Yeah, I'm kind of wishing I'd made it #1 instead of #2. Need to re-watch soon.

His 2004 movie Nobody Knows was also pretty amazing. Wish he didnt work so slowly.

It's pretty great, but there is no way it's better than Tap

I meant best thing he's directed. Tap was Rob Reiner.

I'd agree that it's the best he's directed, but I wouldn't say it's "by far" better than Best In Show.

Two things come to mind when I think about this flick. First, Straight (irl) was a complete asshole and even though he made the trip. His brother never came out of the house so the whole happy ending tapped on here is merely another storybook Hollywood ending. Second thing is a friend of mine who was starting out in production and she turned this down when she got an offer to work on it. Even now I can't help but think of how dumb a move that was.

#070 The Insider (1999) 10 Votes, 1866 points
Michael Mann
Running time - 157 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Biography / Drama / History / Thriller
Original language English / Japanese / Arabic

Writing Credits
Marie Brenner, Eric Roth, Michael Mann

Cast
Al Pacino ... Lowell Bergman
Russell Crowe ... Jeffrey Wigand
Christopher Plummer ... Mike Wallace
Diane Venora ... Liane Wigand
Philip Baker Hall ... Don Hewitt

Academy Awards
Nominated: Best Actor in a Leading Role (Russell Crowe), Best Cinematography, Best Director, Best Editing, Best Picture, Best Sound, Best Writing - Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published

Other awards
Nominated: BAFTA Film Award Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role (Russell Crowe). Golden Globe Best Director - Motion Picture, Best Motion Picture - Drama, Best Original Score - Motion Picture, Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama (Russell Crowe)

Best Screenplay - Motion Picture

BY ROGER EBERT / November 5, 1999

Michael Mann's "The Insider" makes a thriller and expose out of how big tobacco's long-running tissue of lies was finally exposed by investigative journalism. At its center stands Lowell Bergman, a producer for "60 Minutes," the CBS News program where a former tobacco scientist named Jeffrey Wigand spilled the beans. First Bergman coaxes Wigand to talk. Then he works with reporter Mike Wallace to get the story. Then he battles with CBS executives who are afraid to run it--because a lawsuit could destroy the network. He's a modern investigative hero, Woodward and Bernstein rolled into one.

Or so the film tells it. The film is accurate in its broad strokes. Wigand did indeed reveal secrets from the Brown & Williamson laboratories that eventually led to a $246 billion settlement of suits brought against the tobacco industry by all 50 states. "60 Minutes" did eventually air the story, after delays and soul-searching. And reporting by the Wall Street Journal was instrumental in easing the network's decision to air the piece.

But there are ways in which the film is misleading, according to a helpful article in the magazine Brill's Content. Mike Wallace was more of a fighter, less Bergman's puppet. "60 Minutes" executive producer Don Hewitt didn't willingly cave in to corporate pressure, but was powerless. The Wall Street Journal's coverage was not manipulated by Bergman, but was independent (and won a Pulitzer Prize). Bergman didn't mastermind a key Mississippi lawsuit or leak a crucial deposition. And the tobacco industry did not necessarily make death threats against Wigand (his former wife believes he put a bullet in his mailbox himself).

Do these objections invalidate the message of the film? Not at all. And they have no effect on its power to absorb, entertain and anger. They go with the territory in a docudrama like this, in which characters and narrative are manipulated to make the story stronger. The Brill's Content piece, useful as it is, makes a fundamental mistake: It thinks that Lowell Bergman is the hero of "The Insider" because he fed his version of events to Mann and his co-writer, Eric Roth. In fact, Bergman is the hero because he is played by Al Pacino, the star of the film, and thus must be the hero. A movie like this demands only one protagonist. If Pacino had played Mike Wallace instead, then Wallace would have been the hero.

The decision to center on a producer, to go behind the scenes, is a good one, because it allows the story to stand outside Wallace and Hewitt and consider larger questions than tobacco. The movie switches horses in midstream, moving from the story of a tobacco cover-up to a crisis in journalistic ethics. Did CBS oppose the story only because it feared a lawsuit, or were other factors involved, such as the desire of executives to protect the price of their stock as CBS was groomed for sale to Westinghouse? The movie is constructed like a jigsaw puzzle in which various pieces keep disappearing from the table. It begins when Bergman hires Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe) as a consultant on another tobacco story. He learns that Wigand possesses information from the tobacco industry not only proving that nicotine is addictive (which the presidents of seven cigarette companies had denied under oath before Congress), but that additives were used to make it more addictive--and one of the additives was a known carcinogen! Wigand has signed a confidentiality agreement with B&W, and Bergman somehow has to get around that promise if the truth is going to be revealed.

Mann is able to build suspense while suggesting what a long, slow, frustrating process investigative journalism can be. Wigand dances toward a disclosure, then away. Bergman works behind the scenes to manipulate lawsuits and the coverage of the Wall Street Journal (these scenes are mostly fictional, we learn). He hopes to leak parts of the story in truncated form so that he's free to expose its full glory. Mike Wallace (Christopher Plummer) is beside him all the way, finally zeroing in on Wigand in one of those interviews where shocking statements are given little pools of silence to glisten in. Then a corporate lawyer (Gina Gershon) explains the law to the "60 Minutes" gang: The more truthful Wigand's statements, the more damaging they are in a lawsuit. "60 Minutes" boss Don Hewitt (Philip Baker Hall) sides with the network, and Bergman is blindsided when Wallace at first sides with Hewitt.

It's then that Bergman goes to work behind the scenes, leaking information and making calls to competitors to blast the story lose from legal constraints. And these are the scenes that owe the most to Hollywood invention; the chronology is manipulated, and actions of key players get confused. There is an underlying truth, however: "60 Minutes" did eventually find a way to air its original story, through the device of reporting about how it couldn't--a report that had the effect of breaking the logjam.

Hewitt, one of the patron saints of investigative journalism, is portrayed as too much of a corporate lackey, but Wallace's image emerges intact in a wonderful scene where Hewitt says the whole matter will blow over in 15 minutes, and Wallace says, "No, that's fame. You get 15 minutes of fame. Infamy lasts a little longer." Pacino's performance underlies everything. He makes Bergman hoarse, overworked, stubborn and a master of psychological manipulation who inexorably draws Wigand toward the moment of truth. Pacino can be flashy, mannered, over the top, in roles that call for it; this role calls for a dogged crusader, and he supplies a character who is always convincing.

There is, I admit, a contradiction in a film about journalism that itself manipulates the facts. My notion has always been that movies are not the first place you look for facts, anyway. You attend a movie for psychological truth, for emotion, for the heart of a story and not its footnotes. In its broad strokes, "The Insider" is perfectly accurate: Big tobacco lied, one man had damning information, skilled journalism developed the story, intrigue helped blast it free. "The Insider" had a greater impact on me than "All the President's Men," because you know what? Watergate didn't kill my parents. Cigarettes did.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.9/10 (46,644 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #173

Ranked highest by Undo (#8)

I have to agree w/Slakmo
Guffman is still awesome

The My Dinner With Andre action figures bit slays me every time.

#069 Carlito's Way (1993) 3 Votes, 1870 points
Brian De Palma
Running time - 144 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Crime / Drama / Thriller
Original language English / Spanish

Writing Credits
Edwin Torres, David Koepp

Cast
Al Pacino ... Carlito 'Charlie' Brigante
Sean Penn ... David Kleinfeld
Penelope Ann Miller ... Gail
John Leguizamo ... Benny Blanco
Luis Guzmán ... Pachanga


Other awards
Nominated: Golden Globe Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture (Sean Penn), Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture (Penelope Ann Miller)

BY ROGER EBERT / November 12, 1993

Ten years after they made "Scarface," Al Pacino and director Brian De Palma are back with "Carlito's Way," another large-canvas portrait of a professional criminal. Carlito Brigante, is older and wiser, however, than "Scarface's" Tony Montana, and for a time seems to be luckier.

He's a New Yorker with a Puerto Rican background, a drug dealer who was big in the barrio before he got sent up for 30 years.

We meet him at the legal hearing that will free him after only five years, on a technicality. His lawyer, a flashy lowlife named Kleinfeld (Sean Penn), sits by with a smirk as Carlito expansively addresses the judge and courtroom on the lessons to be learned by his release.

The speech paints him as a self-righteous blowhard and something of a showboat, but we begin to see a deeper side of Carlito as he returns to the streets where he was once famous. Facing 30 years in prison, where he expected to die, he got a chance to do some thinking, and now he decides he wants to go straight. A friend has offered him a share in a car rental business in the Bahamas.

To finance his investment, Carlito takes a job at a flashy nightclub, where he's thrown into contact with all the people he should avoid the most. And he meets a young punk who always introduces himself as "Benny Blanco from the Bronx" (John Leguizamo), the kind of hothead Carlito once was. Benny brings out the worst in him.

The movie is narrated by Carlito himself, who explains his hopes, his strategies, and especially his mistakes. One of those is surely to have chosen Kleinfeld as his lawyer. The acting here, by Sean Penn, is a virtuoso tour de force - one of those performances that takes on a life of its own. Penn is hardly recognizable beneath a head of balding, curly hair. He gives the lawyer a spoiled narcissism, a sneakiness and smarminess, and we watch him steadily losing control to cocaine and greed.

Carlito, on the other hand, tries to be a stand-up citizen.

He looks up an old girl friend named Gail (Penelope Ann Miller), who says she dances on Broadway but neglects to explain it's in a strip club. They love each other, after their fashion, but we never sense much depth in their relationship; each one is caught up in the details of personal survival.

Brian De Palma in his best films is a muscular director who relishes over-the-top behavior, and here he paints a gallery of colorful gangsters and lowlifes. The hoods in the movie look borrowed from a production of "Guys and Dolls," the nightclubs look recycled from "Saturday Night Fever," and Al Pacino himself seems to be inspired by his Oscar-winning role in "Scent of a Woman" (there are times when his Puerto Rican accent migrates uncannily toward the voice of the crusty military man he played in that film).

The film is fascinated by the mechanisms which propel a man back into the criminal life despite his best intentions to escape it.

Carlito wants only to keep his nose clean, make some money, and get out of town. But his values, his friends and his circles are criminal, and the screenplay paints him into an inevitable corner - he's betrayed by his compulsion to stand by his friends.

Two of the set-pieces in the film are among De Palma's best work. One involves an insane scheme by the lawyer to rescue a hood from the Riker's Island prison barge. The other is a cat-and-mouse chase leading to a shootout in Grand Central Station. There have been a lot of shootouts in railroad stations in the movies, mostly routine, but De Palma finds endless variations as Carlito tries to elude his pursuers. And the visuals are as striking as the ambush in Chicago's Union Station that was a high point o f De Palma's "The Untouchables." "Carlito's Way," like "Scarface," is first and last a character study, a portrait of a man who wants to be better than he is.

In "Scarface," the hero's ambitions led only to power, lust and greed. Here something more complicated is taking place; Carlito has grown enough to see himself from the outside, to understand some of the mistakes he made, to plot a way to escape from what seems like the inevitable fate of people in his position. Yet step by step and scene by scene, his fate is sealed.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.7/10 (29,108 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by Pavement Ist Rad (#1)

#068 The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) 10 Votes, 1879 points
Henry Selick
Running time - 76 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Animation / Family / Fantasy / Musical
Original language English

Writing Credits
Tim Burton, Michael McDowell, Caroline Thompson

Cast
Danny Elfman ... Jack Skellington (singing) / Barrel / Clown with the Tear away Face (voice)
Chris Sarandon ... Jack Skellington (voice)
Catherine O'Hara ... Sally / Shock (voice)
Greg Proops ... Harlequin Demon, Devil, Sax Player

Academy Awards
Nominated Best Effects - Visual Effects

Other awards
Nominated: Golden Globe Best Original Score - Motion Picture


BY ROGER EBERT / October 22, 1993

The movies can create entirely new worlds for us, but that is one of their rarest gifts. More often, directors go for realism, for worlds we can recognize. One of the many pleasures of "Tim Burton's the Nightmare Before Christmas" is that there is not a single recognizable landscape within it. Everything looks strange and haunting. Even Santa Claus would be difficult to recognize without his red-and-white uniform.

