Haven't seen the movie (!!), but it is kind of disappointing to see it outrank the previous 4.

Second time I've done that to Undo, misread s/sheet. No effect on results.

Stopping at #41 today.

What did I rank it at? Pretty surprised I was the highest there.

15.

Meh, I guess thats not too bad then. Would be at least 10 spots lower now, just hadn't gotten to a lot of the critical 90's stuff when I made my list.

Stuff that I've seen since the list and would rank higher than Good Will Hunting without hesitation:


Pulp Fiction
Reservoir Dogs
Slacker
Clerks
Fargo
The Usual Suspects
Election
Trainspotting
Best in Show

and probably some others.

#043 South Park: Bigger, Louder & Uncut (1998) 13 Votes, 2722 points
Trey Parker
Running time - 81 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Animation / Comedy / Musical
Original language English

Writing Credits
Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Pam Brady

Cast
Trey Parker ... Various (voices)
Matt Stone ... Various (voices)
Mary Kay Bergman ... Various (voices)
Isaac Hayes ... Chef (voice)
George Clooney ... Dr. Gouache / Dr. Doctor (voice)

Academy Awards
Nominated Best Music, Original Song (For the song "Blame Canada".)

BY ROGER EBERT / June 30, 1999

The national debate about violence and obscenity in the movies has arrived in South Park. The ``little redneck mountain town,'' where adult cynicism is found in the mouths of babes, is the setting for vicious social satire in ``South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut.'' The year's most slashing political commentary is not in the new films by Oliver Stone, David Lynch or John Sayles, but in an animated comedy about obscenity. Wait until you see the bedroom scenes between Satan and Saddam Hussein.

Waves of four-letter words roll out over the audience, which laughs with incredulity: People can't believe what they're hearing. The film is rated R instead of NC-17 only because it's a cartoon, I suspect; even so, the MPAA has a lot of 'splaining to do. Not since Andrew Dice Clay passed into obscurity have sentences been constructed so completely out of the unspeakable.

I laughed. I did not always feel proud of myself while I was laughing, however. The movie is like a depraved extension of ``Kids Say the Darnedest Things,'' in which little children repeat what they've heard and we cringe because we know what the words really mean. No target is too low, no attitude too mean or hurtful, no image too unthinkable. After making ``South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut,'' its creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, had better move on. They've taken ``South Park'' as far as it can go, and beyond.

If you've never seen the original Comedy Central show and somehow find yourself in the theater, you'll be jolted by the distance between the images and the content.

The animation is deliberately crude, like elements cut out of construction paper. Characters consist of simple arrangements of basic geometrical shapes in bright colors. The effect is of sophisticated kids slamming stuff around on the project table in first grade.

The story: A new R-rated movie has come to town, starring the Canadian cutups Terrence and Phillip. It's titled ``Asses of Fire.'' (That's the mildest vulgarism in the movie.) The South Park kids, who bribe a homeless man to be their ``adult guardian,'' attend the movie, drink in its nonstop, wall-to-wall profanity, and startle their class at school with streams of four-letter words.

One of their moms, deeply offended, forms Mothers Against Canada. The neighbor to the north is blamed for all of U.S. society's ills, Terrence and Phillip are condemned to death, and in retaliation, the Canadian Air Force bombs the Baldwin brothers' Hollywood home. War is declared, leading to scenes your eyes will register but your mind will not believe, such as a USO show involving Winona Ryder doing unspeakable things with Ping-Pong balls.

The other plot strand begins after little Kenny is killed. (Little Kenny is killed in every episode of the TV series, always with the line, ``Oh, my God! They've killed Kenny!'') He goes to hell and finds that Hussein, recently deceased, is having an affair with Satan. Hussein wants sex, Satan wants a meaningful relationship, and they inspire a book titled Saddam Is From Mars, Satan Is From Venus.

Key plot point: The deaths of Terrence and Phillip would be the seventh sign of the Apocalypse, triggering Armageddon. It's up to the South Park kids to save the world. All of this unfolds against an unending stream of satirical abuse, ethnic stereotyping, sexual vulgarity and pointed political commentary that alternates common sense with the truly and hurtfully offensive.

I laughed, as I have reported. Sometimes the laughter was liberating, as good laughter can be, and sometimes it was simply disbelieving: How could they get away with this? This is a season when the movies are hurtling themselves over the precipice of good taste. Every week brings its new surprises. I watch as Austin Powers drinks coffee that contains excrement, and two weeks later I go to ``American Pie'' and watch a character drink beer that contains the most famous bodily fluid from ``There's Something About Mary.'' In ``Big Daddy,'' I see an adult instruct a 5-year-old on how to trip Roller-bladers and urinate in public.

Now this--a cartoon, but it goes far beyond anything in any of those live-action movies. All it lacks is a point to its message. What is it saying? That movies have gone too far, or that protests against movies have gone too far? It is a sign of our times that I cannot tell. Perhaps it's simply anarchistic, and feels that if it throws enough shocking material at the wall, some of it will stick. A lot of the movie offended me. Some of it amazed me. It is too long and runs out of steam, but it serves as a signpost for our troubled times. Just for the information it contains about the way we live now, thoughtful and concerned people should see it. After all, everyone else will.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.7/10 (56,234 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #142

Ranked highest by Slackmo (#2)

movie in serious danger of being extremely overrated just because it didn't suck as much as it could and maybe should have

I hate you, Kenny.

Enjoyment of said film notwithstanding...

#042 Unforgiven (1992) 15 Votes, 2741 points
Clint Eastwood
Running time - 131 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Drama / Western
Original language English

Writing Credits
David Webb Peoples

Cast
Clint Eastwood ... William 'Bill' Munny
Gene Hackman ... Little Bill Daggett
Morgan Freeman ... Ned Logan
Richard Harris ... English Bob
Jaimz Woolvett ... The Schofield Kid

Academy Awards
Won Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Gene Hackman), Best Director, Best Film Editing, Best Picture
Nominated Best Actor in a Leading Role (Clint Eastwood), Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Best Cinematography, Best Sound, Best Writing - Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen

Other awards
Won: BAFTA Film Award Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Gene Hackman). Golden Globe Best Director - Motion Picture, Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture (Gene Hackman)
Nominated: BAFTA Film Award Best Cinematography, Best Direction, Best Film, Best Screenplay - Original, Best Sound. Golden Globe Best Motion Picture - Drama, Best Screenplay - Motion Picture


Roger Ebert / July 21, 2002

Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven" takes place at that moment when the old West was becoming new. Professional gunfighters have become such an endangered species that journalists follow them for stories. Men who slept under the stars are now building themselves houses. William Munny, "a known thief and a murderer," supports himself with hog farming. The violent West of legend lives on in the memories of men who are by 1880 joining the middle class. Within a few decades, Wyatt Earp would be hanging around Hollywood studios, offering advice.

Eastwood chose this period for "Unforgiven," I suspect, because it mirrored his own stage in life. He began as a young gunslinger on TV and in the early Sergio Leone films "A Fistful of Dollars" and "For a Few Dollars More," and he matured in "Coogan's Bluff" and "Two Mules for Sister Sara," under the guidance of Don Siegel, the director he often cited as his mentor. Now Eastwood was in his 60s, and had long been a director himself. Leone had died in 1989 and Siegel in 1991; he dedicated "Unforgiven" to them. If the Western was not dead, it was dying; audiences preferred science fiction and special effects. It was time for an elegy.

The film reflects a passing era even in its visual style. The opening shot is of a house, a tree, and a man at a graveside. The sun is setting, on this man and the era he represents. Many of the film's exteriors are widescreen compositions showing the vastness of the land. The daytime interiors, on the other hand, are always strongly backlit, the bright sun pouring in through windows so that the figures inside are dark and sometimes hard to see. Living indoors in a civilized style has made these people distinct.

William Munny is not much of a hog farmer. At one point he chases a hog, lands face down in the mud, and stays there for a moment, defeated. He has two young children to raise after the death of his beloved Claudia. There is not enough money. A rider named the Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett) appears with an offer of cash money for bounty hunting. The Kid had heard that Munny was "cold as snow and don't have no weak nerve, nor fear." Munny says, "I ain't like that anymore, Kid. It was whiskey done it as much as anythin' else. I ain't had a drop in over 10 years. My wife, she cured me of that, cured me of drink and wickedness."

William Munny is a chastened man, a killer and outlaw who was civilized by marriage. Thus "Unforgiven" internalizes the classic Western theme in which violent men are "civilized" by schoolmarms, preachers and judges. When he talks about his wife, Munny sounds like a contrite little boy, determined not to be bad anymore.

