it's just so big!

#185 Metropolitan (1990)
Whit Stillman
Running time - 98 mins
Country of origin USA
Genre Comedy / Drama
Original language English

Writing credits
Whit Stillman

Cast
Carolyn Farina ... Audrey Rouget
Edward Clements ... Tom Townsend
Chris Eigeman ... Nick Smith
Taylor Nichols ... Charlie Black
Allison Parisi ... Jane Clark

Academy Awards
Nominations: Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen

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

BY ROGER EBERT / August 10, 1990

`Metropolitan" holds a glass up to the lives and values of a group of New York preppies during the debutante season. They live in a world I dimly knew existed, but one as alien to me as if they belonged to a tribe in the Amazon. Yet their motives are universally recognizable: They want to be accepted, admired and loved. They're teenagers, many of them from wealthy homes, and they go to the right schools and want to be seen in the right places with the right people.

They are acutely aware that they are anachronisms. Even as they put on their tuxedos and venture out into the cold, Christmas weather to attend debutante balls at the Plaza, they realize (in the words of the valet in Elaine May's movie "A New Leaf") that they are carrying on in their own lifetimes a tradition that was dead before they were born.

They are, one of the kids says, the children of the UHB - the "urban haute bourgeoisie." They dress well and hold parties in the Park Avenue apartments of their parents, where they try to sound intellectual about Jane Austen and French socialists, and then play "truth games" like the one where you have to answer even the most embarrassing question with absolute veracity.

Into this tightly knit group comes a newcomer, Tom Townsend (Edward Clements), who lives on the West Side and wears a London Fog raincoat instead of dark-blue overcoat, and who says he doesn't believe in deb parties and the whole preppie value system. Nick (Christopher Eigeman), the most aware and cynical of the group, argues with him: "Deb parties are a way of getting invited to all of the best places and being supplied with food, drink and companionship at very little cost to yourself. What could possibly be the matter with that?" Besides, Tom is told, there is a shortage of "escorts," and he'll actually be doing these poor girls a favor by coming along to their parties.

One of the girls develops an obvious crush on Tom, but he is oblivious to her; indeed, he seems to have an uncanny gift for thoughtless statements that hurt her feelings. He has a crush on the elusive Serena Slocum, once glimpsed at a dance, never forgotten. She has a reputation among the group members for being fast - probably not deserved - and another legendary character often talked about is the mysterious Rick von Sloneker (Will Kempe), said to have driven a girl to suicide.

These fabled people do eventually turn up in "Metropolitan," but not before we've fallen into the seductive rhythms of the deb season - into bursts of hurt feelings or sudden crushes, punctuated by long, desultory conversations and deep confidences. The movie was written and directed by Whit Stillman, who, in his mid-30s, obviously still is fascinated by the coming-of-age process he went through as a preppie.

He has made a film Scott Fitzgerald might have been comfortable with, a film about people covering their own insecurities with a facade of social ease. And he has written wonderful dialogue, words in which the characters discuss ideas and feelings instead of simply marching through plot points as most Hollywood characters do.

Not very much happens in "Metropolitan," and yet everything that happens is felt deeply, because the characters in this movie are still too young to have perfected their defenses against life. They care very deeply about what others think of them, their feelings are easily hurt, their love affairs are really forms of asking for acceptance.

It is strange how the romances of the teenage years retain a poignancy all through life - how a girl who turns you down when you're 16 retains an aura in your memory even long after you, and she, have ceased to be who you were then. I attended my high school reunion a couple of weeks ago and discovered, in the souvenir booklet assembled by the reunion committee, that one of the girls in my class had a crush on me all those years ago. I would have given a great deal to have had that information at the time.

This is a movie about people who are still living through that time, whose reunions and souvenir booklets are still ahead of them, along with their futures, and disappointments and pains that the whole world of debs and dances can scarcely prepare them for.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.2/10 (2,133 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by DerryDukes

#184 Shallow Grave (1994)
Danny Boyle
Running time - 98 mins
Country of origin UK
Genre Comedy / Drama / Thriller
Original language English

Writing credits
John Hodge

Cast
Kerry Fox ... Juliet Miller
Christopher Eccleston ... David Stephens
Ewan McGregor ... Alex Law
Ken Stott ... Detective Inspector McCall
Keith Allen ... Hugo


Other awards
Won: BAFTA Award Alexander Korda Award for Best British Film

BY ROGER EBERT / February 24, 1995

`Shallow Grave" is a movie that might have warmed the heart of George Orwell, who in his famous essay "The Decline of the English Murder" complained that too many modern murders were simply unmotivated acts of squalid violence. "Let me try to define," he wrote, "what it is that the readers of the Sunday papers mean when they fretfully say, `you never seem to get a good murder nowadays.' " In the golden age of murder, which he places between 1850 and 1925, "good murders" had several distinguishing characteristics. To begin with, the murderers were generally "little men of the professional class" - doctors, lawyers, the chairman of the local Conservatives. They lived in intense respectability in semidetached houses, so that strange noises could be heard by the neighbors. They killed not out of passion, but for convenience - to cover up an adultery or a theft, say. Their motive was often financial gain.

Their method was usually poison.

The great preoccupation in the golden age of murder was, of course, disposal of the body. The classic cases feature bathtubs full of acid, bones buried in the backyard, corpses bricked up in the wall or fed to the dogs. (The disappearance of Helen Vorhees Brach took on a special interest because of speculations along these lines.) Much of the enjoyment, for newspaper readers, came from the notion of respectable professional people desperately hauling bodies about by moonlight.

"Shallow Grave" does not supply a perfect murder by Orwell's standards - the first victim kills himself with drugs before his nasty new roommates can form any designs on him. But it qualifies in many other ways. The movie takes place in Glasgow, Scotland, where three roommates are interviewing for a fourth. They are particularly repulsive types of supercilious yuppie twits: a doctor, an accountant and a journalist. They delight in humiliating and mocking applicants, until finally they find a customer tough enough to impress them: Hugo (Keith Allen), a cool wise guy. "He's . . . interesting," says Juliet (Kerry Fox), the doctor.

