#088 Babe (1995) 12 Votes, 1690 points
Chris Noonan
Running time - 89 min
Country of origin Australia / USA
Genre Family / Comedy / Drama / Fantasy
Original language English

Writing Credits:
Dick King-Smith, George Miller, Chris Noonan

Cast
Christine Cavanaugh ... Babe the Gallant Pig (voice)
Miriam Margolyes ... Fly the Female Sheepdog (voice)
Danny Mann ... Ferdinand the Duck (voice)
James Cromwell ... Farmer Arthur Hoggett
Magda Szubanski ... Mrs. Esme Hoggett


Academy Awards
Won Best Effects, Visual Effects
Nominated: Best Actor in a Supporting Role (James Cromwell), Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Best Director, Best Film Editing, Best Picture, Best Writing - Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium

Other awards
Won: Golden Globe Best Motion Picture - Comedy/Musical
Nominated: BAFTA Film Award Best Achievement in Special Effects, Best Editing, Best Film, Best Screenplay - Adapted

BY ROGER EBERT / August 4, 1995

Something passed between them: the faintest hint of a common destiny.

I quote this line because you do not expect such language in a movie about a clever little pig. One of the chief delights of "Babe," indeed, is that it is such a clever little pig movie. It is rated G, and yet all of the people and most of the animals in "Babe" are smarter and more articulate than the characters in most of the R-rated movies I see.

The movie takes place in Australia, where the hero, a young pig, watches wistfully as all the other pigs are trucked away, never to return. They are going to Pig Paradise, he thinks: "a place so wonderful that nobody ever came back." But Babe is somehow spared the trip. Farmer Hoggett (James Cromwell) sees him, and likes him, and, yes, something passes between them that has the faintest hint of a common destiny.

And so Babe is brought to live on the Hoggett farm, where he is adopted by a female border collie and raised as one of her puppies. Life is pleasant on the farm, although the animals have various problems. Ferdinand, the duck, thinks he is a pig, and watches sadly as the humans eat an animal for dinner: "There must be far-off lands with kinder dispositions." Rex, the male collie, hates sheep and is hard of hearing. And Cat, the cat, has a mean disposition.

Still, life is a pleasure for Babe, who is very smart (everyone knows pigs are smarter than horses and maybe dogs and certainly sheep). And the episodes of the story are punctuated by little musical passages by a group of tiny mice, who act as a sort of chorus, and whose rendition of "Blue Moon" must be seen to be appreciated.

Then something strange happens. Babe turns out to have natural herding abilities. Farmer Hoggett, who is nothing if not openminded, wonders if perhaps Babe could . . . naw, a pig can't herd sheep. Right? But Babe gets advice from the dogs, including his foster mother, who says: "Bite them! Do whatever it takes to bend them to your will!" Babe takes the dog approach and tries biting a sheep on the leg. The sheep is deeply offended.

"I'm sorry I bit you," Babe says, beside himself with remorse.

"All you have to do is ask," says Maa, the patient mother sheep.

There is, of course, melodrama at this point, which I will not reveal here, except to say that Babe very nearly goes to Pig Paradise after all. And then the movie ends with the National Sheep Dog Trials, with the hoity-toity dog owners taking great umbrage at the pretensions of a pig.

"Babe" is a movie made with charm and wit, and unlike some family movies it does not condescend, not for a second. It believes it is OK to use words a child might not know, and to have performances that are the best available (James Cromwell, as the farmer, and Magda Szubanski, as his wife, are always convincing).

And instead of the usual contrived melodrama of most kids' pictures, this one develops a story that depends on the character and upbringing of the animals involved. It knows things, and teaches lessons. And it is so well made that adults will find it entertaining, too - maybe more than some kids, because they'll see the invention that went into it.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.3/10 (24,595 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #506!

Ranked highest by four people @ #22

fuck that fuckin' movie, man

#89 works for AP, though.

#087 Happy Gilmore (1996) 10 Votes, 1692 points
Dennis Dugan
Running time - 92 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Comedy / Sport
Original language English

Writing Credits:
Tim Herlihy, Adam Sandler

Cast
Adam Sandler ... Happy Gilmore
Christopher McDonald ... Shooter McGavin
Julie Bowen ... Virginia Venit
Frances Bay ... Grandma Gilmore
Carl Weathers ... Chubbs Peterson

Other awards
Nominated: Razzie Award Worst Actor (Adam Sandler)

BY ROGER EBERT / February 16, 1996

"Happy Gilmore" tells the story of a violent sociopath. Since it's about golf, that makes it a comedy. The movie, the latest in the dumber and dumbest sweepstakes, stars Adam Sandler as a kid who only wants to play hockey. He hits the puck so hard he kills his father, who is in the act of filming a home movie. (Actually, he kills his father's camera, but it's a small point.)

Happy can't skate very well, and when he's not chosen for the hockey team, he beats up the coach. Life seems to hold no future for him. After his father's death he is taken in by his beloved grandmother (Francis Bay), and then a crisis strikes: The IRS seizes Grandma's house and possessions. How can Happy possibly earn $275,000 to pay all of the back taxes?

During a visit to a golf driving range, he discovers a hidden talent. He can hit the ball hundreds of yards, straight as an arrow.

He's taken under the wing of a veteran golf pro named Chubbs (Carl Weathers) who tries to teach him the game, but it's Happy's tendency to explode and pound his clubs into the ground when he misses a shot.

(Chubbs retired from the tour when a one-eyed alligator bit off his hand in a water trap; he is now forced to use a flimsy wooden hand, which he grasps with his real hand, which is clearly outlined beneath his shirt sleeve. No prizes for guessing that the alligator will turn up again.)

Happy's long game is great but his short game stinks. He goes on the tour, where the defending champion, Shooter McGavin (Christopher McDonald), becomes his archenemy. They go mano a mano for weeks, in a series of golf scenes that are too heavy on golf for non-golfers, and too irrelevant to the ancient and honorable game for those who follow it. At a pro-Am tourney Happy teams with Bob Barker, whose fight scene seems longer in the preview trailer.

The Happy Gilmore character is strange. I guess we are supposed to like him. He loves his old Grandma, and wins the heart of a pretty public relations lady (Julie Bowen) who tries to teach him to control his temper. Yet, as played by Sandler, he doesn't have a pleasing personality: He seems angry even when he's not supposed to be, and his habit of pounding everyone he dislikes is tiring in a PG-13 movie. At one point, he even knocks the bottom off a beer bottle and goes for Shooter.

It was a Heineken's beer, I think. The label was a little torn. Maybe nobody paid for product placement. "Happy Gilmore" is filled with so many plugs it looks like a product placement sampler in search of a movie. I probably missed a few, but I counted Diet Pepsi, Pepsi, Pepsi Max, Subway sandwich shops, Budweiser (in bottles, cans, and Bud-dispensing helmets), Michelob, Visa cards, Bell Atlantic, AT&T, Sizzler, Wilson, Golf Digest, the ESPN sports network, and Top-Flite golf balls.

I'm sure some of those got in by accident (the modern golf tour has ads plastered on everything but the grass), but I'm fairly sure Subway paid for placement, since they scored one Subway sandwich eaten outside a store, one date in a Subway store, one Subway soft drink container, two verbal mentions of Subway, one Subway commercial starring Happy, a Subway T-shirt, and a Subway golf bag. Halfway through the movie, I didn't know what I wanted more: laughs, or mustard.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 6.8/10 (32,665 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #461

Ranked highest by Sausage (#8)

One of the valedictorian at my HS graduation began his speech stating, "The details of my life are quite inconsequential." I don't remember anything else he said.

#086 There's Something About Mary (1998) 11 Votes, 1693 points
Bobby Farrelly + Peter Farrelly
Running time - 119 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Comedy / Romance
Original language English

Writing Credits:
Ted Decter, John J. Strauss, Peter Farrelly, Bobby Farrelly

Cast
Cameron Diaz ... Mary Jensen
Matt Dillon ... Pat Healy
Ben Stiller ... Ted Stroehmann
Lee Evans ... Tucker / Norman Phipps
Chris Elliott ... Dom Woganowski
Jonathan Richman ... Jonathan

Other awards
Nominated: Golden Globe Best Motion Picture - Comedy/Musical, Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Comedy/Musical (Cameron Diaz)

BY ROGER EBERT / July 15, 1998

What a blessed relief is laughter. It flies in the face of manners, values, political correctness and decorum. It exposes us for what we are, the only animal with a sense of humor. ``There's Something About Mary'' is an unalloyed exercise in bad taste, and contains five or six explosively funny sequences. OK, five explosive, one moderate.

I love it when a movie takes control, sweeps away my doubts and objections, and compels me to laugh. I'm having a physical reaction, not an intellectual one. There's such freedom in laughing so loudly. I feel cleansed.

``There's Something About Mary'' is the latest work by Peter and Bobby Farrelly, brothers whose earlier credits include ``Dumb & Dumber'' and ``Kingpin.'' Good taste is not their strong suit. ``Dumb & Dumber'' includes a scene where a blind boy realizes his parakeet's head is held on with Scotch tape. ``Kingpin'' includes a scene where a bowler's artificial hand gets stuck in the ball and rolls down the alley, flop flop flop.

Now here is a movie about a woman who is beautiful, sunny, good and pure, and inspires a remarkable array of creeps to fall in love with her. There's ... just something about her. Mary is played by Cameron Diaz as a high school knockout who amazes the geeky Ted (Ben Stiller) by asking him to the prom, even though he has pounds of braces on his teeth. (``I have a thing about braces,'' she muses, long after.) Ted turns up proudly for the date, only to set off the first of the movie's uproariously funny sequences when he asks to use the toilet and then somehow catches in his zipper that part of the male anatomy one least wants to think about in connection with zippers. (``Is it the frank or the beans?'' asks Mary's solicitous stepfather.) In a lesser film, that would be that: The directors would expect us to laugh at his misfortune, and the plot would roll on. Not the Farrelly Brothers. When they get something going, they keep on building, daring themselves to top each outrage. I won't reveal how the scene develops, apart from noting the perfect timing involved with the unexpected closeup.

Thirteen years pass. Ted is still in love with Mary. He hires a sleazy investigator named Healy (Matt Dillon) to track her down. Healy, wearing one of those mustaches that shout ``distrust me!,'' finds her in Miami, discovers she is an unbelievable babe who is still single and decides to grab her for himself. He tells Ted that she weighs 250 pounds, has four children by three fathers and has just shipped out for Japan as a mail-order bride.

