I can't stand that you haven't seen this.

We'll expect a blog post on it within the week.

meeting Mark Borchardt is one of the highlights of my life
the fact that his glasses were held together w/scotch tape only enchanced the moment

this was more entertaining

Thanks, corrected as I forgot to do it.

Tim Burton made a documentary?

I'll probably never get a chance to legitimately ridicule you about anything ever again, so I can't pass this one up. It is pretty inexcusable that you haven't seen heard of American Movie.

Wrong. First the blast on Caddyshack/Vacation and the classic comedies of that era...now this. Your comments of late have not been pretty...in pink or any other color.

Quiz Show was fantastic. End of post.

I mean, I've heard of it, to the extent of if someone asked me a trivia question like "Does a movie called American Movie exist?" I could authoritatively buzz in and say yes. But yeah, that's about it.

edit: And I was talking about Ed Wood

rent it

Coens and...?

or just Joel & Ethan?

That thought did cross my mind...

Wachowskis (unless Bound already went by...)

Try again,

only 2 Wachowski films in the 90's

yeah, sort of a trick question.

clever

Yeah, you need to see this, Bill.

I actually forgot to vote for it...

Why I voted for The Professional vs Leon.

No update today, off to see BSP tonight for the first time this year surprisingly. Weekend I'll not be doing to much updating but we'll all be done by this time week.

Ain't the Wachowski brothers like, ummm, part-girl now?

No one really knows.

Use "The Wachowski Siblings" until there is physical confirmation.

I read an article that stated they were waiting until after the family-friendly Speed Racer is released before announcing his sex-change, at which point they will be referred to as The Wachowskis.

Am I only the only person who feels that after the invasion of the beach, this movie is mediocre at best?

Unamerican

After the invasion I'd switch it off, excellent factual accurate movie.

Never seen it, never will.

#050 Toy Story 2 (1999) 10 Votes, 2373 points
John Lasseter + Ash Brannon + Lee Unkrich
Running time - 92 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Animation / Adventure / Comedy / Family / Fantasy
Original language English

Writing Credits
John Lasseter, Pete Docter, Ash Brannon, Andrew Stanton, Rita Hsiao, Doug Chamberlain, Chris Webb

Cast
Tom Hanks ... Woody (voice)
Tim Allen ... Buzz Lightyear (voice)
Joan Cusack ... Jessie, the Yodeling Cowgirl (voice)
Kelsey Grammer ... Stinky Pete the Prospector (voice)
Don Rickles ... Mr. Potato Head

Academy Awards
Nominated Best Music - Original Song (For the song "When She Loved Me".)

Other awards
Won: Golden Globe Best Motion Picture - Comedy/Musical
Nominated: Golden Globes Best Original Song - Motion Picture (For the song "When She Loved Me".)

BY ROGER EBERT / November 24, 1999

I forgot something about toys a long time ago, and ``Toy Story 2'' reminded me. It involves the love, pity and guilt that a child feels for a favorite toy. A doll or an action figure (or a Pokemon) is yours in the same way a pet is. It depends on you. It misses you. It can't do anything by itself. It needs you and is troubled when you're not there.

``Toy Story 2'' knows this, and for smaller viewers that knowledge may be the most important thing about the film--more important than the story or the skill of the animation. This is a movie about what you hope your toys do when you're not around--and what you fear. They have lives of their own, but you are the sun in the sky of their universe, and when you treat them badly, their feelings are wounded.

The story begins with Andy, the little boy who owns the Toy Story toys, going off to camp. Woody, the cowboy, is in bad shape with a torn arm, and gets left behind. This is crushing to Woody, but worse is to come, when he gets scooped up at a garage sale by Big Al the toy collector, repaired, mended and repainted--and scheduled for sale to a toy museum in Japan.

At first this adventure is kind of fun for Woody, who finds out for the first time that he is part of a set of toys, the Roundup Gang, that also includes a cowgirl named Jessie, a horse named Bullseye and a prospector named Stinky Pete. Woody is blown away to discover he even starred in a black-and-white TV puppet show in the '50s, and begins to think that since Andy might eventually abandon him, he might enjoy retiring as the star attraction in a toy museum.

Meanwhile, Buzz Lightyear and the other toys discover what has happened and lead a dangerous crosstown mission to rescue Woody. And we begin to get insights into the private lives of toys. Stinky Pete, for example, is bitter because no kid ever bought him, and he's still in his original box. Jessie is spunky and liberated, but this cowgirl does get the blues; she sings the winsome ``When She Loved Me'' about her former owner Emily, who tossed her under the bed and forgot her. ``You never forget kids, but they forget you,'' Buzz sighs, but he argues for the position that it is better to be loved for the length of a childhood than admired forever behind glass in a museum.

The movie once again features the enchanting three-dimensional feel of computer-generated animation by Pixar, and has been directed by John Lasseter, the creator of the original ``Toy Story.'' The tale of this film is almost as thrilling as Woody's fate: It was originally intended as a lowly direct-to-video release, but then the early scenes played so well that Pixar retrenched and started over again with a theatrical feature. In other words, this isn't a made-for-video that they decided to put into theaters, but a version intended from the first to be theatrical. That's important, because it means more detail and complexity went into the animation.