The movie, which tells the story of an attempt by Halloween to annex Christmas, is shot in a process called stop-action animation.

In an ordinary animated film, the characters are drawn. Here they are constructed, and then moved a little, frame by frame, so that they appear to live. This allows a three-dimensional world to be presented, instead of the flatter universe of cel animation. And it is a godsend for the animators of "Nightmare," who seem to have built their world from scratch - every house, every stick and stone - before sending their skeletal and rather pathetic little characters in to inhabit it.

The movie begins with the information that each holiday has its own town. Halloweentown, for example, is in charge of all the preparations for Halloween, and its most prominent citizen is a bony skeleton named Jack Skellington, whose moves and wardrobe seem influenced by Fred Astaire.

One day Jack stumbles into the wrong entryway in Halloweentown, and finds himself smack dab in the middle of preparations for Christmas. Now this, he realizes, is more like it! Instead of ghosts and goblins and pumpkins, there are jolly little helpers assisting Santa in his annual duty of bringing peace on earth and goodwill to men.

Back in Halloweentown, Jack Skellington feels a gnawing desire to better himself. To move up to a more important holiday, one that people take more seriously and enjoy more than Halloween. And so he engineers a diabolical scheme in which Santa is kidnapped, and Jack himself plays the role of Jolly Old St. Nick, while his helpers manufacture presents. (Some of the presents, when finally distributed to little girls and boys, are so hilariously ill-advised that I will not spoil the fun by describing them here.) Tim Burton, the director of "Beetlejuice," "Edward Scissorhands" and the "Batman" movies, has been creating this world in his head for about 10 years, ever since his mind began to stray while he was employed as a traditional animator on an unremarkable Disney project.

The story is centered on his favorite kind of character, a misfit who wants to do well, but has been gifted by fate with a quirky personality that people don't know how to take. Jack Skellington is the soul brother of Batman, Edward and the demon in "Beetlejuice" - a man for whom normal human emotions are a conundrum.

"The Nightmare Before Christmas" is a Tim Burton film in the sense that the story, its world and its look first took shape in Burton's mind, and he supervised their filming. But the director of the film, a veteran stop-action master named Henry Selick, is the person who has made it all work. And his achievement is enormous.

Working with gifted artists and designers, he has made a world here that is as completely new as the worlds we saw for the first time in such films as "Metropolis," "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" or "Star Wars." What all of these films have in common is a visual richness, so abundant that they deserve more than one viewing. First, go for the story. Then go back just to look in the corners of the screen, and appreciate the little visual surprises and inspirations that are tucked into every nook and cranny.

The songs by Danny Elfman are fun, too, a couple of them using lyrics so clever they could be updated from Gilbert & Sullivan. And the choreography, liberated from gravity and reality, has an energy of its own, as when the furniture, the architecture and the very landscape itself gets into the act.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 8.0/10 (41,543 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #265

Ranked highest by Agrimorfee and TJENZ (#5)

#067 The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) 10 Votes, 1901 points
Joel Coen + Ethan Coen
Running time - 111 min
Country of origin UK / Germany / USA
Genre Comedy / Drama / Fantasy / Romance
Original language English

Writing Credits
Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, Sam Raimi

Cast
Tim Robbins ... Norville Barnes
Jennifer Jason Leigh ... Amy Archer
Paul Newman ... Sidney J. Mussburger
Charles Durning ... Waring Hudsucker
John Mahoney ... Argus Chief Editor


Other awards
Nominated: Cannes Film Festival Golden Palm

BY ROGER EBERT / March 25, 1994

Two little creatures are perched on my shoulders, one whispering into each ear. One carries a pitchfork. The other has gossamer wings.

They are dictating this review of "The Hudsucker Proxy." Angel: This is the best-looking movie I've seen in years, a feast for the eyes and the imagination. The art direction and set design are breathtaking, re-creating the world of 1930s screwball comedy in which towering skyscrapers and vast boardrooms were the playing fields for the ambitions of corrupt executives, ambitious kids, unsung geniuses, and lady newspaper reporters with nails as sharp as their wisecracks.

Devil: But the problem with the movie is that it's all surface and no substance. Not even the slightest attempt is made to suggest that the film takes its own story seriously. Everything is style. The performances seem deliberately angled as satire.

Angel: But those performances are right on target. Tim Robbins stars, as a mailroom clerk who finds himself thrust into the presidency of the giant Hudsucker Corporation. Paul Newman is the gray eminence behind the scenes, who engineers Robbins' ascendancy because he believes the kid is hopelessly incompetent, and will drive the stock price down - just what Newman desires. And Jennifer Jason Leigh has been studying Rosalind Russell in "His Girl Friday," and has the part down perfect: The hard-bitten, fast-talking girl reporter who sits on your desk, lights a cigarette, and lays down the law. Devil: So what? Was there anyone in this movie to really care about? And did the screwball aspects of the story ever take hold? Screwball comedy needs a certain looseness, an anarchic spirit that's alien to the meticulous productions of the Coen Brothers, Joel and Ethan, who in this film as in their others ("Blood Simple," "Raising Arizona," "Miller's Crossing," "Barton Fink") seem to be so much in love with old movies that they shape their own ideas into the forms of films made before they were born.

Angel: Which brings me back to why I want to see the movie again. There is a grandness to the very conception of "The Hudsucker Proxy," which sets the stage in the opening sequence, as an executive jumps out of a skyscraper and the camera proceeds him in a headlong falls down what looks like a couple of hundred stories of terrifying free-fall, before . . . but you know the scene I mean. It was exhilarating.

Devil: But to what purpose other than pure style? And it's there a glitch between the movie's look and style, which are clearly 1930s Art Deco, and its claim to be set in the 1950s? Angel: Who really cares about stuff like that? Putting it in the 1950s allowed the Coens to have a lot of fun with the brainstorm of the Robbins character, who invents the hula hoop and makes untold billions for Hudsucker.

And the hula hoop, in turn, provides an excuse for a montage showing hoopery sweeping across America - a filmmaking device which the Coens somehow are able to exploit and kid at the same time.

Devil: Wouldn't it have been a little more fun, though, if the hula hoop came as a surprise? The ads and the poster for the Coens movie shows Robbins holding a big hula hoop, so walking into the theater, you know the secret. It's typical of their approach: They obviously think their plot is unimportant except as a clothesline for the visuals. And wasn't there something dead at the heart of all of this? A kind of chill in the air? A feeling that the movie was more thought than art, more calculated than inspired? Doesn't the viewer spend more time admiring the sights on the screen than caring about them? Isn't there something wrong when you walk out of a movie humming the sets? Angel: That's the tired old rap against the Coens, that they're all technique and no heart. How many movies do have heart these days? Not many. Most movies recycle tired old formulas; even a so-called Generation X rebel picture like "Reality Bites" is just a retread of a 1930s romantic comedy that could have played on the same double bill with whatever inspired "The Hudsucker Proxy." One good reason to go to the movies is to feast the eyes, even if the brain remains unchallenged. And "Hudsucker" is a pleasure to regard.

Devil: Unless you want something more from a movie.

The debate goes on. Just before they vaporized into thin air, the angel advised me to give "The Hudsucker Proxy" four stars, and the Devil, whispering that the Coens are talented but need to be prodded to go beyond their technical mastery, wickedly advised me to cut them off with zero. Having weighed all their advice, I have taken a middle position.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.4/10 (20,191 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #236

Ranked highest by Velocity (#3)

#066 Trois couleurs: Bleu (Three Colors: Blue) (1993) 10 Votes, 1901 points
Krzysztof Kieslowski
Running time - 100 min
Country of origin France / Poland / Switzerland / UK
Genre Drama / Music
Original language French / Romanian / Polish

Writing Credits
Krzysztof Kieslowski, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, Agnieszka Holland, Edward Zebrowski, Slawomir Idziak

Cast
Juliette Binoche ... Julie Vignon (de Courcy)
Benoît Régent ... Olivier
Florence Pernel ... Sandrine
Charlotte Véry ... Lucille
Hélène Vincent ... La journaliste


Other awards
Nominated: Golden Globe Best Foreign Language Film, Best Original Score - Motion Picture, Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama (Juliette Binoche)

BY ROGER EBERT / February 11, 1994

There is a kind of movie in which the characters are not thinking about anything. They are simply the instruments of the plot.

And another kind of movie in which we lean forward in our seats, trying to penetrate the mystery of characters who are obviously thinking a great deal. "Blue" is the second kind of film: The story of a woman whose husband dies, and who deals with that fact in unpredictable ways.

The woman, named Julie, is played by Juliette Binoche, whom you may remember from "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" or "Damage." In both of those films she projected a strong sexuality; this time, she seems to be beyond sex, as if it no longer has any reality for her. She lives in France and is married to a famous composer, who is killed in an auto crash early in the film. Now she must pick up the pieces of her life.

She doesn't do that in the ways we think she might. She is sad and shaken, but this is not a film about a grieving widow, and, indeed, by the way she behaves we can guess things about her marriage. One of her first acts, after the initial shock wears off, is to call a man who was a colleague of both her and her husband, and seduce him. "You have always wanted me," she says. "Here I am." This sequence is not played for shock, nor does it even seem especially disrespectful to the dead husband: She seems to be testing, to see if she can still feel. She cannot. She walks out on the man and moves to the center of Paris, to what she hopes is an anonymous apartment on an anonymous street. She doesn't want to see anybody she knows. She wants to walk through the streets free of her history, her memories, her identities. She wants to begin again, perhaps - or to be free of the need to begin.

Binoche has a face that is well-suited to this kind of role.

Because she can convince you that she is thinking and feeling, she doesn't need to "do" things in an obvious way. In the opening moments of "Damage," she saw the Jeremy Irons character for the first time, and they were both struck by a powerful physical passion. She projected this passion, not by overacting or acting at all, but (as nearly as I can tell) by looking at the camera and projecting the feeling without obvious external signs.

Here, too, her feelings are a mystery that her face will help us to solve. The film has been directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski, born in Poland, now working in France, and, in the opinion of some, the best active European filmmaker (he made "The Double Life of Veronique" two years ago). He trusts the human face, and watching his film, I remembered a conversation I had with Ingmar Bergman many years ago, in which he said there were many moments in films that could only be dealt with by a closeup of a face - the right face - and that too many directors tried instead to use dialogue or action.

Think of how we read the thoughts of those closest to us, in moments when words will not do. We look at their faces, and although they do not make any effort to mirror emotions there, we can read them all the same, in the smallest signs. A movie that invites us to do the same thing can be very absorbing.

Eventually there is a surprise. Julie meets a woman she did not know existed - her husband's mistress. The two women must deal with this discovery together. Watching this film, it was impossible not to think about "Intersection," the Hollywood weeper starring Richard Gere, Sharon Stone and Lolita Davidovich in an uncannily similar story of two women dealing with their love of the same man.

That film was an insult to the intelligence. This one, similar in superficial ways, is a challenge to the imagination. It's as if European films have a more adult, inward, knowing way of dealing with the emotions, and Hollywood hasn't grown up enough.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.8/10 (15,762 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #384

Ranked highest by 54Cermack (#6)

#065 Dumb and Dumber (1994) 10 Votes, 1910 points
Peter Farrelly + Bobby Farrelly
Running time - 107 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Comedy
Original language English / Swedish / German

Writing Credits
Peter Farrelly, Bennett Yellin, Bobby Farrelly

Cast
Jim Carrey ... Lloyd Christmas
Jeff Daniels ... Harry Dunne
Lauren Holly ... Mary Swanson
Mike Starr ... Joe 'Mental' Mentaliano
Victoria Rowell ... FBI Special Agent Beth Jordan


BY ROGER EBERT / December 16, 1994

The purpose of a comedy is to make you laugh, and there is a moment in "Dumb and Dumber" that made me laugh so loudly I embarrassed myself. I just couldn't stop. It's the moment involving the kid who gets the parakeet. But because I know that the first sentence of this review is likely to be lifted out and reprinted in an ad, I hasten to add that I did not laugh as loudly again, or very often. It's just as well. If the whole movie had been as funny as that moment, I would have required hospitalization.