The Schofield Kid has named himself, he says, after his Schofield model Smith & Wesson revolver. In an earlier day men were nicknamed by others. Now they create their own monikers, almost as marketing tools. He tells William Munny the story of two drunken cowboys who savagely attacked a prostitute in Wyoming: "They cut up her face, cut her eyes out, cut her ears off, hell, they even cut her teats. ... A thousand dollars reward, Will. Five hundred apiece."

The hog farmer needs the money. But a running theme of the movie is the incompetence of the bounty hunters. The Kid is blind as a bat, and can't hit anything with his trademark revolver. When William Munny prepares to saddle up, he finds to his humiliation that he can hardly mount a horse anymore. ("This old horse is getting even with me for the sins of my youth," he tells his children. "Before I met your dear departed Ma, I used to be weak and given to mistreatin' animals.")

Munny initially turns down the Kid's offer, but reflects on it, and eventually rides off to recruit an old partner, Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman). They will catch up with the Kid and share the bounty. This progression is intercut with life in Big Whiskey, Wyo., where Sheriff Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman) rules with an iron fist. His law says: No guns inside the city limits. He enforces it with fearful, sadistic beatings, and then returns to the riverside where he is building himself a house.

The story then works itself out in classic Western terms, with the corrupt sheriff and the righteous outlaw facing each other. The story becomes less about the bounty than about their personal, mutual, need for settlement, made all the sharper because they have met in the past. And eventually we see the younger William Munny emerging from his shell of age: He turns again into a fearsome man.

This process takes place against a full sense of the town's life. The screenwriter, David Webb Peoples, ignores the recent tradition in which the expensive star dominates every scene, and creates a rich gallery of supporting roles. Here his models are the Western masters like John Ford, who populated their movies with communities. Richard Harris plays English Bob, a famous gunfighter who now lives off his publicity and is followed everywhere by W. W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek), a writer for pulp Western magazines; after Munny is in a gun battle, Beauchamp scribbles furious notes, and wants to know, "who'd you kill first?"

Also important in the town is the madam, Strawberry Alice (Frances Fisher), who has raised the bounty and wants revenge for the mutilation of her girl Delilah (Anna Thomson). Skinny Dubois (Anthony James), owner of the bar and brothel, has more practical concerns: He paid good money for Delilah, and wants compensation; in the half-tamed West, some men now appeal to the law instead of settling things themselves.

The long final act of the movie involves William Munny's desire to avenge the death and public humiliation of his friend Ned, whose corpse has been put on display in a box outside the saloon. Here we see Eastwood as the master of the kind of sustained action sequence he learned from Leone and Siegel: Not a boring montage of quick cuts and meaningless violence, but a story told through deliberate strategy, in which events may not be possible, but are somehow plausible. William Munny, the hapless hog farmer who couldn't even saddle his own horse, has been transformed into the efficient, omniscient figure of vengeance we know from Eastwood's earlier roles. The old pro still remembers the moves.

The title of the movie is intriguing. Does Munny still seek forgiveness from his dead wife, and the others he wronged? There is a sense that he is still haunted by guilt: He has reformed, but has not made amends. Munny tells Logan: "Ned, you remember that drover I shot through the mouth and his teeth came out the back of his head? I think about him now and again. He didn't do anything to deserve to get shot, at least nothin' I could remember when I sobered up."

His friend says "You ain't like that no more." Munny says, "That's right. I'm just a fella now. I ain't no different than anyone else no more." But his voice lacks conviction, and we sense unfinished business in the air. Munny says he needs the bounty money to support his kids, but the kids would be better served if the old man didn't ride off to risk his life against fresher gunfighters.

If Clint Eastwood had not been a star, he would still figure as a major director, with important work in the Western, action and comedy genres, and unique films like "Bird" (1988), his biography of the saxophonist Charlie Parker, the love story "The Bridges of Madison County" (1995), and the wonderful "A Perfect World" (1993), which seems to be about a hunt for an escaped convict, but seems oddly distanced from the chase, and more concerned with the values and histories of the characters. It has the elements of a crime picture, but the freedom of an art film. "Unforgiven," too, uses a genre as a way to study human nature.

There is one exchange in the movie that has long stayed with me. After he is fatally wounded, Little Bill says, "I don't deserve this. To die like this. I was building a house." And Munny says, "Deserve's got nothin' to do with it." Actually, deserve has everything to do with it, and although Ned Logan and Delilah do not get what they deserve, William Munny sees that the others do. That implacable moral balance, in which good eventually silences evil, is at the heart of the Western, and Eastwood is not shy about saying so.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 8.2/10 (55,891 votes) Top 250: #112

SOMB 499 rank - #75

Ranked highest by RSC and Citizen (#8)

#041 Bottle Rocket (1996) 13 Votes, 2760 points
Wes Anderson
Running time - 91 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Adventure / Comedy / Crime / Drama / Romance
Original language English / Spanish

Writing Credits
Owen Wilson, Wes Anderson

Cast
Luke Wilson ... Anthony Adams
Owen Wilson ... Dignan
Ned Dowd ... Dr. Nichols
Shea Fowler ... Grace
Haley Miller ... Bernice


BY ROGER EBERT / February 21, 1996

"Bottle Rocket" was shot in and around Austin, Texas, and like "Slacker," another Austin movie, it's in love with the whimsy, coincidences and conversation of everyday life. The plot is about learning to pull stickups, but crime seems almost like an afterthought in many of the scenes, which play more like a documentary on some old friends sitting around trying to think about something to do.

The movie opens with a character named Anthony (Luke Wilson) planning his escape from a mental asylum. Many of the details have been planned by his friend Didnan (Owen C. Wilson), who signals him furtively from a hiding place on the grounds and who seems loonier than Anthony. The escape works, but it's not much of an achievement, since the asylum is a minimum-security institution that anyone can more or less walk away from.

The logic behind the unnecessary escape soon repeats itself, when Didnan and Anthony collaborate on a house burglary that turns out, shall we say, to be a great deal less risky than it first appears. They're in training for the big time; they want to be crooks, but don't have many of the necessary skills, and their personalities seem all wrong. For Didnan, crime seems like less of a career than a convenient way to control Anthony.

They bring in a friend, Bob (Robert Musgrave). He'll be the getaway driver for their first real big-time heist. They choose a bookstore as their target, and the scene is handled nicely; the employees and customers are too lowkey to really mind very much.

"Bottle Rocket" then falls into a version of a familiar movie story, in which essentially innocent characters choose, or are pushed into, a life of crime, and find themselves increasingly alienated from society when all they really want to do is hang out and kill time. Eventually, they get themselves involved with a real criminal, played by James Caan, and find themselves in over their heads.

The formula provides some nice small moments, but they don't add up to much; they suggest that these filmmakers might make a better movie the next time, when they depend less on their own familiar personalities and inspirations and more on an original screenplay.

The story behind "Bottle Rocket" is encouraging for would-be filmmakers. The director, Wes Anderson, met the writer and co-star, Owen Wilson, at the University of Texas. Owen's brother Luke came on board as another cast member. The group made a short film based on their idea, got support from Texas-based screenwriter L. K. (Kit) Carson, took the short to the Sundance Film Festival, and found backing from big-time filmmakers including James L. Brooks, who helped them get money for a feature from Columbia Pictures.

"Bottle Rocket" is entertaining if you understand exactly what it is: if you see it as a film made by friends out of the materials presented by their lives and with the freedom to not push too hard. Its fragile charm would have been destroyed by rewrites intended to pump it up or focus it; it needs to meander, to take time to listen to its dialogue, to slowly unveil character quirks, particularly Dignan's.

It's the kind of film, in fact, that a festival like Sundance is ideal for. An audience that knows about the realities of low-budget independent filmmaking will probably find a lot of qualities in here that might elude wider audiences. I can't recommend the film - it's too unwound and indulgent - but I have a certain affection for it, and I'm looking forward to whatever Anderson and the Wilsons do next.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.2/10 (13,151 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #198

Ranked highest by U. Sausage (#3)

That is a pretty piss poor attitude to take towards anything.

I left the theatre after the invasion. I didn't buy into the main plot of the film simply because it was handled far too shmaltzy for my tastes. Plus, the acid hangover didn't help.