Healy's trick is to eavesdrop on Mary's conversations, so he'll know just what she wants to hear. Among the things most important to her is her retarded brother Warren (W. Earl Brown), who doesn't like to have his ears touched. Healy poses as the person of her dreams (an architect with a condo in Nepal, who loves to work with retarded people), but he raises the suspicions of another of her suitors, Tucker (Lee Evans), who is an architect who uses crutches. Maybe.

Further plot description would be pointless. The plot exists, like all screwball plots, simply to steer us from one gag to the next. In the TV ads, you may already have seen the moment when the dog of Mary's deeply tanned neighbor needs to have its heart restarted. That's because the dog has been tranquilized. There also is a scene where the dog is on speed, and his human target does things with walls and furniture not seen since Donald O'Connor's ``Make 'Em Laugh'' sequence in ``Singin' in the Rain.'' Then there are the peculiar and intimate preparations Ted goes through in anticipation of his first date with Mary. I have paused here at the keyboard for many minutes, trying to decide how to describe them in a family newspaper, and without spoiling the fun. I cannot. I will simply observe in admiration that after the scene explodes in disbelieving, prolonged laughter, the Farrellys find a way to blindside us with a completely unanticipated consequence that sets us off all over again.

Among the other characters in the movie are Chris Elliott, as Dom, a friend of Ted's, who has a nervous skin condition (``Do you know what it feels like to have a whitehead on your eyeball?''), and Magda (Lin Shaye), the neighbor, whose tan makes her look like she's been put through the same process that produces Slim Jims. Magda is funny in a bizarre over the top way, but Dom is more creepy than funny, or is it just that we're afraid we'll catch his skin rash? Stanley Kauffmann, the great film critic of The New Republic, was on Charlie Rose's show the other night, sharing the discoveries of 40 years as a film critic. What he has noticed over the years, he said, is that we are getting more good dramatic films than in the old days--but fewer good entertainments. It is easier to excel at drama than at comedy. I have no idea if Kauffmann will like "There's Something About Mary," but his point applies for me: After months and months of comedies that did not make me laugh, here at last is one that did.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.2/10 (67,868 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #96

Ranked highest by Elcorazon (#12)

#085 Lola rennt (Run Lola Run) (1998) 12 Votes, 1701 points
Tom Tykwer
Running time - 81 min
Country of origin Germany
Genre Action / Crime / Drama / Romance / Thriller
Original language German

Writing Credits:
Tom Tykwer

Cast
Franka Potente ... Lola
Moritz Bleibtreu ... Manni
Herbert Knaup ... Vater
Armin Rohde ... Herr Schuster
Ludger Pistor ... Herr Meier

Other awards
Won: Sundance Film Festival Audience Award World Cinema
Nominated: BAFTA Film Award Best Film not in the English Language

BY ROGER EBERT / July 2, 1999

"Run Lola Run" is the kind of movie that could play on the big screen in a sports bar. It's an exercise in kinetic energy, a film of nonstop motion and visual invention. A New York critic called it "post-human," and indeed its heroine is like the avatar in a video game--Lara Croft made flesh.

The setup: Lola gets a phone call from her boyfriend Manni. He left a bag containing 100,000 deutsche marks on the subway, and a bum made away with it. Manni is expected to deliver the money at noon to a gangster. If he fails, he will probably be killed. His desperate plan: Rob a bank. Lola's desperate plan: Find the money somehow, somewhere, in 20 minutes. Run, Lola, run! The director, a young German named Tom Tykwer, throws every trick in the book at us, and then the book, and then himself. The opening credits spring a digital surprise, as a shot of a crowd turns into an aerial point of view and the crowd spells out the name of the movie. Lola sometimes runs so frantically that mere action cannot convey her energy, and the movie switches to animation. There's speedup, instant replay, black and white, whatever. And the story of Lola's 20-minute run is told three times, each time with small differences that affect the outcome and the fate of the characters.

Film is ideal for showing alternate and parallel time lines. It's literal; we see Lola running, and so we accept her reality, even though the streets she runs through and the people she meets are altered in each story. The message is that the smallest events can have enormous consequences. A butterfly flaps its wings in Malaysia, causing a hurricane in Trinidad. You know the drill.

Franka Potente, who plays Lola, has a certain offhand appeal. I liked her, though I can't say I got to know her very well, and she is usually out of breath. She runs down sidewalks and the middle of streets, arms pumping, bright red hair flying, stomach tattoo wrinkling in time with her footsteps. She loves Manni and wants to save him from his own stupidity. Occasionally the movie pauses for moments of sharply seen detail, as when her rich father refuses to give her the money, tells her he plans to leave home and marry his mistress, and throws in for good measure: "I'd have never fathered a girl like you. You're a cuckoo's egg." Manni does his share of running, too, and there are various alternate scenarios involving car crashes, gunshot wounds and the sly use of that ancient movie situation where guys are carrying a huge sheet of plate glass across the street. Tykwer also adds segments titled "Now and Then," in which he singles out minor characters on the screen and uses just a few startling flash-frames to foresee their entire lifelines.

"Run Lola Run" is essentially a film about itself, a closed loop of style. Movies about characters on the run usually involve a linear story ("The Fugitive" comes to mind), but this one is basically about running--and about the way that movie action sequences have a life and logic of their own. I would not want to see a sequel to the film, and at 81 minutes it isn't a second too short, but what it does, it does cheerfully, with great energy, and very well.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 8.0/10 (54,670 votes) Top 250: #200

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by Velocity

#084 Chasing Amy (1997) 11 Votes, 1711 points
Kevin Smith
Running time - 113 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Comedy / Drama / Romance
Original language English

Writing Credits:
Kevin Smith

Cast
Ethan Suplee ... Fan
Ben Affleck ... Holden McNeil
Jason Lee ... Banky Edwards
Casey Affleck ... Little Kid
Joey Lauren Adams ... Alyssa Jones

Other awards
Nominated: Golden Globe Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Comedy/Musical
Joey Lauren Adams

BY ROGER EBERT / April 18, 1997

`Chasing Amy'' is a romantic comedy about people who write comic books for a living, and whose most passionate conversations can center on the sex lives of Archie and Jughead. Kevin Smith, who wrote and directed the movie--the third installment in his Jersey trilogy--makes these characters intense and funny. It's all in the writing.

We meet his Gen X heroes at a comic book convention, where they're autographing copies of their hit cult comic ``Bluntman & Chronic.'' Holden (Ben Affleck) and Banky (Jason Lee) have been best friends for years, live together, and take their art so seriously that when an obnoxious fan says ``an inker is only a tracer,'' there's a fight. Then Holden meets Alyssa (Joey Lauren Adams), another comic book artist, and during a long dart game in a nearby pub, they find that their minds are well matched; Holden assumes that where the minds go, the bodies should follow, but what he doesn't realize is that Alyssa is a lesbian.

This could be the setup for an empty-headed sexcom, but Smith is more ambitious and subtle. While the surface of his film sparkles with sharp, ironic dialogue, deeper issues are forming, and ``Chasing Amy'' develops into a film of touching insights. Most romantic comedies place phony obstacles in the way of true love, but Smith knows that at some level there's nothing funny about being in love: It's a dead serious business, in which your entire being is at risk. (That's why lovers can be so funny for the rest of us.) For Kevin Smith, ``Chasing Amy'' represents a big step ahead into the ranks of today's most interesting new directors. Smith, a New Jersey native, is the legendary guerrilla filmmaker who made the comedy ``Clerks'' (1994) on a budget of $24,000; his heroes, who worked behind the counters of a convenience store and the video store next door, talked endlessly about sex, life and videotapes. Because Smith was such a gifted creator of dialogue, the movie worked, despite its bargain-basement production values.

His next film was ``Mallrats'' (1995), a disaster (Smith actually apologized for it at the 1996 Independent Spirit Awards). His mistake was to try to direct an action comedy with stunts and special effects, when in fact his real gifts are as a writer. Smith's direction is clunky and basic: He tends to arrange his characters, aim the camera, and let them talk. Visual grace is not yet his strong point, but in a movie like ``Chasing Amy'' that is absolutely all right. His strength is the ability to create characters and give them dialogue that's alive and charged.

Like Quentin Tarantino, he is willing to follow his characters into the subjects that obsess them, even if they seem to be straying from the plot. Here we get, for example, a hilarious speech at the Comicon about the racism and white imperialism of ``The Holy Trilogy'' (``Star Wars''), delivered by a wonderful character named Hooper (Dwight Ewell)--a gay black man whose militant anger is partly a put-on and partly real pain, masked in irony.

There are also well-written speeches of surprising frankness about sex (the plumbing as well as the glory). ``Chicks never tell you what to do,'' Holden complains. He thinks they should handle sex ``like CNN or the Weather Channel--providing constant updates.'' The main line of the story involves Holden's discovery that Alyssa is gay, and his even more inconvenient discovery that he loves her, anyway--loves her, and her wit and personality and throaty, chuckling voice with an intensity that reveals to him the vacuity of all his previous loves. He is desperate. And so is Banky, his best friend, who also may be secretly in love with him.

The movie's sneaky in the way it draws us in. We expect the characters to exist at a certain comic level, and they do, but then important things happen to them (love, friendship and happiness are all threatened--along with all the adjustments of self-image that are necessary if romance is going to be able to leap across the straight/gay divide). Even the most simple characters can be eloquent when their lives are at issue, and these characters aren't simple. Like the clerks in Smith's first film, they're verbal, passionate and poetic.

In this film's many touching dialogue scenes, Alyssa and Holden spill out their secrets. In a lesser movie, that would be that. ``Chasing Amy'' has more up its sleeve. The closing scenes, which I will not reveal, spring deeper psychological surprises, and there is a three-way meeting among Holden, Alyssa and Banky that is moving and yet written with the skill of a screwball comedy.

As Alyssa, Joey Lauren Adams is a discovery. She has the kind of deep voice and conspiratorial smile that make you think she could be a buddy as well as a lover. Ben Affleck's role is tricky--emotionally, his character makes the biggest changes--and he always makes us believe him. Jason Lee's sidekick is good at not showing us all his cards; at the end, when it's important to know how he really feels, he doesn't make it easy for us. And Kevin Smith himself appears as Silent Bob, the character he's played in all three of his films. This time, Silent Bob opens up, with a heartfelt parable that explains who Amy was, and why she was being chased.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.5/10 (46,758 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by TJENZ (#4)

This one sounds awesome.

Yeah...never saw that one.

I'm thinking maybe it's a time and place in life thing but those Adam Sandler comedies don't belong anywhere near There's Something About Mary.

