She’ll dance and sing or even learn to fly
For consideration of Catherine Corsini’s Leaving, you’re going to need to look elsewhere today. Continue reading She’ll dance and sing or even learn to fly
Category: Film
Top Fifty Films of the 90s — Number Fourteen
#14 — The Sweet Hereafter (Atom Egoyan, 1997) I tend to be hard on films that present narratives with fractured chronologies, but that’s only because I’ve seen the technique done perfectly, exactly right. Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter is based … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 90s — Number Fourteen
Demme, Frears, Hooper, Lee, Wang
Swimming to Cambodia (Jonathan Demme, 1987). Jonathan Demme may not have been the best filmmaker of the nineteen-eighties, but I think there’s an argument to be made that he was the most interesting. This film is a good illustration of that point. It’s a film version of one of Spalding Gray’s monologues, a meandering but always focused act of storytelling that springs from his involvement in the film The Killing Fields. Gray’s approach was simplicity itself, sitting behind a small wooden table with his spiral notebook before him and little more than a couple of maps to help fill out … Continue reading Demme, Frears, Hooper, Lee, Wang
I can walk right in to a lion’s den and make ’em all stand up and grin
I spent the summer of 1990 working at a video store in Stoughton, Wisconsin. That may be a type of business now rapidly approaching typewriter repair on the obsolescence scale, but it was a fairly brisk shop to work in … Continue reading I can walk right in to a lion’s den and make ’em all stand up and grin
Top Fifty Films of the 90s — Number Fifteen
#15 — The Ice Storm (Ang Lee, 1997) I should probably start by acknowledging that any film which uses an old issue of the Marvel Comics series The Fantastic Four to illustrate how dysfunction can envelop and cripple a family is playing directly to my soft spot. The idea is introduced via voiceover narration by the character Paul Carver as he sits on a stalled train bound for New Canaan, Connecticut. He goes to school in Manhattan, but it’s Thanksgiving weekend and he’s headed home, a place that’s held by a chill as deep as the one produced by the … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 90s — Number Fifteen
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended, tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
It takes no time at all for Restrepo to establish itself as a completely different breed of war documentary. The film follows an American platoon that’s been dispatched to Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, an area so fraught with danger that it’s … Continue reading Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended, tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
Acker, Cronenberg, Denis, Heckerling, Sturges
Clueless (Amy Heckerling, 1995). I’m prepared to concede that Heckerling’s gum-snap reworking of Jane Austen’s Emma is better than I would have said after seeing it upon its original release. It’s also, despite its reputation, not some glistening pop gem. It’s an agreeable bit of fluff with some charming moments, and a suitably bright performance from Alicia Silverstone, who’s more a beneficiary of shrewd casting than anything. Writer-director Amy Heckerling–here fresh from a couple dippy crowdpleasers about the inner monologues of babies, let’s not forget–is a sloppy, unfocused filmmaker. Just because her attention span may sync up with those of … Continue reading Acker, Cronenberg, Denis, Heckerling, Sturges
Top Fifty Films of the — Number Sixteen
#16 — Apollo 13 (Ron Howard, 1995) There’s never any doubt about the outcome of Apollo 13. It’s not just that the troubled NASA mission it depicts is a part of history, and anyone with a cursory knowledge of the … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the — Number Sixteen
Benedek, Lang, Morris, Scorsese, Wilder
Standard Operating Procedure (Errol Morris, 2008). The Oscar-winning documentarian turns his attention (and his Interrotron) to the appalling abuse of prisoners inflicted by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison. The resulting film is exhaustive and exhausting, laying out the ugly details of the matter with an appropriate relentlessness. Morris corrals interviews with most of the principals, and their collective testimony seems painfully honest if sometimes buffered down in the name of understandable self-preservation. Morris inserts a handful of subdued and yet entirely unnecessary recreations. It’s a tactic that he’s notably employed before, but this time out it’s just intrusive. The … Continue reading Benedek, Lang, Morris, Scorsese, Wilder
One for Friday: Fetchin Bones, “I Dig You”
To the best of my knowledge, December 31, 1989 was the first time that WWSP-90FM spent New Year’s Eve counting down the top ninety albums of the year. I took all of our charts from the yearly, dutifully compiled and … Continue reading One for Friday: Fetchin Bones, “I Dig You”