American Movie doesn't hold a candle to ... And God Spoke.

she asked me if I'd rather go water-skiing or lay out. And I realized that not only did I not want to answer THAT question, but I never wanted to answer another water-sports question, or see any of these people again for the rest of my life.

that might be my favorite Wes Anderson-related quote ever.

just sayin'. It's good, but it's not that good. Just because it wasn't a huge disappointment doesn't make it one of the 50 best movies of the decade.

edit: or 50 most enjoyable, or 50 funniest or whatever.

Don't make me get out my Crash stick.

"Hey look, it's good because I said it was!"

#040 Casino (1995) 14 Votes, 2862 points
Martin Scorsese
Running time - 178 min
Country of origin USA / France
Genre Crime / Drama
Original language English / French

Writing Credits
Nicholas Pileggi, Martin Scorsese

Cast
Robert De Niro ... Sam 'Ace' Rothstein
Sharon Stone ... Ginger McKenna
Joe Pesci ... Nicky Santoro
James Woods ... Lester Diamond
Frank Vincent ... Frank Marino

Academy Awards
Nominated Best Actress in a Leading Role (Sharon Stone)

Other awards
Won : Golden Globe Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama (Sharon Stone)
Nominated : Golden Globe Best Director - Motion Picture

BY ROGER EBERT / November 22, 1995

If the Mafia didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent it.

The same is true of Las Vegas. There is a universal need to believe in an outfit that exists outside the rules and can get things done.

There's a related need for a place where the rules are suspended, where there's no day or night, where everything has a price, where if you're lucky, you go home a millionaire. Of course, people who go to Vegas lose money, and people who deal with the mob, regret it. But hope is what we're talking about. Neither the mob nor Vegas could exist if most people weren't optimists.

Martin Scorsese's fascinating new film "Casino" knows a lot about the Mafia's relationship with Las Vegas. It's based on a book by Nicholas Pileggi, who had full access to a man who once ran four casinos for the mob, and whose true story inspires the movie's plot.

Like "The Godfather," it makes us feel like eavesdroppers in a secret place.

The movie opens with a car bombing, and the figure of Sam "Ace" Rothstein floating through the air. The movie explains how such a thing came to happen to him. The first hour plays like a documentary; there's a narration, by Rothstein (Robert De Niro) and others, explaining how the mob skimmed millions out of the casinos.

It's an interesting process. Assuming you could steal 25 percent of the slot-machine take - what would you do with tons of coins? How would you convert them into bills that could be stuffed into the weekly suitcase for delivery to the mob in Kansas City? "Casino" knows. It also knows how to skim from the other games, and from food service and the gift shops. And it knows about how casinos don't like to be stolen from.

There's an incident where a man is cheating at blackjack, and a couple of security guys sidle up to him and jab him with a stun gun.

He collapses, the security guys call for medical attention, and hurry him away to a little room where they pound on his fingers with a mallet and he agrees that he made a very bad mistake.

Rothstein, based on the real-life figure of Frank (Lefty) Rosenthal, starts life as a sports oddsmaker in Chicago, attracts the attention of the mob because of his genius with numbers and is assigned to run casinos because he looks like an efficient businessman who will encourage the Vegas goose to continue laying its golden eggs. He is a man who detests unnecessary trouble. One day, however, trouble finds him, in the person of Ginger McKenna (Sharon Stone), a high-priced call girl.

Scorsese shows him seeing Ginger on a TV security monitor and falling so instantly in love that the image becomes a freeze-frame.

Ace showers her with gifts, which she is happy to have, but when he wants to marry her, she objects; she's been with a pimp named Lester Diamond (James Woods) since she was a kid, and she doesn't want to give up her profession. Rothstein will make her an offer she can't refuse: cars, diamonds, furs, a home with a pool and the key to his safety-deposit box. She marries him. It is Ace's first mistake.

Another mistake was to meet Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci) when they were both kids in Chicago. Nicky is a thief and a killer, who comes to Vegas, forms a crew and throws his weight around. After he squeezes one guy's head in a vise, the word goes out that he's the mob's enforcer. Not true, but people believe it, and soon Nicky's name is being linked with his old pal Ace in all the newspapers.

Scorsese tells his story with the energy and pacing he's famous for, and with a wealth of little details that feel just right. Not only the details of tacky 1970s period decor, but little moments such as when Ace orders the casino cooks to put "exactly the same amount of blueberries in every muffin." Or when airborne feds are circling a golf course while spying on the hoods, and their plane runs out of gas and they have to make an emergency landing right on the green.

And when crucial evidence is obtained because a low-level hood kept a record of his expenses. And when Ace hosts a weekly show on local TV - and reveals a talent for juggling.

Meanwhile, Ginger starts drinking, and Ace is worried about their kid, and they start having public fights, and she turns to Nicky for advice that soon becomes consolation, and when Ace finds out she may be fooling around, he utters a line that, in its way, is perfect: "I just hope it's not somebody who I think it might be." "It was," a narrator tells us, "the last time street guys would ever be given such an opportunity." All the mob had to do was take care of business. But when Ace met Ginger and when Nicky came to town, the pieces were in place for the mob to become the biggest loser in Vegas history. "We screwed up good," Nicky says, not using exactly those words. Scorsese gets the feel, the mood, almost the smell of the city just right; De Niro and Pesci inhabit their roles with unconscious assurance, Stone's call girl is her best performance, and the supporting cast includes such people as Don Rickles, whose very presence evokes an era (his job is to stand impassively beside the boss and look very sad about what might happen to whoever the boss is talking to).

Unlike his other Mafia movies ("Mean Streets" and "GoodFellas"), Scorsese's "Casino" is as concerned with history as with plot and character. The city of Las Vegas is his subject, and he shows how it permitted people like Ace, Ginger and Nicky to flourish, and then spit them out, because the Vegas machine is too profitable and powerful to allow anyone to slow its operation. When the Mafia, using funds from the Teamsters union, was ejected in the late 1970s, the 1980s ushered in a new source of financing: junk bonds. The guys who floated those might be the inspiration for "Casino II." "The big corporations took over," the narrator observes, almost sadly. "Today, it works like Disneyland." Which brings us back to our opening insight. In a sense, people need to believe a town like Vegas is run by guys like Ace and Nicky.

In a place that breaks the rules, maybe you can break some, too. For those with the gambler mentality, it's actually less reassuring to know that giant corporations, financed by bonds and run by accountants, operate the Vegas machine. They know all the odds, and the house always wins. With Ace in charge, who knows what might happen?

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 8.0/10 (57,795 votes) Top 250: #221

SOMB 499 rank - #107

Ranked highest by Nic (#6)

Truth be told there are entire sequences of this film that are complete and utter rip-offs of half a dozen other war films so to call it unique to begin with is pretty far fetched.


stop this guy-he's nuts.

see A.M. Doc. Find it now before it's too late.

I know I ranked Casino and Bottle Rocket both absurdly high, but they are two of my favorite movies god dammit.

All right, we'll stop bitching about it if you will.

And South Park is worthy of it's placing here. I personally find it to be my favorite thing parker and stone have put out, and when you consider how many high points the tv series has had over the last decade, definitely high praise from me.

#039 Short Cuts (1993) 15 Votes, 2938 points
Robert Altman
Running time - 187 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Drama
Original language English

Writing Credits
Raymond Carver, Robert Altman, Frank Barhydt

Cast
Jack Lemmon ... Paul Finnigan
Julianne Moore ... Marian Wyman
Matthew Modine ... Dr. Ralph Wyman
Madeleine Stowe ... Sherri Shepard
Tim Robbins ... Gene Shepard

Academy Awards
Nominated Best Director

Other awards
Won : Golden Globe Best Ensemble Cast. Venice Film Festival - Golden Lion, Volpi Cup - Best Ensemble Cast
Nominated : Golden Globe Best Screenplay - Motion Picture

BY ROGER EBERT / October 22, 1993

Los Angeles always seems to be waiting for something. Permanence seems out of reach; some great apocalyptic event is on the horizon, and people view the future tentatively. Robert Altman's "Short Cuts" captures that uneasiness perfectly in its interlocking stories about people who seem trapped in the present, always juggling.

The movie is based on short stories by Raymond Carver, but this is Altman's work, not Carver's, and all the film really has in common with its source is a feeling for people who are disconnected - from relatives, church, tradition - and support themselves with jobs that never seem quite real. It is hard work, no doubt, to be a pool cleaner, a chauffeur, a phone-sex provider, a birthday cake decorator, a jazz singer, a helicopter pilot, but these are professions that find you before you find them. How many people end up in jobs they planned for? Altman is fascinated by the accidental nature of life, by the way that whole decades of our lives can be shaped by events we do not understand or even know about.