#083 The Sweet Hereafter (1997) 10 Votes, 1714 points
Atom Egoyan
Running time - 112 min
Country of origin Canada
Genre Drama
Original language English

Writing Credits:
Russell Banks, Atom Egoyan

Cast
Ian Holm ... Mitchell
Caerthan Banks ... Zoe
Sarah Polley ... Nicole
Tom McCamus ... Sam
Gabrielle Rose ... Dolores


Academy Awards
Nominated Best Director, Best Writing - Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium

Other awards
Won Cannes Film Festival FIPRESCI Prize, Grand Prize of the Jury, Prize of the Ecumenical Jury
Nominated: Cannes Film Festival Golden Palm


BY ROGER EBERT / December 23, 1997

A cold, dark hillside looms above the Bide-a-Wile Motel, pressing down on it, crushing out the life with the gray weight of winter. It is one of the strongest images in Atom Egoyan's ``The Sweet Hereafter,'' which takes place in a small Canadian town, locked in by snow and buried in grief after 14 children are killed in a school bus accident.

To this town comes a quiet man, a lawyer who wants to represent the residents in a class action suit. Mitchell Stephens (Ian Holm) lacks the energy to be an ambulance chaser; he is only going through the motions of his occupation. In a way he's lost a child, too; the first time we see him, he's on the phone with his drug-addicted daughter. ``I don't know who I'm talking to right now,'' he tells her.

There will be no victory at the end, we sense. This is not one of those Grisham films in which the lawyers battle injustice and the creaky system somehow works. The parents who have lost their children can never get them back; the school bus driver must live forever with what happened; lawsuits will open old wounds and betray old secrets. If the lawyer wins, he gets to keep a third of the settlement; one look in his eyes reveals how little he thinks about money.

Egoyan's film, based on the novel by Russell Banks, is not about the tragedy of dying, but about the grief of surviving. In the film the Browning poem about the Pied Piper is read, and we remember that the saddest figure in that poem was the lame boy who could not join the others in following the piper. In ``The Sweet Hereafter,'' an important character is a teenage girl who loses the use of her legs in the accident; she survives, but seems unwilling to accept the life left for her.

Egoyan is a director whose films coil through time and double back to take a second look at the lives of their characters. It is typical of his approach that ``The Sweet Hereafter'' neither begins nor ends with the bus falling through the ice of a frozen lake, and is not really about how the accident happened, or who was to blame. The accident is like the snow clouds, always there, cutting off the characters from the sun, a vast fact nobody can change.

The lawyer makes his rounds, calling on parents. Egoyan draws them vividly with brief, cutting scenes. The motel owners, Wendell and Risa Walker (Maury Chaykin and Alberta Watson), fill him in on the other parents--Wendell has nothing good to say about anyone. Sam and Mary Burnell (Tom McCamus and Brooke Johnson) are the parents of Nicole, the budding young country-music singer who is now in a wheelchair. Wanda and Hartley Otto (Arsinee Khanjian and Earl Pastko) lost their son, an adopted Indian boy. Billy Ansell (Bruce Greenwood) was following the bus in his pickup and waved to his children just before it swerved from the road. He wants nothing to do with the lawsuit and is bitter about those who do. He is having an affair with Risa, the motel owner's wife.

This story is not about lawyers or the law, not about small-town insularity, not about revenge (although that motivates an unexpected turning point). It is more about the living dead--about people carrying on their lives after hope and meaning have gone. The film is so sad, so tender toward its characters. The lawyer, an outsider who might at first seem like the source of more trouble, comes across more like a witness, who regards the stricken parents and sees his own approaching loss of a daughter in their eyes.

Ian Holm's performance here is bottomless with its subtlety; he proceeds doggedly through the town, following the routine of his profession, as if this is his penance. And there is a later scene, set on an airplane, where he finds himself seated next to his daughter's childhood friend, and remembers, in a heart-breaking monologue, a time in childhood when his daughter almost died of a spider bite. Is it good or bad that she survived, in order now to die of drugs? Egoyan sees the town so vividly. A hearing is held in the village hall, where folding tables and chairs wait for potluck dinners and bingo nights. A foosball table is in a corner. In another corner, Nicole, in her wheelchair, describes the accident. She lies. It is too simple to say she lies as a form of getting even, because we wonder--if she were not in a wheelchair, would she feel the same way? Does she feel abused, or scorned? ``You'd make a great poker played, kid,'' the lawyer tells her.

This is one of the best films of the year, an unflinching lament for the human condition. Yes, it is told out of sequence, but not as a gimmick: In a way, Egoyan has constructed this film in the simplest possible way. It isn't about the beginning and end of the plot, but about the beginning and end of the emotions. In his first scene, the lawyer tells his daughter he doesn't know who he's talking to. In one of his closing scenes, he remembers a time when he did know her. But what did it get him?

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.8/10 (12,764 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #418

Ranked highest by 54Cermak (#3)

Wow, props to Artem. And yes, all you people should see Fallen Angels because it rules. Might wanna see Chungking Express first though.

#082 Crumb (1994) 11 Votes, 1715 points
Terry Zwigoff
Running time - 112 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Documentary / Biography
Original language English

Cast
Robert Crumb ... Himself
and other people as themselves

Other awards
Won Cannes Film Festival Cinematography Award - Documentary, Grand Jury Prize Documentary


BY ROGER EBERT / November 20, 2005

"Crumb" is a meeting between two eccentrics in sympathy with each other. The artist R. Crumb created such bizarre images in his underground comic books that the art critic Robert Hughes named him "the Brueghel of the last half of the 20th century." The director Terry Zwigoff knew him before he had any notion of making this documentary. They shared a love for obscure musicians on 78 rpm records from the 1920s and 1930s, and they once played in the same band. Long before he knew the inhabitants of Crumb's childhood home would be the keys to this film, Zwigoff had slept the night there and met Crumb's brother Charles, who is perhaps the key to the whole Crumb story.

The old 78s led Zwigoff to his first film, "Louie Bluie" (1986) about a musician named Howard Armstrong, whose forgotten recordings from the 1930s fascinated him. Learning that Armstrong was still alive, he made a film about a man who was ageless, gifted in music and art, a clown and mimic, a life force. Zwigoff was now a filmmaker, and knew that his next subject was obviously his fellow music lover, Robert Crumb.

This was not obvious to Crumb, a legendary underground artist from San Francisco whose "Keep on Truckin'" image had become a 1960s icon, and whose cover for Janis Joplin's "Cheap Thrills" album was a classic even apart from the music it enclosed. Crumb had little interest in success, turned down countless offers to license "Keep on Truckin'," turned down an offer to host "Saturday Night Live" with his band, drew compulsively all the time, produced small-press graphic novels of startling, often pornographic, weirdness and listened to his old records.

Zwigoff told me he "called in every favor he owed me" to persuade Crumb to be in his film: He spent nine years on the documentary "while averaging an income of about $200 a month and living with back pain so intense that I spent three years with a loaded gun on the pillow next to my bed, trying to get up the nerve to kill myself."

I am apparently responsible for the urban legend that Zwigoff told Crumb, "Make this film or I will shoot myself." That never happened, but it may be true that Zwigoff's life was saved because he did make the film.

Among documentaries about artists, "Crumb" (1994) is unusual in having access to the key players and biographical artifacts of Crumb's entire life. Crumb himself is entirely forthcoming on camera, uninhibited, honest. We meet both of his wives, who talk cheerfully about the way their images and secrets were incorporated, sometimes directly, into Crumb's work. We see the high school yearbook portraits of classmates immortalized into grotesques and sadists, sometimes under their own names. Most crucially, we enter Crumb's boyhood home in New Jersey, still occupied by his mother and his brother Charles, and in San Francisco we visit his brother Max. His two sisters refuse to participate.

We leave the film convinced there are no secrets still concealed in this family. We know that Robert's central sexual fantasy was to ride bareback on women with overdeveloped rumps; that Charles remained a virgin and recluse, rarely leaving his bedroom, his erotic imagination forever fixed on Bobby Driscoll in the 1960 film "Treasure Island"; that Max lived in monkish isolation, slept on a bed of nails and regularly passed a 30-foot cloth ribbon through his body; that their alcoholic father broke Robert's collarbone when he was a boy, and that the parents fought between themselves so fiercely that their faces were often covered with scratches and bruises. Photographs of the family circa 1950 find parents and five children posed in their Sunday best on a suburban lawn, looking as if they are awaiting the arrival of Diane Arbus.

Charles was the first artist in the family. He hand-drew comic books, and encouraged Robert and Max to draw, against their will at first. Handmade comics from the period survive and are seen in the film; Robert seems to have saved everything, and Charles did, too, although after his death by overdose, his mother threw out most of his work before Robert could rescue it. Max accumulates little, as befits a monk, but his paintings now draw high prices in galleries. Ironic that Robert and Max gained fame as artists while Charles remained in his room, reading stacks of paperback novels and filling notebooks with endless entries, some of them words, some only elaborate typographical patterns. In an extraordinary scene involving Robert, Charles and their mother, Beatrice, she sprawls almost flat on a sofa, but like her sons is funny, articulate, and very strange.

Art may have saved Crumb from madness, turning private neurosis into public validation. Zwigoff is unsparing in showing Crumb's more transgressive work; the camera follows panel by panel through comic books as Crumb narrates stories of incest, necrophilia, scatology, assault, mayhem and sexual couplings as unlikely as they are alarming. To call some of his images sexist, racist and depraved is putting it mildly.

Zwigoff is fair enough to provide an articulate objection to Crumb's work: Good sane Deirdre English, a former editor of Mother Jones magazine, is not shocked as much as saddened and repelled by Crumb's work, which treats women as objects, commodities, victims, mindless (sometimes even headless) conveniences. In defense of Crumb, the art critic Hughes finds a vision of suffering and yearning, of barriers ignored, of inhibitions disregarded, of a psyche turning itself out naked upon the page. Certainly it is true that Crumb's men are treated no better than his women: all are disgusting creatures driven by animalistic lust and depraved need.

His graphic novels have undeniable energy and a visual style that depends on meticulous command of the divide between portrait and caricature. We see his pen at work, we see the materials that inspire some of his images, we see him giving a drawing lesson to his teenage son, Jesse. He is one of those artists whose pen stroke is instantly identifiable as his own. His subjects are not superheroes or comic characters (although Crumb reveals that as a child he masturbated to Bugs Bunny). They are lonely, disenfranchised, pimply, unpopular -- all the things we sense Crumb was when he was "the most unpopular kid in high school." In some of his most loathsome caricatures, Crumb is still settling scores with bullies from his adolescence and girls who turned him down.

