Category: Movies

You know what I haven’t seen in a while? A list meme.

The International Cinephile something something has presented its list of the top 100 films of the 1990s. The ones in bold I’ve seen. The ones in italics I’ve seen parts of.

01. The Thin Red Line (Malick, 1998)
02. Short Cuts (Altman, 1993)
03. Trois couleurs: Rouge (Kieslowski, 1994)
04. Breaking the Waves (von Trier, 1996)
05. The Age of Innocence (Scorsese, 1993)
06. My Own Private Idaho (Van Sant, 1991)
07. Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick, 1999)
08. Trois couleurs: Bleu (Kieslowski, 1993)
09. The Ice Storm (Lee, 1997)
10. Goodfellas (Scorsese, 1990)
11. Being John Malkovich (Jonze, 1999)
12. LA Confidential (Hanson, 1997)
13. Sense and Sensibility (Lee, 1995)
14. The Double Life of Véronique (Kieslowski, 1991)
15. Safe (Haynes, 1995)
16. All About My Mother (Almodóvar, 1999)
17. Unforgiven (Eastwood, 1992)
18. The Remains of the Day (Ivory, 1993)
19. Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1994)
20. The English Patient (Minghella, 1996)
21. Chungking Express (Wong, 1994)
22. Close-Up (Kiarostami, 1990)
23. The Grifters (Frears, 1990)
24. Barton Fink (Coen & Coen, 1991)
25. The Piano (Campion, 1993)
26. Secrets & Lies (Leigh, 1996)
27. A Taste of Cherry (Kiarostami, 1997)
28. Ed Wood (Burton, 1994)
29. Lost Highway (Lynch, 1997)
30. Happy Together (Wong, 1997)
31. Mother and Son (Sokurov, 1997)
32. Magnolia (Anderson, 1999)
33. Howards End (Ivory, 1992)
34. Les amants du Pont-Neuf (Carax, 1991)
35. The Long Day Closes (Davies, 1992)
36. The Silence of the Lambs (Demme, 1991)
37. Naked Lunch (Cronenberg, 1991)
38. Heavenly Creatures (Jackson, 1994)
39. Lone Star (Sayles, 1996)
40. Raise the Red Lantern (Zhang, 1991)
41. Edward Scissorhands (Burton, 1990)
42. Naked (Leigh, 1993)
43. Fargo (Coen & Coen, 1996)
44. Schindler’s List (Spielberg, 1993)
45. Husbands and Wives (Allen, 1992)
46. Beauty and the Beast (Trousdale & Wise, 1991)
47. The Truman Show (Weir, 1998)
48. La belle noiseuse (Rivette, 1991)
49. Miller’s Crossing (Coen & Coen, 1990)
50. Sátántangó (Tarr, 1994)
51. Jackie Brown (Tarantino, 1997)
52. Rushmore (Anderson, 1998)
53. Rosetta (Dardenne & Dardenne, 1999)
54. Dead Man (Jarmusch, 1995)
55. Groundhog Day (Ramis, 1993)
56. Underground (Kusturica, 1995)
57. Flowers of Shanghai (Hou, 1998)
58. The Wind Will Carry Us (Kiarostami, 1999)
59. Starship Troopers (Verhoeven, 1997)
60. Thelma & Louise (Scott, 1991)
61. Wild at Heart (Lynch, 1990)
62. Days of Being Wild (Wong, 1990)
63. The Player (Altman, 1992)
64. La cérémonie (Chabrol, 1995)
65. Beau travail (Denis, 1999)
66. The Talented Mr. Ripley (Minghella, 1999)
67. Fallen Angels (Wong, 1995)
68. The Big Lebowski (Coen & Coen, 1998)
69. Titus (Taymor, 1999)
70. Vanya on 42nd Street (Malle, 1994)
71. Crash (Cronenberg, 1996)
72. Ulysses’ Gaze (Angelopoulos, 1995)
73. Van Gogh (Pialat, 1991)
74. Babe (Noonan, 1995)
75. Before Sunrise (Linklater, 1995)
76. A Brighter Summer Day (Yang, 1991)
77. Boogie Nights (Anderson, 1997)
78. American Beauty (Mendes, 1999)
79. Dead Man Walking (Robbins, 1995)
80. Kundun (Scorsese, 1997)
81. Porco Rosso (Miyazaki, 1992)
82. Smoking/No Smoking (Resnais, 1993)
83. The Crying Game (Jordan, 1992)
84. Gattaca (Niccol, 1997)
85. The Nightmare Before Christmas (Selick, 1993)
86. Trainspotting (Boyle, 1996)
87. Trois couleurs: Blanc (Kieslowski, 1994)
88. Bullets Over Broadway (Allen, 1994)
89. Everyone Says I Love You (Allen, 1996)
90. Eve’s Bayou (Lemmons, 1997)
91. Goodbye South, Goodbye (Hou, 1996)
92. Se7en (Fincher, 1995)
93. Carlito’s Way (De Palma, 1993)
94. Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion (Mirkin, 1997)
95. Un coeur en hiver (Sautet, 1992)
96. The Straight Story (Lynch, 1999)
97. Dong (Tsai, 1998)
98. JFK (Stone, 1991)
99. A Summer’s Tale (Rohmer, 1996)
100. Edward II (Jarman, 1991)

Strangely, I take pride in having seen so few.