"Short Cuts" understands and knows because it is filmed from an all-seeing point of view. Its characters all live at the same time in the same city, and sometimes their paths even cross, but for the most part they don't know how their lives are changed by people they meet only glancingly.

Imagine the rage of the baker (Lyle Lovett), for example, when he gets stuck with an expensive birthday cake. We could almost comprehend the cruel anonymous telephone calls he makes to the parents (Andie MacDowell and Bruce Davison) who ordered the cake, if we didn't know their child missed his birthday because he was hit by a car. Imagine what they would say to the unknown driver (Lily Tomlin) who struck their child. But we know that she wanted to take him to a doctor; the boy refused because he has been forbidden to get into the cars of strangers, and besides, he seemed OK. If you knew the whole story in this world, there'd be a lot less to be angry about.

The movie's characters all seem to be from somewhere else, and without parents. Their homes are as temporary as the trailer park two of the characters inhabit, where people come and go, no one knows from where, or to where. The grandparent (Jack Lemmon) of the injured little boy has disappeared for years. Faced with a son and grandson he hardly knows, he spends most of his time talking about himself.

The jazz singer would rather drink than know her daughter.

Sad, insoluble mysteries seem right under the surface. Three men go on a fishing trip and discover the drowned body of a dead woman. They have waited a long time and come a long way for this trip, and if they report the woman, their trip will be ruined. So, since she's already dead, what difference will a few more days make? And what would the police do, anyway? There's a motorcycle cop (Tim Robbins) in the movie, who seems to be a free-lancer, responsible to no one, using his badge simply as a way to get his will, spending a lot of time cheating on his wife (Madeleine Stowe), who finds his lies hilarious.

Almost everybody drinks all through this movie, although only a few characters ever get exactly drunk. It's as if life is a preventable disease, and booze is the medication. Sex places a very slow second. The pool cleaner's wife (Jennifer Jason Leigh) supplements the family income by working as a phone-sex performer, spinning verbal fantasies to strangers on the phone, while sitting bored in her living room, changing her baby's diapers. Her husband (Chris Penn) is angry: "How come you never talk that way to me?" Think about that. He's married to her. They sleep in the same bed. He can have actual physical sex with her. But he envies the strangers who will never meet her - who value her inaccessibility: She services their fantasies without imposing her own reality.

Some of these characters, if they could find each other, would find the answers to their needs. The baker, for example, has unexplored reserves of tenderness. He could help the sad young woman (Lori Singer) who plays the cello, and waits for those moments when her mother (Annie Ross), the jazz singer, is sober. The cop would probably be happier talking with the phonesex girl than carrying on his endless affairs, which have no purpose except to anger his wife, who is past caring. He likes the deception more than the sex, and could get off by telling the stranger on the other end of the phone that he'd been cheating with "another phone-sex girl.

Yet these people have a certain nobility to them. They keep on trying. They hope for better times. The hash-house waitress (Tomlin) loves her husband (Tom Waits), who is so good to her when he's not drinking that she forgives the dark times when he is drinking. The parents of the little boy find an unexpected consolation from the baker. The wife (Anne Archer) of one of the fly-fishermen finds a new resolve and freedom. Life goes on.

Altman has made this kind of film before, notably in "Nashville" (1976) and "The Player" (1992). He doesn't like stories that pretend that the characters control their destinies, and their actions will produce a satisfactory outcome. He likes the messiness and coincidence of real life, where you can do your best, and some days it's just not good enough. He doesn't reproduce Raymond Carver's stories so much as his attitude.

In a Carver story (and you should read one if you never have), there is typically a moment when an ordinary statement becomes crucial, or poetic, or sad. People get blinding glimpses into the real nature of their lives; the routine is peeled aside, and they can see they've been stuck in a rut for years, going through the motions.

Sometimes they see with equal clarity that they are free to take charge, that no one has sentenced them to repeat the same mistakes.

Carver died five years ago, at 50, of a brain tumor. He believed he would have died at 40, of alcoholism, if he hadn't found a way to stop drinking. When he knew the cancer would kill him, he wrote a poem about that bonus of 10 years, called "Gravy." Altman, who spent most of the 1980s in a sort of exile after Hollywood declared him noncommercial, continued to make films, but they didn't have the budgets or the distribution a great filmmaker should have had.

Then came the comeback of "The Player," and now here is "Short Cuts." Gravy.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.6/10 (12,855 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #137

Ranked highest by Saskadelphia (#3)

#038 The Ice Storm (1997) 15 Votes, 2741 points
Ang Lee
Running time - 112 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Drama
Original language English

Writing Credits
Rick Moody, James Schamus

Cast
Kevin Kline ... Ben Hood
Joan Allen ... Elena Hood
Sigourney Weaver ... Janey Carver
Henry Czerny ... George Clair
Tobey Maguire ... Paul Hood

Other awards
Won : BAFTA Film Award Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role (Sigourney Weaver). Cannes Film Festival Best Screenplay
Nominated : BAFTA Film Award Best Screenplay - Adapted. Cannes Film Festival Golden Palm. Golden Globe Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture (Sigourney Weaver)

BY ROGER EBERT / October 17, 1997

The Ice Storm'' takes place as an early winter storm descends on Connecticut, casting over Thanksgiving a shroud of impending doom. In a wooded suburb, affluent adults stir restlessly in their split-level homes, depressed not only by their lives but by their entertainments, and even by their sins. Their teenage children have started experimenting with the same forms of escape: booze, pot and sex.

The Hood family is held together by quiet desperation. Ben (Kevin Kline) is having an affair with a neighbor (Sigourney Weaver). His wife Elena (Joan Allen) is a shoplifter who is being hit on by a long-haired minister. The children sip wine in the kitchen. Young Wendy Hood's grace before Thanksgiving dinner is to the point: ``Thanks for letting us white people kill all the Indians and steal all their stuff.'' Ben and Elena observe later, ``The only big fight we've had in years is about whether to go back into couples therapy.'' The film, based on a novel by Rick Moody, has been directed by Ang Lee, whose previous credit was an adaptation of Jane Austen's ``Sense and Sensibility.'' Both films are about families observing protocol and exchanging visits. Only the rules have changed. When Ben Hood visits Janey Carver (Weaver) for an adulterous liaison, he wanders into Janey's rec room to find his own daughter, Wendy (Christina Ricci), experimenting with Janey's son Mikey (Elijah Wood). Wendy, who is 14, has also conducted an exploratory session with Mikey's kid brother, Sandy. The father asks his daughter what she's doing there. She could as easily have asked him. The early 1970s were a time when the social revolution of the 1960s had seeped down, or up, into the yuppie classes, who wanted to be ``with it'' and supplemented their martinis with reefer. The sexual revolution is in full swing for the characters in this movie, leading to Ben Hood's lecture to his son on the facts of life: ``Masturbating in the shower wastes water and electricity.'' When Janey Carver finds her son and the Hood girl playing ``I'll show you mine if you'll show me yours,'' her response is a bizarre speech on Margaret Mead's book about coming of age in Samoa.

The literate, subtle screenplay by James Schamus cuts between the children and their parents, finding parallels. Paul takes the train into the city to visit the apartment of the girl he likes; he puts sleeping pills into her drink to make her perhaps more agreeable, and she passes out. Meanwhile in New Canaan, the adults are attending a ``key party'' that turns into a sort of race: Can they swap their wives before they pass out? Elena Hood even finds Philip, the long-haired minister (Michael Cumpsty) there. ``Sometimes the shepherd needs the comfort of the sheep,'' he explains tolerantly. She answers: ``I'm going to try hard not to understand the implications of that.'' There is a sense of gathering tragedy, symbolized in one scene where a child balances on an icy diving board over an empty pool. When disaster does strike, it releases helpless tears for one of the characters; we reflect on how very many things he has to cry about. Despite its mordant undertones, the film is often satirical and frequently very funny, and quietly observant in its performances, as when the Weaver character takes all she can of Kline's musings about his dislike of golf, and finally tells her lover: ``You're boring me. I have a husband. I don't feel the need for another.'' They all feel the need for something. What we sense after the film is that the natural sources of pleasure have been replaced with higher-octane substitutes, which have burnt out the ability to feel joy. Going through the motions of what once gave them escape, they feel curiously trapped.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.5/10 (19,565 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #465

Ranked highest by Pinkerton (#1)

