1990s List Discussion and Suggestions (Lists Project Vol. 3)

An ongoing project to survey the best films of individual decades, genres, and filmmakers.
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therewillbeblus
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Re: 1990s List Discussion and Suggestions (Lists Project Vol. 3)

#476 Post by therewillbeblus » Thu Sep 17, 2020 8:16 pm

Drop Dead Gorgeous: Count me among the critics who don't find this funny at all. A film that seems almost impossible to misfire so much, what with the immensely talented stock cast and crew connected, instead is laced with a ubiquitous feeling that everyone is trying soooo hard to force comedy that should've been easy pitches down the plate. It's hard to figure out what went wrong.. often the gags aren't as well-delivered as they are written, but sometimes the jokes themselves aren't funny while the idea behind them is begging for laughs, if only they were thought-out a little bit more. I dunno, I'm all for this kind of full-tilt smear, but everything that should work is shortchanged. One of the more inspired bits
SpoilerShow
when the girl in the wheelchair is wheeled around on stage failing to even successfully lip sync a song about burying your feelings
has all the ingredients to be a hit, and is incredibly funny in multiple ways, but there's so much winking at the audience that I was equal parts irritated and amused, with the negative impression poisoning the ability to surrender to the vibe. Though I will say that there is one excellent bit that feels right out of The Simpsons or Community's quietly absurdist irreverence
SpoilerShow
"You know the babysitter's dead!"

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therewillbeblus
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Re: 1990s List Discussion and Suggestions (Lists Project Vol. 3)

#477 Post by therewillbeblus » Sun Oct 04, 2020 5:40 pm

All Things Fair (Bo Widerberg): Erotic cinema tows a risky line, necessitating an intimacy between viewer and the universality of the experiences we're seeing in order to work at all. I'm admittedly not usually a fan of this subgenre, since I don't find many filmmakers succeed at divorcing their own self-interest and solipsistic erotica in an effort to share this feeling compatibly with an audience, rather than project their own version of it. This film, however, breaks that mold, which shouldn't be a surprise from the director of Elvira Madigan, who offered us an opportunity to feel love all over again instead of professing specificity to observe and posture at. The plot may be too much for some to get past, a female teacher engaging in a sexual relationship with a 15-year old boy, but the film has zero concern for ethics and total concern for immersing itself in the unstoppable allure of sexual attraction and the consequences of the process of following urges and making oneself vulnerable in a union that can't sustain simpatico agendas.

The excitement, the chasing games, the flirtations, risks, and sudden elicitation of details otherwise ignored in another, are all granted ample time to flesh out. The characters aren't externally judged for cheating or breaking norms, but allow themselves to embrace what they feel in a given moment, because denying that would go against the internal logic hypnotically binding them to each other. This is a great film about what it's like to be a pubescent male with a daydream actualized, but it's also a film that, when deconstructed from the specifics of its time period and demographic characteristics, speaks to the overwhelming spiritual energy passing between you and your first lover. The confusing, tantalizing, debilitating rush that boosts our confidence and feels depersonalized in an 'out of body' way as we cannot believe we could be so lucky to deserve this connection. As the narrative progresses, we realize that we are our own judges, juries and executioners, and the consequential formulation of identity that Stig experiences as he contests with his desires and newfound morality through nonsexual male-to-male intimacy, and empathy for both sexual and nonsexual people he's indirectly harmed, finds a complex shaky balance that defines his humanity. What starts as an erotic film emerges into a full coming-of-age drama, validating each stage and treating one's story of development as an invaluable part of life, regardless of the pain and glory, losses and gains, populating its path.