The movie is more silliness from Jim Carrey, who is beginning to grow on me. It's strange. His mannerisms, instead of becoming more wearisome from film to film, grow more endearing. I hated him in "Ace Ventura," enjoyed him in "The Mask," and felt positively fond of him here. He plays a limousine driver whose roommate (Jeff Daniels) runs a dog-grooming service, although business is bad for both of them and they live in a dump. (At one point a gangster suggests trashing their apartment, and decides they wouldn't notice it.) As the movie opens, Carrey is driving a beautiful but troubled young woman (Lauren Holly) to the airport. He has fallen instantly in love with her. When he notices that she has left a briefcase on the terminal floor, he races into the building and snatches it - thus foiling a kidnap ransom payment. Trying to chase after her onto a flight to Aspen, he has a nasty accident that is the movie's second big laugh, although not nearly so big as the parakeet.

After developments that will be familiar to students of sitcom and other formula comedy, Carrey and Daniels find themselves heading west in their dogmobile (a van that looks like a shaggy dog).

They intend to drive to Aspen, find the woman, and return the briefcase. Along the way they have the usual obligatory run-in with some tough guys in a diner, are pulled over by the usual cop, and are chased by gangsters, etc., etc.

The cop gets a bad surprise when he tests what he thinks is an open bottle of beer, but that gag misfires because its final shot is just plain not funny. That happens several times in "Dumb and Dumber": The movie sets up a potentially good joke (like the one involving a megadose of laxative) and then doesn't know how to pay it off.

The plot is lame, but that doesn't matter, because "Dumb and Dumber" is essentially pitched at the level of an "Airplane!"-style movie, with rapid-fire sight gags. Some of them work, like the karate fight that ends with a guy getting his heart handed to him in a doggie bag. Some of them don't, like a curious scene where Carrey is hugging a girl and lifts the back of her skirt for no apparent reason: It seems creepy.

For Jeff Daniels, the role is a departure from his usual deadpan comedy roles and straight drama. He fits right in. The relationship between the two guys creates a lot of the fun, as they discuss their grim lifestyle and their bizarre plans to improve it.

The elements are here for a better movie, and Jim Carrey, I am now convinced, is a true original. In "The Mask," he had the screenplay and production to back him up. Here, the filmmaking is more uncertain.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 6.9/10 (52,217 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #321

Ranked highest by MitchellStirling (#6)

#064 La Haine (Hate) (1995) 7 Votes, 1943 points
Mathieu Kassovitz
Running time - 96 min
Country of origin France
Genre Crime / Drama
Original language French

Writing Credits
Mathieu Kassovitz

Cast
Vincent Cassel ... Vinz
Hubert Koundé ... Hubert
Saïd Taghmaoui ... Saïd
Abdel Ahmed Ghili ... Abdel
Solo ... Santo


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


BY ROGER EBERT / April 19, 1996

Mathieu Kassovitz is a 29-year-old French director who in his first twofilms has probed the wound of alienation among France's young outsiders. His newfilm ``Hate'' tells the story of three young men--an Arab, an African and aJew--who spend an aimless day in a sterile Paris suburb, as social turmoilswirls around them and they eventually get into a confrontation with the police.

If France is the man falling off the building, they are the sidewalk.

In Kassovitz's first film, ``Cafe au Lait'' (1994), he told the story ofa young woman from the Caribbean who summons her two boyfriends--one African,one Jewish--to announce that she is pregnant. That film, inspired by Spike Lee's``She's Gotta Have It,'' was more of a comedy, but with ``Hate,'' also aboutcharacters who are not ethnically French, he has painted a much darker vision.

In America, where for all of our problems, we are long accustomed tobeing a melting pot, it is hard to realize how monolithic most European nationshave been--especially France, where Frenchness is almost a cult, and a politicalleader like Jean-Marie Le Pen can roll up alarming vote totals with hisanti-Semitic, anti-immigrant diatribes. The French neo-Nazi right wing lurks inthe shadows of ``Hate,'' providing it with an unspoken subtext for its Frenchaudiences. (Imagine how a moviegoer from Mars would misread a film like``Driving Miss Daisy'' if he knew nothing about Southern segregation.) The three heroes of ``Hate'' are Vinz (Vincent Cassel), Jewish, workingclass; Hubert (Hubert Kounde), from Africa, a boxer, more mature than hisfriends, and Said (Said Taghmaoui), from North Africa, more lighthearted thanhis friends. That they hang out with one another reflects the fact that inFrance, friendships are as likely to be based on class as race.

These characters inhabit a world where much of the cultural furniturehas been imported from America. They use words like ``homeboy.'' Vinz gives Saida ``killer haircut, like in New York.'' Vinz does a De Niro imitation (``Who youtalkin' to?''). There's break-dancing in the movie. Perhaps they like U.S.

culture because it is not French, and they do not feel very French, either.

During the course of less than 24 hours, they move aimlessly throughtheir suburb and take a brief trip to Paris. They have run-ins with the cops,who try to clear them off a rooftop hangout that has become such a youth center,it even has its own hot dog stand. They move on the periphery of riots that havestarted after the police shooting of an Arab youth. When his younger sister'sschool is burned down, Vinz's Jewish grandmother warns,``You start out likethat, you'll end up not going to temple.'' What underlies everything they do is the inescapable fact that they havenothing to do. They have no jobs, no prospects, no serious hopes of economicindependence, no money, few ways to amuse themselves except by hanging out. Theyare not bad kids, not criminals, not particularly violent (the boxer is theleast violent), but they have been singled out by age, ethnicity and appearanceas probable troublemakers. Treated that way by the police, they respond--almostwhether they want to or not. As a filmmaker, Kassovitz has grown since his first film. Hisblack-and-white cinematography camera is alert, filling the frame with meaninghis characters are not aware of. Many French films place their characters insuch picturesque settings--Paris, Nice--that it is easy to see them as morecolorful than real. But the concrete suburbs where Kassovitz sets his film (thesame sterile settings that were home to Eric Rohmer's cosmically different``Boyfriends and Girlfriends'' in 1987) give back nothing. These are emptyvistas of space--architectural deserts--that flaunt their hostility to the threeyoung men, as if they were designed to provide no cover. The film's ending is more or less predictable and inevitable, buteffective all the same. The film is not about its ending. It is not about thelanding, but about the fall. ``Hate'' is, I suppose, a Generation X film,whatever that means, but more mature and insightful than the American Gen Xmovies. In America, we cling to the notion that we have choice, and so if ourGen X heroes are alienated from society, it is their choice--it's their``lifestyle.'' In France, Kassovitz says, it is society that has made thechoice.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 8.1/10 (14,398 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by Brugel (#3)

#063 Mononoke-hime (Princess Mononoke) (1997) 7 Votes, 1971 points
Hayao Miyazaki
Running time - 134 min
Country of origin Japan
Genre Animation / Action / Adventure / Drama / Fantasy / Thriller
Original language Japanese

Writing Credits
Hayao Miyazaki, Neil Gaiman

Cast
Yôji Matsuda ... Ashitaka (voice)
Yuriko Ishida ... San (voice)
Yûko Tanaka ... Eboshi-gozen (voice)
Kaoru Kobayashi ... Jiko-bô (voice)
Masahiko Nishimura ... Kouroku (voice)
Tsunehiko Kamijô ... Gonza (voice)


BY ROGER EBERT / October 29, 1999

Igo to the movies for many reasons. Here is one of them. I want to see wondrous sights not available in the real world, in stories where myth and dreams are set free to play. Animation opens that possibility, because it is freed from gravity and the chains of the possible. Realistic films show the physical world; animation shows its essence. Animated films are not copies of "real movies," are not shadows of reality, but create a new existence in their own right. True, a lot of animation is insipid, and insulting even to the children it is made for. But great animation can make the mind sing.

Hayao Miyazaki is a great animator, and his "Princess Mononoke" is a great film. Do not allow conventional thoughts about animation to prevent you from seeing it. It tells an epic story set in medieval Japan, at the dawn of the Iron Age, when some men still lived in harmony with nature and others were trying to tame and defeat it. It is not a simplistic tale of good and evil, but the story of how humans, forest animals and nature gods all fight for their share of the new emerging order. It is one of the most visually inventive films I have ever seen.

The movie opens with a watchtower guard spotting "something wrong in the forest." There is a disturbance of nature, and out of it leaps a remarkable creature, a kind of boar-monster with flesh made of writhing snakes. It attacks villagers, and to the defense comes Ashitaka, the young prince of his isolated people. He is finally able to slay the beast, but his own arm has been wrapped by the snakes and is horribly scarred.

A wise woman is able to explain what has happened. The monster was a boar god, until a bullet buried itself in its flesh and drove it mad. And where did the bullet come from? "It is time," says the woman, "for our last prince to cut his hair and leave us." And so Ashitaka sets off on a long journey to the lands of the West, to find out why nature is out of joint, and whether the curse on his arm can be lifted. He rides Yakkuru, a beast that seems part horse, part antelope, part mountain goat.

There are strange sights and adventures along the way, and we are able to appreciate the quality of Miyazaki's artistry. The drawing is not simplistic, but has some of the same "clear line" complexity used by the Japanese graphic artists of two centuries ago, who inspired such modern works as Herge's Tintin books. Nature is rendered majestically (Miyazaki's art directors journeyed to ancient forests to make their master drawings) and fancifully (as with the round little forest sprites). There are also brief, mysterious appearances of the spirit of the forest, who by day seems to be a noble beast, and at night a glowing light.

Ashitaka eventually arrives in an area that is prowled by Moro, a wolf god, and sees for the first time the young woman named San. She is also known as "Princess Mononoke," but that's more a description than a name; a mononoke is the spirit of a beast. San was a human child, raised as a wolf by Moro; she rides bareback on the swift white spirit-wolves and helps the pack in their battle against the encroachments of Lady Eboshi, a strong ruler whose village is developing ironworking skills and manufactures weapons using gunpowder.

As Lady Eboshi's people gain one kind of knowledge, they lose another, and the day is fading when men, animals and the forest gods all speak the same language. The lush green forests through which Ashitaka traveled west have been replaced here by a wasteland; trees have been stripped to feed the smelting furnaces, and on their skeletons, yellow-eyed beasts squat ominously. Slaves work the bellows of the forges, and lepers make the weapons.

But all is not black and white. The lepers are grateful that Eboshi accepts them. Her people enjoy her protection. Even Jigo, a scheming agent of the emperor, has motives that sometimes make a certain amount of sense. When a nearby samurai enclave wants to take over the village and its technology, there is a battle with more than one side and more than one motive. This is more like mythical history than action melodrama.

The artistry in "Princess Mononoke" is masterful. The writhing skin of the boar-monster is an extraordinary sight, one that would be impossible to create in any live-action film. The great white wolves are drawn with grace, and not sentimentalized; when they bare their fangs, you can see that they are not friendly comic pals, but animals who can and will kill.

The movie does not dwell on violence, which makes some of its moments even more shocking, as when Ashitaka finds that his scarred arm has developed such strength that his arrow decapitates an enemy.

Miyazaki and his collaborators work at Japan's Studio Ghibli, and a few years ago Disney bought the studio's entire output for worldwide distribution. (Disney artists consider Miyazaki a source of inspiration.) The contract said Disney could not change a frame--but there was no objection to dubbing into English, because of course, all animation is dubbed into even its source language, and as Miyazaki cheerfully observes, "English has been dubbed into Japanese for years." This version of "Princess Mononoke" has been well and carefully dubbed with gifted vocal talents, including Billy Crudup as Ashitaka, Claire Danes as San, Minnie Driver as Eboshi, Gillian Anderson as Moro, Billy Bob Thornton as Jigo, and Jada Pinkett-Smith as Toki, a commonsensical working woman in the village.