Hugo moves in and is found dead of an overdose the next morning, sprawled on his red bedspread (in a shot inspired by the famous painting "The Death of Chatterton"). This quite annoys his new roommates, until they discover that his suitcase is filled with cash.

Then they decide that since no one knows he has come to live with them, they should dispose of the body and keep the cash.

This involves doing unsavory and unthinkable things that are completely outside their experience: cutting off the corpse's head, hands and feet to prevent identification. Burying the remains.

Incinerating the severed parts in the hospital where Juliet works.

Alex (Ewan McGregor) and David (Christopher Eccleston) certainly don't want to perform the dismemberment. They think Juliet should.

("But Juliet - you're a doctor! You kill people every day!") The director, Danny Boyle, wants the disposal scenes to be funny, as he backlights his fastidious characters desperately sawing away at the bones of the dead. There is a touch here of the Coen brothers' "Blood Simple," but if you want to see how a great director gets laughs with the con trast between gruesome deeds and the desire to avoid dry-cleaning bills, look at Martin Scorsese's "Goodfellas." Back at the flat, the desperate situation becomes more unmanageable. The three grow paranoid, and David, the meek accountant, moves into the attic with the cash, drilling holes in the ceiling so he can spy on the activities below. A series of visitors arrive at the flat and discover it is unwise to go up into the attic.

The body count mounts.

All of the materials are in place for a film that might have pleased Orwell. But somehow they never come together. One of the problems, I think, is that all three conspirators are so unpleasant.

Not evil - that would be fine, in material like this - but simply obnoxious in a boring way. To some degree we need to identify with their fear of discovery, and we do not: The only likable character is the police inspector (Ken Stott), who asks insinuating questions and then exchanges significant looks with his assistant.

The bottom line in any great murder case, I believe, is the sneaky suspicion that there, but for the grace of God, go we - either as victim or, in our nightmares, murderer. Since no reasonable person can remotely hope to identity with Juliet, David or Alex, the whole case drops through.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.4/10 (14,011 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by The Good Dr Bill and MitchellStirling

man, that Ebert review really misses it--the general unlikeability of the characters even before the bad stuff starts is what makes the movie so interesting and funny, I think.

I agree, I'm sticking with the old man's reviews though for consistency even if it's a rubbish one.

there are so many classic lines in that movie.

"What's your book about?"
"A dying priest."
"Isn't that a little?..."
"Yeah, you're right. I mean, who wants to read another book about a dying priest? It's actually about another guy, who's not a priest...and he lives, he doesn't die."

"Normally I don't meet people...unless I already know them."

"Have you seen Hugo?"
"No, any idea which channel he's on?"

"You didn't tell me that this was for children. I hate children. I'd raise money to have the little fuckers put down. I want me money back!"

ummmm...so no links to download the movie...ha! kidding...kidding.
seriously...Mitch...after the countdown, anyway to post all the movie countdowns as just titles. would set up my netflix queue for years!

I nearly lead with that one.

Don't worry Rob the whole 700+ films will be posted as text and I can go find the other list if you want them.

Crap.

I forgot to bitch about how low Smoke is.

What the fuck is wrong with you people?

#182= Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998)
Guy Ritchie
Running time - 107 mins
Country of origin UK
Genre Comedy / Crime / Thriller
Original language English

Writing credits
Guy Ritchie

Cast
Jason Flemyng ... Tom
Dexter Fletcher ... Soap
Nick Moran ... Eddie
Jason Statham ... Bacon
Vinnie Jones ... Big Chris

Other awards
Nominated: BAFTA Award Alexander Korda Award for Best British Film, Best Editing

BY ROGER EBERT / March 12, 1999

``Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels'' is like Tarantino crossed with the Marx Brothers, if Groucho had been into chopping off fingers. It's a bewilderingly complex caper film, set among the low-lifes of London's East End, and we don't need to be told that the director used to make TV commercials; we figure that out when a cook throws some veggies into water, and the camera shoots up from the bottom of the pot.

The movie is about a poker player named Eddy (Nick Moran), who is bankrolled by three friends for a high-stakes game with Hatchet Harry (P.H. Moriarity), a gambling and porn kingpin. Harry cheats, Eddy runs up an enormous debt, and Harry's giant enforcer, Barry the Baptist (Lenny McLean), explains that he will start chopping fingers if the friends don't pay up--or hand over a pub belonging to Eddy's father (Sting).

What to do? Eddy and his mates eavesdrop on neighbors in the next flat--criminals who are planning to rob a rich drug dealer. Meanwhile, Barry assigns two dimwits to steal a couple of priceless antique shotguns for Harry. The shotguns end up in the hands of Eddy and friends, who steal the drug money from the other thieves, and then--but you get the idea.

Or maybe you don't. The movie, which is an enormous hit in Britain, had its American premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, where I lost track of the plot and some of the dialogue.

Seeing it again recently, I found the dialogue easier to understand, and the labyrinthine plot became a little clearer--although it's designed to fold back upon itself with unexpected connections.

The actors seem a little young for this milieu; they seem to be playing grown-up. Tarantino's ``Reservoir Dogs'' had characters with mileage on them, played by veterans like Harvey Keitel, Lawrence Tierney and Michael Madsen.

But the heroes of ``Lock'' (Jason Flemyng, Dexter Fletcher, Jason Statham and Moran) seem a little downy-cheeked to be moving in such weathered circles. And as the cast expands to include the next-door neighbors and the drug dealers, there are times when, frankly, we wish everybody would wear name tags (``Hi! I'm the effete ganja grower!'').

I was convinced, however, by Harry and Barry--and also by Harry's collector, Big Chris, who is played by a soccer star named Vinnie Jones who became famous for squeezing in his vice-like grip that part of an opponent's anatomy that most quickly gains his full attention. They seem plausible as East End vice retailers--seamy, cynical, middle-aged professionals in a heartless business.