#037 Barton Fink (1991) 13 Votes, 3021 points
Joel Coen + Ethan Coen
Running time - 116 min
Country of origin USA / UK
Genre Comedy / Drama
Original language English

Writing Credits
Joel Coen, Ethan Coen

Cast
John Turturro ... Barton Fink
John Goodman ... Charlie Meadows
Judy Davis ... Audrey Taylor
Michael Lerner ... Jack Lipnick
John Mahoney ... W.P. Mayhew

Academy Awards
Nominated: Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Michael Lerner), Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Best Costume Design

Other awards
Won : Cannes Film Festival Best Actor (John Turturro), Best Director, Golden Palm
Nominated :Golden Globe Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture (John Goodman)

BY ROGER EBERT / August 23, 1991

If there is a favorite image in the movies by the Coen brothers, it's of crass, venal men behind desks, who possess power the heroes envy. Maybe that's because, like all filmmakers, the Coens have spent a lot of time on the carpet, pitching projects to executives. In "Blood Simple," the guy behind the desk was M. Emmet Walsh, as a scheming private detective. In "Raising Arizona," it was Trey Wilson's furniture czar. In "Miller's Crossing," it was Albert Finney, as a mob boss. In "Barton Fink," it is Michael Lerner, as the head of a Hollywood studio. All of these men are vulgar, smoke cigars, and view their supplicants with contempt.

To their desks come characters who want to make a deal with the devil. They know these men are evil, compromised and corrupt. But they want what they have - a lot of money. "Barton Fink," the latest Coen film (directed by Joel, produced by Ethan, written by both), tells the story of a man who would like to sell out to Hollywood, if only he had the talent. Barton Fink is a left-wing New York playwright, modeled on the Clifford Odets of "Waiting for Lefty," who writes one proletarian hand-wringer in the late 1930s and then is summoned to Hollywood, where Jack Lipnick (Lerner), the vulgarian in charge of Capitol Pictures, pays him piles of money and assigns him to write a wrestling picture for Wallace Beery.

Fink, played with a likable, dim earnestness by John Turturro, checks into an eerie hotel that looks designed by Edward Hopper. There is apparently only one other tenant, the affable Charlie Meadows (John Goodman), a traveling salesman who lives next door and says he could tell Fink a lot of interesting stories. But Fink, who claims to be the poet of the working man, is not interested in a real proletarian, and spends most of his time staring at his typewriter in despair. He has writer's block.

Lou Breeze (Jon Polito), the studio czar's right-hand man, tells Fink he should look up W.P. Mayhew (John Mahoney), another great American writer on the studio payroll. Mayhew is obviously modeled on William Faulkner, and Mahoney, with a moustache, is his uncanny double. Fink arrives breathlessly at the great man's feet, only to discover that he is a raving drunk and that his "secretary" (Judy Davis) has written most of his recent work. The three go on a picnic one day, and the scene builds into a wry comic vignette - some satire, some slapstick.

Like all of the Coen productions, "Barton Fink" has a deliberate visual style. The Hollywood of the late 1930s and early 1940s is seen here as a world of Art Deco and deep shadows, long hotel corridors and bottomless swimming pools. And there is a horror lurking underneath the affluent surface. Goodman, as the ordinary man in the next room, is revealed to have inhuman secrets, and the movie leads up to an apocalyptic vision of blood, flames and ruin, with Barton Fink unable to influence events with either his art or his strength.

The Coens mean this aspect of the film, I think, to be read as an emblem of the rise of Nazism. They paint Fink as an ineffectual and impotent left-wing intellectual, who sells out while telling himself he is doing the right thing, who thinks he understands the "common man" but does not understand that, for many common men, fascism had a seductive appeal. Fink tries to write a wrestling picture and sleeps with the great writer's mistress, while the Holocaust approaches and the nice guy in the next room turns out to be a monster.

It would be a mistake to insist too much on this aspect of the movie, however, since "Barton Fink" is above all a black comedy in the tradition of David Lynch, Luis Bunuel and the Coens themselves. Turturro is the right man for the role, making Fink a plodding, introspective, unsure intellectual whose lack of insight is matched only by his lack of talent. The movie is a little unfair to Odets, its inspiration (even if he did go to Hollywood in the late 1930s and write a boxing picture, "Golden Boy," which did not drip with political commitment). But it is even more unfair, hilariously, to Faulkner, whose works were not written by a "secretary," but who was by all accounts just as much of a boozer as the Mayhew character.

"Barton Fink" won this year's Palm d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and an unprecedented two more prizes as well, for director and actor. Since Cannes juries traditionally limit themselves to one award per film, their ecstasy would seem to indicate "Barton Fink" is one of the greatest films ever made. It is not. But it's an assured piece of comic filmmaking, and perhaps a warning by the Coens to themselves about what can happen when brilliant young talents from the East make that trek out to the land of the guys behind the desks.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.6/10 (17,815 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #143

Ranked highest by Held (#1)

What a great goddamned movie right there.

#036 Trois couleurs: Rouge (1994) 13 Votes, 3021 points
Krzysztof Kieslowski

Running time - 116 min
Country of origin USA / UK
Genre Comedy / Drama
Original language English

Writing Credits
Krzysztof Kieslowski, Krzysztof Piesiewicz

Cast
Irène Jacob ... Valentine Dussaut
Jean-Louis Trintignant ... Le juge
Frédérique Feder ... Karin
Jean-Pierre Lorit ... Auguste Bruner

Academy Awards
Nominated: Best Cinematography, Best Director, Best Writing - Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen

Other awards
Nominated :BAFTA Film Award Best Actress (Irène Jacob), Best Film not in the English Language, Best Screenplay - Adapted, David Lean Award for Direction. Cannes Film Festival Golden Palm. Golden Globe Best Foreign Language Film

BY ROGER EBERT / December 2, 1994

At this moment, in this cafe, we're sitting next to strangers.

Everyone will get up, leave, and go their own way, And then, they'll never meet again. And if they do, they won't realize that it's not for the first time.

- Krzysztof Kieslowski One of the opening images in "Red" is of telephone lines, crossing. It is the same in life. We are connected with some people and never meet others, but it could easily have happened otherwise.

Looking back over a lifetime, we describe what happened as if it had a plan. To fully understand how accidental and random life is - how vast the odds are against any single event taking place - would be humbling.

That is the truth that Kieslowski keeps returning to in his work. In "The Double Life of Veronique," there is even a moment when, if the heroine had looked out of a bus window, she might have seen herself on the street; it's as if fate allowed her to continue on one lifeline after choosing another. In "Red," none of the major characters knows each other at the beginning of the movie, and there is no reason they should meet. Exactly.

The film opens in Geneva, in an apartment occupied by a model named Valentine (Irene Jacob). She makes a telephone call, and the phone rings at the same time in an apartment just across the street, occupied by Auguste (Jean-Pierre Lorit), a law student. But she is not calling him. Her call is to her boyfriend, who is in England, and whom she rarely sees. As far as we know, Valentine and Auguste have never met. And may never meet. Or perhaps they will.

One day Valentine's car strikes a dog, and she takes it to the home of its owner, a retired judge (Jean-Louis Trintignant). He hardly seems to care for the dog, or for her. He spends his days in an elaborate spying scheme, using wiretaps to monitor an affair being carried on by a neighbor. There is an instant spark that strikes between the old man and the young woman - a contact, a recognition of similarity, or sympathy - but they are 40 years apart in age, strangers to one another, and have met by accident, and . . .

The story becomes completely fascinating. We have no idea where it is going, where it could possibly go. There is no plot to reassure us. No goal that the characters hope to attain. Will the young woman and the judge ever meet again? What will come of that? Does it matter? Would it be good, or bad? Such questions, in "Red," become infinitely more interesting than the questions in simple-minded commercial movies, about whether the hero will kill the bad guys, and drive his car fast, and blow things up, or whether his girlfriend will take off her clothes.

Seeing a movie like "Red," we are reminded that watching many commercial films is the cinematic equivalent of reading Dick and Jane. The mysteries of everyday life are so much deeper and more exciting than the contrivances of plots.

We learn something about Auguste, the law student who lives across the way. He has a girlfriend named Karin (Frederique Feder).

She specializes in "personal weather reports" for her clients, which sounds reasonable, like having a personal trainer or astrologer, until we reflect that the weather is more or less the same for everybody. But perhaps her clients live in such tight boxes of their own construction that each one has different weather.

Valentine talks to her boyfriend. They are rarely together.