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therewillbeblus
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Re: 1990s List Discussion and Suggestions (Lists Project Vol. 3)

#478 Post by therewillbeblus » Sun Jan 03, 2021 6:23 pm

Buffalo ‘66 exists in a more aggressive version of a Solondz-stained lens on humanity's stagnancy, a purgatory state of pent-up emotional, physical, and psychological needs unable to be realised with pervasive powerlessness, following roads for catharsis that lead nowhere. Gallo is so furious at the world he blames a kicker for his problems with paranoia, deflecting responsibility from his fragile ego, tries to forge a fake romance to please parents that resent him, and is as impotent to execute or process these permanent losses as he is to literally take a piss. This is a film where everyone embodies their own worlds as solipsistic individuals coexisting, from a personalized escape into a tap-dancing routine at a bowling alley to the formalist strategy of blown-out cinematography encapsulating a completely novel perspective to view existence. Memories intrude from strange editing techniques, boxes popping up over the face of another person and expanding to flood the entire scene. These people are so eccentric, rough, frustrating and frustrated, moving to the beat of their own internal logic rather than movie-logic, that they feel more authentic than likeable, socially-conventional characters do. The film feels like a confession from Gallo of his own anger, vulnerability, and discomfort hidden under a tough exterior of erratic behavior, though it’s hardly an apology. Is it an introspective tale of self-pity, revenge, and therapeutic processing of nostalgia? Sure, and many more things. Granting Ricci her own moments to be liberated from his conceit isn’t a gift for her, but evidence of an awareness that challenges the narcissistic positioning Gallo is often sewn to, but finds solace in departing from to a wider appreciation for the beauty outside oneself even if it’s futile to sustain for any substantial length of time.

I first saw this film as a child, totally unable to recognize its artistic merits, but it's a bizarre indie affair that’s a more inspired commentary on the American male identity than most, even if it’s also an admission to being unable to practice these observations outside of the film. The gonzo-intimacy that transpires is equal parts raw realism and constructed fantasy after all, so it makes sense that when the latter complementary state isn’t authenticated to restore even a wobbly balance to one’s existential needs, Gallo should find himself puttering around lost, spiteful, and confused once again in the outside world. Not that he was ever, or will ever be, cured of it. Will any of us? He seems to know that being called the “sweetest guy in the world” is undeserved wish-fulfillment, yet it's a line he yearns to be told, and that longing is validated rather than the behavior the longing is submerged in. Gallo also half-believes that he can earn it- but how else than to embrace his authentic self that repels others? This is one of many paradoxes giving rise to self-examination and an ounce of hope for rehabilitation, even if only in a dream, or impermanently on and off again for the rest of time.

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Re: 1990s List Discussion and Suggestions (Lists Project Vol. 3)

#479 Post by therewillbeblus » Mon Feb 01, 2021 11:25 am

Late August, Early September: Well here's a film unjustifiably neglected in Assayas' canon, which after a first viewing last night has immediately shot to the top of his best dramas (demonlover is still his best work, whatever the hell it is). Assayas has always had a knack for depicting realistic people, and this film in particular draws some very complex yet ordinary characters that I either identify with or know in real life, understanding its subjects so thoroughly that I would believe it to be one of Amalric's documentaries if Assayas didn't provide those wistful fadeouts that deliberately deprive us from cinematic catharsis. This isn't a film about loss, but one that uses its universally-experienced yet singularly-endured nature to remind the characters of their limitations to exercise the intimacy they feel for one another into tangible expression. This is considerately not a tragedy nor a linear development towards acceptance, but a film where people attempt to bridge their connections with one another using the means they have, only to continually feel like they're coming up short. Assayas is familiar with this existential struggle in a social world, and gives his characters plenty of wonderful moments to have as memories, and these fadeouts occur at times that signify these scenes as memories, emasculating opportunities at 'achieving' anything finite that could make any one character feel in absolute harmony with their own sense of accomplishment or the quality of their union with a friend or lover. And how wonderful, Assayas seems to be saying, for us to always be wanting more, to love someone and care for ourselves so much that we can identify faults or barriers to accessing what we want, because it shows us how important it is for us that we want those things. Is that the meaning of life?

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therewillbeblus
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Re: 1990s List Discussion and Suggestions (Lists Project Vol. 3)

#480 Post by therewillbeblus » Sun Feb 14, 2021 9:21 pm

Protozoa, one of Darren Aronofsky's early shorts, is pretty terrible- examining the dreary lives of a few young people judging each other and passively examining their grey world without any insight. The mise en scene is so on-the-nose (they're sitting in an empty junkyard!), which is a quality of Aronofsky's that he would execute in the offensively obnoxious (Requiem) and eventually translate into defiantly creative (mother!). Lucy Liu is one of the pack though, and it's fun to hear her say "shit, eat, and fuck" though that's about the only bearable part of this amateur mess. I'm not exactly in a rush to check out his other three shorts. The linked poster on Letterboxd is a Virtual University advertisement though and it's more entertaining in its misjudgment than anything in this movie.