I also liked the movie's sense of fun. The soundtrack uses a lot of rock music and narration to flaunt its attitude, it keeps most of the violence off-screen, and it's not above throwaway gags. While Eddy plays poker, for example, his three friends go next door to a pub. A man on fire comes staggering out of the door. They look at him curiously, shrug, and go in. The pub is named Samoa Joe's, which seems like a sideways nod to ``Pulp Fiction'' (Big Kahuna burgers crossed with Jack Rabbit Slim's restaurant). The guys sip drinks with umbrellas in them.

I sometimes feel, I confess, as if there's a Tarantino reference in every third movie made these days. ``Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels'' is the kind of movie where you naturally play Spot the Influence: Tarantino, of course, and a dash of Hong Kong action pictures, and the old British crime comedies like ``The Lavender Hill Mob.'' The director, Guy Ritchie, says his greatest inspiration was ``The Long Good Friday'' (1980), the Cockney crime movie that made a star out of Bob Hoskins. Lurking beneath all the other sources, I suspect, is ``Night and the City'' (1950), Jules Dassin's masterful noir, also about crime in the East End, also with a crime kingpin who employs a giant bruiser.

By the end of it all, as you're reeling while trying to make sense of the plot, ``Lock, Stock, etc.'' seems more like an exercise in style than anything else. And so it is. We don't care much about the characters (I felt more actual affection for the phlegmatic bouncer, Barry the Baptist, than for any of the heroes). We realize that the film's style stands outside the material and is lathered on top (there are freeze frames, jokey subtitles, speed-up and slo-mo). And that the characters are controlled by the demands of the clockwork plot.

But ``Lock, Stock'' is fun, in a slapdash way; it has an exuberance, and in a time when movies follow formulas like zombies, it's alive.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 8.0/10 (64,988 votes) Top 250: #214

SOMB 499 rank - 117

Ranked highest by Velocity

From #117 of all eras to #182 of the '90s. Has anyone worked harder to fuck up their legacy than Guy Ritchie?

#182= Dick (1999)
Andrew Fleming
Running time - 94 mins
Country of origin France / Canada / USA
Genre Comedy
Original language English

Writing credits
Andrew Fleming, Sheryl Longin

Cast
Kirsten Dunst ... Betsy Jobs
Michelle Williams ... Arlene Lorenzo
Dan Hedaya ... President Richard M. Nixon
Will Ferrell ... Bob Woodward
Bruce McCulloch ... Carl Bernstein

BY ROGER EBERT / August 4, 1999

Dick'' is the flip side of ``All the President's Men,'' explaining at last all of the loose ends of the Watergate scandal--how the duct tape got on the Watergate lock, who Deep Throat really was, and why the 18 1/2-minute gap appeared on the White House tapes. We also learn that Richard M. Nixon resented the fact that his dog didn't follow him around adoringly, like the Kennedy and Johnson dogs; at one point, he snarls, ``Checkers--shut up! I'll feed you to the Chinese!'' The movie is a bright and sassy comedy, seeing Watergate entirely through the eyes of its prime movers, who are revealed to be two 15-year-old girls. Betsy Jobs (Kirsten Dunst) and Arlene Lorenzo (Michelle Williams) are best friends who live in the Watergate complex, and one night they sneak downstairs to mail a letter to the Bobby Sherman Fan Club; they slap the tape on the door lock, it's discovered by a security guard, and the White House burglars are busted inside Democratic national headquarters.

Ah, but it doesn't end there. The girls are on a class trip to the White House when they spot a man they'd seen in the Watergate. He's G. Gordon Liddy (Harry Shearer), but they don't know that; they get separated from their group and wander the White House corridors, overhearing crucial conversations in the Oval Office itself. During later visits, they stumble upon shredding operations and rooms where cash is being counted.

President Nixon (Dan Hedaya, very funny) grows concerned over how much they may have heard, and puts on a show of false good cheer: ``How would you young ladies like to be the White House dog walkers?'' Calling every day to walk Checkers, they dimly perceive that all is not as it should be in the Oval Office, and the plot reveals how they became Deep Throat, why John Dean had an attack of conscience, and why their rendition of Olivia Newton-John's ``I Honestly Love You'' appeared on a tape in the desk drawer of Rosemary Woods.

Yes, Arlene, the apple-cheeked one with the merry smile, develops a crush on Nixon. There's a funny dream sequence in which he appears to her riding a white charger on the beach, but even funnier is the classroom scene where, like millions of teenage girls before her, she tries out a married name by writing it in her notebook: ``Mrs. Arlene Nixon.'' ``Dick,'' directed by Andrew Fleming and written by Fleming and Sheryl Longin, finds just the right tone for its merciless satire: Not strident, not wacky, but kind of earnest and intent, as the girls, who are not geniuses, blunder onto one incriminating secret after another. Their motivation seems to stem from ordinary teenage attributes, such as curiosity, idealism and romance.

The crusading reporters Woodward and Bernstein (Will Ferrell and Bruce McCulloch), on the other hand, are played more broadly--Woodward as a self-important totem pole, Bernstein as an insecure runt. They're always trying to grab the phone away from one another, and their Watergate coverage, so majestic when seen from the outside, is portrayed as the work of a couple of ambitious reporters on a power trip, believing everything the teenage ditzos tell them. (Of course, everything the girls tell them turns out to be correct.) Comedy like this depends on timing, invention and a cheerful cynicism about human nature. It's wiser and more wicked than the gross-out insult humor of many of the summer's other comedies. Consider the scene where the girls accidentally bake cookies with a secret herbal ingredient from their brother's stash, and take them to Nixon, who offers one to Leonid Brezhnev, whose mood is so altered that Nixon tells them, ``You know, girls, I think your cookies just saved the world from nuclear catastrophe.'' Hedaya's president looks a little like the real Nixon, and the match of the public persona is uncanny, as he complains to Henry Kissinger (Saul Rubinek) about his enemies, his insecurities and his dog. He grows bitter as his administration collapses around him, eventually retreating to bourbon and recrimination, while meanwhile even the faithful Arlene grows disenchanted (``You're prejudiced and you have a potty mouth'').