Yet the women who knew him best seem fond of him, especially his first wife, Dana, and current wife, Aline, who see him (as we do in the film) as a smart and entertaining companion who has transformed his demons into his work. Yes, he has sexual hangups, but not ones they find unpleasant or painful. Researching Crumb's fetishes for isolated body parts, especially feet, buttocks and breasts, Zwigoff visits Dian Hanson, the editor of the Juggs and Leg Show magazines, who attributes her publishing success to the fact that she actually reads the letters from her readers.

She arranges a fantasy session for Crumb and some of her models, but this scene doesn't work; for Crumb, the point is not realizing his fantasies, but displacing them into obsessive visual caricatures. In this process some of his work becomes a critique of the same values Deirdre English deplores. If pornography dehumanizes and objectifies, then perhaps that is the point of the Crumb story (shown in detail) about a woman whose neck ends with a peg on which a mannequin head can be attached? She is otherwise functional in all the ways Crumb's hero desires. The strip has a shocking climax, when the hero discovers his woman is not without a head after all; it has been shoved down inside her neck, and when it emerges, the woman has a great deal to complain about. Such a work is disgusting and depraved at the same time it is satirical and subversive; it is an overdose of sexism, inspiring not desire but disgust. It is also, let us be honest, satirical in a dark and scary way.

Crumb's art and career would define the limits of this film if it had been made by someone else. What deepens Zwigoff's work are the scenes with the family members. There is in Charles such a gentle sadness, such a resigned acceptance of his emotional imprisonment, that we sense how Robert's art has saved him from a similar destiny. In the fondness of his wives and girlfriends, there is a redemption to be sensed. As the film ends, Crumb is moving with his family to the south of France, where in the last 10 years he has not produced so much, perhaps because, let us speculate, he is happier.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.6/10 (5,065 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #296

Ranked highest by DerryDukes

#081 Grosse Pointe Blank (1997) 11 Votes, 1718 points
George Armitage
Running time - 107 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Comedy / Crime / Romance / Thriller
Original language English

Writing Credits
Tom Jankiewicz, D.V. DeVincentis, Steve Pink, John Cusack

Cast
John Cusack ... Martin Q. Blank
Minnie Driver ... Debi Newberry
Alan Arkin ... Dr. Oatman
Dan Aykroyd ... Grocer
Joan Cusack ... Marcella


BY ROGER EBERT / April 11, 1997

John Cusack is one of those rare actors who can convincingly look as if he is thinking about words of many syllables. He seems smart, and that's crucial for the character he plays in ``Grosse Pointe Blank,'' because like so many really smart people, this one is clueless about matters of the heart.

Cusack plays Martin Q. Blank, a professional assassin who is more articulate while discussing his kills with a shrink than while explaining to his high school sweetheart why he stood her up at the prom.

As the movie opens, he's preparing to do a job with a high-powered rifle, while simultaneously discussing his busy schedule with his office manager (played by his real-life sister, Joan Cusack). She thinks he should attend his 10th high school reunion in the Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe, Mich. He thinks not. He misses on the assassination attempt, however, and that leads to an interesting coincidence: He can redeem himself by pulling a job in Detroit--killing two birds, so to speak, with one stone.

He discusses his plight with his psychiatrist (Alan Arkin), a man alarmed to learn he has a hit man for a client.

``I don't think what a person does for a living is necessarily who he is,'' Blank observes reassuringly, but the shrink gives the impression of a man constantly holding himself in readiness to take a bullet.

Cusack plays Blank as a man who entered his chosen profession with good skills and high spirits, but is now beginning to entertain doubts about its wisdom as a lifelong career. He has no qualms about killing people (someone has to do it, and as a character in the film observes, it's a ``growth industry''). But for him, it's getting to be the same old same old. Against his better judgment, he caves in and heads for Michigan.

Grosse Pointe may hold the key to why Martin's life seems on hold. Unfinished business waits for him there: a woman named Debi (Minnie Driver), whom he loved in high school, but stood up at the senior prom.

Tooling through town in a rented car, he hears her voice on the radio and is soon peering through the window of the local radio station. She's a deejay, who smoothly segues into asking her listeners how she should feel when her prom date turns up 10 years late.

Another major player in Martin's life is Mr. Grocer (Dan Aykroyd), also a professional assassin, who wants Martin to join a union he is forming: ``We could be working together again, for chrissakes! Making big money! Killing important people!'' He is also in Grosse Pointe, possibly on the same assignment, and soon Blank and Grocer are seated uneasily across from each other at a diner, both armed and both dangerous, mostly to each other.

The film takes the form but not the feel of a comic thriller. It's quirkier than that. The underlying plot, which also involves Martin being shadowed by assorted mysterious types who want to kill him, is not original. But the screenplay, by Cusack, Tom Jankiewicz and others, uses that story as a backdrop for Martin Blank's wry behavior. It's not often that a film about professional killers has a high school reunion dance as its centerpiece, and rarer still that the hero kills someone during the dance and disposes of the body in the school boiler.

I enjoyed the exchanges between Cusack and Driver as the couple on a long-delayed date. Affection still smolders between them, and it was sexy the way Driver casually put an arm around Cusack's shoulders, her hand resting possessively on the back of his neck. I liked the dialogue, too, and the assortment of classmates they encounter. Have you ever noticed that whatever odd qualities your friends had in school seem to grow as the years go by? Despite these qualities, the movie for me is a near-miss. One of the problems is the conclusion, in which things are resolved with an elaborate action sequence. This sequence may have been intended ironically, but the gunshots are just as loud as if they were sincere. Too many movies end like video games, with characters popping up and shooting each other. ``Grosse Pointe Blank,'' which takes such a detached view toward killing and has such an articulate hero, could have done better.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.4/10 (29,122 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #377

Ranked highest by Castana (#4)

I like that more and more every time I see it.

Really, I just saw it for the first time in a long while a couple months ago and it was about half as good as I remembered it, I don't know if movies like this lose their watch-it-every-time-it's-on-TBS classic status if you fall out of seeing it twice a year or what. Crumb on the other hand I am a total shit for forgetting to list (I think)

Yeah, Debbie, long-time listener, first-time caller. I love the show. Uh, so, Martin, what? No yellow ribbons? Didn't anybody miss you? Don't you think you should tell her why you're really in town, tough guy? Huh? You know what we love? We love tough guys like you.

"You got any ideas on how you wanna wax this guy?"
"Can't you just say 'kill'? You always gotta romanticize it."

Everybody's coming back to take stock of their lives. You know what I say? Leave your livestock alone.

"Debbie, I love your show. It's so timeless!"
"Yeah, it does run a little long sometimes..."

A thousand innocent people get killed every day! But a millionaire's pet gets detonated, and you're marked for life.

You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.

I know the law, OK? But I don't want to be withholding, I'm very serious about this process...and I know where you live.

I really didn't care for this movie at all.

#080 The Player (1992) 10 Votes, 1733 points
Robert Altman
Running time - 124 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Comedy / Drama / Thriller
Original language English

Writing Credits
Michael Tolkin

Cast
Tim Robbins ... Griffin Mill
Fred Ward ... Walter Stuckel
Whoopi Goldberg ... Detective Susan Avery
Peter Gallagher ... Larry Levy
Brion James ... Joel Levison

Academy Awards
Nominated: Best Director, Best Film Editing, Best Writing - Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium

Other awards
Won: BAFTA Film Award Best Direction, Best Screenplay - Adapted. Cannes Film Festival Best Actor (Tim Robbins), Best Director. Golden Globe Best Motion Picture - Comedy/Musical, Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Comedy/Musical (Tim Robbins)
Nominated: BAFTA Film Award Best Actor (Tim Robbins), Best Editing, Best Film. Cannes Film Festival Golden Palm. Golden Globe Best Director - Motion Picture, Best Screenplay - Motion Picture,


BY ROGER EBERT / April 24, 1992

It would be hard to describe Griffin Mill's job in terms that would make sense to anyone who has had to work for a living. He's a vice president at a movie studio, which pays him enormous sums of money to listen to people describe movies to him. When he hears a pitch he likes, he passes it along. He doesn't have the authority to give a "go" signal himself, and yet for those who beseech him to approve their screenplays, he has a terrifying negative authority. He can turn them down. Griffin starts getting anonymous postcards from a writer who says he is going to kill him. Griffin's crime: He said he would call the writer back, and he never did.

Robert Altman's "The Player," which tells Griffin's story with a cold sardonic glee, is a movie about today's Hollywood -- hilarious and heartless in about equal measure, and often at the same time. It is about an industry that is run like an exclusive rich boy's school, where all the kids are spoiled and most of them have ended up here because nobody else could stand them. Griffin is capable of humiliating a waiter who brings him the wrong mineral water. He is capable of murder. He is not capable of making a movie, but if a movie is going to be made, it has to get past him first.

This is material Altman knows from the inside and the outside. He owned Hollywood in the 1970s, when his films like M*A*S*H," "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" and "Nashville" were the most audacious work in town. Hollywood cast him into the outer darkness in the 1980s, when his eclectic vision didn't fit with movies made by marketing studies. Now he is back in glorious vengeance, with a movie that is not simply about Hollywood, but about the way we live now, in which the top executives of many industries are cut off from the real work of their employees, and exist in a rarefied atmosphere of greedy competition with one another.

"The Player" opens with a very long continuous shot that is quite a technical achievement, yes, but also works in another way, to summarize Hollywood's state of mind in the early 1990s. Many names and periods are evoked: Silent pictures, foreign films, the great directors of the past. But these names are like the names of saints who no longer seem to have the power to perform miracles. The new gods are like Griffin Mill -- sleek, expensively dressed, noncommittal, protecting their backsides. Their careers are a study in crisis control. If they do nothing wrong, they can hardly be fired just because they never do anything right.

"The Player" follows Griffin (Tim Robbins) during a period when his big paycheck, his luxury car and his expensive lifestyle seem to be in danger. There is another shark in the pond, a younger executive (Peter Gallagher) who may be even sleeker and greedier, and who may get Griffin's job. This challenge comes at a bad time: Griffin is shedding a girl friend (a woman whose superior intelligence he feeds on, while treating the rest of her like a shabby possession). And there are those postcards. Who is sending the postcards? Griffin racks his memory and his secretary's appointment book. He has lied to so many writers that there is no way to narrow the field. Finally he picks one name and calls the guy for a meeting. The guy's girl friend says he's out in Pasadena, seeing "The Bicycle Thief" at a revival house. Griffin drives out there, meets the guy, has a conversation with him, follows him back to a parking lot, and kills him. As if Griffin didn't have enough problems already.