The stars of the voice track certainly seem to remember how they once identified with toys. Many of the actors from the first movie are back again, including Tom Hanks as Woody, Tim Allen as Buzz, Don Rickles as Mr. Potato Head and Jim Varney as Slinky Dog. The key newcomer is Joan Cusack as Jessie the Cowgirl, and she brings new life to the cast by confronting the others for the first time with a female character who's a little less domestic than Mrs. Potato Head.

Hanks is responsible for what's probably the movie's high point; he sings ``You've Got a Friend in Me,'' and seems to speak for all toys everywhere. His Woody has, indeed, grown into quite a philosopher. His thoughts about life, love and belonging to someone are kind of profound. The screenplay by Andrew Stanton, Rita Hsiao, Doug Chamberlin and Chris Webb isn't just a series of adventures (although there are plenty of those) but a kind of inside job, in which we discover that all toys think the way every kid knows his toys think.
Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 8.0/10 (70,956 votes) Top 250: #204

SOMB 499 rank - #337

Ranked highest by Abortion Angel (#2)

#049 Edward Scissorhands (1990) 15 Votes, 2387 points
Tim Burton
Running time - 105 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Comedy / Drama / Fantasy / Romance
Original language English

Writing Credits
Tim Burton, Caroline Thompson

Cast
Johnny Depp ... Edward Scissorhands
Winona Ryder ... Kim
Dianne Wiest ... Peg
Anthony Michael Hall ... Jim
Kathy Baker ... Joyce

Academy Awards
Nominated Best Makeup

Other awards
Won: BAFTA Film Award Best Production Design
Nominated: BAFTA Film Award Best Costume Design, Best Make Up Artist, Best Special Visual Effects. Golden Globes Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Comedy/Musical (Johnny Depp)

BY ROGER EBERT / December 14, 1990

The director Tim Burton wages a valiant battle to show us new and wonderful things. In a Hollywood that placidly recycles the same old images, Burton uses special effects and visual tricks to create sights that have never been seen before. That is the good news. The disappointment is that Burton has not yet found the storytelling and character-building strength to go along with his pictorial flair.

That was true even of his "Batman," which was 1989's box office champion, but could have been a better film, I believe, if there had been anyone in it to inspire our emotional commitment. Even comic characters can make us care. Unlike Richard Donner's original "Superman," which actually had a heart beneath its special effects, Burton's "Batman" occupied a terrain in which every character was a grotesque of one sort of another, and all of their actions were inspired by shallow melodramatic motivations.

That movie was stolen by a supporting character - Jack Nicholson's Joker - and now comes "Edward Scissorhands," another inventive effort in which the hero is strangely remote. He is intended, I think, as an everyman, a universal figure like one of the silent movie clowns, who exists on a different plane from the people he meets in his adventures. One problem is that the other people are as weird, in their ways, as he is: Everyone in this film is stylized and peculiar, so he becomes another exhibit in the menagerie, instead of a commentary on it.

The movie takes place in an entirely artificial world, where a haunting gothic castle crouches on a mountaintop high above a storybook suburb, a goofy sitcom neighborhood where all of the houses are shades of pastels and all of the inhabitants seem to be emotional clones of the Jetsons. The warmest and most human resident of this suburb is the Avon lady (Dianne Wiest), who comes calling one day at the castle - not even its forbidding facade can deter her - and finds it occupied only by a lonely young man named Edward (Johnny Depp).

His story, told in a flashback, is a sad one. He was created by a mad inventor (Vincent Price), who was almost finished with his task when he died, leaving Edward with temporary scissors in place of real hands. One look at Edward and we see that scissors are inconvenient substitutes for fingers: His face is a mass of scars, and he tends to shred everything he tries to pick up.

The Avon lady isn't fazed. She bundles Edward into her car and drives him back down the mountain to join her family, which includes daughter Kim (Winona Ryder) and husband Bill (Alan Arkin).

The neighbors in this suburb are insatiably curious, led by a nosy neighbor named Joyce (Kathy Baker). The movie then develops into a series of situations that seem inspired by silent comedy, as when Edward tries to pick up a pea.

Successful satire has to have a place to stand, and a target to aim at. The entire world of "Edward Scissorhands" is satire, and so Edward inhabits it, rather than taking aim at it. Even if he lived in a more hospitable world, however, it is hard to tell what satirical comment Edward would have to make, because the movie makes an abrupt switch in his character about two-thirds of the way through. Until then he's been a gentle, goofy soul, a quixotic outsider. Then Burton and his writer, Caroline Thompson, go on autopilot and paste in a standard Hollywood ending.

You know what that is. The hero and the villain meet, there is a deadly confrontation, and no prizes for guessing who wins.

Except in pure action films, situations used to be solved by dialogue and plot developments. No more. Now someone is killed, and that's the solution, and the movie is over. In "Edward Scissorhands," the villain is a neighborhood lout named Jim (Anthony Michael Hall), who doesn't like guys with scissors for hands, and picks on Edward until finally there is a trumped-up fight to the finish up at the castle.

