That may explain the narration, in which Duke comments on events that are apparently incomprehensible to himself on screen.

The movie goes on and on, repeating the same setup and the same payoff: Duke and Gonzo take drugs, stagger into new situations, blunder, fall about, wreak havoc, and retreat to their hotel suite. The movie itself has an alcoholic and addict mind-set, in which there is no ability to step outside the need to use and the attempt to function. If you encountered characters like this on an elevator, you'd push a button and get off at the next floor. Here the elevator is trapped between floors for 128 minutes.

The movie's original director was Alex Cox, whose brilliant "Sid & Nancy" showed insight into the world of addiction. Maybe too much insight; he was replaced by Terry Gilliam ("Brazil," "Time Bandits"), whose input is hard to gauge; this is not his proudest moment. Who was the driving force behind the project? Maybe Depp, who doesn't look unlike the young Hunter Thompson but can't communicate the genius beneath the madness.

Thompson may have plowed through Vegas like a madman, but he wrote about his experiences later, in a state which for him approached sobriety. You have to stand outside the chaos to see its humor, which is why people remembering the funny things they did when they were drunk are always funnier than drunks doing them.

As for Depp, what was he thinking he made this movie? He was once in trouble for trashing a New York hotel room, just like the heroes of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." What was that? Research? After River Phoenix died of an overdose outside Depp's club, you wouldn't think Depp would see much humor in this story--but then, of course, there *isn't* much humor in this story.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.4/10 (45,414 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #313

Ranked highest by SuckeredYou (#9)

What an abjectly loathsome triple-bill.

seriously? How could you possibly dislike Bound?

And how could Naked be loathsome? One of my favourite movies ever.

#111 Naked Lunch ( (1991)
David Cronenberg
Running time - 115 mins
Country of origin Canada / UK / Japan
Genre Crime / Drama / Fantasy / Mystery
Original language English

Writing Credits:
William S. Burroughs, David Cronenberg

Cast
Peter Weller ... Bill Lee
Judy Davis ... Joan Frost / Joan Lee
Ian Holm ... Tom Frost
Julian Sands ... Yves Cloquet
Roy Scheider ... Doctor Benway

BY ROGER EBERT / January 10, 1992

William S. Burroughs is one of the most pathetic figures in modern literature, his sadness made more poignant because it has been drawn out for so long. His cadaverous presence gave a hollow echo to a key scene in "Drugstore Cowboy," in which he was a junkie ex-priest who has long decades of pain in his eyes. It didn't seem like acting. And in a recent documentary about his life, Burroughs came across as a man who walks around with something wounded inside, something that hurts so much that his spirit simply shut down.

That aspect of Burroughs is celebrated at feature length in "Naked Lunch," the new David Cronenberg film in which Peter Weller gives a performance as evocative as it is depressing, as a fictional character obviously meant to be taken as the author. The film opens with "William Lee" making one of his periodic attempts to go straight. He has kicked drugs, he claims, and is gainfully employed as an insect exterminator. But his wife (Judy Davis) is addicted to the bug powder, and so is Bill, to such an extent that millions of cockroaches owe him their lives.

Weller has studied the film on Burroughs and probably even met the man. He has the manner down flat: The low, flat, graveled voice. The dead eyes. The anonymous suits and ties, worn as a disguise for the outlaw inside. The fedora pulled low on the forehead. The lack of any visible display of emotion. I did not like the character - who could? - but I admire Weller's artistry in creating this portrait of the living dead.

The character is an unsuccessful writer who has turned to pornography to support himself, and of course Burroughs did much of his now-acclaimed work in that genre, including "Naked Lunch." His days, when they are not spent in desultory work or experiments with bug powder and other substances, are devoted to aimless sessions of cynical talk, delivered in perfunctory monosyllables. During one such evening he and his wife perform their celebrated William Tell party trick, during which he shoots things off her head with a pistol. This night he is a bad shot, and the bullet hits her square in the forehead.

Such a tragedy actually did occur. Burroughs did accidentally shoot his wife, although apparently he did not read her death as a warning that maybe he should cut back on the old bug powder. In the film, her death opens the yawning pits of paranoia and schizophrenia for the author, who begins to hallucinate that his wife is still before him, who thinks he is being investigated by "Interzone," and whose typewriters turn into large bugs that communicate through their pulsating sphincters.

Joining Weller are a group of supporting actors who are all able to hit the dry note of insects rustling in the walls. Roy Scheider is the quack doctor and drug dealer, and Ian Holm and Julian Sands are inhabitants of Interzone. Davis, as the wife, is playing her second muse of the year (she was the inspiration for the Faulkner character in "Barton Fink"), in a performance so different from the first it underlines her range.

But I'm spinning my wheels here, maybe to avoid the paradox of this film: While I admired it in an abstract way, I felt repelled by the material on a visceral level. There is so much dryness, death and despair here, in a life spinning itself out with no joy.

Burroughs inhabits the madhouse of his mind, and as he is addressed by bugs and phantoms and the specter of his murdered wife, the most horrifying thing of all is that he reacts in the same detached, cold way. All except for a moment of grief he permits himself over her dead body. One suspects he could have cried out with the same rage and hurt all of his life.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 6.7/10 (9,084 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by Nic (#1)

Bound wasn't one of the last three.

As much as I love Naked Lunch the book, and all of Burroughs' work, Cronenberg's movie doesn't work for me at all. It was an interesting approach, but I think it just sputters.

Surprised Mitchell didn't drag out the classic line, "I can think of two things wrong about that title."

Every now and then, a director does something totally cheesy that I just adore. In "Bound", it's when they decide to show the phone call being made from one apartment to the other by following the phone cord. That shot kicks ass.

Surprised at the lack of love for Fear and Loathing. I can't believe my number 9 ranking was the highest either. And I'm not even a druggie.

I can definitely understand how precious FAL is to the drug culture, and that's fair enough, but I don't see it as any more of a great movie than, say, Half Baked. Far too long and too episodic, some awesome stuff and some of the most quotable lines of the time period, but I'd say high 100s is more than fair enough for it.

The first time I ever drank was when Hunter S. Thompson died and we watched that flick, so it'll always have kind of a special place in my heart

I nearly did, unsurprisingly for this era there's a few Simpson's teasers that can be used.