The movie then follows Griffin's attempts to protect his position at the studio, evade arrest for murder, and conduct a romance with the dead man's fiancé (Greta Scacchi), who if anything is more cynical than Griffin. This story was first told in a novel by Michael Tolkin, who made it so compelling I read it in a single sitting. Now Altman has made it funny as well, without losing any of the lacerating anger and satire.

Altman fills his film with dozens of cameos by recognizable stars, most of them saying exactly what's on their minds. And he surrounds Griffin with the kind of oddball characters who seem to roll into Los Angeles, as if the continent was on a tilt: Whoopi Goldberg as a Pasadena police detective who finds Griffin hilarious, Fred Ward as a studio security chief who has seen too many old "Dragnet" episodes, Sydney Pollack as a lawyer who does for the law what Griffin does for the cinema, Lyle Lovett as a sinister figure lurking on the fringes of many gatherings.

Watching "The Player," we want to despise Griffin Mill, but we can't quite manage that. He is not dumb. He has a certain verbal charm. As played by Tim Robbins, he is tall, with a massive forehead but a Dana Carvey smile, and he wears a suit well. Watching him in some shots, especially when the camera is below eye level and Altman uses a mock-heroic composition, we realize with a shock that Griffin looks uncannily like the young Citizen Kane. He has a similar morality, too, but not the breadth of vision.

Altman, who has always has a particular strength with unusual supporting characters, surrounds him with people who all seem to be sketches for movies of their own. The girl friend played by Scacchi, whose name is June Gudmundsdottir, and who may or may not be Icelandic, is an example: A Southern California combination of artistic self-realization (she paints ) and self-interest (for her, romances are like career stages). Peter Gallagher, as the rival young executive, is like the kid at school who could always push your buttons, who was so hateful you could never understand why God didn't strike him dead for smirking at you all the time. And Whoopi Goldberg, as the cop who is almost certain Griffin is a murderer, brings a certain moral detachment to her job: Would she rather apprehend a perpetrator, or enjoy the human comedy?

"The Player" is a smart movie, and a funny one. It is also absolutely of its time. After the savings and loan scandals, after Michael Milkin, after junk bonds and stolen pension funds, here is a movie that uses Hollywood as a metaphor for the avarice of the 1980s. It is the movie "The Bonfire of the Vanities" wanted to be. There was a full page photo of Robert Altman in one of the newsweeklies, looking sideways at the camera, grinning like someone who has waited a long time, and finally gotten in the last word. As someone who grew up on his great films, it gives me such pleasure to see him make another one. In the same season as "The Babe," Altman is the guy who has hit one out of the park.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.7/10 (18,248 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #402

Ranked highest by Nic (#8)

#079 Clueless (1995) 12 Votes, 1740 points
Amy Heckerling
Running time - 97 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Comedy / Romance
Original language English

Writing Credits
Amy Heckerling

Cast
Alicia Silverstone ... Cher Horowitz
Stacey Dash ... Dionne
Brittany Murphy ... Tai
Paul Rudd ... Josh
Donald Faison ... Murray

BY ROGER EBERT / July 19, 1995

"So, OK, you're probably like - what is this, a Noxzema commercial? First words of "Clueless" That's exactly what I was like. The hand-held camera was tilting crazily, showing the sun-blessed teenagers of Southern California, and I'm like - what is this, an MTV video? Then Cher says the line and breaks the ice. Not Cher who won the Oscar. Cher, the heroine of this movie. A little later, she explains that she and her friend Dionne "were both named after great singers of the past that now do infomercials." (She adds, "She's my friend because we both know what it is to have people be jealous of us.") "Clueless" is a smart and funny movie, and the characters are in on the joke. Cher (Alicia Silverstone), who lives in a mansion and looks like Cybill Shepherd, is capable of lines like, "Why learn to park when everry place you go has a valet?" But she puts a little satirical spin on them. She is one of the most totally self-absorbed characters in a movie since the heroes of "Wayne's World," and yet she isn't a victim, and we get the idea she willl grow up tough and clever, like her dad (Dan Hedaya).

He's a big-time lawyer, a litigator who is always working on big cases. In most movies like this, he would therefore be a blundering, insensitive oaf with a microscopic IQ. Not here. He knows everything that's going on, cares for his daughter, is protective of her, and tells a kid taking her out on a date: "If anything happens to her, I got a .45 and a shovel. I don't think you'll be missed." Also looking out for Cher is her stepbrother (Paul Rudd) by one of her dad's earlier marriages. Family trees have many branches in these circles.

Cher and Dionne live in Beverly Hills and go to one of those high schools where the students look like they've posed for the cover of Sassy. They have longsuffering teachers such as Mr. Hall (Wallace Shawn) and Miss Geist (Twink Caplan), who both give Cher bad grades.

She is not discouraged. She knows that happy teachers give higher grades, and convinces each teacher that the other is a secret admirer. "You negotiated your way from a C to an A?" her dad asks.

"Honey, I couldn't be happier than if they were based on real grades." Cher doesn't have a regular boyfriend. Then she gets a crush on a new kid named Christian (Justin Walker) and explains the wiles she will use to capture him. At the same time, she persuades Dionne (Stacey Dash) to help her increase the popularity of a hopeless new girl named Tai (Brittany Murphy). She explains her party strategy: Pretend to be having a good time, pretend not to notice the guy you're interested in, and laugh and dance a lot. Also, "sometimes you have to show a little skin. This reminds guys of being naked, and then they think of sex." The movie was written and directed by Amy Heckerling, who made "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" (1982). This film, about different kinds of kids in a much different kind of school, is much better. But like the earlier film, which introduced Jennifer Jason Leigh, Sean Penn, Phoebe Cates, Forest Whitaker and Judge Reinhold, it may make some stars.

Alicia Silverstone and Stacey Dash display the knack of suggesting that their characters are not limited by their airhead dialogue and teen queen behavior. They talk that way, and do those things, but with a sly humor that suggests they're putting themselves on. ("What'd you do in school today?" "Broke in my purple clogs.") And their motives are essentially pure. They want to help out poor Tai because she doesn't have a clue. After they have completed their makeover of her face and wardrobe and given away all their boy-catching tricks, Tai becomes popular and not very nice. And in the way the girls handle this development, they reveal some quiet insights.

The movie is aimed at teenagers, but like all good comedies, it will appeal to anyone who has a sense of humor and an ear for the ironic.

Heckerling walks a fine line between satire and put-on, but she finds it, and her dialogue could be anthologized. You have to like a movie with lines such as: "Searching for high grades in high school is like searching for meaning in a Pauly Shore movie." Or this excuse in P.E. class: "My plastic surgeon doesn't want me doing any activity where balls fly at my nose." The answer to that, which cannot be printed here, may be worth at least a third of the price of admission, all by itself.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 6.6/10 (25,539 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #263

Ranked highest by The Good Dr Bill (#12)

#078 Beautiful Girls (1996) 4 Votes, 1740 points
Ted Demme
Running time - 112 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Drama / Comedy / Romance
Original language English

Writing Credits
Scott Rosenberg

Cast
Matt Dillon ... Tommy 'Birdman' Rowland
Uma Thurman ... Andera
Lauren Holly ... Darian Smalls
Timothy Hutton ... Willie Conway
Rosie O'Donnell ... Gina Barrisano
Natalie Portman ... Marty

BY ROGER EBERT / February 9, 1996

There is a scene in "Beautiful Girls" where a small-town feminist (Rosie O'Donnell) grabs a copy of Penthouse from a magazine stand and uses it as a prop while lecturing some of her sheepish male friends on the realities of womanhood. It is not common, she points out, for women to have small hips and large breasts. "Small hips - small breasts. Big breasts - big hips," she explains. By holding onto an unrealistic image of the dream girl they might somehow, someday, be able to meet, the guys are denying themselves a good relationship with a real flesh-and blood woman right here in their hometown.

These are guys who need more than one lesson, and they're going to get more than one lesson. It's an icy February in Knight's Ridge, Mass. - a strange time for a high school class reunion, but that's why Willie (Tim Hutton) has returned to town, linking up with his old classmates, including Tommy (Matt Dillon), Paul (Michael Rapaport) and Kev (Max Perlich). The local guys work construction in the summer and plow snow in the winter, and mope over the girls they used to love and the girls they may someday love - all kinds of girls except for the girls they could reasonably love.

Paul, for example, has a crazed obsession for supermodels.

His room, in the house he shares with Tommy, is papered with swimsuit pin-ups. Supermodels are "bottled promise," he explains. His dog is named Elle Macpherson. While he moons over the inaccessible, he mourns the loss of his longtime girl (Martha Plimpton), who has given up after dating him for years, and started going out with another guy. Paul retaliates by plowing snow in front of her garage door.

Tommy has big problems, too. He's been going with Sharon (Mira Sorvino), but he still longs for his old high-school flame, Darian (Lauren Holly). Sharon is wounded: "How do I feel with you when the best years of your life were in high school?" Sharon has married, but still wants to carry on an affair with Tommy. She thinks her husband doesn't know.

For Willie, the Tim Hutton character, life is just as complicated. He has left a girl behind in New York City, and come home for a couple of weeks to "sort things out," which is another way of saying that, like all of his buddies, he's terrified by the commitment of marriage. He moves in with his terminally depressed father and brother, and soon finds himself smitten by Marty, the girl next door. The problem is, she's only 13.

We can see what he sees in her. As played by Natalie Portman (from "The Professional") she's smart, she's pretty, she sees right through him and she has a gift with words. Willie is so charmed that when he sees Marty with one of her schoolmates, he complains to a friend: "I'm actually jealous of a 12-year-old kid on a bike." When Marty sees him with a woman his own age, her comment is priceless: "two words not in her vocabulary: lunch money." "Beautiful Girls" is not, however, about a Lolita complex, although when Paul identifies Marty as the "neighborhood Lolita," her response is swift, hilarious and devastating. What the movie is really about is just what Rosie O'Donnell said in her lecture on Penthouse; it's about guys who are so bedazzled by visions of possible bliss that they cannot see, or relate to, the perfectly wonderful women right there in front of them.

The movie was directed by Ted Demme, with a light touch that allows the humor to survive in spite of the gloomy thoughts and the bleak, dark, frozen winter landscape. The screenplay by Scott Rosenberg shows the same verbal facility he employs in "Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead," but this time the dialogue feels more real and less written. Even the big set-pieces, like the monologues by O'Donnell and Rapaport, sound convincing.