This conclusion is so lame it's disheartening. Surely anyone clever enough to dream up Edward Scissorhands should be swift enough to think of a payoff that involves our imagination.

All of Burton's movies look great. "Pee-wee's Big Adventure" was an unalloyed visual delight, and so was "Beetlejuice," and "Batman" gave us a Gotham City that was one of the most original and atmospheric places I've seen in the movies. But shouldn't there be something more? Some attempt to make the characters more than caricatures? All of the central characters in a Burton film - Pee-wee, the demon Betelgeuse, Batman, the Joker or Edward Scissorhands - exist in personality vacuums; they're self-contained oddities with no connection to the real world. It's saying something about a director's work when the most well-rounded and socialized hero in any of his films is Pee-wee Herman.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.9/10 (56,760 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #192

Ranked highest by Hero (#5)

Toy Story 2 was just OK.

So you're the guy who graffitied that on the overpass.

Did someone really do that? Its a line from a Dimitri Martin comedy album. I've also seen it graffitied in a few bathroom stalls.

I have heard that album, it's funny.

B Batteries.

lol @

Leather Sleeves!

Can this become a Demetri Martin quote topic? That'd be crazy awesome.

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#048 The Thin Red Line (1998) 9 Votes, 2404 points
Terrence Malick
Running time - 170 min
Country of origin Canada / USA
Genre Canada / USA
Original language English

Writing Credits
James Jones, Terrence Malick

Cast
Adrien Brody ... Cpl. Fife
James Caviezel ... Pvt. Witt
Ben Chaplin ... Pvt. Bell
George Clooney ... Capt. Bosche
John Cusack ... Capt. Gaff

Academy Awards
Nominated Best Cinematography, Best Director, Best Film Editing, Best Music - Original Dramatic Score, Best Picture, Best Sound, Best Writing - Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium


BY ROGER EBERT / January 8, 1999

The actors in "The Thin Red Line" are making one movie, and the director is making another. This leads to an almost hallucinatory sense of displacement, as the actors struggle for realism, and the movie's point of view hovers above them like a high school kid all filled with big questions. My guess is that any veteran of the actual battle of Guadalcanal would describe this movie with an eight-letter word much beloved in the Army.

The movie's schizophrenia keeps it from greatness (this film has no firm idea of what it is about), but doesn't make it bad. It is, in fact, sort of fascinating: a film in the act of becoming, a field trial, an experiment in which a dreamy poet meditates on stark reality. It's like horror seen through the detachment of drugs or dementia. The soundtrack allows us to hear the thoughts of the characters, but there is no conviction that these characters would have these thoughts. They all seem to be musing in the same voice, the voice of a man who is older, more educated, more poetic and less worldly than any of these characters seem likely to be: the voice of the director.

Terrence Malick is the director of two of the best films I have ever seen, "Badlands" (1973) and "Days of Heaven" (1978). "The Thin Red Line" feels like an extension of the second film, in which a narrator muses on the underlying tragedy that is sometimes shown on the screen, sometimes implied. Both films are founded on a transcendental sense that all natural things share their underlying reality in the mind of God. The film opens with a question: "Why does nature contend with itself?" It shows a crocodile, a killing machine. Later, as men prove more deadly than crocodiles, it shows a bird, its wing shattered by gunfire, pulling itself along the ground. In a way the film is not about war at all, but simply about the way in which all living beings are founded on the necessity of killing one another (and eating each other, either literally or figuratively).

The film opens with an idyll on a Pacific island. Two soldiers have gone AWOL and live blissfully with tribal people who exist in a pre-lapsarian state, eating the fruit that falls from the trees and the fish that leap from the seas, and smiling contentedly at the bounty of Eden. This is, the movie implies, a society that reflects man's best nature. But reality interrupts when the two soldiers are captured and returned to their Army company for the assault on a crucial hill on Guadalcanal.

During the battle scenes, there will be flashbacks to the island idyll--and other flashbacks as a soldier remembers his love for his wife. Against these simple pleasures is stacked the ideology of war, as expressed by a colonel (Nick Nolte) who read Homer at West Point ("in Greek") and is intoxicated to be in battle at last after having studied it so long. The plot of the second act of the film involves the taking of a well-defended hill, and the colonel prefers that it be attacked in a frontal assault; a captain (Elias Koteas) resists this plan as suicidal, and is right from strategic point of view, but wrong when viewed through the colonel's bloodlust: "You are not gonna take your men around in the jungle to avoid a goddamn fight." The soldiers are not well-developed as individual characters. Covered in grime and blood, they look much alike, and we strain to hear their names, barked out mostly in one syllable (Welsh, Fife, Tall, Witt, Gaff, Bosche, Bell, Keck, Staros). Sometimes during an action we are not sure who we are watching, and have to piece it together afterward. I am sure battle is like that, but I'm not sure that was Malick's point: I think he was just not much interested in the destinies and personalities of individual characters.