It didn’t sound like the sort of film I’d see since I’m not dating/married to a girl who would want to see it, but this review of the film Amreeka doesn’t make it sound like it delivers warm and fuzzies to people of a certain mindset:

The two arrive at the Illinois home of her sister Raghda (Hiam Abbass of “The Visitor”) shortly after the start of the war in Iraq, as anti-Arab paranoia runs high.

Was anti-Arab paranoia peaking in 2003? I would have put whatever anti-Arab paranoia at its peak in 2001 or 2002. Also, I’d like to wonder who diagnosed suspicion of Middle Eastern people after an attack by Middle Eastern people on Americans as clinical paranoia.

A film reviewer, no doubt.

I was treated to this trailer on Veteran’s Day when I treated my wife to what turned out to be an anti-Iraq War film Men Who Stare At Goats:

You know, it could have been a good drama. Soldier dies in combat, and his ne’er-do-well brother straightens out and grows up as he sort of steps into the role of father-figure for his nieces and eventually the lover for the widow. Then, the MIA soldier returns. I could see it being chock full of drama as they deal with the emotional situations.

But.

In the trailer, the eventual seduction takes place over a joint and the movie-normal “I’m not too straight to toke” trope. And the soldier returns home apparently an angry, psychotic fellow who cannot relate to his family and wants to hurt them or commit suicide by cop.

Frankly, through the trailer and my own predilections, the Iraq soldier is the most sympathetic character. But he’s just an archetype to endanger the pot-smoking, non soldier lovers in the film.

I booed the trailer in the theater.

Instead of a dramatic film with real emotion, I think Lionsgate has gone for the sure Oscar award-winning, Cannes Palm D’or, and Nobel Prize for Cinema route. Which probably won’t make any money, but they’re making art. All-too-predictable, comfortable-to-the-artists and offensive-to-the-plebes art. Hey, Hollywood: <expletive deleted>.

UPDATE: I originally identified the soldier as serving in Iraq, but I guess it’s supposed to be Afghanistan. MfBJN regrets this error and retracts everything. Well, everything except the words including the letters I-R-A-Q.

With Fireproof (only one paper reviewed it? Really? I hear showings for Saturday night here in St. Louis are already sold out) opening this weekend and An American Carol next–both to limited release–will boffo numbers for both refocus Hollywood money men on making films that people want to see that portray Christianity favorably or lampoon the taboo subjects of Liberalism?

Who am I kidding?

Today he announces:

Simply put: my wife got me a collection of 100 Mystery movies on DVD for my birthday, and I’m going to watch them all. This feature will run at least once a week, and will range from the boring – like our first one, alas – to the really, really bad.

My wife gave me the very collection for Christmas a couple years ago. Lileks is already further into it than I am.

In a review of Hancock, St. Louis Post-Dispatch cinema critic Calvin Wilson tosses in this aside critical not of the movie, but of plebes who go to films for their own pleasure and not for edification through serious cinema:

That probably won’t bother the film’s core audience, which is happy to see Smith in just about anything except “Ali.”

Dude, they didn’t exactly clamor for The Legend of Bagger Vance either, ainna?

Instapundit links to a couple of The New Republic takedowns of the new M. Night Someguyan movie The Happening, saving me a couple bucks on seeing a film that ultimately would have cheesed me off. Go head, click here and here, read the spoilers, and know why I’d have been peeved.

However, in the biggest meta-twist of any career (and I’ll guess that Shyamalan’s career is officially over now), the finally movie suggests that the protagonists of his earlier films were actually the bad guys. That’s right: The Sixth Sense‘s burglar, Unbreakable‘s Mr. Glass, Sign‘s aliens, and that mermaid film’s anti-mermaid contingent were actually the good guys, doing the work of the Trees.

Game on for DiCaprio:

The word bounding out of Hollywood this week is that “Titanic”-star Leonardo DiCaprio is intent on doing a gaming-related pic about Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari and the Chuck E. Cheese’s pizza chain. DiCaprio would star as the entrepreneur and, Game Guy presumes, bring a little of the on-screen spice he demonstrated in such flicks as “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape” and “The Basketball Diaries.”

DiCaprio as Blinky or Clyde, maybe. DiCaprio as Bushnell? I’ll never look at my Ataris the same again.

What do you get when you cross Lileks with Kim du Toit? Something like this: a post with screen caps of an attractive old timey actress.

This particular actress, June Howard Tripp, appeared in a hand’s worth of British films in the early part of the 20th century, most of them silent. She was born in June 1901 and died in January 1985 according to the IMDB bio.

I’m posting these photos of her because 1)I thought she was cute and 2)The Internet apparently doesn’t have many photos of her on it. These stills are from the 1927 Hitchcock film The Lodger.

Click for full size
June in a flapper hat.

Click for full size
June with big smile.

Click for full size
June with concerned look.

Click for full size
June serving breakfast.

Click for full size
June with eyes raised heavenward.

There, that should help make sure my content column is almost as long as the sidebar. What, with over five years’ worth of weekly archives, it gets hard sometimes.

Also, she was a cutie. Relative to the rest of the cast of the movie, anyway.