What's nicest about the film is the way it treasures the good feelings people can have for one another. They emerge most tenderly in the friendship between Willie and the 13-year-old girl.

They have crushes on each other for essentially idealistic reasons (each projects a simplicity and perfection that may not be there), and yet they draw apart, ever so tactfully, because they are sensible enough to know that it's the right thing to do.

Their relationship is mirrored in all of the others, which are all about idealism and its disappointments. The men insist that women correspond to some sort of universal ideal, and the women sometimes blame themselves when they cannot. But somehow, doggedly, true love teaches its lesson, which is that you can fall in love with an ideal, but you can only be in love with a human being.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.1/10 (11,058 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #225

Ranked highest by Derry Dukes (#1)

#077 Dead Man (1995) 10 Votes, 1744 points
Jim Jarmusch
Running time - 121 min
Country of origin USA / Germany / Japan
Genre Drama / Western
Original language English

Writing Credits
Jim Jarmusch

Cast
Johnny Depp ... William Blake
Gary Farmer ... Nobody
Crispin Glover ... Train Fireman
Lance Henriksen ... Cole Wilson
Michael Wincott ... Conway Twill

Other awards
u]Nominated:[/u] Cannes Film Festival - Golden Palm

BY ROGER EBERT / June 28, 1996

I once traveled for two days from Windhoek to Swakopmund through theKalahari Desert, on a train without air conditioning, sleeping at night on ahard leather bench that swung down from the ceiling. That journey seemed alittle shorter than the one that opens ``Dead Man,'' the new film by JimJarmusch.

In the mid- to late 1800s, a man named William Blake (Johnny Depp) istraveling from Cleveland, where his parents have just died, to the Western townof Machine, where he has been promised a job. He is dressed in a checked suitthat looks as if it had been waiting a long time in the menswear store for asucker to come along. The train drones through the endless prairie. There areshots of the inside of the train. Shots of the view from the train. Shots of thetrain. Then the train's soot-faced fireman warns Blake that his grave awaits himin Machine.

For some of my readers, the name William Blake will have rung a bell,and they will be wondering if there is any connection between this character andthe mystical British poet who died in 1827. There is: They both have the samename. Our Blake has not heard of the English Blake, however, but before long hewill run into an Indian named Nobody who can quote him by the yard.

We are getting ahead of the story. Blake arrives in Machine and reportsto the Dickinson Steel Works, a dark, satanic mill where he expects to beemployed as an accountant. The office manager (John Hurt) explains that the jobno longer exists. Blake is appalled; he's spent his last dime getting there. Heconfronts the owner of the mill (Robert Mitchum), who stands between a stuffedbear and a portrait of himself, which frame his fearful symmetry. Mitchumbrandishes a shotgun and advises Blake to leave.

Blake befriends a hapless flower girl, and is invited to her room for anencounter between innocence and experience. Then the girl's lover bursts in andshoots her. Blake shoots the man, is shot near the heart, leaps from the window,and flees. We discover the dead man is Dickinson's son, and the mill owner hiresmen to track and kill Blake.

The next morning Blake regains consciousness in the forest to find hiswound being tended by the Indian named Nobody (Gary Farmer), who was raised bywhite men, educated in England, and treats Blake as if he really is the poet.

The two men now undertake an odyssey, pursued by the killers, in search ofBlake's ultimate destiny, which is revealed as a pleasing cross between themysticism of the original Blake and the American Indians.

``Dead Man'' is a strange, slow, unrewarding movie that provides us withmore time to think about its meaning than with meaning. The black and whitephotography by Robby Muller is a series of monochromes in which the brave newland of the West already betrays a certain loneliness. Farmer brings to theIndian a sweetness and a curious contemporary air (he talks like a new ageguru), and Depp is sad and lost as the opposite of Nobody--which is, I fear,Everyman. A mood might have developed here, had it not been for the unfortunatescore by Neil Young, which for the film's final 30 minutes sounds like nothingso much as a man repeatedly dropping his guitar.

Jim Jarmusch is trying to get at something here, and I don't have aclue what it is. Are the machines of the East going to destroy the nature of the West? Is the white man doomed, and is the Indian his spiritual guide to thefarther shore? Should you avoid any town that can't use another accountant?Watching the film, I was reminded of the original William Blake's visionarydrawings and haunting poems. Leaving the theater, I came home and took down myBlake and spent a very pleasant half-hour. So the evening was not a loss.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.7/10 (19,261 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #78

Ranked highest by Held (#8)

#076 Tommy Boy (1995) 9 Votes, 1768 points
Peter Segal
Running time - 97 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Adventure / Comedy / Drama
Original language English

Writing Credits
Bonnie Turner, Terry Turner

Cast
Chris Farley ... Thomas 'Tommy' Callahan III
David Spade ... Richard Hayden
Brian Dennehy ... Thomas 'Big Tom' Callahan
Bo Derek ... Beverly Barish, aka Beverly Burns
Dan Aykroyd ... Ray Zalinsky

Other awards
Nominated: Razzie Award Worst Supporting Actress (Bo Derek)

BY ROGER EBERT / March 31, 1995

`Tommy Boy" is one of those movies that plays like an explosion down at the screenplay factory. You can almost picture a bewildered office boy, his face smudged with soot, wandering through the ruins and rescuing pages at random. Too bad they didn't mail them to the insurance company instead of filming them.

The movie is an assembly of cliches and obligatory scenes from dozens of other movies, all its better. It has only one original idea, and that's a bad one: The inspiration of making the hero's sidekick into, simultaneously, his buddy, his critic and his rival.

It's like the part was written by three writers locked in separate rooms.

"Tommy Boy" stars Chris Farley of "Saturday Night Live," the guy with the size 23 neck, as Tommy Callahan, the dopey son of a Sandusky brake shoe manufacturer. His father, Big Tom (Brian Dennehy), is proud of him even though he squeaked through college in seven years, and supplies him with an office and big responsibilities when he comes back to Ohio. Meanwhile, there are startling developments on the domestic front, where Big Tom, a widower, is engaged to marry the bodacious Beverly (Bo Derek).

Young Tommy is overjoyed, because Beverly has a son, Paul (Rob Lowe), which means Tommy at last will have the brother he always dreamed of. Paul doubts there's much to do in Sandusky, but Tommy proves him wrong, introducing him to the favorite local pastime, "cow tipping," which means sneaking up on sleeping cows and tipping them over. In other hands this could have been the movie's only funny scene, but director Peter Segal doesn't have a clue about comic payoffs and bungles it before ending with the desperate director's ancient standby, as the lads fall in the mud.

The plot thickens. Or does it congeal? I began ticking off the story cliches: We'd already had (1) dumb son returns to family business and (2) unexpected stepmother. Soon we get (3) company gets in trouble and all workers will lose jobs, (4) it's up to the kid to save the day, (5) evil stepmother, (6) road movie and (7) buddy picture. The last two come as Tommy hits the road in a desperate last-minute bid to sell brake shoes, accompanied by his friend Richard (David Spade, also from "Saturday Night Live"). Richard has been introduced as a resentful employee who doesn't think Tommy should get such a quick promotion. Now he becomes a sidekick, critic, rival and buddy, all wrapped in one ungainly package.

The movie tries for laughs during the road trip, I'm afraid, by having Richard's car fall to pieces. First a deer destroys the convertible roof. Then a door comes loose. Then the hood flies off.

They drive down the highway in what's left. Those whose memories stretch all the way back . . . back . . . back to the dim past of 1987 will remember a similar demolished car in "Planes, Trains and Automobiles," one of the many better movies this one rips off.

No one is funny in "Tommy Boy." There are no memorable lines. None of the characters is interesting except for the enigmatic figure played by Rob Lowe, who seems to have wandered over from "Hamlet." Judging by the evidence on the screen, the movie got a green light before a usable screenplay had been prepared, with everybody reassuring each other that since they were such funny people, inspiration would overcome them. It was Forrest Gump, I believe, who said, "Funny is as funny does."

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 6.6/10 (15,684 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by StPhone (#4)

Somebody above complained that Happy Gilmore outranked There's Something About Mary...and now...

No shit--Rosie O'Donnell in the top 100? Jeebus, people.

Ammo for those who like Rosie.

Puh-leese! Rosie in "Beautiful Girls" is like the Zeppo scenes of Marx Brothers movies....free time to get some popcorn, or go to the bathroom

Mitchell knows what I'm talking about.

I hate Tommy Boy.

Beautiful Girls and Dead Man are two of the best, though.

Oh, shit, just noticed Clueless and The Player. So many great movies.

You can see showings of the short film "Tim Hutton gets a crush on a 12-year Old" at the Free the Pedos Pub. The rest of Beautiful Girls is Steel Magnolias with guys in all the primary roles.

What the fuck's a washing machine doing in a pub? Jesus- I need a DRINK.

need to see Beautiful Girls. Not really sure how Dead Man beat Ghost Dog, but glad to see it so high anyway. And awesome at Tommy Boy at the top of the quarter. Clueless should be way higher.

As for people complaining about Happy Gilmore and Tommy Boy, this is revenge for fucking Fletch or Vacation or Caddyshack or whatever else unfunny bullshit that probably starred Chevy Chase that inundated the 80s list.

Cause it's better?

nope

Yes.

#075 Sling Blade (1996) 11 Votes, 1781 points
Billy Bob Thornton
Running time - 135 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Drama
Original language English

Writing Credits
Billy Bob Thornton

Cast
Billy Bob Thornton ... Karl Childers
Dwight Yoakam ... Doyle Hargraves
J.T. Walsh ... Charles Bushman
John Ritter ... Vaughan Cunningham
Lucas Black ... Frank Wheatley

Academy Awards
Won: Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium
Nominated: Best Actor in a Leading Role (Billy Bob Thornton)


BY ROGER EBERT / November 29, 1996

``Sling Blade'' begins with a remarkable monologue delivered straight to the camera. A man with a raspy voice, an overshot jaw and a lot of pain in his eyes says he reckons we might like to hear about his story, and so he tells it. His name is Karl Childers, he is retarded, and he has been in a state facility since childhood, when he found his mother with her lover and killed them both. But now, he says, ``I reckon I got no reason to kill no one. Uh, huh.'' Karl is talking to a reporter about his release from the institution. They reckon he has been cured. They are probably right. He is not a killer, would not kill without good and proper reason, and now understands how, as a child, he misinterpreted the situation. As he talks, we are struck by his forceful presence; he is retarded, yes, but he is complex and observant, and has spent a lot of time thinking about what he should and shouldn't do.