Will the movie play for audiences who don't remember Watergate--for teenage Kirsten Dunst fans? I think so, because it contains all the information the audience really needs to know, although older viewers will enjoy the wealth of cross-references, as when the Plumbers offer Nixon menus of dirty tricks. ``Dick'' is a sly little comic treasure.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 6.1/10 (7,541 votes)
SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by Abortion Angel

#181 Home Alone (1990)
Chris Columbus
Running time - 103 mins
Country of origin USA
Genre Comedy / Crime / Family
Original language English

Writing credits
John Hughes

Cast
Macaulay Culkin ... Kevin
Joe Pesci ... Harry
Daniel Stern ... Marv
John Heard ... Peter
Roberts Blossom ... Marley

BY ROGER EBERT / November 14, 1990

`Home Alone" is a splendid movie title because it evokes all sorts of scary nostalgia. Being left home alone, when you were a kid, meant hearing strange noises and being afraid to look in the basement - but it also meant doing all the things that grownups would tell you to stop doing, if they were there. Things like staying up to watch Johnny Carson, eating all the ice cream, and sleeping in your parents' bed.

"Home Alone" is about an 8-year-old hero who does all of those things, but unfortunately he also single-handedly stymies two house burglars by booby-trapping the house. And they're the kinds of traps that any 8-year-old could devise, if he had a budget of tens of thousands of dollars and the assistance of a crew of movie special effects people.

The movie's screenplay is by John Hughes, who sometimes shows a genius for remembering what it was like to be young. His best movies, such as "Sixteen Candles," "Breakfast Club," "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" and "Planes, Trains and Automobiles," find a way to be funny while still staying somewhere within the boundaries of remote plausibility. This time, he strays so far from his premise that the movie suffers.

If "Home Alone" had limited itself to the things that might possibly happen to a forgotten 8-year-old, I think I would have liked it more. What I didn't enjoy was the subplot involving the burglars (Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern), who are immediately spotted by little Kevin (Macaulay Culkin), and made the targets of his cleverness.

The movie opens in the Chicago suburbs with a houseful of people on the eve of a big family Christmas vacation in Paris. There are relatives and kids everywhere, and when the family oversleeps and has to race to the airport, Kevin is somehow overlooked in the shuffle. When he wakes up later that morning, the house is empty. So he makes the best of it.

A real kid would probably be more frightened than this movie character, and would probably cry. He might also try calling someone, or asking a neighbor for help. But in the contrived world of this movie, the only neighbor is an old coot who is rumored to be the Snow Shovel Murderer, and the phone doesn't work. When Kevin's parents discover they've forgotten him, they find it impossible to get anyone to follow through on their panicked calls - if anyone did so, the movie would be over.

The plot is so implausible that it makes it hard for us to really care about the plight of the kid. What works in the other direction, however, and almost carries the day, is the gifted performance by young Macaulay Culkin, as Kevin. Culkin is the little boy who co-starred with John Candy in "Uncle Buck," and here he has to carry almost the whole movie. He has lots of challenging acting scenes, and he's up to them. I'm sure he got lots of help from director Chris Columbus, but he's got the stuff to begin with. He's such a confident and gifted little actor that I'd like to see him in a story I could care more about.

"Home Alone" isn't that story. When the burglars invade Kevin's home, they find themselves running a gamut of booby traps so elaborate they could have been concocted by Rube Goldberg - or by the berserk father in "Last House on the Left." Because all plausibility is gone, we sit back, detached, to watch stunt men and special effects guys take over a movie that promised to be the kind of story audiences could identify with.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 6.1/10 (7,541 votes)
SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by StPhone

SOMB rightly shocked into silence by the last one. Bedtime.

what the fuck. what the fuck what the fuck

what the fuck. what the fuck what the fuck

i'd be lying if i said i wasn't worried about the fate of lost in new york

god having the last post on both boards makes me want to drink pesticide

I'm all about the last two films on this list.

I thought somb didn't like heartwarming movies or William Hurt.

This thing is making my list of movies to watch quite expanded. Thanks, guys!

#180Defending Your Life (1991)
Albert Brooks
Running time - 112 mins
Country of origin USA
Genre Comedy / Fantasy / Romance
Original language English

Writing credits
Albert Brooks

Cast
Albert Brooks ... Daniel Miller
Michael Durrell ... Agency head
Meryl Streep ... Julia
James Eckhouse ... Jeep owner
Gary Beach ... Car salesman

BY ROGER EBERT / April 5, 1991

Arecent survey indicated that most Americans believe in heaven and hell, and of those who believe, the overwhelming majority expect to find themselves in heaven after they die. Since many of them obviously deserve to go to the other place, if only for owning cars with burglar alarms that go off in the middle of the night, a movie like "Defending Your Life" makes perfect sense.

It is Albert Brooks' notion in this film that after death we pass on to a sort of heavenly way station where we are given the opportunity to defend our actions during our most recent lifetime.

The process is like an American courtroom, with a prosecutor, defense attorney and judge, but the charges against us are never quite spelled out. The basic question seems to be, are we sure we did our best, given our opportunities? In the movie, Brooks plays Dan Miller, a successful exec who takes delivery on a new BMW and plows it into a bus while trying to adjust the CD player. He awakens in a place named Judgment City, which resembles those blandly modern office and hotel complexes around big airports. He's given a room in a clean but spartan place that looks franchised by Motel 6.

At first Dan is understandably dazed at finding himself dead, but the staff takes good care of him. He's dressed in a flowing gown, whisked around the property on a bus, and told he can eat all he wants in the cafeteria (where the food is delicious but contains no calories). Then he meets his genial, avuncular defense attorney (Rip Torn), and his hard-edged prosecutor (Lee Grant). It's time for the courtroom, in which we see flashbacks to Dan's life as he tries to explain himself.