The drama is underlaid with Miyazaki's deep humanism, which avoids easy moral simplifications. There is a remarkable scene where San and Ashitaka, who have fallen in love, agree that neither can really lead the life of the other, and so they must grant each other freedom, and only meet occasionally. You won't find many Hollywood love stories (animated or otherwise) so philosophical. "Princess Mononoke" is a great achievement and a wonderful experience, and one of the best films of the year.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 8.3/10 (38,401 votes) Top 250: #120

SOMB 499 rank - #507

Ranked highest by Capt. Midnight (#1)

#062 Hana-Bi (Fireworks) (1997) 4 Votes, 1984 points
Takeshi Kitano
Running time - 103 min
Country of origin Japan
Genre Crime / Drama / Thriller
Original language Japanese

Writing Credits
Takeshi Kitano

Cast
Takeshi Kitano ... Yoshitaka Nishi
Kayoko Kishimoto ... Miyuki, Nishi's wife
Ren Osugi ... Horibe
Susumu Terajima ... Nakamura
Tetsu Watanabe ... Tesuka


BY ROGER EBERT / March 20, 1998

It has been said that Western art is the art of putting in, and Eastern art is the art of leaving out. The new Japanese film ``Fireworks'' is like a Charles Bronson ``Death Wish'' movie so drained of story, cliche, convention and plot that nothing is left, except pure form and impulse. Not a frame, not a word, is excess. Takeshi Kitano, who made it, must be very serene or very angry; only extreme states allow such a narrow focus.

Kitano, who wrote, directed and edited the film, also stars as Nishi, a man whose only two emotional states are agony and ecstasy. As the film opens, he is a policeman whose young daughter died not long ago; now his wife is dying of leukemia. During a stakeout, his partner Horibe (Ron Osugi) suggests he go visit his wife in the hospital. He does, and while he is gone, another cop is killed and Horibe is so badly wounded that he will have to spend his life in a wheelchair.

A cop movie would have dwelled on the action. ``Fireworks'' reveals what happened only gradually, and at first we even misunderstand the source of the bullets. The movie is not about action, but about consequences and states of mind. Nishi leaves the police force, and we learn, abruptly, that he is deep in debt to Yakuza loan sharks. How? Why? Unimportant. All of those scenes that other films find so urgent are swept away here. When punk Yakuza collectors arrive in a noodle shop to try to get money from Nishi, he stabs one in the eyeball with a chopstick, so suddenly and in a shot so brief that we can hardly believe our eyes.

Nishi cares deeply for his wife, Miyuki (Kayoko Kishimoto), and wants to spend time with her. He robs a bank to raise the necessary cash. They do childish things together, such as playing with the kite of a girl they meet on the beach. Sometimes they dissolve in laughter. But when a stranger laughs at Miyuki for trying to water dead flowers, Nishi brutally beats him. And when more collectors arrive from the Yakuza, Nishi explodes again.

The pattern of the movie is: Ordinary casual life, punctuated by sharp, clinical episodes of violence. Nishi hardly speaks (there is little dialogue in the film), and his face shows almost no expression (reportedly because of injuries to Kitano in a motorcycle crash). He is like a blank slate that absorbs the events in the film without giving any sign that he has registered them. When he attacks, he gives no warning; the wrong trigger word releases his rage.

Nishi is therefore, I suppose, psychotic, a dangerous madman. To read his behavior any other way, as ``protecting his wife,'' say, would be childish. Sane people do not behave like this. And his wife, who hardly says six words in the movie, and who seems unaffected by his brutal behavior, shares the family madness. But that isn't really the point: This is not a clinical study, but a distillation of attitudes. In Kitano's bipolar universe, you are happy when the world leaves you alone, and when it doesn't, you strike back.

Against this swing of yin and yang, there is a steadying character: Horibe, the man in the wheelchair. He paints naive, yet colorful and disturbing pictures of people with the faces of flowers. At one point his wheelchair is at the edge of the sea and we anticipate suicide as the tide washes in, but he is a man who has found some accommodation with life and will endure. Nishi, on the other hand, has adopted such an inflexible and uncompromised attitude toward the world that it will, we feel, sooner or later destroy him.

The film is an odd viewing experience. It lacks all of the narrative cushions and hand-holding that we have come to expect. It doesn't explain, because an explanation, after all, is simply something arbitrary the story has invented.

``Fireworks'' is a demonstration of what a story such as this is really about, fundamentally, after you cut out the background noise.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.8/10 (8,131 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by Caley and Brugel (#2)

#061 Clerks (1994) 12 Votes, 2032 points
Kevin Smith
Running time - 92 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Comedy
Original language English / Russian

Writing Credits
Kevin Smith

Cast
Brian O'Halloran ... Dante Hicks
Jeff Anderson ... Randal Graves
Marilyn Ghigliotti ... Veronica Loughran
Lisa Spoonhauer ... Caitlin Bree
Jason Mewes ... Jay
Kevin Smith ... Silent Bob

Other awards
Won: Cannes Film Festival Award of the Youth (Foreign Film), Mercedes-Benz Award .Sundance Film Festival Filmmakers Trophy (Dramatic)
Nominated: Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize

BY ROGER EBERT / November 4, 1994

Hardly anybody ever works in the movies, except at jobs like cops, robbers, drug dealers and space captains. One of the many charms of Kevin Smith's "Clerks" is that it clocks a full day on the job. Its hero, Dante Hicks, is a clerk in a convenience store, and his friend Randal works next door in the video store. Both stores are in a strip mall in Asbury Park, N.J. - marginal operations with ill-paid and disenchanted employees.

The movie has the attitude of a gas station attendant who tells you to check your own oil. It's grungy and unkempt, and Dante and Randal look like they have been nourished from birth on beef jerky and Cheetos. They are tired and bored, underpaid and unlucky in love, and their encounters with customers feel like a series of psychological tests.

Dante, played by Brian O'Halloran on a perfect note of defensive detachment, has that gift for getting through a bad job by running his private life at the same time. He's 22, a college dropout, dating the talkative Veronica (Marilyn Ghigliotti), and is alarmed to read in the paper that his former girlfriend, Caitlin, is engaged to an "Asian studies major." Meanwhile, his life is going nowhere, and he has had to cancel his hockey game to work on his day off.

His day begins at dawn. He sleeps in his clothes closet. He drinks his coffee out of the lid of the cookie jar. When the store's steel shutters won't roll up, he uses shoe polish to write a big sign: I ASSURE YOU WE ARE OPEN. He gets in desultory conversations with customers who are opposed to cigarettes, or looking for porno mags, or claim the vacant-eyed guy leaning against the building is a heavy metal star from Russia.

Randal, next door, is working in the kind of video store with a stock so bad that he goes to another store when he wants to rent a video. He has customers with questions like, "Do you have that one with that guy who was in that movie last year?" And he discusses deep cinematic questions with Dante, such as: When Darth Vader's second Death Star was destroyed, it was still under construction, so doesn't that mean a lot of innocent workers were killed? Many of Dante's customers are very strange. One is obsessed with finding a dozen perfect eggs. Another finds an unprecedented use for the rest room. A guy named Silent Bob (Kevin Smith himself) is permanently posted outside the store; he's allegedly a drug dealer, but business seems very bad.

Considering that Smith shot the entire movie in and around the convenience store, he shows ingenuity in finding fresh set-ups.

There's a danger that the movie could reduce itself to a series of people standing around talking, but look at the way he handles the conversation between Dante and Veronica, who paints her nails while they talk. Or consider the hockey game, which is finally played on the store roof.

"Clerks," which contains no nudity or violence, was originally classified NC-17by the MPAA just on the basis of its language - which includes the kind of graphic descriptions of improbable sex acts that guys sometimes indulge in while killing vast amounts of celibate time. (One sexual encounter does take place during the movie, off screen, and after it becomes clear exactly what happened, we are all pretty much in agreement, I think, that offscreen is where it belongs.) Quentin Tarantino has become famous as a video store clerk who watched all the movies in his store, and then went out and directed "Reservoir Dogs" and "Pulp Fiction." Kevin Smith has done him one better, by working behind the counter and then making a movie about the store itself. Within the limitations of his bare-bones production, Smith shows great invention, a natural feel for human comedy, and a knack for writing weird, sometimes brilliant, dialogue.

Much has been written about Generation X and the films about it.

"Clerks" is so utterly authentic that its heroes have never heard of their generation. When they think of "X," it's on the way to the video store.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.9/10 (63,851 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #68

Ranked highest by Tjenz (#11)

Odd--an animated film placing in the list that *I* didn't even vote for.

Highly underrated film. Good job Velocity

10 Votes, top 67 for the decade. I don't if "highly underrated" really works.

I meant underrated in the general public. Very glad it's done so well here.

Clerks sucks 36 dicks.

Here here. Smelly dicks at that.

That Ebert review of Hudsucker Proxy is interesting to say the least.

Three amazing movies in a row that all deserve to be in the Top 10.

Why do you hate America, caley?

#060 The Lion King (1994) 9 Votes, 2040 points
Roger Allers + Rob Minkoff
Running time - 89 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Animation / Adventure / Comedy / Drama / Family / Musical
Original language English / Swahili / Xhosa / Zulu

Writing Credits
Irene Mecchi, Jonathan Roberts, Linda Woolverton, J.T. Allen, Jim Capobianco, Lorna Cook, Thom Enriquez, Andy Gaskill, Francis Glebas, Ed Gombert, Kevin Harkey, Barry Johnson, Mark Kausler, Jorgen Klubien, Larry Leker, Rick Maki, Burny Mattinson, Joe Ranft , Chris Sanders, George Scribner, Tom Sito, Miguel Tejada-Flores, Jenny Tripp, Gary Trousdale, Bob Tzudiker, Christopher Vogler,
Noni White, Kirk Wise, Arthur Fucksake

Cast
Jonathan Taylor Thomas ... Young Simba (voice)
Matthew Broderick ... Adult Simba (voice)
James Earl Jones ... King Mufasa (voice)
Jeremy Irons ... Scar (voice)
Rowan Atkinson ... Zazu the Hornbill (voice)
Whoopi Goldberg ... Shenzi the Hyena (voice)

Academy Awards
Won: Best Music - Original Score, Best Music - Original Song (For the song "Can You Feel the Love Tonight".)
Nominated Best Music - Original Song (For the songs "Circle of Life" and "Hakuna Matata".)

Other awards
Won: Golden Globe Best Motion Picture - Comedy/Musical, Best Original Score - Motion Picture, Best Original Song - Motion Picture (For the song "Can You Feel the Love Tonight".)
Nominated: BAFTA Film Award Best Sound, Anthony Asquith Award for Film Music. Golden Globe Best Original Score - Motion Picture. Golden Globes Best Original Song - Motion Picture (For the song "The Circle of Life")


BY ROGER EBERT / June 24, 1994

My generation grew up mourning the death of Bambi's mother. Now comes "The Lion King," with the death of Mufasa, the father of the lion cub who will someday be king. The Disney animators know that cute little cartoon characters are not sufficient to manufacture dreams. There have to be dark corners, frightening moments, and ancient archetypes like the crime of regicide. "The Lion King," which is a superbly drawn animated feature, is surprisingly solemn in its subject matter, and may even be too intense for very young children.

The film is the latest in a series of annual media events from Disney, which with "The Little Mermaid," "Beauty and the Beast" and "Aladdin" reinvented its franchise of animated feature films. The inspiration for these recent films comes from the earliest feature cartoons created by Walt Disney himself, who in movies like "Dumbo," with the chaining of Mrs. Jumbo, and "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," with its wicked stepmother, tapped into primal fears and desires. Later Disney films drifted off into the neverland of innocuous "children's movies," which were harmless but not very exciting. These most recent four animated features are once again true "family films," in that they entertain adults as well as children.

"The Lion King" is the first Disney animated feature not based on an existing story. In another sense, it is based on half the stories in classical mythology. It tells the tale of the birth, childhood and eventual manhood of Simba, a lion cub. The cub's birth is announced in the opening sequence of the movie, called "The Circle of Life," which is an evocative collaboration of music and animation to show all of the animals of the African veld gathering to hail their future king. The cute little cub is held aloft from a dramatic spur of rock, and all his future minions below hail him, in a staging that looks like the jungle equivalent of a political rally.