If ``Forrest Gump'' had been written by William Faulkner, the result might have been something like ``Sling Blade.'' The movie is a work of great originality and fascination by Billy Bob Thornton, who wrote it, directed it and plays Karl Childers. He says that the character ``came to him'' one morning while he was shaving, and he started talking to himself in the mirror, in Karl's voice.

Thornton is a former country musician turned screenwriter (he wrote the remarkable ``One False Move'' and ``A Family Thing''). He plays Karl as a man of limited intelligence but great seriousness, who reasons as well as he can, and feels deeply. There is pain, humor, irony and sweetness in the character, and a voice and manner so distinctive, he is the most memorable movie character I've seen in a long time. Uh, huh. And the way the story of his freedom unfolds has a terrible fascination: We can guess where events might be leading, and we can see how they cannot be changed.

On his release from prison, Karl is more or less at loose ends. He can fix most anything and gets a job as a garage mechanic. He encounters and befriends a young boy named Frank (Lucas Black), and senses immediately that the boy has a wounded spirit. He meets the boy's mother, Linda (Natalie Canerday), who has a good heart and offers to let Karl live with them, in quarters in the garage. Karl soon understands the wounded look in Frank's eyes, because he meets Linda's boyfriend Doyle (country singer Dwight Yoakam), who likes to lounge in the living room, drinking one longneck beer after another and ruling the roost with loud, boorish opinions. His criticisms of the boy are especially cruel.

Karl watches, and listens, and thinks. There is another key character in the story: Linda's boss, Vaughan (John Ritter), a homosexual who accepts his sexuality but seems sort of apologetic about it, and who is also Linda's best friend. It's hard to understand why Linda stays with the venomous Doyle; maybe it's a version of battered-wife syndrome, and she can't imagine leaving. Only Vaughan and her son make life bearable.

Karl settles into the household and begins to savor the taste of freedom. He is not too sure how some aspects of the world work, and stands in front of a door for hours before he thinks of knocking. He repairs everything he puts his hand to, he makes new friends, and in one superb adventure, he orders and eats french fries for the first time, and his delight, masked behind his usual gruff manner, is boundless. (``I reckon I'd like me some of them french fries, uh, huh.'') These characters are brought to life with a vivid strength. We see Linda's life from the outside, through Karl's eyes, which view it in a very literal way and try to make sense of it. And we see it from the inside, through the eyes of Vaughan, the homosexual, who like Karl is only a witness, but feels the pain. One of the movie's many pleasures is Ritter's performance as Vaughan; the character has a complexity and sensitivity that seem to have come right out of his small-town time and place.

The movie's ultimate destination is not hard to guess, but we feel a certain satisfaction when it arrives there. And by then we have come to know Karl with a real understanding and fondness. He is a character unlike any other in the movies, an original, and in creating him, Thornton has made a place for himself among the best new filmmakers. As an actor, he creates a difficult character and finds exactly the right way to play him. If there were the slightest justice and curiosity in the Academy Award process, Thornton's work here would get a nomination.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 8.0/10 (31,729 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #126

Ranked highest by Elcorazon (#5)

#074 The Straight Story (1999) 9 Votes, 1786 points
David Lynch
Running time - 112 min
Country of origin France / UK / USA
Genre Adventure / Biography / Drama
Original language English

Writing Credits
John Roach, Mary Sweeney

Cast
Sissy Spacek ... Rose 'Rosie' Straight
Jane Galloway Heitz ... Dorothy, Straight's Next-Door Neighbor
Joseph A. Carpenter ... Bud
Donald Wiegert ... Sig
Richard Farnsworth ... Alvin Straight

Academy Awards
Nominated: Best Actor in a Leading Role (Richard Farnsworth)

Other awards
Nominated: Cannes Film Festival Golden Palm. Golden Globe Best Original Score - Motion Picture, Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama (Richard Farnsworth)

BY ROGER EBERT / October 15, 1999

The first time I saw "The Straight Story," I focused on the foreground and liked it. The second time I focused on the background, too, and loved it. The movie isn't just about the old Alvin Straight's odyssey through the sleepy towns and rural districts of the Midwest, but about the people he finds to listen and care for him. You'd think it was a fantasy, this kindness of strangers, if the movie weren't based on a true story.

Straight (Richard Farnsworth) is a 73-year-old man from in Laurens, Iowa, who learns that his brother is dying and wants to see him one last time. His eyes are too bad to allow him to drive. He lives with his daughter Rose (Sissy Spacek), who is somewhat retarded and no good behind the wheel. Nor do they have a car. But they have a tractor-style lawn mower, and the moment Alvin's eyes light on it, he knows how he can drive the 300 miles to Mt. Zion, Wis. The first mower konks out, but he gets another one, a John Deere, hitches a little trailer to it, and stubbornly sets off down the road.

Along the way we will learn a lot about Alvin, including a painful secret he has kept ever since the war. He is not a sophisticated man, but when he speaks, the words come out like the bricks of a wall built to last. Like Hemingway's dialogue, the screenplay by John Roach and Mary Sweeney finds poetry and truth in the exact choice of the right everyday words. Richard Farnsworth, who was 79 when he made the film, speaks the lines with perfect repose and conviction.

Because the film was directed by David Lynch, who usually deals in the bizarre ("Wild at Heart," "Twin Peaks"), we keep waiting for the other shoe to drop--for Alvin's odyssey to intersect with the Twilight Zone. But it never does. Even when he encounters a potential weirdo, like the distraught woman whose car has killed 14 deer in one week on the same stretch of highway (". . . and I HAVE to take this road!"), she's not a sideshow exhibit and we think, yeah, you can hit a lot of deer on those country roads.

Alvin's journey to his brother is a journey into his past. He remembers when they were young and filled with wonder. He tells a stranger, "I want to sit with him and look up at the stars, like we used to, so long ago." He remembers his courtship and marriage. His Army service as a sniper whose aim, one day, was too good. And about years lost to drinking and nastiness. He has emerged from the forge of his imperfections as a better man, purified, simple, and people along the way seem to sense that.

My favorite, of all of his stops, comes in a town where he's almost killed when he loses a drive belt and speeds out of control down a hill. He comes to rest where some people in lawn chairs are watching the local firefighters practicing putting out a fire.

In the town are twin brothers who squabble all the time, even while charging him by the hour to repair the mower. And a retired John Deere employee named Danny Riordan (James Cada), who lets Alvin camp for a while in his backyard (Alvin won't enter the house, even to use the phone).

Danny is a rare man of instinctive sweetness and tact, who sees what the situation requires and supplies it without display. He embodies all of our own feelings about this lovable old--yes, fool. He gently offers advice, but Alvin is firm: "You're a kind man talking to a stubborn man." If Riordan and the deer lady and the dueling twins (and a forlorn young girl) are the background I was talking about, so are the locations themselves. The cinematographer, Freddie Francis, who once made the vastness of Utah a backdrop for "The Executioner's Song," knows how to evoke a landscape without making it too comforting. There are fields of waving corn and grain here, and rivers and woods and little bed barns, but on the soundtrack the wind whispering in the trees plays a sad and lonely song, and we are reminded not of the fields we drive past on our way to picnics, but on our way to funerals, on autumn days when the roads are empty.

The faces in this movie are among its treasures. Farnsworth himself has a face like an old wrinkled billfold that he paid good money for and expects to see him out. There is another old man who sits next to him on a barstool near the end of the movie, whose face is like the witness to time. And look and listen to the actor who plays the bartender in that same late scene, the one who serves Alvin the Miller Lite. I can't find his name in the credits, but he finds the right note: He knows how all good bartenders can seem like a friend bringing a present to a sickroom.

The last notes are also just right. Who will this dying brother be, and what will he say? Will the screenplay say too much or reach for easy sentimentality? Not at all. Just because you have to see someone doesn't mean you have a lot to gab about. No matter how far you've come.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 8.0/10 (25,981 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by Helmet52 and SNC (#5)

#073 Wandâfuru raifu (After Life) (1998) 5 Votes, 1804 points
Hirokazu Koreeda
Running time - 118 min
Country of origin Japan
Genre Drama
Original language Japanese

Writing Credits
Hirokazu Koreeda

Cast
Arata ... Takashi Mochizuki, counsellor
Erika Oda ... Shiori Satonaka, trainee counsellor
Susumu Terajima ... Satoru Kawashima, counsellor
Takashi Naitô ... Takuro Sugie, counsellor
Kyôko Kagawa ... Kyoko Watanabe, Ichiro's Wife

BY ROGER EBERT / August 6, 1999

The people materialize from out of clear white light, as a belltolls. Where are they? An ordinary building is surrounded by greenery andan indistinct space. They are greeted by staff members who explain,courteously, that they have died, and are now at a way-station before thenext stage of their experience.

They will be here a week. Their assignment is to choose one memory,one only, from their lifetimes: One memory they want to save for eternity.

Then a film will be made to reenact that memory, and they will move along,taking only that memory with them, forgetting everything else. They willspend eternity within their happiest memory.

That is the premise of Hirokazu Kore-eda's "After Life," a filmthat reaches out gently to the audience and challenges us: What is thesingle moment in our own lives we treasure the most? One of the newarrivals says that he has only bad memories. The staff members urge him tothink more deeply. Surely spending eternity within a bad memory wouldbe--well, literally, hell. And spending forever within our best memorywould be, I suppose, as close as we should dare to come to heaven.

The film is completely matter-of-fact. No special effects, nocelestial choirs, no angelic flim-flam. The staff is hard-working; theyhave a lot of memories to process in a week, and a lot of production workto do on the individual films. There are pragmatic details to be workedout: Scripts have to be written, sets constructed, special effectsimprovised. This isn't all metaphysical work; a member of an earlier group,we learn, choose Disney World, singling out the Splash Mountain ride.

Kore-eda, with this film and the 1997 masterpiece "Maborosi," hasearned the right to be considered with Kurosawa, Bergman and other greathumanists of the cinema. His films embrace the mystery of life, andencourage us to think about why we are here, and what makes us truly happy.

At a time when so many movies feed on irony and cynicism, here is a man whohopes we will feel better and wiser when we leave his film.

The method of the film contributes to the impact. Some of thesepeople, and some of their memories, are real (we are not told which).

Kore-eda filmed hundreds of interviews with ordinary people in Japan. Thefaces on the screen are so alive, the characters seem to be recallingevents they really lived through, in world of simplicity and wonder.

Although there are a lot of characters in the movie, we have no troubletelling them apart because each is unique and irreplaceable.