This is a perfect story notion for Brooks, whose movies always involve his insecurities about himself, his relationships, and his material possessions. (Who can forget the moment in "Lost in America" when he mercilessly blasted his wife for gambling away their nest egg?) But his notion would finally have no place to go if Brooks didn't add a romantic subplot, in which he falls in love with another sojourner in Judgment City.

She is a sweet, open-faced, serene young woman named Julia and played, of course, by Meryl Streep, who is the only actress capable of providing the character's Streepian qualities. They fall into like with one another. Dan visits her hotel and is dismayed to discover that she has much better facilities than he does - Four Seasons instead of Motel 6 - and he wonders if maybe your hotel assignment is a clue about how well you lived your past life. But nobody in Judgment City will give him a straight answer to a question like that.

The movie is funny in a warm, fuzzy way, and it has a splendidly satisfactory ending, which is unusual for an Albert Brooks film (his inspiration in his earlier films is bright but seems to wear thin toward the third act). The best thing about the movie, I think, is the notion of Judgment City itself. Doesn't it make sense that heaven, for each society, would be a place much like the Earth that it knows? We're still stuck with images of angels playing harps, which worked fine for Renaissance painters. But isn't our modern world ready for images in which the angels look like Rotarians and CEOs? Stanley Kubrick's "2001" ended with the astronaut leaving the solar system and finding himself, quite unexpectedly, in a spotless hotel room. The usual explanation for that scene is that a superior race from elsewhere in the universe had constructed this room for him as a place where he would feel at home, while they studied him - much as a zoo throws in some trees for the monkeys. The best joke in "Defending Your Life" is that heaven is run along the lines that would be recommended by a good MBA program.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.0/10 (4,513 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by Elcorazon

#179 Apollo 13 (1995)
Ron Howard
Running time - 140 mins
Country of origin USA
Genre Adventure / Drama / History
Original language English

Writing credits
Jim Lovell, Jeffrey Kluger, William Broyles Jr., Al Reinert

Cast
Tom Hanks ... Jim Lovell
Bill Paxton ... Fred Haise
Kevin Bacon ... Jack Swigert
Gary Sinise ... Ken Mattingly
Ed Harris ... Gene Kranz
Kathleen Quinlan ... Marilyn Lovell

Academy Awards
Won: Best Film Editing, Best Sound
Nominations: Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Ed Harris), Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Kathleen Quinlan), Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Best Effects - Visual Effects, Best Music - Original Dramatic Score, Best Picture, Best Writing - Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium

Other awards
Won: BAFTA Film Award Best Achievement in Special Effects, Best Production Design
Nominations: BAFTA Film Award Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Sound. Golden Globe Best Director, Best Motion Picture - Drama, Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture (Ed Harris), Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture (Kathleen Quinlan)

BY ROGER EBERT / June 30, 1995

There is a moment early in "Apollo 13" when astronaut Jim Lovell is taking some press on a tour of the Kennedy Space Center, and he brags that they have a computer "that fits in one room and can send out millions of instructions." And I'm thinking to myself, hell, I'm writing this review on a better computer than the one that got us to the moon.

"Apollo 13" inspires many reflections, and one of them is that America's space program was achieved with equipment that would look like tin cans today. Like Lindbergh, who crossed the Atlantic in the first plane he could string together that might make it, we went to the moon the moment we could, with the tools that were at hand.

Today, with new alloys, engines, fuels, computers and technology, it would be safer and cheaper - but we have lost the will.

"Apollo 13" never really states its theme, except perhaps in one sentence of narration at the end, but the whole film is suffused with it: The space program was a really extraordinary thing, something to be proud of, and those who went into space were not just "heroes," which is a cliche, but brave and resourceful.

Those qualities were never demonstrated more dramatically than in the flight of the 13th Apollo mission in April, 1970, when an oxygen tank exploded en route to the moon. The three astronauts on board - Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert - were faced with the possibility of becoming marooned in space. Their oxygen could run out, they could be poisoned by carbon dioxide accumulations, or they could freeze to death. If somehow they were able to return to the Earth's atmosphere, they had to enter at precisely the right angle.

Too steep an entry, and they would be incinerated; too shallow, and they would skip off the top of the atmosphere like a stone on a pond, and fly off forever into space.

Ron Howard's film of this mission is directed with a single-mindedness and attention to detail that makes it riveting. He doesn't make the mistake of adding cornball little subplots to popularize the material; he knows he has a great story, and he tells it in a docudrama that feels like it was filmed on location in outer space.

So convincing are the details, indeed, that I went back to look at "For All Mankind," the great 1989 documentary directed by ex-astronaut Al Reinert, who co-wrote "Apollo 13." It was an uncanny experience, like looking at the origins of the current picture.

Countless details were exactly the same: the astronauts boarding the spacecraft, the lift-off, the inside of the cabin, the view from space, the chilling sight of their oxygen supply venting into space, even the little tape recorder floating in free-fall, playing country music.

All these images are from the documentary, all look almost exactly the same in the movie, and that is why Howard has been at pains to emphasize that every shot in "Apollo 13" is new. No documentary footage was used. The special effects - models, animation, shots where the actors were made weightless by floating inside a descending airplane - have re-created the experience exactly.

The astronauts are played by Tom Hanks (Lovell), Bill Paxton (Haise) and Kevin Bacon (Swigert). The pilot originally scheduled for the Apollo 13 mission was Ken Mattingly (Gary Sinise), who was grounded because he had been exposed to the measles. The key figure at Houston Mission Control is Gene Kranz (Ed Harris). Cleancut, crew-cut, wearing white collars even in space, the astronauts had been built up in the public mind as supermen, but as Tom Wolfe's book and Phil Kaufman's movie "The Right Stuff" revealed, they were more likely to be hot-shot test pilots (with the exception of John Glenn) than straight arrows.

The movie begins with the surprise selection of Lovell's group to crew Apollo 13. We meet members of their families, particularly Marilyn Lovell (Kathleen Quinlan), we follow some of the training, and then the movie follows the ill-fated mission, in space and on the ground. Kranz, the Harris character, chain-smoking Camels, masterminds the ground effort to figure out how (and if) Apollo 13 can ever return.