It was not this way in the novel by James Jones that inspired the screenplay. Jones drew his characters sharply, and indicated the ways in which each acted according to his ability and personality; his novel could have been filmed by Spielberg in the style of "Saving Private Ryan." Malick's movie sees it more as a crap shoot. For defying his superior's officers, the captain is offered first a court martial, later a Silver Star and then a Purple Heart. It is all the same. He is also transferred stateside by the colonel, and instead of insisting on staying with his men, he confesses he is rather happy to be going. This is not a movie of conventional war cliches.

The battle scenes themselves are masterful, in creating a sense of the geography of a particular hill, the way it is defended by Japanese bunkers, the ways in which the American soldiers attempt to take it. The camera crouches low in the grass, and as Malick focuses on locusts or blades of grass, we are reminded that a battle like this must have taken place with the soldiers' eyes inches from the ground. The Japanese throughout are totally depersonalized (in one crucial scene, their language is not even translated with subtitles); they aren't seen as enemies so much as necessary antagonists--an expression of nature's compulsion to "contend with itself." (One wonders what murky philosophical voice-over questions were floating above the Japanese soldiers in "The Thin Red Line." Were they also dreaming about nature, immortality, humanity and death?) Actors like Sean Penn, John Cusack, Jim Caviezel and Ben Chaplin find the perfect tone for scenes of a few seconds or a minute, and then are dropped before a rhythm can be established. We get the sense that we are rejoining characters in the middle of interrupted actions. Koteas and Nolte come the closest to creating rounded performances, and Woody Harrelson has a good death scene; actors like John Travolta and George Clooney are onscreen so briefly they don't have time to seem like anything other than guest stars.

The central intelligence in the film doesn't belong to any of the characters, or even to their voice-over philosophies. It belongs to Malick, whose ideas about war are heartfelt but not profound; the questions he asks are inescapable, but one wonders if soldiers in combat ever ask them (one guesses they ask themselves what they should do next, and how in the hell they can keep themselves from being shot). It's as if the film, long in pre-production, drifted away from the Jones novel (which was based on Jones' personal combat experience) and into a meditation not so much on war, as on film. Aren't most of the voice-over observations really not about war, but about war films? About their materials and rationales, about why one would make them, and what one would hope to say? Any film that can inspire thoughts like these is worth seeing. But the audience has to finish the work: Malick isn't sure where he's going or what he's saying. That may be a good thing. If a question has no answer, it is not useful to be supplied with one. Still, one leaves the theater bemused by what seems to be a universal law: While most war films are "anti-war," they are always anti-war from the point of view of the winning side. They say, "War is hell, and we won." Shouldn't anti-war films be told from the point of view of the losers? War was hell, and they lost.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.3/10 (41,387 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #275

Ranked highest by Helmet52 (#3)

take that, the 1999 academy awards

That's so far down the list of the transgressions committed in the name of the '99 Oscars.

hilarious bit of info on Malick from Seth Rogen no less

http://www.hollywood-elsewhere.com/archive...ckzoolander.php

#047 Eyes Wide Shut (1999) 13 Votes, 2517 points
Stanley Kubrick
Running time - 159 min
Country of origin USA / UK
Genre Drama / Mystery / Thriller
Original language English

Writing Credits
Arthur Schnitzler, Stanley Kubrick, Frederic Raphael

Cast
Tom Cruise ... Dr. William 'Bill' Harford
Nicole Kidman ... Alice Harford
Madison Eginton ... Helena Harford
Jackie Sawiris ... Roz
Sydney Pollack ... Victor Ziegler

Other awards
Nominated Golden Globe Best Original Score - Motion Picture


BY ROGER EBERT / July 16, 1999

Stanley Kubrick's ``Eyes Wide Shut'' is like an erotic daydream about chances missed and opportunities avoided. For its hero, who spends two nights wandering in the sexual underworld, it's all foreplay. He never actually has sex, but he dances close, and holds his hand in the flame. Why does he do this? The easy answer is that his wife has made him jealous. Another possibility is that the story she tells inflames his rather torpid imagination.

The film has the structure of a thriller, with the possibility that conspiracies and murders have taken place. It also resembles a nightmare; a series of strange characters drift in and out of focus, puzzling the hero with unexplained details of their lives. The reconciliation at the end of the film is the one scene that doesn't work; a film that intrigues us because of its loose ends shouldn't try to tidy up.

Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman star as Dr. Bill and Alice Harford, a married couple who move in rich Manhattan society. In a long, languorous opening sequence, they attend a society ball where a tall Hungarian, a parody of a suave seducer, tries to honey-talk Alice (``Did you ever read the Latin poet Ovid on the art of love?''). Meanwhile, Bill gets a come-on from two aggressive women, before being called to the upstairs bathroom, where Victor (Sydney Pollack), the millionaire who is giving the party, has an overdosed hooker who needs a doctor's help.