Of course this coming together of zebra and gazelle, monkey and wildebeest, fudges on the uncomfortable fact that many of these animals survive by eating one another. And all through "The Lion King" the filmmakers perform a balancing act between the fantasy of their story and the reality of the jungle. Early scenes show Simba as a cute, trusting little tike who believes everyone loves him. He is wrong. He has an enemy - his uncle Scar, the king's jealous brother, who wants to be king himself one day.

Villains are often the most memorable characters in a Disney animated film, and Scar is one of the great ones, aided by a pack of yipping hyenas who act as his storm troopers. With a voice by Jeremy Irons, and facial features suggestive of Irons' gift for sardonic concealment, Scar is a mannered, manipulative schemer who succeeds in bringing about the death of the king.

Worse, he convinces Simba that the cub is responsible, and the guilty little heir slinks off into the wastelands. (The movie makes a sly reference to a famous earlier role by Irons. When Simba tells him, "You're so weird," he replies "You have no idea," in exactly the tone he used in "Reversal of Fortune.") It is an unwritten law that animated features have comic relief, usually in the form of a duet or trio of goofy characters who become buddies with the hero. This time they are a meerkat named Timon (voice by Nathan Lane) and a warthog named Pumbaa (Ernie Sabella), who cheer up Simba during his long exile.

The movie has a large cast of other colorful characters, including a hornbill named Zazu (Rowan Atkinson), who is confidant and advisor to King Mufasa (James Earl Jones). And there are the three hyenas (with voices by Whoopi Goldberg, Cheech Marin and Jim Cummings), who are a tumbling, squabbling, yammering team of dirty tricks artists.

The early Disney cartoons were, of course, painstakingly animated by hand. There has been a lot of talk recently about computerized animation, as if a computer program could somehow create a movie. Not so. Human animators are responsible for the remarkably convincing portrayals of Scar and the other major characters, who somehow combine human and animal body language. But computers did assist with several remarkable sequences, including a stampede in which a herd seems to flow past the camera.

Despite the comic relief from the hyenas, the meerkat and the warthog, "The Lion King" is a little more subdued than "Mermaid," "Beauty" and "Aladdin." The central theme is a grim one: A little cub is dispossessed, and feels responsible for the death of its father.

An uncle betrays a trust.

And beyond the gently rolling plans of the great savanna lies a wasteland of bones and ashes. Some of the musical comedy numbers break the mood, although with the exception of "Circle of Life" and "Hakuna Matata," the songs in "The Lion King" are not as memorable as those in "Mermaid" and "Beauty." Basically what we have here is a drama, with comedy occasionally lifting the mood. The result is a surprising seriousness; this isn't the mindless romp with cute animals that the ads might lead you to expect. Although the movie may be frightening and depressing to the very young, I think it's positive that "The Lion King" deals with real issues. By processing life's realities in stories, children can prepare themselves for more difficult lessons later on. The saga of Simba, which in its deeply buried origins owes something to Greek tragedy and certainly to "Hamlet," is a learning experience as well as an entertainment.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 8.0/10 (68,281 votes) Top 250: #214

SOMB 499 rank - #305

Ranked highest by Agrimorfee (#2)

#059 Saving Private Ryan (1998) 11 Votes, 2063 points
Steven Spielberg
Running time - 170 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Action / Drama / War
Original language English / French / German / Czech

Writing Credits
Robert Rodat

Cast
Tom Hanks ... Captain John H. Miller
Tom Sizemore ... Sergeant Mike Horvath
Edward Burns ... Pvt. Richard Reiben
Barry Pepper ... Pvt. Daniel Jackson
Adam Goldberg ... Pvt. Stanley Mellish
Vin Diesel ... Private Adrian Caparzo
Giovanni Ribisi ... T-4 Medic Irwin Wade
Jeremy Davies ... Cpl. Timothy P. Upham
Matt Damon ... Private James Francis Ryan
Ted Danson ... Captain Fred Hamill
Paul Giamatti ... Sergeant Hill
Dennis Farina ... Lieutenant Colonel Anderson

Academy Awards
Won: Best Cinematography, Best Director, Best Effects - Sound Effects Editing, Best Film Editing, Best Sound
Nominated Best Actor in a Leading Role (Tom Hanks), Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Best Makeup, Best Music, Original Dramatic Score, Best Picture, Best Writing - Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen

Other awards
Won: BAFTA Film Award Best Sound, Best Special Effects. Golden Globe Best Director - Motion Picture, Best Motion Picture - Drama
Nominated: BAFTA Film Award Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Film, Best Make Up/Hair, Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role (Tom Hanks), Best Production Design, David Lean Award for Direction. Golden Globes Best Original Score - Motion Picture, Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama (Tom Hanks), Best Screenplay - Motion Picture


BY ROGER EBERT / July 24, 1998

The soldiers assigned to find Pvt. Ryan and bring him home can do the math for themselves. The Army Chief of Staff has ordered them on the mission for propaganda purposes: Ryan's return will boost morale on the homefront, and put a human face on the carnage at Omaha Beach. His mother, who has already lost three sons in the war, will not have to add another telegram to her collection. But the eight men on the mission also have parents--and besides, they've been trained to kill Germans, not to risk their lives for publicity stunts. ``This Ryan better be worth it,'' one of the men grumbles.

In Hollywood mythology, great battles wheel and turn on the actions of individual heroes. In Steven Spielberg's ``Saving Private Ryan,'' thousands of terrified and seasick men, most of them new to combat, are thrown into the face of withering German fire. The landing on Omaha Beach was not about saving Pvt. Ryan. It was about saving your skin.

The movie's opening sequence is as graphic as any war footage I've ever seen. In fierce dread and energy it's on a par with Oliver Stone's ``Platoon,'' and in scope surpasses it--because in the bloody early stages the landing forces and the enemy never meet eye to eye, but are simply faceless masses of men who have been ordered to shoot at one another until one side is destroyed.

Spielberg's camera makes no sense of the action. That is the purpose of his style. For the individual soldier on the beach, the landing was a chaos of noise, mud, blood, vomit and death. The scene is filled with countless unrelated pieces of time, as when a soldier has his arm blown off. He staggers, confused, standing exposed to further fire, not sure what to do next, and then he bends over and picks up his arm, as if he will need it later.

This landing sequence is necessary to establish the distance between those who give the order that Pvt. Ryan be saved, and those who are ordered to do the saving. For Capt. Miller (Tom Hanks) and his men, the landing at Omaha has been a crucible of fire. For Army Chief George C. Marshall (Harve Presnell) in his Washington office, war seems more remote and statesmanlike; he treasures a letter Abraham Lincoln wrote consoling Mrs. Bixby of Boston, about her sons who died in the Civil War. His advisors question the wisdom and indeed the possibility of a mission to save Ryan, but he barks, ``If the boy's alive we are gonna send somebody to find him--and we are gonna get him the hell out of there.'' That sets up the second act of the film, in which Miller and his men penetrate into French terrain still actively disputed by the Germans, while harboring mutinous thoughts about the wisdom of the mission. All of Miller's men have served with him before--except for Cpl. Upham (Jeremy Davies), the translator, who speaks excellent German and French but has never fired a rifle in anger and is terrified almost to the point of incontinence. I identified with Upham, and I suspect many honest viewers will agree with me: The war was fought by civilians just like him, whose lives had not prepared them for the reality of battle.

The turning point in the film comes, I think, when the squadron happens upon a German machinegun nest protecting a radar installation. It would be possible to go around it and avoid a confrontation. Indeed, that would be following orders. But they decide to attack the emplacement, and that is a form of protest: At risk to their lives, they are doing what they came to France to do, instead of what the top brass wants them to do.

Everything points to the third act, when Private Ryan is found, and the soldiers decide what to do next. Spielberg and his screenwriter, Robert Rodat, have done a subtle and rather beautiful thing: They have made a philosophical film about war almost entirely in terms of action. ``Saving Private Ryan'' says things about war that are as complex and difficult as any essayist could possibly express, and does it with broad, strong images, with violence, with profanity, with action, with camaraderie. It is possible to express even the most thoughtful ideas in the simplest words and actions, and that's what Spielberg does. The film is doubly effective, because he communicates his ideas in feelings, not words. I was reminded of ``All Quiet on the Western Front.'' Steven Spielberg is as technically proficient as any filmmaker alive, and because of his great success, he has access to every resource he requires. Both of those facts are important to the impact of ``Saving Private Ryan.'' He knows how to convey his feelings about men in combat, and he has the tools, the money and the collaborators to make it possible.

His cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski, who also shot ``Schindler's List,'' brings a newsreel feel to a lot of the footage, but that's relatively easy compared to his most important achievement, which is to make everything visually intelligible. After the deliberate chaos of the landing scenes, Kaminski handles the attack on the machinegun nest, and a prolonged sequence involving the defense of a bridge, in a way that keeps us oriented. It's not just men shooting at one another. We understand the plan of the action, the ebb and flow, the improvisation, the relative positions of the soldiers.

Then there is the human element. Hanks is a good choice as Capt. Miller, an English teacher who has survived experiences so unspeakable that he wonders if his wife will even recognize him. His hands tremble, he is on the brink of breakdown, but he does his best because that is his duty. All of the actors playing the men under him are effective, partly because Spielberg resists the temptation to make them zany ``characters'' in the tradition of World War II movies, and makes them deliberately ordinary. Matt Damon, as Pvt. Ryan, exudes a different energy, because he has not been through the landing at Omaha Beach; as a paratrooper, he landed inland, and although he has seen action he has not gazed into the inferno.

They are all strong presences, but for me the key performance in the movie is by Jeremy Davies, as the frightened little interpreter. He is our entry into the reality because he sees it clearly as a vast system designed to humiliate and destroy him. And so it is. His survival depends on his doing the very best he can, yes, but even more on chance. Eventually he arrives at his personal turning point, and his action writes the closing words of Spielberg's unspoken philosophical argument.

``Saving Private Ryan'' is a powerful experience. I'm sure a lot of people will weep during it. Spielberg knows how to make audiences weep better than any director since Chaplin in ``City Lights.'' But weeping is an incomplete response, letting the audience off the hook. This film embodies ideas. After the immediate experience begins to fade, the implications remain and grow.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 8.4/10 (169,803 votes) Top 250: #64

SOMB 499 rank - #88

Ranked highest by ManIsMatter (#9)

#058 Twelve Monkeys (12 Monkeys) (1995) 13 Votes, 2080 points
Terry Gilliam
Running time - 129 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Drama / Sci-Fi / Thriller
Original language English

Writing Credits
Chris Marker, David Webb Peoples, Janet Peoples

Cast
Bruce Willis ... James Cole
Jon Seda ... Jose
Madeleine Stowe ... Kathryn Railly
Brad Pitt ... Jeffrey Goines
Christopher Plummer ... Dr. Goines

Academy Awards
Nominated Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Brad Pitt), Best Costume Design

Other awards
Won:Golden Globe Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture (Brad Pitt)


BY ROGER EBERT / January 5, 1996

Terry Gilliam's ambitious "12 Monkeys" was co-authored by David Peoples, who wrote "Blade Runner," and it has the same view of the near future as a grunge pit - a view it shares with Gilliam's own "Brazil." In this world, everything is rusty, subterranean, and leaks. The movie uses its future world as a home base and launching pad for the central story, which is set in 1990 and 1996, and is about a time traveler trying to save the world from a deadly plague.

The traveler is Cole (Bruce Willis), who in the opening shots lives with a handful of other human survivors in an underground shelter put together out of scrap parts and a lot of wire mesh. The surface of the planet has been reclaimed by animals, after the death of 5 billion people during a plague in 1996.