A scheme is dreamed up to shut down power in the space capsule and move the astronauts into the lunar exploratory module, as a sort of temporary lifeboat. The lunar lander will be jettisoned at the last minute, and the main capsule's weakened batteries may have enough power left to allow the crew to return alive.

Meanwhile, the problem is to keep them from dying in space.

A scrubber to clean carbon dioxide from the capsule's air supply is jerry-built out of materials on board (and you can see a guy holding one just like it in "For All Mankind"). And you begin to realize, as the astronauts swing around the dark side of the moon and head for home, that, given the enormity of the task of returning to Earth, their craft and equipment is only a little more adequate than the rocket sled in which Evil Knievel proposed to hurtle across Snake River Canyon at about the same time.

Ron Howard has become a director who specializes in stories involving large groups of characters: "Cocoon," "Parenthood," "Backdraft," "The Paper." Those were all films that paid attention to the individual human stories involved; they were a triumph of construction, indeed, in keeping many stories afloat and interesting.

With "Apollo 13," he correctly decides that the story is in the mission. There is a useful counterpoint in the scenes involving Lovell's wife, waiting fearfully on the ground. (She tells their son, "Something broke on your daddy's spaceship, and he's going to have to turn around before he even gets to the moon.") But Howard adds no additional side stories, no little parallel dramas, as a lesser director might have.

This is a powerful story, one of the year's best films, told with great clarity and remarkable technical detail, and acted without pumped-up histrionics. It's about men trained to do a job, and doing a better one than anyone could have imagined. The buried message is: When we dialed down the space program, we lost something crucial to our vision. When I was a kid, they used to predict that by the year 2000, you'd be able to go to the moon. Nobody ever thought to predict that you'd be able to, but nobody would bother.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.5/10 (59,642 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by Worrywort

Back when Ron Howard could do no wrong, and didn't need "Arrested Development" to prove it.

#178 Microcosmos: Le peuple de l'herbe (1996)
Claude Nuridsany + Marie Pérennou
Running time - 80 mins
Country of origin USA
Genre France / Switzerland / Italy
Original language French

Writing credits
Claude Nuridsany
Marie Pérennou

Cast
Insects .. Themselves

Other awards
Won: Cannes Film Festival Technical Grand Prize

BY ROGER EBERT / January 10, 1997

There are so many different insect species that there's a famous scientific quip: Essentially *all* species are insects. Their biomass -- the combined weight of the creepy-crawly things -- is many times greater than the combined weight of everything that swims, flies, walks and makes movies. Insects are the great success story on planet Earth; they were here before we arrived and will remain long after we've gone, inhabiting their worlds of mindless and intricate beauty.

Children, being built nearer to the ground and having more time on their hands, are close observers of ants and spiders, caterpillars and butterflies. Adults tune them out; bugs are things you slap, swat, step on or spray. "Microcosmos" is an amazing film that allows us to peer deeply into the insect world and marvel at creatures we casually condemn to squishing. The makers of this film took three years to design their closeup cameras and magnifying lenses, and to photograph insects in such brilliant detail that if they were cars, we could read their city stickers.

The movie is a work of art and whimsy as much as one of science. It uses only a handful of words, but is generous with music and amplified sound effects, dramatizing the unremitting struggle of survival that goes on in a meadow in France. If a camera could somehow be transported to another planet, in order to photograph alien life forms, would the result be any more astonishing than these invasions into the private lives of snails and bees, mantises and beetles, spiders and flies?

Where did these forms come from? These legs -- two, four, six, a thousand? Eyes like bombardier's turrets? Giant pincers? Honeyed secretions? Metamorphoses from a wormy crawling thing into a glorious flying thing? Grasshoppers that look like plants, and beetles that look like ants? Every one of these amazing creatures represents a successful Darwinian solution to the problem of how to reproduce and make a living. And so do we.

One beautiful creature after another takes the screen. There is a parade of caterpillars. A dung beetle, tirelessly moving his treasure. Two snails engaging in a long and very loving wet kiss. Spiders methodically capturing and immobilizing their prey (what a horrible fate; does the victim understand what has happened to it?). Ants construct lives of meticulous order and then a hungry pheasant comes along and gobbles up thousands of them. More ants construct more anthills, flawless in design and function, and then the hills are bombed by raindrops that look to them as big as beach balls.

There is a fight to the death between two beetles, and their struggle looks as gargantuan as the battling dinosaurs in "Jurassic Park." There are tiny insects who live in, on and for the nectar supplied by plants that are perfectly designed for them. Ladybugs seem so ill-designed to fly that every takeoff seems like a clumsy miracle; do they get sweaty palms? Overhead there is a towering canopy of jungle foliage, consisting of the grasses and flowers of the meadow.

See whatever other movies you want to this year. "Microcosmos'' is in a category of its own. There is no other film like it. If the movies allow us to see places we have not visited and people we do not know, then "Microcosmos'' dramatically extends the range of our vision, allowing us to see the world of the creatures who most completely and enduringly inhabit the Earth.

Sometimes the closeup cameras are almost embarrassingly intimate; should we blush, to see these beings engaged in their crucial daily acts of dining, loving, fighting, being born and dying? You may leave this movie feeling a little like a god. Or like a big, inelegant and energy-inefficient hunk of clunky design. Of course, we're smart and they're not. We know the insects exist, and they don't know we exist. Or need to.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.9/10 (3,196 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by Elemeno P.T.

This statement is disturbing on so many levels.