He is someone on the phone. Perhaps she "stays" with him to save herself the trouble of a lover whose life she would actually share.

She goes back out to the house of the old judge, and talks to him some more. We learn more about the lives he is eavesdropping on.

There are melodramatic developments, but no one seems to feel strongly about them.

And Valentine and Auguste. What a good couple they would make! Perhaps. If they ever meet. And if, in the endless reaches of cosmic time, there had been the smallest shift in the lifetimes of Valentine and the Judge, they could have been the same age. Or another infinitesimal shift, and they would have lived a century apart. Or never lived at all. Or if the dog had wandered somewhere else, Valentine would not have struck him, and met the judge. Or if the judge had had a cat . . .

Think about these things, reader. Don't sigh and turn the page. Think that I have written them and you have read them, and the odds against either of us ever having existed are greater by far than one to all of the atoms in creation.

"Red" is the conclusion of Kieslowski's masterful trilogy, after "Blue" and "White," named for the colors in the French flag. He says he will retire now, at 53, and make no more films. At the end of "Red," the major characters from all three films meet - through a coincidence, naturally. This is the kind of film that makes you feel intensely alive while you're watching it, and sends you out into the streets afterwards eager to talk deeply and urgently, to the person you are with. Whoever that happens to be.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 8.0/10 (16,573 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #285

Ranked highest by Saskadelphia(#1)

Am i the only person who thinks Christina Ricci is aging in reverse?

Looking at that last pic, I really don't care.

The Ice Storm came out in 1993?

I'm excited as hell about this list.

#035 The Matrix (1999) 18 Votes, 3268 points
Andy Wachowski + Larry Wachowski
Running time - 136 min
Country of origin Australia / USA
Genre Action / Thriller / Sci-Fi
Original language English

Writing Credits
Andy Wachowski, Larry Wachowski

Cast
Keanu Reeves ... Neo
Laurence Fishburne ... Morpheus
Carrie-Anne Moss ... Trinity
Hugo Weaving ... Agent Smith
Joe Pantoliano ... Cypher

Academy Awards
Won: Best Editing, Best Effects - Sound Effects Editing, Best Effects - Visual Effects, Best Sound

Other awards
Won : BAFTA Film Award Best Achievement in Special Visual Effects, Best Sound
Nominated :BAFTA Film Award Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Production Design

BY ROGER EBERT / March 31, 1999

"The Matrix" is a visually dazzling cyberadventure, full of kinetic excitement, but it retreats to formula just when it's getting interesting. It's kind of a letdown when a movie begins by redefining the nature of reality, and ends with a shoot-out. We want a leap of the imagination, not one of those obligatory climaxes with automatic weapons fire.

I've seen dozens if not hundreds of these exercises in violence, which recycle the same tired ideas: Bad guys fire thousands of rounds, but are unable to hit the good guy. Then it's down to the final showdown between good and evil--a martial arts battle in which the good guy gets pounded until he's almost dead, before he finds the inner will to fight back. Been there, seen that (although rarely done this well).

Too bad, because the set-up is intriguing. "The Matrix" recycles the premises of "Dark City" and "Strange Days," turns up the heat and the volume, and borrows the gravity-defying choreography of Hong Kong action movies. It's fun, but it could have been more. The directors are Larry and Andy Wachowski, who know how to make movies (their first film, "Bound," made my 10 best list in 1996). Here, with a big budget and veteran action producer Joel Silver, they've played it safer; there's nothing wrong with going for the Friday night action market, but you can aim higher and still do business.

Warning; spoilers ahead. The plot involves Neo (Keanu Reeves), a mild-mannered software author by day, a feared hacker by night. He's recruited by a cell of cyber-rebels, led by the profound Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) and the leather-clad warrior Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss). They've made a fundamental discovery about the world: It doesn't exist. It's actually a form of Virtual Reality, designed to lull us into lives of blind obedience to the "system." We obediently go to our crummy jobs every day, little realizing, as Morpheus tells Neo, that "Matrix is the wool that has been pulled over your eyes--that you are a slave." The rebels want to crack the framework that holds the Matrix in place, and free mankind. Morpheus believes Neo is the Messianic "One" who can lead this rebellion, which requires mind power as much as physical strength. Arrayed against them are the Agents, who look like Blues Brothers. The movie's battles take place in Virtual Reality; the heroes' minds are plugged into the combat. (You can still get killed, though: "The body cannot live without the mind"). "Jacking in" like this was a concept in "Strange Days" and has also been suggested in novels by William Gibson ("Idoru") and others. The notion that the world is an artificial construction, designed by outsiders to deceive and use humans, is straight out of "Dark City." Both of those movies, however, explored their implications as the best science fiction often does. "Dark City" was fascinated by the Strangers who had a poignant dilemma: They were dying aliens who hoped to learn from human methods of adaptation and survival.

In "Matrix," on the other hand, there aren't flesh-and-blood creatures behind the illusion--only a computer program that can think, and learn. The Agents function primarily as opponents in a high-stakes computer game. The movie offers no clear explanation of why the Matrix-making program went to all that trouble. Of course, for a program, running is its own reward--but an intelligent program might bring terrifying logic to its decisions.

Both "Dark City" and "Strange Days" offered intriguing motivations for villainy. "Matrix" is more like a superhero comic book in which the fate of the world comes down to a titanic fist-fight between the designated representatives of good and evil. It's cruel, really, to put tantalizing ideas on the table and then ask the audience to be satisfied with a shoot-out and a martial arts duel. Let's assume Neo wins. What happens then to the billions who have just been "unplugged" from the Matrix? Do they still have jobs? Homes? Identities? All we get is an enigmatic voice-over exhortation at the movie's end. The paradox is that the Matrix world apparently resembles in every respect the pre-Matrix world. (I am reminded of the animated kid's film "Doug's 1st Movie," which has a VR experience in which everything is exactly like in real life, except more expensive.) Still, I must not ignore the movie's virtues. It's great-looking, both in its design and in the kinetic energy that powers it. It uses flawlessly integrated special effects and animation to visualize regions of cyberspace. It creates fearsome creatures, including mechanical octopi. It morphs bodies with the abandon of "Terminator II." It uses f/x to allow Neo and Trinity to run horizontally on walls, and hang in the air long enough to deliver karate kicks. It has leaps through space, thrilling sequences involving fights on rooftops, helicopter rescues and battles over mind control.

And it has performances that find the right notes. Keanu Reeves goes for the impassive Harrison Ford approach, "acting" as little as possible. I suppose that's the right idea. Laurence Fishburne finds a balance between action hero and Zen master. Carrie-Anne Moss, as Trinity, has a sensational title sequence, before the movie recalls that she's a woman and shuttles her into support mode. Hugo Weaving, as the chief Agent, uses a flat, menacing tone that reminded me of Tommy Lee Jones in passive-aggressive overdrive. There's a well-acted scene involving Gloria Foster as the Oracle, who like all Oracles is maddeningly enigmatic.

"The Matrix" did not bore me. It interested me so much, indeed, that I wanted to be challenged even more. I wanted it to follow its material to audacious conclusions, to arrive not simply at victory, but at revelation. I wanted an ending that was transformational, like "Dark City's," and not one that simply throws us a sensational action sequence. I wanted, in short, a Third Act.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 8.6/10 (240,491 votes) Top 250: #32

SOMB 499 rank - #51

Ranked highest by Tracy Jacks (#2)

This list was having a really outstanding run until this one.

That is an entirely different opinion than the one that I possess.

#034 Jurassic Park (1993) 18 Votes, 3343 points
Michael Crichton, David Koepp
Running time - 127 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Action / Adventure / Horror / Sci-Fi / Thriller
Original language English

Writing Credits
Andy Wachowski, Larry Wachowski

Cast
Sam Neill ... Dr. Alan Grant
Laura Dern ... Dr. Ellie Sattler
Jeff Goldblum ... Dr. Ian Malcolm
Richard Attenborough ... John Hammond
Samuel L. Jackson ... Ray Arnold
Wayne Knight ... Dennis Nedry

Academy Awards
Won: Best Effects - Sound Effects Editing, Best Effects - Visual Effects, Best Sound

Other awards
Won : BAFTA Film Award Best Special Effects
Nominated :BAFTA Film Award Best Sound

BY ROGER EBERT / June 11, 1993

When young Steven Spielberg was first offered the screenplay for "Jaws," he said he would direct the movie on one condition: That he didn't have to show the shark for the first hour. By slowly building the audience's apprehension, he felt, the shark would be much more impressive when it finally arrived.