Cole is plucked from his cage and sent on a surface expedition by the rulers of this domain, who hope to learn enough about the plague virus to defeat it. Later, he is picked for a more crucial mission: He will travel back in time and gather information about the virus before it mutated. (The movie holds out no hope that he can "stop" it before it starts; from his point of view, the plague has already happened, and so the future society is seeking treatment, not prevention.) Cole lands in 1990, bruised, bleeding, and dripping sweat and mucus from every pore (a large percentage of Bruce Willis' film career has been spent in this condition). He's thrown in jail, and assigned a psychiatrist, Dr. Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe), who believes he's delusional when he says he's a visitor from the future ("You won't think I'm crazy when people start dying next month"). He pulls off an inexplicable jail break and reappears in her life in 1996, kidnapping her because he needs help in finding 12 monkeys in Philadelphia that have the virus in its "pure" form before it mutated, later that year, into a killer of humans.

Cole discovers that a mental patient named Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt), whom he met in 1990, is an animal rights activist with a father (Christopher Plummer) whose laboratory may be harboring the deadly virus. Does Jeffrey want to unleash the virus, returning the earth to the animals? Or does his father, or another member of the team . . .

All of this is just the plumbing of the plot. What the movie is really about is its vision. The decor looks cobbled together from the debris of the 20th century. Cities are either scabby Skid Rows or towering skyscrapers. Scientists still work in laboratories that look like old postcards of Thomas Edison inventing. Bizarre killers and villains are hurled at Cole and Railly, and there are many bloody fights. Gradually the psychiatrist comes to believe, after Cole makes a series of accurate predictions, that he may be from the future after all.

The movie is not, however, a straightforward action thriller.

Much of the interest comes from the nature of the Cole character. He is simple, confused, badly informed, exhausted and shot through with feelings of betrayal. Nothing is as it seems - not in his future world, not in 1990 and not in 1996. And there is another factor, one hinted at in the opening shot of the movie and confirmed in the closing: He may have already witnessed the end of the story.

The plot of "12 Monkeys," if you follow it closely, involves a time travel paradox. Almost all time travel movies do. But who cares? What's good about the film is the way Gilliam, his actors and his craftsmen create a universe that is contained within 130 minutes.

There are relatively few shots in this movie that would look normal in any other film; everything is skewed to express the vision.

Gilliam's "Brazil" was praised by a lot of critics, but I didn't get it, even after repeated viewings. "12 Monkeys" is easier to follow, with a plot that holds together and a solid relationship between Cole and Railly. But even here, Gilliam allows the anarchic flywheel of madness to spin: The Brad Pitt character, spewing compulsive visions of paranoia and dread, is a powerful influence, suggesting that logic cannot solve the movie's problems. And other characters - those in charge of the subterranean future world, as well as the conspirators around the Plummer character - behave like villains pumped in from an H.G. Wells science-fiction fantasy. Wild overacting takes place on bizarre sets that are photographed with tilt shots and wideangle lenses, and we begin to share the confusion and exhaustion of Cole. Like him, we're wrenched back and forth through time, and dumped on the concrete floor of reality.

One of the most intriguing sequences is completely arbitrary.

Cole and the woman hide out in a movie theater playing Hitchcock's "Vertigo," and later, in their own lives, replay the movie's key scene, with the same music on the soundtrack. What is Gilliam doing here? He's not simply providing a movie in-joke. The point, I think, is that Cole's own life is caught between rewind and fast-forward, and he finds himself repeating in the past what he learned in the future, and vice versa.

I've seen "12 Monkeys" described as a comedy. Any laughs that it inspires will be very hollow. It's more of a celebration of madness and doom, with a hero who tries to prevail against the chaos of his condition, and is inadequate. This vision is a cold, dark, damp one, and even the romance between Willis and Stowe feels desperate rather than joyous. All of this is done very well, and the more you know about movies (especially the technical side), the more you're likely to admire it. But a comedy it's not. And as an entertainment, it appeals more to the mind than to the senses.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 8.4/10 (169,803 votes) Top 250: #194

SOMB 499 rank - #124

Ranked highest by Undercooked Sausage (#10)

#057 Lone Star (1996) 10 Votes, 2217 points
John Sayles
Running time - 135 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Crime / Drama / Mystery / Western
Original language English

Writing Credits
John Sayles

Cast
Stephen J. Lang ... Sgt. Mikey
Chris Cooper ... Sheriff Sam Deeds
Kris Kristofferson ... Sheriff Charlie Wade
Jeff Monahan ... Young Hollis
Matthew McConaughey ... Buddy Deeds

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

Other awards
Won:BAFTA Film Award Best Screenplay - OriginalGolden Globe Best Screenplay - Motion Picture (John Sayles)

BY ROGER EBERT / July 3, 1996

John Sayles' "Lone Star" contains so many riches, it humbles ordinary movies. And yet they aren't thrown before us, to dazzle and impress: It is only later, thinking about the film, that we appreciate the full reach of its material. I've seen it twice, and after the second viewing, I began to realize how deeply, how subtly, the film has been constructed.

On the surface, it's pure entertainment. It involves the discovery of a skeleton in the desert of a Texas town near the Mexican border. The bones belong to a sheriff from the 1950s, much hated. The current sheriff suspects the murder may have been committed by his own father. As he explores the secrets of the past, he begins to fall in love all over again with the woman he loved when they were teenagers.

Those stories -- the murder and the romance -- provide the film's spine and draw us through to the end. But Sayles is up to a lot more than murders and love stories. We begin to get a feel for the people of Rio County, where whites, blacks, Chicanos and Seminoles all remember the past in different ways. We understand that the dead man, Sheriff Charlie Wade, was a sadistic monster who strutted through life, his gun on his hip, making up the law as he went along. That many people had reason to kill him -- not least hisdeputy, Buddy Deeds (Matthew McConaughey). They exchanged death threats in a restaurant, shortly before Charlie disappeared. Buddy became the next sheriff.

Now Charlie's skull, badge and Masonic ring have been discovered on an old Army firing range, and Buddy's son, Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper) is the sheriff on the case. He wanders through town, talking to his father's old deputy (Clifton James), and to Big Otis (Ron Canada), who ran the only bar in the county where blacks were welcome, and to Mercedes Cruz (Miriam Colon), who runs the popular Mexican restaurant where the death threat took place.

Along the way, Sam does a favor. A kid has been arrested for maybe stealing car radios. He releases him to the custody of his mother, Pilar (Elizabeth Pena). He is pleased to see her again. Pilar and Sam were in love as teenagers, but their parents forced them to break up, maybe because both families opposed a Mexican-Anglo marriage. Now, tentatively, they begin to see each other again. Onenight in an empty restaurant, they play "Since I Left You, Baby" on the jukebox and dance, having first circled each other warily in a moment of great eroticism.

All of these events unfold so naturally and absorbingly that all we can do is simply follow along. Sayles has made other films following many threads (his "City of Hope" in 1991 traced a tangled human web through the politics of a New Jersey city). But never before has he done it in such a spellbinding way; like Faulkner, he creates a sure sense of the way the past haunts the present, and how old wounds and secrets are visited upon the survivors.

"Lone Star" is not simply about the solution to the murder and the outcome of the romance. It is about how people try to live together at this moment in America. There are scenes that at first seem to have little to do with the story's main lines. A school board meeting, for example, at which parents argue about textbooks (and are really arguing about whose view of Texas history will prevail).

Scenes involving the African-American colonel (Joe Morton) in charge of the local Army base, whose father was Big Otis, owner of the bar.

Another scene involving a young black woman, an Army private, whose interview with her commanding officer reveals a startling insight into why people enlist in the Army. And conversations between Sheriff Deeds and old widows with long memories.

The performances are all perfectly eased together; you feel these characters have lived together for a long time and known things they have not spoken about for years. Chris Cooper, as Sam Deeds, is a tall, laconic presence that moves through the film, learning something here and something there and eventually learning something about himself. Cooper looks a little like Sayles; they project the same watchful intelligence.

As Pilar, Elizabeth Pena is a warm, rich female presence; her love for Sam is not based on anything simple like eroticism or need, but on a deep, fierce conviction that this should be her man.

Kris Kristofferson is hard-edged and mean-eyed as Charlie Wade, and there is a scene where he shoots a man and then dares his deputy to say anything about it. Wade's evil spirit in the past is what haunts the whole film, and must be exorcised.

And then there is so much more. I will not even hint at the surprises waiting for you. They're not Hollywood-style surprises -- or yes, in a way, they are -- but they're also truths that grow out of the characters; what we learn seems not only natural, but instructive, and by the end of the film, we know something about how people have lived together in this town, and what it has cost them.

"Lone Star" is a great American movie, one of the few to seriously try to regard with open eyes the way we live now. Set in a town that until very recently was rigidly segregated, it shows how Chicanos, blacks, whites and Indians shared a common history, and how they knew one another and dealt with one another in ways that were off the official map. This film is a wonder -- the best work yet by one of our most original and independent filmmakers -- and after it isover, and you begin to think about it, its meanings begin to flower.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link -7.6/10 (11,327 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by 54Cermak (#1)

What an awful, misleading poster. No wonder I never heard of it.

Good movie.

Real good. It's on IFC or Sundance at least once a month and I always find something new that I like about it.

Had they taken two words out of that tagline, they could've had 6 Oscar noms and $680 million in the bank.

#056 Quiz Show (1994) 13 Votes, 2279 points
Robert Redford
Running time - 133 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Drama / History
Original language English

Writing Credits
Richard N. Goodwin, Paul Attanasio

Cast
John Turturro ... Herbie Stempel
Rob Morrow ... Dick Goodwin
Ralph Fiennes ... Charles Van Doren
Paul Scofield ... Mark Van Doren
David Paymer ... Dan Enright

Academy Awards
Nominated Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Paul Scofield), Best Director, Best Picture, Best Writing - Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium

Other awards
Won: BAFTA Film Award Best Screenplay - Adapted
Nominated: BAFTA Film Award Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Paul Scofield), Best Film Golden Globe Best Director - Motion Picture, Best Motion Picture - Drama, Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture
(John Turturro), Best Screenplay - Motion Picture

BY ROGER EBERT / September 16, 1994

"Why fix them? Why not just make the questions easier? The audience doesn't want to see the contestants - they want to see the money." Dialogue from "Quiz Show" Amilestone in the decline of American values came in the mid-1950s, when it was revealed that many of the top TV quiz shows were rigged - that contestants were being supplied with the answers.

This was a milestone, not because of the scandal, which was a small storm to weather, but because of the result.

The early quiz shows rewarded knowledge, and made celebrities out of people who knew a lot of things and could remember them. The post-fix quiz shows rewarded luck. On "The $64,000 Question" and "Twenty-One" you could see people getting rich because they were smart. Today people on TV make money by playing games a clever child can master. The message is that it's not necessary to know anything, because you can be ignorant and still get lucky.

The 1950s have been packaged as a time of Eisenhower and Elvis, Chevy Bel-Airs and blue jeans, crew cuts and drive-ins. "Quiz Show" remembers it was also a decade when intellectuals were respected, when a man could be famous because he was a poet and a teacher, when TV audiences actually watched shows on which experts answered questions about Shakespeare and Dickens, science and history. All of that is gone now.

The first show, CBS's "The $64,000 Question," was apparently on the level. But across the street at NBC's "Twenty-One" executives and sponsors watched the ratings, and realized that some contestants drew more viewers than others. A grating know-it-all named Herbert Stempel won for weeks on "Twenty-One," partly because he was being given the answers. The executives decided his appeal was wearing thin. So they broke the news to him: He'd had a free ride long enough, and now it was time to lose.

Stempel took that news very badly. Meanwhile, America liked his successor, an attractive, disarming intellectual named Charles Van Doren, who was a member of one of America's great literary families: his father, Mark, and his uncle, Philip, were beloved and respected. Blinded not so much by money as by fame, Charles had agreed to cheat. And when Stempel blew the whistle on the whole setup, a Congressional investigator brought the deception tumbling down.

Robert Redford has directed "Quiz Show" as entertainment, history, and challenge. It is fun as a thriller; we find ourselves sort of hoping Van Doren doesn't get caught. It works as a memory of the first decade in which a society that used to sit on the front porch went inside and stared at the tube. And then it asks us what we might have done, if someone offered us a lot of money and popularity for pretending to be smarter than we were.