#177 Jerry Maguire (1996)
Cameron Crowe
Running time - 139 mins
Country of origin USA
Genre Comedy / Drama / Romance / Sport
Original language English

Writing credits
Cameron Crowe

Cast
Tom Cruise ... Jerry Maguire
Cuba Gooding Jr. ... Rod Tidwell
Renée Zellweger ... Dorothy Boyd
Kelly Preston ... Avery Bishop
Jerry O'Connell ... Frank Cushman

Academy Awards
Won: Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Cuba Gooding Jr.)
Nominations: Best Actor in a Leading Role (Tom Cruise), Best Film Editing, Best Picture, Best Writing - Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen

Other awards
Won: Golden Globe Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Comedy/Musical (Tom Cruise)
Nominations: Golden Globe Best Motion Picture - Comedy/Musical, Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture (Cuba Gooding Jr.)

BY ROGER EBERT / December 13, 1996

There are a couple of moments in ``Jerry Maguire'' when you want to hug yourself with delight. One comes when a young woman stands up in an office where a man has just been fired because of his ethics, and says, yes, she'll follow him out of the company. The other comes when she stands in her kitchen and tells her older sister that she really, truly, loves a man with her whole heart and soul.

Both of those moments involve the actress Renee Zellweger, whose lovability is one of the key elements in a movie that starts out looking cynical and quickly becomes a heartwarmer.

The man she follows, and loves, is Jerry Maguire (Tom Cruise), a high-powered pro sports agent who has so many clients he can't really care about any of them. He spends most of his time as a road warrior, one of those dogged joggers you see in airports, racking up the frequent flyer miles in pursuit of the excellence they read about in pinbrained best-sellers. One night he has a panic attack in a lonely hotel room, and writes a memo titled ``The Things We Think and Do Not Say: The Future of Our Business.'' One of the things he thinks is that agents should be less concerned about money and more concerned about their clients. That gets him a standing ovation in the office, but a few days later, when he's fired, he understands why agents do not say those things they think. Maguire stages a grandstand exit (his decision to take along the office goldfish plays awkwardly, however). But when he asks who's walking out with him, only Dorothy, an accountant he's met just once at the airport, stands up and says she believes in him. Dorothy is a widow with a cute little son (maybe just a mite too cute).

She also has an outspoken older sister, played by Bonnie Hunt with her usual exuberance and ironic cheer (she's almost always a delight to watch). The sisters live together in a house where the living room seems to be semipermanently filled by a kvetching self-help group for divorced women, who spend all of their time talking about men. Someone should tell them that resentment is just a way of letting someone else use your mind rent-free.

Only one client doesn't dump Maguire when the agency boots him out. That's Rod Tidwell (Cuba Gooding Jr.), a wide receiver for Arizona, who resents the crappy waterbed commercials Maguire puts him in, but sticks with him anyway. Rod's wife Marcee (Regina King) is her husband's shrewdest defender and biggest fan, and their marriage is a true love story--in contrast to Maguire's failing engagement to the power-mad Avery Bishop (Kelly Preston).

Avery is soon out of the picture, Dorothy begins to look less like an accountant and more like the most wonderful woman in the world, and under the influence of his ennobling new feelings, Jerry helps Rod learn to play from the heart and not just from the mind and the pocketbook. And somewhere along in there I began to feel that writer-director Cameron Crowe had bitten off more than he really needed to chew. The screenplay knows enough about sports agents to make that the subject of the whole film, and enough about romance, too, but there are so many subplots that ``Jerry Maguire'' seems too full: Less might have been more.

Still, the film is often a delight, especially when Cruise and Zellweger are together on the screen. He plays Maguire with the earnestness of a man who wants to find greatness and happiness in an occupation where only success really counts. She plays a woman who believes in this guy she loves, and reminds us that true love is about idealism. (Remember Franklin McCormick years ago on the all-night radio? ``I love you because of who you are--and who I am when I am with you.'') The actual sports scenes are more predictable (right down to and including the big play that settles the season). But Cuba Gooding Jr., so strong in ``Boyz N the Hood,'' is fine here in a much different role. Finally the movie is about transformation: About two men who learn how to value something more important than money, and about two women who always knew.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.2/10 (51,978 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - 368

Ranked highest by DerryDukes

Jerry Maguire finishing higher than Man on the Moon on a supposedly indie website? Andy Kaufman spinneth in his grave.

He would do if he was dead.

Jerry Maguire's slick shit, way too slick for my tastes, but I wasn't crazy about Man on the Moon either. The actors had their hearts in it, but Forman and his writers didn't, they just ran through the highlights of his life without saying much.

Jerry Maguire is getting to be sort of underrated, actually.

In my defense:

1. I only had it ranked #30.

2. Call me a spaz but as the parent of a kid in sports, this fact-based story was fairly inspirational.

3. Who here can honestly say that toward the end of The Return of the King when Samwise tearfully lifted Frodo and carried him those final thousand yards up Mount Doom, you didn't think to yourself, "RUDY! RUDY! RUDY!"

Apologizing for liking Rudy is ridiculous.

Great fucking movie.

I enjoyed Velocity's endearing defense of Rudy. Nicely.


And yes, during Return of the King, I did have a moment where I thought, OMGWTFLOL--this is nearly as gay as Rudy.

I loved Jerry Maguire and Rudy.

Meeting the real life Rudy, otoh, was somewhat of a letdown.

I think Jerry Maguire is one of those movies that has a lot to do with what age you were when you saw it for the first time. But there are lines in it that crack me up...everyone has their own frame of reference.

Cuba Gooding's best performance. By far.

It's a typical Cameron Crowe flick, which means it's a really well done chick flick, disguised enough so that most guys don't realize it until after the fact.

I wish they would've kept everything the same but named it Dicky Fox.

agreed. (and it's def better than Man on the Moon, which is just a flat re-telling of someone's life that offers little reason for non-fanboys to care.) (p.s. rudy blows)

Check out this page about Dicky Fox. Includes what became of his character and who played him:

http://www.tcnj.edu/~rgraham/2004/04/unsun...rry-maguire.php

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vdd9Pr9VTKM

Apropos of nothing, seeing Jerry Maguire on this list (a nice film) reminded me of how much I despise Elizabethtown.

That is easily among the worst movies of the 21st century.

Nevermind.

What wonderful praise for the winner of the academy award.

Can't wait until this list continues.