He was right. I wish he had remembered that lesson when he was preparing "Jurassic Park," his new thriller set in a remote island theme park where real dinosaurs have been grown from long-dormant DNA molecules. The movie delivers all too well on its promise to show us dinosaurs. We see them early and often, and they are indeed a triumph of special effects artistry, but the movie is lacking other qualities that it needs even more, such as a sense of awe and wonderment, and strong human story values.

It's clear, seeing this long-awaited project, that Spielberg devoted most of his effort to creating the dinosaurs. The human characters are a ragtag bunch of half-realized, sketched-in personalities, who exist primarily to scream, utter dire warnings, and outwit the monsters.

Richard Attenborough, as the millionaire who builds the park, is given a few small dimensions - he loves his grandchildren, he's basically a good soul, he realizes the error of tampering with nature. But there was an opportunity here to make his character grand and original, colorful and oversize, and instead he comes across as unfocused and benign.

As the film opens, two dinosaur experts (Sam Neill and Laura Dern) arrive at the park, along with a mathematician played by Jeff Goldblum whose function in the story is to lounge about uttering vague philosophical imprecations. Also along are Attenborough's grandchildren, and a lawyer, who is the first to be eaten by a dinosaur.

Attenborough wants the visitors to have a preview of his new park, where actual living prehistoric animals live in enclosures behind tall steel fences, helpfully labeled "10,000 volts." The visitors set off on a tour in remote-controlled utility vehicles, which stall when an unscrupulous employee (Wayne Knight) shuts down the park's computer program so he can smuggle out some dinosaur embryos. Meanwhile, a tropical storm hits the island, the beasts knock over the fences, and Neill is left to shepherd the kids back to safety while they're hunted by towering meat-eaters.

The plot to steal the embryos is handled on the level of a TV sitcom. The Knight character, an overwritten and overplayed blubbering fool, drives his Jeep madly through the storm and thrashes about in the forest. If this subplot had been handled cleverly - with skill and subtlety, as in a caper movie - it might have added to the film's effect. Instead, it's as if one of the Three Stooges wandered into the story.

The subsequent events - after the creatures get loose - follow an absolutely standard outline, similar in bits and pieces to all the earlier films in this genre, from "The Lost World" and "King Kong" right up to the upcoming "Carnosaur." True, because the director is Spielberg, there is a high technical level to the execution of the cliches. Two set-pieces are especially effective: A scene where a beast mauls a car with screaming kids inside, and another where the kids play hide and seek with two creatures in the park's kitchen.

But consider what could have been. There is a scene very early in the film where Neill and Dern, who have studied dinosaurs all of their lives, see living ones for the first time. The creatures they see are tall, majestic leaf-eaters, grazing placidly in the treetops. There is a sense of grandeur to them. And that is the sense lacking in the rest of the film, which quickly turns into a standard monster movie, with screaming victims fleeing from roaring dinosaurs.

Think back to another ambitious special effects picture from Spielberg, "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" (1977). That was a movie about the "idea" of visitors from outer space. It inspired us to think what an awesome thing it would be, if earth were visited by living alien beings. You left that movie shaken and a little transformed. It was a movie that had faith in the intelligence and curiosity of its audience.

In the 16 years since it was made, however, big-budget Hollywood seems to have lost its confidence that audiences can share big dreams. "Jurassic Park" throws a lot of dinosaurs at us, and because they look terrific (and indeed they do), we're supposed to be grateful. I have the uneasy feeling that if Spielberg had made "Close Encounters" today, we would have seen the aliens in the first 10 minutes, and by the halfway mark they'd be attacking Manhattan with death rays.

Because the movie delivers on the bottom line, I'm giving it three stars. You want great dinosaurs, you got great dinosaurs.

Spielberg enlivens the action with lots of nice little touches; I especially liked a sequence where a smaller creature leaps suicidally on a larger one, and they battle to the death. On the monster movie level, the movie works and is entertaining. But with its profligate resources, it could have been so much more.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.7/10 (97,710 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #258

Ranked highest by Artem (#6)

^ Interesting to see two of the more influential special effects movies back-to-back like that.

#033 The Truman Show (1998) 18 Votes, 3370 points
Peter Weir
Running time - 103 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Drama / Sci-Fi
Original language English

Writing Credits
Andrew Niccol

Cast
Jim Carrey ... Truman Burbank
Laura Linney ... Meryl Burbank / Hannah Gill
Natascha McElhone ... Lauren / Sylvia
Peter Krause ... Lawrence
Ed Harris ... Christof

Academy Awards
Won: Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Ed Harris), Best Director, Best Writing - Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen

Other awards
Won : BAFTA Film Award Best Production Design, Best Screenplay - Original, David Lean Award for Direction. Golden Globe Best Original Score - Motion Picture, Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama (Jim Carrey), Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture (Ed Harris)
Nominated :BAFTA Film Award Best Cinematography, Best Film, Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role (Ed Harris), Best Special Effects. Golden Globe Best Director - Motion Picture, Best Motion Picture - Drama, Best Screenplay - Motion Picture

BY ROGER EBERT / June 5, 1998

``The Truman Show'' is founded on an enormous secret that all of the studio's advertising has been determined to reveal. I didn't know the secret when I saw the film, and was able to enjoy the little doubts and wonderings that the filmmakers so carefully planted. If by some good chance you do not know the secret, read no further.

Those fortunate audience members (I trust they have all left the room?) will be able to appreciate the meticulous way director Peter Weir and writer Andrew Niccol have constructed a jigsaw plot around their central character, who doesn't suspect that he's living his entire life on live television. Yes, he lives in an improbably ideal world, but I fell for that: I assumed the movie was taking a sitcom view of life, in which neighbors greet each other over white picket fences, and Ozzie and Harriet are real people.

Actually, it's Seaside, a planned community on the Gulf Coast near Tampa. Called Seahaven in the movie, it looks like a nice place to live. Certainly Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) doesn't know anything else. You accept the world you're given, the filmmakers suggest; more thoughtful viewers will get the buried message, which is that we accept almost everything in our lives without examining it very closely. When was the last time you reflected on how really odd a tree looks? Truman works as a sales executive at an insurance company, is happily married to Meryl (Laura Linney), and doesn't find it suspicious that she describes household products in the language of TV commercials. He is happy, in a way, but an uneasiness gnaws away at him. Something is missing, and he thinks perhaps he might find it in Fiji, where Lauren (Natascha McElhone), the only woman he really loved, allegedly has moved with her family.

Why did she leave so quickly? Perhaps because she was not a safe bet for Truman's world: The actress who played her (named Sylvia) developed real feeling and pity for Truman, and felt he should know the truth about his existence. Meryl, on the other hand, is a reliable pro (which raises the question, unanswered, of their sex life).

Truman's world is controlled by a TV producer named Christof (Ed Harris), whose control room is high in the artificial dome that provides the sky and horizon of Seahaven. He discusses his programming on talk shows, and dismisses the protests of those (including Sylvia) who believe Truman is the victim of a cruel deception. Meanwhile, the whole world watches Truman's every move, and some viewers even leave the TV on all night, as he sleeps.

The trajectory of the screenplay is more or less inevitable: Truman must gradually realize the truth of his environment, and try to escape from it. It's clever the way he's kept on his island by implanted traumas about travel and water. As the story unfolds, however, we're not simply expected to follow it: We're invited to think about the implications. About a world in which modern communications make celebrity possible, and inhuman.

Until fairly recently, the only way you could become really famous was to be royalty, or a writer, actor, preacher or politician--and even then, most people had knowledge of you only through words or printed pictures.

Television, with its insatiable hunger for material, has made celebrities into ``content,'' devouring their lives and secrets. If you think ``The Truman Show'' is an exaggeration, reflect that Princess Diana lived under similar conditions from the day she became engaged to Charles.

Carrey is a surprisingly good choice to play Truman. We catch glimpses of his manic comic persona, just to make us comfortable with his presence in the character, but this is a well-planned performance; Carrey is on the right note as a guy raised to be liked and likable, who decides his life requires more risk and hardship. Like the angels in ``City of Angels,'' he'd like to take his chances.

Ed Harris also finds the right notes as Christof, the TV svengali. He uses the technospeak by which we distance ourselves from the real meanings of our words. (If TV producers ever spoke frankly about what they were really doing, they'd come across like Bulworth.) For Harris, the demands of the show take precedence over any other values, and if you think that's an exaggeration, tell it to the TV news people who broadcast that Los Angeles suicide.