At the party, Bill meets an old friend from medical school, now a pianist. The next night, at home, Alice and Bill get stoned on pot (apparently very good pot, considering how zonked they seem), and she describes a fantasy she had about a young naval officer she saw last summer while she and Bill were vacationing on Cape Cod: ``At no time was he ever out of my mind. And I thought if he wanted me, only for one night, I was ready to give up everything ... .'' There is a fight. Bill leaves the house and wanders the streets, his mind inflamed by images of Alice making love with the officer. And now begins his long adventure, which has parallels with Joyce's Ulysses in Nighttown and Scorsese's ``After Hours,'' as one sexual situation after another swims into view. The film has two running jokes, both quiet ones: Almost everyone who sees Bill, both male and female, reacts to him sexually. And he is forever identifying himself as a doctor, as if to reassure himself that he exists at all.

Kubrick's great achievement in the film is to find and hold an odd, unsettling, sometimes erotic tone for the doctor's strange encounters. Shooting in a grainy high-contrast style, using lots of back-lighting, underlighting and strong primary colors, setting the film at Christmas to take advantage of the holiday lights, he makes it all a little garish, like an urban sideshow. Dr. Bill is not really the protagonist but the acted-upon, careening from one situation to another, out of his depth.

Kubrick pays special attention to each individual scene. He makes a deliberate choice, I think, not to roll them together into an ongoing story, but to make each one a destination--to give each encounter the intensity of a dream in which this moment is clear but it's hard to remember where we've come from or guess what comes next.

The film pays extraordinary attention to the supporting actors, even cheating camera angles to give them the emphasis on two-shots; in several scenes, Cruise is like the straight man. Sydney Pollack is the key supporting player, as a confident, sinister man of the world, living in old-style luxury, deep-voiced, experienced, decadent. Todd Field plays Nick, the society piano player who sets up Bill's visit to a secret orgy. And there is also a wonderful role for Vinessa Shaw as a hooker who picks up Dr. Bill and shares some surprisingly sweet time with him.

The movie's funniest scene takes place in a hotel where Bill questions a desk clerk, played by Alan Cumming as a cheerful queen who makes it pretty clear he's interested. Rade Sherbedgia, a gravel-voiced, bearded patriarch, plays a costume dealer who may also be retailing the favors of his young daughter. Carmela Marner is a waitress who seems to have learned her trade by watching sitcoms. And Marie Richardson is the daughter of a dead man, who wants to seduce Dr. Bill almost literally on her father's deathbed.

All of these scenes have their own focus and intensity; each sequence has its own dramatic arc. They all lead up to and away from the extraordinary orgy sequence in a country estate, where Dr. Bill gate-crashes and wanders among scenes of Sadeian sexual ritual and writhings worthy of Bosch. The masked figure who rules over the proceedings has ominous presence, as does the masked woman who warns Dr. Bill he is in danger. This sequence has hypnotic intensity.

The orgy, alas, has famously undergone digital alterations to obscure some of the more energetic rumpy-pumpy. A shame. The events in question are seen at a certain distance, without visible genitalia, and are more atmosphere than action, but to get the R rating, the studio has had to block them with digitally generated figures (two nude women arm in arm, and some cloaked men).

In rough-draft form, this masking evoked Austin Powers' famous genital hide-and-seek sequence. I have now seen the polished version of the technique, and will say it is done well, even though it should not have been done at all. The joke is that ``Eyes Wide Shut'' is an adult film in every atom of its being. With or without those digital effects, it is inappropriate for younger viewers. It's symbolic of the moral hypocrisy of the rating system that it would force a great director to compromise his vision, while by the same process making his adult film more accessible to young viewers.

Kubrick died in March. It is hard to believe he would have accepted the digital hocus-pocus. ``Eyes Wide Shut'' should have been released as he made it, either ``unrated'' or NC-17. For adult audiences, it creates a mesmerizing daydream of sexual fantasy. The final scene, in the toy store, strikes me as conventional moralizing--an obligatory happy resolution of all problems--but the deep mystery of the film remains. To begin with, can Dr. Bill believe Victor's version of the events of the past few days? I would have enjoyed a final shot in a hospital corridor, with Dr. Bill doing a double-take as a gurney wheels past carrying the corpse of the piano player.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.1/10 (61,428 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #310

Ranked highest by Agrimorfee (#4)

They need to get around to releasing the unrated version of that movie.

#046Out of Sight (1998) 11 Votes, 2519 points
Steven Soderbergh
Running time - 123 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Comedy / Crime / Drama / Romance / Thriller
Original language English

Writing Credits
Elmore Leonard, Scott Frank

Cast
George Clooney ... Jack Foley
Jennifer Lopez ... Karen Sisco
Catherine Keener ... Adele
Ving Rhames ... Buddy Bragg
Dennis Farina ... Marshall Sisco

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

BY ROGER EBERT / June 19, 1998

Steven Soderbergh's ``Out of Sight'' is a crime movie less interested in crime than in how people talk, flirt, lie and get themselves into trouble. Based on an Elmore Leonard novel, it relishes Leonard's deep comic ease; the characters mosey through scenes existing primarily to savor the dialogue.

The story involves a bank robber named Foley (George Clooney) and a federal marshal named Sisco (Jennifer Lopez) who grow attracted to each other while they're locked in a car trunk. Life goes on, and in the nature of things, it's her job to arrest him. But several things might happen first.