#176 Titanic (1997)
James Cameron
Running time -194 mins
Country of origin USA
Genre Adventure / Drama / Romance
Original language English / French / German / Swedish / Italian / Russian

Writing credits
James Cameron

Cast
Leonardo DiCaprio ... Jack Dawson
Kate Winslet ... Rose DeWitt Bukater
Billy Zane ... Caledon 'Cal' Hockley
Kathy Bates ... Molly Brown
Frances Fisher ... Ruth Dewitt Bukater

Academy Awards
Won 11, Nominated for a further three details


BY ROGER EBERT / December 19, 1997

Like a great iron Sphinx on the ocean floor, the Titanic faces still toward the West, interrupted forever on its only voyage. We see it in the opening shots of ``Titanic,'' encrusted with the silt of 85 years; a remote-controlled TV camera snakes its way inside, down corridors and through doorways, showing us staterooms built for millionaires and inherited by crustaceans.

These shots strike precisely the right note; the ship calls from its grave for its story to be told, and if the story is made of showbiz and hype, smoke and mirrors--well, so was the Titanic. She was ``the largest moving work of man in all history,'' a character boasts, neatly dismissing the Pyramids and the Great Wall. There is a shot of her, early in the film, sweeping majestically beneath the camera from bow to stern, nearly 900 feet long and ``unsinkable,'' it was claimed, until an iceberg made an irrefutable reply.

James Cameron's 194-minute, $200 million film of the tragic voyage is in the tradition of the great Hollywood epics. It is flawlessly crafted, intelligently constructed, strongly acted and spellbinding. If its story stays well within the traditional formulas for such pictures, well, you don't choose the most expensive film ever made as your opportunity to reinvent the wheel.

We know before the movie begins that certain things must happen. We must see the Titanic sail and sink, and be convinced we are looking at a real ship. There must be a human story--probably a romance--involving a few of the passengers. There must be vignettes involving some of the rest and a subplot involving the arrogance and pride of the ship's builders--and perhaps also their courage and dignity. And there must be a reenactment of the ship's terrible death throes; it took two and a half hours to sink, so that everyone aboard had time to know what was happening, and to consider their actions.

All of those elements are present in Cameron's ``Titanic,'' weighted and balanced like ballast, so that the film always seems in proportion. The ship was made out of models (large and small), visual effects and computer animation. You know intellectually that you're not looking at a real ocean liner--but the illusion is convincing and seamless. The special effects don't call inappropriate attention to themselves but get the job done.

The human story involves an 17-year-old woman named Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet) who is sailing to what she sees as her own personal doom: She has been forced by her penniless mother to become engaged to marry a rich, supercilious snob named Cal Hockley (Billy Zane), and so bitterly does she hate this prospect that she tries to kill herself by jumping from the ship. She is saved by Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio), a brash kid from steerage, and of course they will fall in love during the brief time left to them.

The screenplay tells their story in a way that unobtrusively shows off the ship. Jack is invited to join Rose's party at dinner in the first class dining room, and later, fleeing from Cal's manservant, Lovejoy (David Warner), they find themselves first in the awesome engine room, with pistons as tall as churches, and then at a rousing Irish dance in the crowded steerage. (At one point Rose gives Lovejoy the finger; did young ladies do that in 1912?) Their exploration is intercut with scenes from the command deck, where the captain (Bernard Hill) consults with Andrews (Victor Garber), the ship's designer and Ismay (Jonathan Hyde), the White Star Line's managing director.

Ismay wants the ship to break the trans-Atlantic speed record. He is warned that icebergs may have floated into the hazardous northern crossing but is scornful of danger. The Titanic can easily break the speed record but is too massive to turn quickly at high speed; there is an agonizing sequence that almost seems to play in slow motion, as the ship strains and shudders to turn away from an iceberg in its path--and fails.

We understand exactly what is happening at that moment because of an ingenious story technique by Cameron, who frames and explains the entire voyage in a modern story. The opening shots of the real Titanic, we are told, are obtained during an expedition led by Brock Lovett (Bill Paxton), an undersea explorer. He seeks precious jewels but finds a nude drawing of a young girl. Meanwhile, an ancient woman sees the drawing on TV and recognizes herself. This is Rose (Gloria Stuart), still alive at 101. She visits Paxton and shares her memories (``I can still smell the fresh paint''). And he shows her video scenes from his explorations, including a computer simulation of the Titanic's last hours--which doubles as a briefing for the audience. By the time the ship sinks, we already know what is happening and why, and the story can focus on the characters while we effortlessly follow the stages of the Titanic's sinking.

Movies like this are not merely difficult to make at all, but almost impossible to make well. The technical difficulties are so daunting that it's a wonder when the filmmakers are also able to bring the drama and history into proportion. I found myself convinced by both the story and the saga. The setup of the love story is fairly routine, but the payoff--how everyone behaves as the ship is sinking--is wonderfully written, as passengers are forced to make impossible choices. Even the villain, played by Zane, reveals a human element at a crucial moment (despite everything, damn it all, he does love the girl).

The image from the Titanic that has haunted me, ever since I first read the story of the great ship, involves the moments right after it sank. The night sea was quiet enough so that cries for help carried easily across the water to the lifeboats, which drew prudently away. Still dressed up in the latest fashions, hundreds froze and drowned. What an extraordinary position to find yourself in after spending all that money for a ticket on an unsinkable ship.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.1/10 (143,491 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by Helmet 52

Awesome. I wish Mitchell would've used this instead for the review. Or the poster.

haven't watched it since the millennium, don't think, but seriously fuck anyone who rips on Titanic

Your reactions mirror the nuanced subtleties of your choices, dude.

With all due respect GDB, your remarks fail to deter me.

Well, fuck me then. Saw this in the theater with a date and then watched some of it a few years ago.

1) It's way too long.

2) It's way too boring.

3) I don't care if anyone on the boat lives (in fact, I'm hoping for death for most of them).

4) Billy Zane is one of the most carbon copy character I've ever seen.



THIS MOVIE BLOWS!