►Top 25 of the 1990s ◄

Started by Lottery, May 14, 2014, 11:29:44 PM

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samsong

not one mention of kiarostami so far?!  close-up makes my top 5, and if i weren't inclined to implement a 1 film per director limit, almost every other film he made in the 90s would be included.  (i haven't seen through the olive trees.)

order is somewhat arbitrary... more accurate to think of the list in terms of general proximity relative to preference. 

1. the thin red line
2. underground
3. close-up
4. a brighter summer day
5. beau travail
6. eyes wide shut
7. satantango
8. barton fink
9. lessons of darkness
10. dead man
11. the age of innocence
12. crumb
13. blue
14. nixon
15. secrets & lies
16. happy together
17. the long day closes
18. the idiots
19. terminator 2
20. bottle rocket
21. lovers on the bridge
22. sweet & lowdown
23. office space
24. boogie nights
25. face/off

i'm sure i'll remember something or want to change everything minutes after i post but i'll just stick with this.  my memory of short cuts and the player are hazy.  i saw them when my appreciation of altman wasn't what it is today.

jenkins

samsong i'm taking to you. careful. jk. not jk

jk. some recent time i also did a the player/short cuts reviewing, and short cuts was miles higher in terms of characters and emotional details imo. the player has cinematic juices, but so many fewer emotional entry points. that's what i thought. i'd like to hear back how you hear their tunes

JG

a lot i need to see, somehow haven't seen close-up, and generally ignorant of foreign film in the 90s i guess?

old stand-bys -

a brighter summer day
jackie brown
american movie
barton fink
naked
the ice storm
crumb
boogie nights
dead man
kingpin
eyes wide shut
rushmore
chungking express
goodfellas

jenkins

this year i've revisited the 90s more than usual. 20 year culture cycles, that's what i hear. 30s to 50s to 70s to 90s to 10s, maybe

a fresh 90s list of mine:

last of the mohicans --
an ending scene in last of the mohicans made me cry. fact. i'm an adult. rumor. listen, you gotta know exactly when that happened if you've seen the movie. you can be feeling that scene right now for sure. i was like "no way" in a fashion that was tears on my face and two-three people have called me an adult in my life, i hope crying becomes fashionable soon, fine with me, have you seen this movie recently? fwew, i tell ya

wonderland --
the essential mechanics of contemporary city emotions fused into cinema that i'd guess i'll spend my entire life fascinated by

my own private idaho --
he's so good at making people, and this is when everything was young and beautiful

he got game --
i imagine my life kinda like taking a vacation from prison to a rundown coney island hotel while trying to convince my son to like me again but it's tricky and i'm always in danger of appearing horrible, i just get it, and it buzzes with grammatically emotional cinema

jackie brown --
if the creator feels comfortable, genre movies can feel like they're being lead by their characters, which seems in direct opposition to how genres start to form, and i think it's badass when someone cares and feels enough to do that

se7en --
an emotional movie that says emotions are scary and mean people can prove it, dang. so good. and los angeles crime movies for life

the matrix --
things such bullshit, we could actually be in hovercrafts. and multiple people (lottery e.g.) have convinced me to nbd the rage against the machine situation. i just don't see the problem with this movie

jurassic park --
fact is, they cooked up a way to put people and dinosaurs together, in modern times, and everyone acts pretty natural about it

scream --
do you think this was a pivotal movie that made a lot of us think about our fantasies from the inside? happy halloween

belly --
this was my first year seeing belly because i'd been afraid of it. i thought it was gonna be brutal shit. but it's not, and it's so visually lush, i could feel it. i think this movie has emotions beyond and/or inside what i see

slacker --
a city is full of interesting people of different types and this is such a good movie about that, it's almost a bummer this was already made

la vie de bohème --
strikes me as both totally realistic and artistic and totally what i wish my life was like, actually

rebels of the neon god
goodbye south, goodbye
johnny mnemonic (blu-ray)
the long day closes

^movies on my last list that i've recently double-checked

Reel

I'll just comment on yours before getting to mine:


Did I ever tell my Last Of The Mohicans story? I had free tickets to a screening at our best theater in town, the kind that's 100 years old and looks like a palace inside. There were a couple extras, so I offered them to this woman I knew. She had a Native American boyfriend, so I thought they'd be interested. She suggested that we all go together and they came by and picked me up. The film was part of a festival so we had to sit through about a half hour of people at a podium telling us how important this event was. Then they played this corny animation that looked like a super low grade version of 'Ice Age', even though it sucked I was happy they were at least getting the show on the road. Then the time comes to start 'Last Of The Mohicans' and the lights go down, credits come up, they're in black and white! This isn't the movie I'd grown up hearing about, always wanted to see but never had. This wasn't even the 1936 version by the same name, it was the 1920 version. So, suddenly our entire mood has shifted from going out for a night of entertainment to feeling forced to revere this piece of classic cinema, which is tough because all of the actors portraying Indians are white guys in 'red face', I guess you'd call it. After 20 minutes in and several uncomfortable stares between us to gage how fucking bored we were, we decide to leave. Most awkward car ride home of my life and biggest movie fail EVER.Still haven't seen the 90's one to this day.


I've owned My Private Idaho on DVD, but I still haven't gotten around to revisiting it. Caught it on IFC once, but after reading 'Last Night At The Viper Room' I think it's going to be a whole different experience knowing how much it seems to mirror River's own life. Also bought 'Dogfight' recently and I'm looking forward to that, one of the last performances he was lauded for and still on top of his game, it seems.

I watched Scream the other day on a terrible looking DVD transfer, really regretted not buying the bluray (Drenk's fault). As much as the movie practically has no register on my 'fear meter' after seeing it so many times, I really admire the structure of it more and more as the years go by and we're exposed to less truly original horror like this. The final scene in the kitchen was what struck me as truly horrific this time around when the killers are finally unmasked and doing this morbid comedy routine, it made me think of how much of Wes Craven's horror takes place in kitchens, it's a lot if you look at his Nightmare on Elm Streets, The People Under The Stairs, etc ( get back to you on that.) Then in Scream he uses them as bookends in the beginning and the end, both great. What is it that makes his kitchen scenes so scary? Maybe the appearance of a calm suburban lifestyle, which most of his movies seem to be about the terrorizing of, going back to Last House On The Left. 

The last time I watched Scream, seeing all the pratfalls of the killer I was like "Come on, she definitely wouldn't have gotten away", but I never really took into account that these are just stoner guys running around that probably need to get insanely fucked up to even work up the nerve to do this. That's why it was so funny in the party sequence how completely hammered Stu is and the way he's sloppily chasing Sydney when he gets in the costume, noting this little tidbit made the characters seem more relatable and mortal. They're not just Faceless invincible killers, they're misguided kids who need a good dose of psychotropic meds. Something about that made it scarier, keeping in mind that people with these ideas and the potential to commit violence actually exist in society.

I've been watching a TON of 90's shit. 'Smoke' with Harvey Keitel and 'Popcorn' are two from 1990 that I saw this week. I don't know how detailed I want to get in my reviews of those, let's just say I really like 'Smoke' and a lot of it serves as inspiration for my own screenplay, which was just by happenstance when I checked it out a year ago and saw how many elements of it I wanted to take a little further in my script, let's say. 

Popcorn, oof. Cool idea, bad execution. A lot of people say that this was a precursor to Scream with it's characters aware of, referencing, and watching movies throughout. It's just a lazily written, overall unsatisfactory horror experience that leaves you feeling a little too creeped out and disgusted by how much we have to wallow in the killer's twisted vision, who puts on one of the most annoyingly over the top performances in cinema.

I watched 'The Bone Collector' to confirm my suspicions as a youth that it's a stupid movie, and it was. Some cool set design, but really just another pathetic 'Silence Of The Lambs' ripoff at the end of the day. It borrows too many elements of other successful police procedurals, thrillers, and serial killer movies and tries to cram them all into this one story, that shows promise in the beginning but quickly unravels into nonsense. They're basically taking that last ridiculously suspenseful act of 'Rear Window' and milking it for the whole movie, with the one guy immobile and the hot chick out doing his detective work. Possibly one of the laziest reveals ever when Angelina's characters discovers *gasp* "he's copying all of his crimes from this book! look, there's illustrations to prove it!"

There were others, can't list them all now and a lot were disappointments so I'm not too keen to talk about them. I haven't been overjoyed with any of my 90's movie experiences lately, but I keep going back to check up on things and see how I feel about them.
I tend to enjoy the nostalgia of watching them more than the actual films.

anyway, to be continued..

OstrichRidingCowboy

Just to throw a Soderbergh out there and perhaps the most personal and/or obtuse film ever made: Schizopolis.
Since dreams are to align, not to change nor
to grow, whatever are the really for?