This is the fourth recent adaptation of a Leonard novel, after ``Get Shorty,'' ``Touch'' and ``Jackie Brown,'' and the most faithful to Leonard's style. What all four movies demonstrate is how useful crime is as a setting for human comedy. For example: All caper movies begin with a self-contained introductory caper that has nothing at all to do with the rest of the plot. A cop will disarm a hostage, or a terrorist will plant a preliminary bomb. ``Out of Sight'' begins with the most laid-back bank robbery you'd want to see, as Clooney saunters up to a teller's window and politely asks, ``This your first time being held up?'' How he cons the teller is one of the movie's first pleasures. The point of the scene is behavior, not robbery.

It turns out that this robbery is not, in fact, self-contained--it leads out of and into something--and it's not even really the first scene. ``Out of Sight'' has a time line as complex as ``Pulp Fiction,'' although at first we don't realize that. The movie's constructed like hypertext, so that, in a way, we can start watching at any point. It's like the old days when you walked into the middle of a film and sat there until somebody said, ``This is where we came in.'' Elmore Leonard is above all the creator of colorful characters. Here we get the charming, intelligent Foley, who is constitutionally incapable of doing anything but robbing banks, and Sisco, the marshal, who had a previous liaison with a bank robber (admittedly, she eventually shot him). They are surrounded by a rich gallery of other characters, and this movie, like ``Jackie Brown,'' takes the time to give every character at least one well-written scene showing them as peculiar and unique.

Among Foley's criminal accomplices are his partner Buddy Bragg (Ving Rhames, who played Marcellus Wallace in ``Pulp Fiction''). He's waiting on the outside after the prison break. In prison, Foley met a small-time hood named Glenn (Steve Zahn), who ``has a vacant lot for a head.'' They're highly motivated by one of their fellow prisoners, a former Wall Street leverage expert named Ripley, who unwisely spoke of a fortune in uncut diamonds that he keeps in his house. (Ripley is played by Albert Brooks with a Michael Milken hairstyle that is not a coincidence.) Then there's the threesome who join Foley and his friends in a raid on Ripley's house. Snoopy Miller (Don Cheadle) is a nasty piece of work, a hard-nosed and violent former boxer; Isaiah Washington plays his partner, and Keith Loneker is White Boy Rob, his clumsy but earnest bodyguard. It's ingenious how the raid involves shifting loyalties, with Foley and Sisco simultaneously dueling and cooperating.

All of these characters have lives of their own, and don't exist simply at the convenience of the plot. Consider a tender father-daughter birthday luncheon between Karen Sisco and her father (Dennis Farina), a former lawman who tenderly gives her a gun. And notice the scene between Buddy Bragg and his born-again sister.

At the center of the film is the repartee between Jennifer Lopez and George Clooney, and these two have the kind of unforced fun in their scenes together that reminds you of Bogart and Bacall. There's a seduction scene in which the dialogue is intercut with the very gradual progress of the physical action, and it's the dialogue that we want to linger on. Soderbergh edits this scene with quiet little freeze-frames; nothing quite matches up, and yet everything fits, so that the scene is like a demonstration of the whole movie's visual and time style.

Lopez had star quality in her first role in ``My Family,'' and in ``Anaconda,'' ``Selena'' and the underrated ``Blood and Wine,'' she has only grown; here she plays a role that could be complex or maybe just plain dumb, and brings such a rich comic understanding to it. She wants to arrest the guy, but she'd like to have an affair with him first, and that leads to a delicate, well-written scene in a hotel bar where the cat and mouse hold negotiations. (It parallels, in a way, the ``time out'' between Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in ``Heat.'') Clooney has never been better. A lot of actors who are handsome when young need to put on some miles before the full flavor emerges; observe how Nick Nolte, Mickey Rourke, Harrison Ford and Clint Eastwood moved from stereotypes to individuals. Here Clooney at last looks like a big screen star; the good-looking leading man from television is over with.

For Steven Soderbergh, ``Out of Sight'' is a paradox. It's his best film since ``sex, lies and videotape'' a decade ago, and yet at the same time it's not what we think of as a Soderbergh film--detached, cold, analytical. It is instead the first film to build on the enormously influential ``Pulp Fiction'' instead of simply mimicking it. It has the games with time, the low-life dialogue, the absurd violent situations, but it also has its own texture. It plays like a string quartet written with words instead of music, performed by sleazeballs instead of musicians.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.2/10 (27,517 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #373

Ranked highest by Citizen (#2)

They just did, two weeks ago: http://www.amazon.com/Eyes-Wide-Unrated-Tw...4647&sr=8-1

Thanks. I had no idea.

#045Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) 16 Votes, 2579 points
James Cameron
Running time - 137 min
Country of origin France / USA
Genre Action / Adventure / Sci-Fi / Thriller
Original language English / Spanish

Writing Credits
James Cameron, William Wisher Jr.