The staff members offer a mystery of their own. Who are they, andwhy were they chosen to work here at the way-station, instead of moving onto the next stage like everybody else? The solution to that question iscontained in revelations I will not discuss, because they emerge sonaturally from the film.

One of the most emotional moments in "After Life" is when a youngstaff member discovers a connection between himself and an elderly newarrival. The new arrival is able to tell him something that changes hisentire perception of his life. This revelation, of a young love long ago,has the kind of deep bittersweet resonance as the ending of "The Dead," theJames Joyce short story (and John Huston film) about a man who feels asudden burst of identification with his wife's first lover, a young man nowlong dead.

"After Life" considers the kind of delicate material that could bedestroyed by schmaltz. It's the kind of film that Hollywood likes to remakewith vulgar, paint-by-the-numbers sentimentality. It is like a transcendentversion of "Ghost," evoking the same emotions, but deserving them. Knowingthat his premise is supernatural and fantastical, Kore-eda makes everythingelse in the film quietly pragmatic. The staff labors against deadlines. Thearrivals set to work on their memories. There will be a screening of thefilms on Saturday--and then Saturday, and everything else, will cease toexist. Except for the memories.

Which memory would I choose? I sit looking out the window, asimages play through my mind. There are so many moments to choose from. Justthinking about them makes me feel fortunate. I remember a line from IngmarBergman's film "Cries and Whisper." After the older sister dies painfullyof cancer, her diary is discovered. In it she remembers a day during herillness when she was feeling better. Her two sisters and her nurse join herin the garden, in the sunlight, and for a moment pain is forgotten, andthey are simply happy to be together. This woman who we have seen die aterrible death has written: "I feel a great gratitude to my life, whichgives me so much."

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.8/10 (2,599 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #508

Ranked highest by 54Cermak (#2)

#072 The Sixth Sense (1999) 13 Votes, 1842 points
M. Night Shyamalan
Running time - 107 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Drama / Mystery / Thriller
Original language English / Latin / Spanish

Writing Credits
M. Night Shyamalan

Cast
Bruce Willis ... Dr. Malcolm Crowe
Haley Joel Osment ... Cole Sear
Toni Collette ... Lynn Sear
Olivia Williams ... Anna Crowe
Mischa Barton ... Kyra Collins

Academy Awards
Nominated: Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Haley Joel Osment), Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Toni Collette), Best Director, Best Editing, Best Picture, Best Writing - Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen

Other awards
Nominated: BAFTA Film Award Best Editing, Best Film, Best Screenplay - Original, David Lean Award for Direction Golden Globe Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture (Haley Joel Osment), Best Screenplay - Motion Picture

BY ROGER EBERT / August 6, 1999

"The Sixth Sense" isn't a thriller in the modern sense, but more of a ghost story of the sort that flourished years ago, when ordinary people glimpsed hidden dimensions. It has long been believed that children are better than adults at seeing ghosts; the barriers of skepticism and disbelief are not yet in place. In this film, a small boy solemnly tells his psychologist, "I see dead people. They want me to do things for them." He seems to be correct.

The psychologist is Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis), who is shot one night in his home by an intruder, a man who had been his patient years earlier and believes he was wrongly treated. The man then turns the gun on himself. "The next fall," as the subtitles tell us, we see Crowe mended in body but perhaps not in spirit, as he takes on a new case, a boy named Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment) who exhibits some of the same problems as the patient who shot at him. Maybe this time he can get it right.

The film shows us things adults do not see. When Cole's mother (Toni Collette) leaves the kitchen for just a second and comes back in the room, all of the doors and drawers are open. At school, he tells his teacher "they used to hang people here." When the teacher wonders how Cole could possibly know things like that, he helpfully tells him, "when you were a boy they called you Stuttering Stanley." It is Crowe's task to reach this boy and heal him, if healing is indeed what he needs. Perhaps he is calling for help; he knows the Latin for "from out of the depths I cry into you, oh Lord!" Crowe doesn't necessarily believe the boy's stories, but Crowe himself is suffering, in part because his wife, once so close, now seems to be drifting into an affair and doesn't seem to hear him when he talks to her. The boy tells him, "talk to her when she's asleep. That's when she'll hear you." Using an "as if" approach to therapy, Crowe asks Cole, "What do you think the dead people are trying to tell you?" This is an excellent question, seldom asked in ghost stories, where the heroes are usually so egocentric they think the ghosts have gone to all the trouble of appearing simply so they can see them. Cole has some ideas. Crowe wonders whether the ideas aren't sound even if there aren't really ghosts.

Bruce Willis often finds himself in fantasies and science fiction films. Perhaps he fits easily into them because he is so down to earth. He rarely seems ridiculous, even when everything else in the screen is absurd (see "Armageddon"), because he never over-reaches; he usually plays his characters flat and matter of fact. Here there is a poignancy in his bewilderment. The film opens with the mayor presenting him with a citation, and that moment precisely marks the beginning of his professional decline. He goes down with a sort of doomed dignity.

Haley Joel Osment, his young co-star, is a very good actor in a film where his character possibly has more lines than anyone else. He's in most of the scenes, and he has to act in them--this isn't a role for a cute kid who can stand there and look solemn in reaction shots. There are fairly involved dialogue passages between Willis and Osment that require good timing, reactions and the ability to listen. Osment is more than equal to them. And although the tendency is to notice how good he is, not every adult actor can play heavy dramatic scenes with a kid and not seem to condescend (or, even worse, to be subtly coaching and leading him). Willis can. Those scenes give the movie its weight and make it as convincing as, under the circumstances, it can possibly be.

I have to admit I was blind-sided by the ending. The solution to many of the film's puzzlements is right there in plain view, and the movie hasn't cheated, but the very boldness of the storytelling carried me right past the crucial hints and right through to the end of the film, where everything takes on an intriguing new dimension. The film was written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, whose previous film, "Wide Awake," was also about a little boy with a supernatural touch; he mourned his dead grandfather, and demanded an explanation from God. I didn't think that one worked. "The Sixth Sense" has a kind of calm, sneaky self-confidence that allows it to take us down a strange path, intriguingly.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 8.2/10 (157,037 votes) Top 250: #124

SOMB 499 rank - #213

Ranked highest by Hero (#8)

I've never heard of this. I'm intrigued to see it, even though Ebert didn't like it.

Have neither the time or energy to take on this absurd statement at the moment. Care to pinch hit aggie?

#071Waiting For Guffman (1996) 13 Votes, 1850 points
Christopher Guest
Running time - 84 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Comedy
Original language English

Writing Credits
Christopher Guest, Eugene Levy

Cast
Christopher Guest ... Corky St. Clair
Fred Willard ... Ron Albertson
Catherine O'Hara ... Sheila Albertson
Parker Posey ... Libby Mae Brown
David Cross ... UFO Expert
Eugene Levy ... Dr. Allan Pearl


BY ROGER EBERT / February 21, 1997

Blaine, Mo., was founded, we are told, 150 years ago, by settlers who were trekking to the West Coast and stopped when their leader ``smelled the salt air.'' Its place in history has been assured by two events: A wooden stool made in Blaine, presented to President Grover Cleveland, led to the city becoming ``stool capital of America.'' And in 1946, a flying saucer landed nearby. Within the resulting crater, it was ``always 67 degrees with a 40 percent chance of rain.'' Local residents were invited aboard for a potluck supper, and one of them still has no feeling in his buttocks.

Obviously, such events cry out for dramatic treatment, and for its 150th anniversary, Blaine obtains the services of Corky St. Clair (Christopher Guest), a ``relocated'' Broadway wanna-be who will stage an amateur theatrical pageant. Corky's credits include ``Backdraft,'' an improbable musical based on the Hollywood film. He allegedly has a wife named Bunny, who has never been seen, though he buys all of her clothing and knows a great deal about depilatories. Such is the setup for ``Waiting for Guffman,'' directed and co-written by Guest, who also was the co-writer for ``This Is Spinal Tap,'' the very funny 1984 mock-documentary about a failing rock group. ``Guffman'' is not as insistently funny, perhaps because it has a sneaking fondness for its characters (``Spinal Tap'' ridiculed its heroes with true zeal). In a sequence which, I gather, was improvised by the actors themselves, a group of locals audition for Corky and the local high-school music teacher (Bob Balaban), and we see an extremely literal interpretation of ``Teacher's Pet'' by a local fast-food worker (Parker Posey).

Others in the audition include travel agents (Fred Willard and Catherine O'Hara), who have never been out of town but have travelers' imaginations. The pair, known as ``the Lunts of Blaine,'' perform ``Midnight at the Oasis.'' And there is the local dentist (Eugene Levy), who sings a vaudevillian medley for his audition.

The movie doesn't bludgeon us with gags. It proceeds with a certain comic relentlessness from setup to payoff, and its deliberation is part of the fun (as when it takes its time explaining the exact nature of the travel agent's plastic surgery). Some of the better laughs are deadpan, as when the travel agent and his wife take the dentist and his wife to dinner at a Chinese restaurant. It has a neon sign two stories high that announces ``CHOP SUEY''; the dentist asks, ``How did you find this place?'' Much of the fun comes from the songs composed for the pageant (music and lyrics by Guest, Harry Shearer and Michael McKean). They have the sound and the brio of 1940s musicals, and the literal-mindedness of people determined to shoehorn cosmic significance into a perspective.

Tension is generated when it becomes known that a man named Guffman, a famous New York producer's agent, will attend opening night with the thought that ``Red, White . . . and Blaine'' might travel well to Broadway.

The comic tone of ``Waiting for Guffman'' has grown out of Second City and the classic SCTV TV show. Attention is paid not simply to funny characters and punch lines, but to small nudges at human nature. Consider, for example, Bob Balaban in an understated role as the long-suffering local teacher who knows how outrageous Corky St. Clair is, but never quite acts on his knowledge. Or listen to small touches as when the descendant of Blaine's original settlers sighs, ``I know how the Kennedys must feel.'' Some of the laughs are so subtle you almost miss them, as when Corky warns the dentist that his oversized plastic glasses would be out of place in a scene set in 1846--but neglects to remember his own earring.

If you see the film, don't leave before the closing credits, which include several ``movie collectibles'' that provide maybe the loudest laughs in the movie.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.5/10 (10,944 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #175

Ranked highest by Abortion Angel

Sometimes, in life, there are certain polemical statements made by othewise ignorant pedants that are so patently ridiculous they do not deserve the dignity of a response.

Now there's a deserving comedy. Still the best thing Guest has done by far.

One of the best movies of the 90s. Endlessly imaginative and captivating.