I enjoyed ``The Truman Show'' on its levels of comedy and drama; I liked Truman in the same way I liked Forrest Gump--because he was a good man, honest, and easy to sympathize with.

But the underlying ideas made the movie more than just entertainment. Like ``Gattaca,'' the previous film written by Niccol, it brings into focus the new values that technology is forcing on humanity.

Because we can engineer genetics, because we can telecast real lives--of course we must, right? But are these good things to do? The irony is, the people who will finally answer that question will be the very ones produced by the process.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.8/10 (98,048 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #228

Ranked highest by Undo (#1)

#032 Dazed and Confused (1993) 15 Votes, 3377 points
Richard Linklater
Running time - 103 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Comedy / Drama
Original language English

Writing Credits
Richard Linklater

Cast
Jason London ... Randall 'Pink' Floyd
Rory Cochrane ... Ron Slater
Wiley Wiggins ... Mitch Kramer
Sasha Jenson ... Don Dawson
Michelle Burke ... Jodi Kramer

BY ROGER EBERT / September 24, 1993

The years between 13 and 18 are among the most agonizing in a lifetime, yet we remember them with a nostalgia that blocks out much of the pain. This is a truth well understood by "Dazed and Confused," Richard Linklater's film about the last day of school and the long night that follows it.

The film is art crossed with anthropology. It tells the painful underside of "American Graffiti." In a small town, classes let out for the summer, and upperclassmen go looking for next year's new high school students, so they can paddle them - an initiation inspired, I guess, by high school fraternities.

We follow a large number of teenagers, boys and girls, popular and not, "good" and "troubled," as they drive aimlessly around town, drink beer, hang out, trade adolescent life-truths, lust, experiment with sex, fight, and in general, try to invest their passage into adulthood with a significance it does not seem to have.

"If I ever say these were the best years of my life," one of the kids says, "remind me to kill myself." Linklater does not impose a plot on his material. "Dazed and Confused" (the title comes from a song) is not about whether the hero gets the girl, or the nerd loses his virginity, or the bully gets beaten up. It doesn't end in a tragic car crash, although it does end in some quiet moments of truth, which are not pressed too hard.

The film's real inspiration, I think, is to depict some high school kids from the 1970s with such unblinking attention that we will realize how romanticized most movie teenagers are. A lot of these kids are asking, with Peggy Lee, "Is that all there is?"

Linklater's style is to introduce some characters, linger with them for a while, and then move on to different characters, eventually circling back so that all the stories get told simultaneously. His previous film, "Slacker" (1991), applied a more extreme version of this style to a large group of characters in Austin, Texas. The film would follow one character, then veer off to follow another, so that we got glimpses of many lives.

Here, in addition to limiting his characters and following through on their stories, he quietly introduces an observation. It is always the case in any group of males -- students, fraternity brothers, military men, businessmen -- that the ones most zealous about male-bonding rituals, especially those involving drinking and quasisexual "initiations," are the most troubled. They secretly feel like outsiders. As their targets, they choose misfits who are too dumb or too smart, who are different in any way, who do not reflect the mediocrity of the crowd.

The kids who enforce this system usually turn out to be losers, and indeed part of their desperation -- part of the reason they cling to status in teenage society -- is that they already feel themselves losing. The most pathetic character in "Dazed and Confused" is a graduate from a few years back, in his '20s now, who still hangs out with the kids because he senses that the status he had at 17 was his personal high point. This is a good film, but it would not cheer people up much at a high school reunion.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.4/10 (26,222 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #60

Ranked highest by The Good Dr Bill (#2)

Every episode of Friday Night Lights obliterates that nonsense in like a hundred ways.

Really?

Doesn't seem like Artem's kind of flick.

On point comparison, incredibly stupid qualitative judgement.

I think Sasky is still hurting from the sequels.

That's understandable. I tried to defend them when they came out, but I rewatched the third one a few weeks ago on cable. That ending is just horrid. The first one really should be viewed (and judged) as a stand alone saga.

#031 Before Sunrise (1995) 15 Votes, 3430 points
Richard Linklater
Running time - 105 min
Country of origin USA / Austria / Switzerland
Genre Drama / Romance
Original language English / German / French

Writing Credits
Richard Linklater, Kim Krizan

Cast
Ethan Hawke ... Jesse
Julie Delpy ... Celine
Andrea Eckert ... Wife on Train
Hanno Pöschl ... Husband on Train
Karl Bruckschwaiger ... Guy on Bridge

BY ROGER EBERT / January 27, 1995

They Meet Cute on a train in Austria. They start talking. There is a meeting of the minds (our most erotic organs) and they like each other. They're in their early 20s. He's an American with an Eurail pass, on his way to Vienna to catch a cheap flight home. She's French, a student at the Sorbonne, on her way back to Paris. They go to the buffet car, drink some coffee, keep talking, and he has this crazy idea: Why doesn't she get off the train with him in Vienna, and they can be together until he catches his plane? This sort of scenario has happened, I imagine, millions of times. It has rarely happened in a nicer, sweeter, more gentle way than in Richard Linklater's "Before Sunrise," which I could call a "Love Affair" for Generation X, except that Jesse and Celine stand outside their generation, and especially outside its boring insistence on being bored.

There is no hidden agenda in this movie. There will be no betrayals, melodrama, phony violence, or fancy choreography in sex scenes. It's mostly conversation, as they wander the city of Vienna from mid-afternoon until the following dawn. Nobody hassles them.

"Before Sunrise" is so much like real life - like a documentary with an invisible camera - that I found myself remembering real conversations I had experienced with more or less the same words.

Jesse and Celine are played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy.

You may remember him from "Dead Poets Society," "White Fang" or especially "Reality Bites," in which he played a character who is 180 degrees different from this one. She starred in Krzysztof Kieslowski's "White," as the wife who eventually regrets dumping her husband. Here she is ravishingly beautiful and, more important, warm and matter-of-fact, speaking English so well the screenplay has to explain it (she spent some time in the States).

What do they talk about? Nothing spectacular. Parents, death, former boyfriends and girlfriends, music, and the problem with reincarnation when there are more people alive now than in all previous times put together (if there is a finite number of souls, are we living in a period of a 5-to-1 split?). Linklater's dialogue is weirdly amusing, as when Jesse suggests they should think of their time together as a sort of "time travel," and envisions a future in which she is with her boring husband and wonders, "what would some of those guys be like that I knew when I was young," and wishes she could travel back in time to see - and so here she is, back in time, seeing.

A sexual attraction is obviously present between them, and Linklater handles it gently, with patience. There is a wonderful scene in the listening booth of a music store, where each one looks at the other, and then looks away, so as not to be caught. The way they do this - the timing, the slight embarrassment - is delicate and true to life. And I liked their first kiss, on the same ferris wheel used in "The Third Man," so much I didn't mind that they didn't know Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten had been there before them.

The city of Vienna is presented as a series of meetings and not as a travelogue. They meet amateur actors, fortune tellers, street poets, friendly bartenders. They spend some time in a church at midnight. They drink wine in a park. They find a way to exchange personal information by holding imaginary phone calls with imaginary best friends. They talk about making love. There are good arguments for, and against.

This is Linklater's third film, after "Slacker' (1991) and "Dazed and Confused" (1993). He's onto something. He likes the way ordinary time unfolds for people, as they cross paths, start talking, share their thoughts and uncertain philosophies. His first movie, set in Austin, Texas, followed one character until he met a second, then the second until he met a third, and so on, eavesdropping on one life and conversation after another. The second film was a long night at the end of a high school year, as the students regarded their futures. Now there's "Before Sunrise," about two nice kids, literate, sensitive, tentative, intoxicated by the fact that their lives stretch out before them, filled with mystery and hope, and maybe love.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.9/10 (22,345 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #92

Ranked highest by Bird Is The Word (#3)

Cherish your caricatures, dude, but someday you'll need to admit to yourself you're in love with a Breakfast Club clone with a more credible soundtrack.

Definitely, they sullied the first movie permanently.


Now we're back on track.

That's it for tonight. Hopefully get to #21 tomorrow.

Uh, try American Graffiti. To think, we're only 5-6 years away from another multiple-stories-on-last-night-of-school-with-nostalgic-soundtrack-and-cars movie set in THE 90s.

This thought gives me comfort in my darkest hours.

And The Breakfast Club and Dazed and Confused really have next to nothing in common. I usually at least expect logic of your ridiculous, damning criticisms, Slackerman.