Cast
Arnold Schwarzenegger ... The Terminator
Linda Hamilton ... Sarah Connor
Edward Furlong ... John Connor
Robert Patrick ... T-1000
Earl Boen ... Dr. Silberman

Academy Awards
Won Best Effects - Sound Effects Editing, Best Effects - Visual Effects, Best Makeup, Best Sound
Nominated Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing

Other awards
Won BAFTA Film Award Best Sound, Best Special Visual Effects
Nominated BAFTA Film Award Best Production Design

BY ROGER EBERT / July 3, 1991

In "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," the future once again comes hunting to kill John Connor. Though the world after the nuclear holocaust of 1997 is ruled by machines, a single man can still make a difference - and that man is Connor, who is a youngster as the movie opens but is destined to grow up into the leader of the human resistance movement against the cyborgs.

You will recall from the original "The Terminator" (1984), or perhaps you will not, that the first Terminator, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, was sent back from the future to kill Connor's mother (Linda Hamilton). That mission failed, and the young man was born, and so, now, in "Terminator 2," two Terminators journey back from the future: A good one, played by Schwarzenegger, who is assigned to protect young Connor, and a bad one, played by Robert Patrick, whose mission is to destroy him. (Terminators, by the way, look like humans but are made of high-tech materials and have computer brains; the bad one, named T-1000, was apparently named after his great-grandfather, a Toshiba laptop.) You'd think those machines of the future would realize that their mission is futile; that, because Connor is manifestly the leader of the human resistance, their mission to kill him obviously must fail. But such paradoxes are ignored by "Terminator 2," which overlooks an even larger one: If indeed, in the last scene of the film, the computer chips necessary to invent Terminators are all destroyed, then there couldn't have been any Terminators - so how come they exist in the first place? Science fiction has had fun toying with such paradoxes for generations, but "Terminator 2" takes the prudent course of simply ignoring them and centering its action in the present, where young John Connor (Eddie Furlong) is a wild street kid, being raised in a foster home because his birth mother (Hamilton) is a prisoner in a mental hospital. They think she's crazy, of course, because she keeps trying to warn mankind about the approaching nuclear disaster.

From the opening chase scene - in which young Connor, on a fast motorcycle, outruns T-1000, at the wheel of a semi - "Terminator 2" develops a close relationship between the young boy and the good Terminator. Before long young Connor even discovers that Schwarzenegger is programmed to follow his instructions, and so he orders the awesome machine to stop killing people. The result is a neat twist on the tradition of the Schwarzenegger special effects film; this time, instead of corpses littering the screen, the Arnold character shoots to maim or frighten.

It's fun for a kid, having his own pet Terminator, and that's one of the inspirations in the screenplay by director James Cameron and William Wisher. Schwarzenegger becomes a father figure for young Connor, who has never met his own father because, as nearly as I can recall, his own father came from the future. Another intriguing screenplay idea is to develop the Terminator's lack of emotions; like Mr. Spock in "Star Trek," he does not understand why humans cry.

Schwarzenegger's genius as a movie star is to find roles that build on, rather than undermine, his physical and vocal characteristics. Here he becomes the straight man in a human drama - and in a human comedy, too, as the kid tells him to lighten up and stop talking like a computer. After the kid's mother is freed from the mental home, the threesome work together to defeat T-1000, while at the same time creating an unlikely but effective family unit.

While that's happening on the story level, the movie surpasses itself with special effects. There are the usual car chases, explosions and fight scenes, of course, all well done, but what people will remember is the way the movie envisions T-1000. This cyborg is made out of a newly invented liquid metal that makes him all but invincible. Shoot a hole in him, and you can see right through him, but the sides of the hole run together again, and he's repaired and ready for action.

These scenes involve ingenious creative work by Industrial Light & Magic, the George Lucas special effects shop. The basic idea for T-1000 was first tried out by ILM in "Abyss" (1990), in which an undersea station was invaded by a creature with a body made entirely of water. The trick is to create a computer simulation of the movement desired and then use a computer paintbox program to give it surface color and texture - in this case, the appearance of liquid mercury. The computer images are then combined with the live action; T-1000 turns from shiny liquid into a human being through a dissolve from the effect to the actor.

All of that work would simply be an exercise if the character itself were not effective, but T1000, as played by Patrick, is a splendid villain, with compact good lucks and a bland expression. His most fearsome quality is his implacability; no matter what you do to him, he doesn't get disturbed and he doesn't get discouraged. He just pulls himself together and keeps on coming.

The key element in any action picture, I think, is a good villain.

"Terminator 2" has one, along with an intriguing hero and fierce heroine, and a young boy who is played by Furlong with guts and energy. The movie responds to criticisms of excessive movie violence by tempering the Terminator's blood lust, but nobody, I think, will complain that it doesn't have enough action.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 8.3/10 (135,609 votes) Top 250: #75

SOMB 499 rank - #86

Ranked highest by Hero (#7)

I started googling as soon as i read Johnny's first post. It should be noted that the set contains only the unrated (ie., orgy scene not blocked out) version, not both versions of the film.

The most recent release, as always was featured at the bottom Amazon.com link.