The movie shows the sponsors casting the contestants as if they were regulars on a soap opera. It also reflects intriguing conflicts of race and class: Stempel (John Turturro) is portrayed as an unpolished Jew who is replaced by Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes), an urbane WASP. The congressional investigator, Richard Goodwin (Rob Morrow) is a Jew who is attracted to the genteel intellectualism of the Van Dorens (who, at a family dinner, play a Shakespeare trivia game). Goodwin attempts to bring down the quiz shows on Stempel's testimony while giving Van Doren a pass - just because he likes him.

"You're the Uncle Tom of the Jews," his wife accuses him. But he cannot help himself; Charles himself has become such a friend that he cannot bear to bring him crashing down. In a way, the movie subtly argues, Goodwin arrived at the same casting decision as the sponsors.

The movie uses real names throughout, including the network (NBC) and the sponsor (Geritol, which cured "tired blood" and made you "feel stronger fast"). It depicts TV producer Dan Enright (David Paymer) and game show host Jack Barry (Christopher McDonald) and there is a certain fascination in the fact that the movie, to use a 1950s catch phrase, "names names." There is real poignancy in its portrayal of the upright, ethical Mark Van Doren (Paul Scofield) realizing what has happened to his son.

There are also little shocks along the way, as characters reveal that they have standards we no longer much adhere to. One executive says, in justifying the fix, "It isn't like we're hardened criminals here - we're in show business." His moral justification was higher ratings. Today on TV, so many sins are justified in the name of ratings that any other standard hardly exists. Then, such reasoning was new.

The screenplay, by former Washington Post film critic Paul Attanasio, is smart, subtle and ruthless. And it is careful to place blame where it belongs. Oh, yes, Charles Van Doren was wrong to take the answers and play the game. But he has paid for his moment of weakness a thousand times over, year after year; to this day, millions of people remember him as "the guy who cheated on the quiz show." But Van Doren is better remembered as the guy on the quiz show that cheated. The network, the sponsors and the producers set him up, and then they all stepped clear when the scandal broke.

The movie makes it clear that NBC and Geritol were able to claim they "knew nothing" about the rigged games, although they clearly did. And Dan Enright, the producer, was soon back at work making more TV shows. Only the contestants have continued to pay, and pay, and pay. There is a theological belief that it is a greater sin to tempt than to be tempted, and this movie firmly reminds us of that.

Now take stock of what we have lost in the four decades since "Twenty-One"came crashing down. We have lost a respect for intelligence; we reward people for whatever they happen to have learned, instead of feeling they might learn more. We have forgotten that the end does not justify the means - especially when the end is a high TV rating or any other kind of popular success. And we have lost a certain innocent idealism.

Charles Van Doren lied on a quiz show, and then the standards that created that quiz show went on to infect ever-widening circles, until Oliver North could lie to Congress, and then run for it.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link -7.4/10 (16,999 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #152

Ranked highest by Asher Ford (#4)

#055 Léon (The Professional) (1994) 14 Votes, 2281 points
Luc Besson
Running time - 133 min
Country of origin France
Genre Crime / Drama / Thriller / Romance
Original language English

Writing Credits
Luc Besson

Cast
Jean Reno ... Leon
Gary Oldman ... Stansfield
Natalie Portman ... Mathilda
Danny Aiello ... Tony
Peter Appel ... Malky

BY ROGER EBERT / November 18, 1994

History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. So, apparently, do the films of Luc Besson. In 1992 he made "La Femme Nikita," which in its cold sadness told the story of a tough street girl who became a professional killer and then a civilized woman. Now he has made "The Professional," about a tough child who wants to become a professional killer, and civilizes the man she chooses as her teacher.

Besson seems fascinated by the "Pygmalion" story, by the notion of a feral street person who is transformed by education. He crosses that with what seems to be an obsession with women who kill as a profession. These are interesting themes, and if "The Professional" doesn't work with anything like the power of "La Femme Nikita," it is because his heroine is 12 years old, and we cannot persuade ourselves to ignore that fact. It colors every scene, making some unlikely and others troubling.

The film opens with one of those virtuoso shots which zips down the streets of New York and in through a door, coming to a sudden halt at a plate of Italian food and then looking up at its owner. Besson must have been watching the opening of the old Letterman show. The man eating the food is a mob boss, played by Danny Aiello, who wants to put a contract on a guy. The man who has come whizzing through the streets is Leon (Jean Reno), a skillful but uneducated "cleaner," or professional hitman.

We see him at work, in opening scenes of startling violence and grim efficiency. In the course of the movie, Leon will, in effect, adopt his neighbor Matilda (Natalie Portman), a tough, streetwise, 12-yearold girl. She escapes to Leon's nearby apartment after her family has been wiped out by a crooked top DEA enforcer named Stansfield (Gary Oldman), who wants to kill her too. Matilda wants to hire Leon to avenge the death of her little brother; in payment, she offers to do his laundry.

Leon wants nothing to do with the girl, but she insists, and attaches herself like a leech. Eventually she develops an ambition to become a cleaner herself. And their fate plays out like those of many another couple on the lam, although with that 30-year age difference.

Matilda is played with great resourcefulness by Portman, who is required by the role to be, in a way, stronger than Leon. She has seen so many sad and violent things in her short life, and in her dysfunctional family, that little in his life can surprise her. She's something like the Jodie Foster character in "Taxi Driver," old for her years. Yet her references are mostly to movies: "Bonnie and Clyde didn't work alone," she tells him. "Thelma and Louise didn't work alone. And they were the best." (To find a 12-yearold in 1994 who knows "Bonnie and Clyde" is so extraordinary that it almost makes everything else she does plausible.) So Leon finds himself saddled with a little sidekick, just when the manic Stansfield is waging a personal vendetta against him.

Although "The Professional" bathes in grit and was shot in the scuzziest locations New York has to offer, it's a romantic fantasy, not a realistic crime picture. Besson's visual approach gives it a European look; he finds Paris in Manhattan. That air of slight displacement helps it get away with various improbabilities, as when Matilda teaches Leon to read (in a few days, apparently), or when Leon is able to foresee the movements of his enemies with almost psychic accuracy.

This gift is useful during several action sequences in "The Professional," when Leon, alone and surrounded by dozens if not hundreds of law officers, is able to conceal himself in just such a way that when the cops enter an apartment in just such a manner, he can swing down from the ceiling, say, and blast them. Or he can set a trap for them. Or he can apparently teleport himself from one part of an apartment to another; they think they have him cornered, but he's behind them. So many of the movie's shoot-outs unfold so conveniently for him that they seem choreographed. The Oldman character sometimes seems to set himself up to be outsmarted, while trying to sneak up on Leon in any way not actually involving chewing through the scenery.

The premise "La Femme Nikita" was that its heroine began as a thoroughly uncivilized character without a decent bone in her body, and then, after society exploited her savagery, she was slowly civilized through the love of a good, simple man. "The Professional" uses similar elements, rearranged. It is a well-directed film, because Besson has a natural gift for plunging into drama with a charged-up visual style. And it is well acted.

But always at the back of my mind was the troubled thought that there was something wrong about placing a 12-year-old character in the middle of this action. In a more serious movie, or even in a human comedy like Cassavetes' "Gloria," the child might not have been out of place. But in what is essentially an exercise - a slick urban thriller - it seems to exploit the youth of the girl without really dealing with it.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link -8.6/10 (108,522 votes) Top 250: #39

SOMB 499 rank - #171

Ranked highest by Theremin (#11)

Free The Pedos

#054 The Iron Giant (1999) 12 Votes, 2336 points
Brad Bird
Running time - 86 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Animation / Drama / Family / Sci-Fi
Original language English

Writing Credits
Ted Hughes, Brad Bird, Tim McCanlies

Cast
Jennifer Aniston ... Annie Hughes (voice)
Harry Connick Jr. ... Dean McCoppin (voice)
Vin Diesel ... The Iron Giant (voice)
James Gammon ... Marv Loach / Floyd Turbeaux / General Sudokoff (voice)
Christopher McDonald ... Kent Mansley (voice)

BY ROGER EBERT / August 6, 1999

Imagine "E.T." as a towering metal man, and you have some of the appeal of "The Iron Giant," an enchanting animated feature about a boy who makes friends with a robot from outer space. The giant crash-lands on a 1957 night when America is peering up at the speck of Sputnik in the sky, and munches his way through a Maine village, eating TV antennas and cars, until he finds a power plant. That's where young Hogarth Hughes finds him.

Hogarth is a 9-year-old who lives with his single mom (Jennifer Aniston) and dreams of having a pet. She says they make too much of a mess around the house, little dreaming what a 100-foot robot can get up to. One night Hogarth discovers their TV antenna is missing and follows the Iron Giant's trail to the power plant, where he saves the robot from electrocution after it chomps on some live wires. That makes the giant his friend forever, and now all Hogarth has to do is keep the robot a secret from his mom and the federal government.

"The Iron Giant" is still another example of the freedom that filmmakers find in animation: This would have been a $100 million live-action special-effects movie, but it was made for a fraction of that cost because the metal man is drawn, not constructed. And here is a family movie with a message: a Cold War parable in which the Iron Giant learns from a little boy that he is not doomed to be a weapon because "you are what you choose to be." The movie is set in the 1950s because that's the decade when science fiction seemed most preoccupied with nuclear holocaust and invaders from outer space. It includes a hilarious cartoon version of the alarming "Duck and Cover" educational film, in which kids were advised to seek shelter from H-bombs by hiding under their desks. And the villain is a Cold Warrior named Kent Mansley (voice by Christopher McDonald), a G-man who of course sees the Iron Giant as a subversive plot and wants to blast it to pieces.

That political parable is buried beneath a lot of surface charm; the film's appeal comes from its "E.T."-type story about a boy trying to hide an alien from his mom. The Iron Giant is understandably too big to conceal in the closet, but there's a funny sequence where Hogarth brings the creature's hand into the house, and it scampers around like a disobedient dog.

Like the new Japanese animated films, "The Iron Giant" is happy to be a "real movie" in everything but live action. There are no cute little animals and not a single musical number: It's a story, plain and simple. The director, Brad Bird, is a "Simpsons" veteran whose visual look here, much more complex than "The Simpsons," resembles the "clear line" technique of Japan's Hayao Miyazaki ("My Neighbor Totoro"). It works as a lot of animation does, to make you forget from time to time that these are moving drawings, because the story and characters are so compelling.

As for the Iron Giant himself, he's surprisingly likable. He can't speak English at first, but is a quick study, and like E.T. combines great knowledge with the naivete of a stranger in a puzzling land. His voice is by Vin Diesel and sounds like it has been electronically lowered. He looks unsophisticated--something like a big Erector Set construction with a steam-shovel mouth--but as we get to know him he turns into a personality before our very eyes--a big lunk we feel kind of sorry for. By the big climax (which, also like "E.T.," involves a threat from bureaucrats and technocrats), we're hoping Hogarth can help save his friend once again.

It must be tough to get a movie like this made. Disney has the traditional animation market locked up, but other studios seem willing to throw money at Disney musical look-alikes (like "The King and I") even though they might have a better chance moving in the opposite direction--toward real stories told straight. "The Iron Giant," based on a book by the recently deceased British poet laureate Ted Hughes, is not just a cute romp but an involving story that has something to say.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link -7.8/10 (24,772 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - n/a

Ranked highest by Theremin (#2)

#053 Wayne's World (1992) 16 Votes, 2355 points
Penelope Spheeris
Running time - 95 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Comedy / Music
Original language English

Writing Credits
Mike Myers, Bonnie Turner, Terry Turner

Cast
Mike Myers ... Wayne Campbell
Dana Carvey ... Garth Algar
Rob Lowe ... Benjamin Kane
Tia Carrere ... Cassandra
Lara Flynn Boyle ... Stacy

BY ROGER EBERT / February 14, 1992

I walked into "Wayne's World" expecting a lot of dumb, vulgar comedy, and I got plenty, but I also found what I didn't expect: a genuinely amusing, sometimes even intelligent, undercurrent. Like the "Bill & Ted" movies, this one works on its intended level and then sneaks in excursions to some other levels, too.