#045Good Will Hunting (1997) 15 Votes, 2720 points
Gus Van Sant
Running time - 126 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Drama
Original language English

Writing Credits
Matt Damon , Ben Affleck

Cast
Robin Williams ... Sean Maguire
Matt Damon ... Will Hunting
Ben Affleck ... Chuckie Sullivan
Stellan Skarsgård ... Prof. Gerald Lambeau
Minnie Driver ... Skylar

Academy Awards
Won Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Robin Williams), Best Writing - Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen
Nominated Best Actor in a Leading Role (Matt Damon), Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Minnie Driver), Best Director, Best Film Editing, Best Music - Original Dramatic Score, Best Music - Original Song (For the song "Miss Misery"), Best Picture

Other awards
Won Golden Globe Best Screenplay - Motion Picture
Nominated Golden Globe Best Motion Picture - Drama, Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama (Matt Damon), Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture (Robin Williams)

BY ROGER EBERT / December 25, 1997

t must be heartbreaking to be able to appreciate true genius and yet fall just short of it yourself. A man can spend his entire life studying to be a mathematician--and yet watch helplessly while a high school dropout, a janitor, scribbles down the answers to questions the professor is baffled by.

It's also heartbreaking when genius won't recognize itself, and that's the most baffling problem of all in ``Good Will Hunting,'' the smart, involving story of a working-class kid from Boston.

The film stars Matt Damon as a janitor at MIT who likes to party and hang around the old neighborhood and whose reading consists of downloading the contents of whole libraries into his photographic memory. Stellan Skarsgard (the husband in ``Breaking the Waves'') plays Lambeau, the professor, who offers a prize to any student who can solve a difficult problem. The next morning, the answer is written on a blackboard standing in the hall.

Who claims credit? None of the students does. A few days later, Lambeau catches Will Hunting (Damon) at the board and realizes he's the author--a natural mathematical genius who can intuitively see through the thorniest problems. Lambeau wants to help Will, to get him into school, maybe, or collaborate with him. But before that can take place, Will and some buddies are cruising the old neighborhood and beat up a guy. Will also hammers on the cops a little and is jailed.

He's a tough nut. He sees nothing wrong with spending his whole life hanging out with his friends, quaffing a few beers, holding down a blue-collar job. He sees romance in being an honest bricklayer, but none in being a professor of mathematics--maybe because bricklaying is work, and, for him, math isn't.

``Good Will Hunting'' is the story of how this kid's life edges toward self-destruction and how four people try to haul him back. One is Lambeau, who gets probation for Will with a promise that he'll find him help and counseling.

One is Sean McGuire (Robin Williams), Lambeau's college roommate, now a community college professor who has messed up his own life, but is a gifted counselor. One is Skylar (Minnie Driver), a British student at Harvard, who falls in love with Will and tries to help him. And one is Chuckie (Ben Affleck), Will's friend since childhood, who tells him: ``You're sitting on a winning lottery ticket. It would be an insult to us if you're still around here in 20 years.'' True, but Will doesn't see it that way. His reluctance to embrace the opportunity at MIT is based partly on class pride (it would be betraying his buddies and the old neighborhood) and partly on old psychic wounds. And it is only through breaking through to those scars and sharing some of his own that McGuire, the counselor, is able to help him. Robin Williams gives one of his best performances as McGuire, especially in a scene where he finally gets the kid to repeat, ``It's not my fault.'' ``Good Will Hunting'' perhaps found some of its inspiration in the lives of its makers. The movie was co-written by Damon and Affleck, who grew up in Boston, who are childhood friends, and who both took youthful natural talents and used them to find success as actors. It's tempting to find parallels between their lives and the characters--and tempting, too, to watch the scenes between Damon and Driver with the knowledge that they fell in love while making the movie.

The Will Hunting character is so much in the foreground that it's easy to miss a parallel relationship: Lambeau and McGuire also are old friends who have fought because of old angers and insecurities. In a sense, by bringing the troubled counselor and the troublesome janitor together, the professor helps to heal both of them.

The film has a good ear for the way these characters might really talk.

It was directed by Gus Van Sant (``Drugstore Cowboy,'' ``To Die For''), who sometimes seems to have perfect pitch when it comes to dialogue; look at the scene where Matt and Skylar break up and say hurtful things, and see how clear he makes it that Matt is pushing her away because he doesn't think he deserves her.

The outcome of the movie is fairly predictable; so is the whole story, really. It's the individual moments, not the payoff, that make it so effective.

``Good Will Hunting'' has been rather inexplicably compared to ``Rainman,'' although ``Rainman'' was about an autistic character who cannot and does not change, and ``Good Will Hunting'' is about a genius who can change, and grow, if he chooses to.

True, they can both do quick math in their heads. But Will Hunting is not an idiot savant or some kind of lovable curiosity; he's a smart man who knows he's smart but pulls back from challenges because he was beaten down once too often as a child.

Here is a character who has four friends who love and want to help him, and he's threatened by their help because it means abandoning all of his old, sick, dysfunctional defense mechanisms.

As Louis Armstrong once said, ``There's some folks, that, if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.'' This movie is about whether Will is one of those folks.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.9/10 (93,416 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #195

Ranked highest by Asher Ford

It's your fault. It's your fault. It's your fault.