The movie is inspired by "Saturday Night Live's" long-running parody of local access cable TV. "Wayne's World" originates from the paneled basement room of its host, Wayne Campbell (Mike Myers), who looks to be in his late 20s but still lives at home with his parents in Aurora. Wayne's sidekick is Garth Algar (Dana Carvey), looking uncannily like Arte Johnson and operating with the brain power of a clever 7-year-old. The two of them interview strange guests, drool over posters of their favorite models and use the word "excellent" a whole lot.

Onto this basic situation, director Penelope Spheeris and writers Myers, Bonnie Turner and Terry Turner have grafted a plot of overwhelming predictability: An ad executive (Rob Lowe) spots their show, and sees it as the ideal vehicle for a client (Brian Doyle-Murray) who owns a chain of video arcades. Wayne and Garth don't want to sell out for the big bucks (individual cashier's checks for $5,000), but get outsmarted. And meanwhile Wayne falls in love with a foxy Chinese chick (Tia Carrere) who's the lead singer in a heavy metal band. Of course Lowe tries to win her away from him, which leads up to the final emotional showdown, etc., etc.

The plot is not exactly the point here. It's only a clothesline. What is funny about "Wayne's World" - sometimes really funny - are the dialogue and sight gags. The movie wants to be a laffaminit extravaganza like the Zucker & Abrahams productions, but with slyer humor, more inside jokes, throwaway references and just plain goofiness, as when the characters occasionally break into their own language. Some of the biggest laughs in the film could not possibly be described, because their humor depends entirely on the fact that the filmmakers were weird enough to go for them in the first place.

One quality that grew on me during the film was Myers' conversations with the camera. In a sense, this whole movie is a cable access documentary on his life, and particularly on his great and helpless crush on Tia Carrere. The Dana Carvey character doesn't wear as well; the fact that his personality has a severely limited range of notes doesn't prevent him from playing them over and over.

But the movie is so good-spirited we forgive him.

A few days before "Wayne's World" was screened, I got a letter from my local cable access people, advising me of some of the real shows they run, and asking me to have a look. I have already been looking, but my reactions may not please them very much. In a way, their best programs are their worst ones - because in aspiring to professionalism, they aspire also to the canned predictability of routine TV. The access shows I like the best are the ones on which I can never be sure what is going to happen next. "Wayne's World" gets that right.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link -6.8/10 (27,866 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #232

Ranked highest by Undo (#14)

Nice. Two ranked highest in a row.

Our cat is named Hogarth after this film.

Didn't expect this.

Not surprised that couldn't crack anyone's top 10.

#052 Swingers (1992) 18 Votes, 2357 points
Doug Liman
Running time - 96 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Comedy / Drama
Original language English

Writing Credits
Jon Favreau

Cast
Jon Favreau ... Mike Peters
Vince Vaughn ... Trent Walker
Ron Livingston ... Rob
Alex Désert ... Charles
Heather Graham ... Lorraine

BY ROGER EBERT / October 25, 1996

Sometimes I get this Whitmanesque vision of America. But instead of wheat fields and mighty cities and deep lakes stretching from sea to sea, I imagine a vast number of coffee shops. And in these coffee shops, urgent conversations are taking place. Here's Mickey Rourke in Baltimore, talking with Kevin Bacon in ``Diner.'' And Quentin Tarantino, on Santa Monica Boulevard, writing down ideas for ``Pulp Fiction.'' And Andy Garcia, in Denver, rehearsing for ``Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead.'' And Pacino and De Niro, out near the LA airport, acting in their first scene together in ``Heat.'' And Marc Andreesson, in Urbana, inventing a surfer for the World Wide Web. . .

I doubt if there ever will be a movie named ``Netscape 3.0,'' but no matter; the new American frontier is the all-night diner, with Formica tops and ketchup and sugar on every table, and a waitress who writes down your order on a green and white Guest Check. And in these coffee shops, which reach out like an endless progression of stops on the highway to fame, there are countless young men like the heroes of ``Swingers,'' who are so near to stardom they can reach out and touch it, and so far away they can't afford to pick up the check. ``Swingers'' is about a loosely knit group of friends who hang out in Hollywood and hope to make it big in the entertainment industry. ``The hottest 1 percent of guys from all over the world come to our gene pool,'' they assure one another, although that gives them better prospects for reproduction than success. One of the guys, named Trent (Vince Vaughn), uses the word ``money'' as an adjective: ``That's really money. They'll see how money you are.'' This is inspired, since in Hollywood absolutely everything comes down to money. Intelligence, beauty, talent and fame go through a kind of universal currency exchange, and come out converted into money, less 15 percent.

The film's hero is Mike (Jon Favreau), who wants to be a stand-up comic but has no job prospects. A friend is weighing an offer to play Goofy at Disneyland (``Hey, at least it's Disney,'' Trent observes). Mike mopes about Michelle, the girlfriend he left behind back East, and Trent spends long hours with him in the coffee shop of a Best Western, advising him that you cannot get a woman to come back unless you're willing to forget her, after which, of course, you don't care if she comes back.

The movie follows Mike, Trent and a shifting cast of friends through several days, during which they drive through the Hollywood Hills looking for parties at which Trent promises there will be lots of ``honey babies'' to pick up. They spend a lot of time playing an advanced version of video hockey. They go looking for hot clubs (``All the cool bars in Hollywood have to be real hard to find and have no signs''). They try to pick up girls (Mike claims he's in show biz, but the woman remembers seeing him in Starbucks, picking up an employment application). In the middle of his angst, Mike more or less shuts down, cowering in his half-furnished apartment. Trent blasts him out with a midnight drive to Las Vegas, where Mike has difficulty finding conversation openers (it doesn't help to drop insights about the Age of Enlightenment). Amazingly, they pick up a couple of waitresses, who take them home (an Airstream trailer), where of course Mike blubbers about his former girlfriend.

They say you should write about what you know. Doug Liman, who directed ``Swingers,'' and Favreau, who wrote it, obviously know a lot about young guys in Hollywood sitting around in coffee shops talking about making it in show business. If you had entered that Best Western coffee shop a year or two ago, you might actually have seen them planning this movie. It's not a terribly original idea, but then as one of the guys says, ``Everybody steals from everybody'' (this observation is closely followed by shots cheerfully stolen from Scorsese's ``Goodfellas'' and Tarantino's ``Reservoir Dogs''). The movie is sweet, funny, observant and goofy with a small ``g,'' which means you don't get paid, but at least you don't have to wear the suit.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link -7.6/10 (23,550 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #76

Ranked highest by CerebralCaustic (#12)

I didn't see Swingers until like maybe a year and a half ago. The only thing I remember about this movie, with any fond memory, is Vince Vaughn. i don't know if that was because of the movie, or knowing what Vince Vaughn has done since then (both good and bad).

#051 American Movie (1999) 8 Votes, 2364 points
Chris Smith
Running time - 101 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Documentary
Original language English

Cast
Mark Borchardt ... Filmmaker
Tom Schimmels ... Actor in 'Coven'
Monica Borchardt ... Mark's Mom
Alex Borchardt ... Mark's Brother
Chris Borchardt ... Mark's Brother

Other awards
Won: Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize - Documentary


BY ROGER EBERT / October 25, 1996

If you've ever wanted to make a movie, see "American Movie," a documentary about someone who wants to make a movie more than you do. Mark Borchardt may want to make a movie more than anyone else in the world. He is a 30-year-old, odd-job man from Menomonee Falls, Wis., who has been making movies since he was a teenager and dreams of an epic about his life, which will be titled "Northwestern," and be about "rust and decay." Mark Borchardt is a real person. I have met him. I admire his spirit, and I even admire certain shots in the only Borchardt film I have seen, "Coven." I saw it at the 1999 Sundance film festival--not because it was invited there, but because after the midnight premiere of "American Movie," there wasn't a person in the theater who didn't want to stay and see Mark's 35-minute horror film, which we see him making during the course of the documentary.

"American Movie" is a very funny, sometimes very sad documentary directed by Chris Smith and produced by Sarah Price, about Mark's life, his friends, his family, his films and his dreams. From one point of view, Mark is a loser, a man who has spent his adult life making unreleased and sometimes unfinished movies with titles such as "The More the Scarier III." He plunders the bank account of his elderly Uncle Bill for funds to continue, he uses his friends and hapless local amateur actors as his cast, he enlists his mother as his cinematographer, and his composer and best friend is a guy named Mike Schank who, after one drug trip too many, seems like the twin of Kevin Smith's Silent Bob.

Borchardt's life is a daily cliffhanger involving poverty, desperation, discouragement and diehard ambition. He's behind on his child support payments, he drinks too much, he can't even convince his ancient Uncle Bill that he has a future as a moviemaker. Bill lives in a trailer surrounded by piles of magazines that he possibly subscribed to under the impression he would win the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes. He brightens slightly when Mark shows him the portrait of an actress. "She wants to be in your movie, Bill!" Bill studies the photo: "Oh, my gorsh!" But when Mark tells him about great cinema, what he hears is "cinnamon." And when Bill fumbles countless takes while trying to perform the ominous last line of "Coven," and Mark encourages him to say it like he believes it, Bill answers frankly, "I don't believe it." Smith's camera follows Borchardt as he discusses his theories of cinema (his favorite films are "Night of the Living Dead" and "The Seventh Seal"). He watches as Mark and Bill go to the bank so Bill can grudgingly sign over some of his savings. He is at cast meetings, where one local actor (Robert Jorge) explains in a peeved British accent that "Coven" is correctly pronounced "CO-ven." Not according to Mark, who says his film is pronounced "COVE-n: "I don't want it to rhyme with oven!" Some of the scenes could work in a screwball comedy. One involves an actor being thrown headfirst through a kitchen cabinet. To capture the moment, Mark recruits his long-suffering Swedish-American mother, Monica, to operate the camera, even though she complains she has shopping to do. He gets on the floor behind his actor, who finds out belatedly that Mark's special-effects strategy is simply to ram his head through the door. The first time, the actor's head bounces off. Mark prepares for take two. One reason to see "Coven" is to appreciate that shot knowing what we know now.

For another shot, Mark lies flat on the frozen ground to get low-angle shots of his friends dressed in black cloaks. "Look menacing!" he shouts. That's hard for them to do since their faces are not visible.

If Mark's mother is supportive, his father stays out of sight, sticking his head around a doorway occasionally to warn against bad language. Mark has two brothers who are fed up with him; one says he would be "well suited to factory work," and the other observes, "his main asset is his mouth." And yet Mark Borchardt is the embodiment of a lonely, rejected, dedicated artist. No poet in a Paris garret has ever been more determined to succeed. To find privacy while writing his screenplays, he drives his old beater to the parking lot of the local commuter airport and composes on a yellow legal pad. To support himself, he delivers the Wall Street Journal before dawn and vacuums the carpets in a mausoleum. He has inspired the loyalty of his friends and crew members, and his girlfriend observes that if he accomplishes 25 percent of what he hopes to do, "that'll be more than most people do." Every year at Sundance, young filmmakers emerge from the woodwork, bearing the masterpieces they have somehow made for peanuts, enlisting volunteer cast and crew. Last year's discovery was not "Coven," but "The Blair Witch Project." It cost $25,000 and so far has grossed $150 million. One day Mark Borchardt hopes for that kind of success. If it never comes, it won't be for lack of trying.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link -7.6/10 (5,069 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #76

Ranked highest by TJENZ (#1)

man is that high for Quiz Show. Movie's like the definition of a 3.5/5.

WTF is American Movie?

it's a documentary about a guy who wants to make movies and he won't let the fact that he has zero money and zero talent stop him.

Really surprised this isn't much higher.

Also, according to imdb this was released in 1999 which jibes with when I remember seeing it in the theater.

didn't Tim Burton do that already?

That’s it for today, hoping to have this all done inside a week. Not going to be doing a 2000- poll this year and certainly not before the Oscars and the 2007 poll. Might try and squeeze it between that the mid year correction.

The final fifty has:

3 animated films.
3 Best Picture winners at the Oscars
3 that aren’t in English
3 sequels
2 directors with four films to come
10 films from one year