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Basquiat (Julian Schnabel,1996)

#481 Post by RIP Film » Mon Feb 22, 2021 11:37 am

So for a long time I was ignorant of Jean-Michel Basquiat. I knew of him and that he collaborated with Warhol, but I never really looked at his work-- I think in part because he was so popular with highschool/college art students. "'Who's your favorite artist?' 'Basquiat'". It was practically a meme. But 2020 must have been the year I took notice; The Strokes used him on the cover of their latest album, the Brooklyn Nets paid homage to him on their jerseys. He sort of drifted into my consciousness, and after actually looking at his work I can see why he's maintained his relevance.

But this post is mainly to discuss Julian Schnabel's Basquiat, which I rented a few weeks ago. I'm unsure how I feel about this film, both in its portrayal of JMB and in what it's ultimately trying to achieve. Starting with Jeffrey Wright, who obviously can act, but his performance is perilously close to being an impression at times-- and I'm not sure of who. I have subsequently watched some documentaries and interviews on JMB, and there's a reserved intensity and quiet intelligence there that I don't really see in Wright's performance, instead leaning into the innocent, stoner artist thing. Yet in spite of that, I do feel sympathetic to Wright's performance as a character in itself.

The film doesn't really have a strong focus though. We see a bit of the New York arts scene of the time, how fluid and classless it appeared to be, and how JMB was born out of that-- but once discovered the focus shifts pretty quickly to his relationships in the art world, and I have a hard time reconciling the first part of the film with the latter. Possibly this is the point, the depersonalization of fame. And yet for a guy who was painting all the time, you see little of it. Again it seems to be mainly an examination of his relationships, yet sometimes I don't fully appreciate who these people are or why they are important. Even Warhol, who is played brilliantly by David Bowie, kind of relies on pretense-- what magnetic polarity brought them together to be friends and collaborators? JMB himself feels almost like a cipher or a surrogate for the audience at times to show these other artists and the surrounding drama.

Thematically Schnabel seems to be interested in how JMB rose out of poverty to be this giant figure in the arts, and the sort of whiplash from that, made more complicated with race. Though I take issue with the film's focus on the corroding effects of fame, since JMB is all but erased by that focus-- this was probably the director's intention, and it has a certain compellingness to it. But I suppose as a viewer though I wanted to see more of what made JMB who he was, since he was such a unique voice in the 20th century, and not just another self-destructive artist battling drugs and fame.

Maybe it just wasn't the best introduction for me, and I would be more receptive if I'd known more about JMB and had an outline of his life. I do feel it was a decent film, with a touching and well-chosen soundtrack, and a view into New York's 70s/80s uniquely fertile art scene.

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Re: 1990s List Discussion and Suggestions (Lists Project Vol. 3)

#482 Post by RIP Film » Tue Jun 15, 2021 9:58 am

Kiss the Sky (Roger Young, 1998) A hard film to find, but something of a hidden gem. You can't stream it anywhere, except for a crappy Youtube upload, and there's no blu ray release that I'm aware of. I ended up buying the DVD.

It stars William Petersen and Gary Cole as two burnt out careerists searching for something more out of their lives when they go on a business trip to the Philippines. The tagline for this film is kind of brilliant "In search of paradise they made one mistake... they brought themselves". There's supporting roles by Sheryl Lee and Terrence Stamp (as a Buddhist monk). First glance may give you the impression it's a softcore porno, particularly from the marketing, but there's a prevailing respect for the audience and story being told.
Without doing a plot outline I'll just say I quite enjoyed it, particularly its honesty in dealing with what one might call a midlife crisis. There's a sweet earnestness that cuts through its wrapper of clichés, making it almost feel as if it has been lived by the creators. The soundtrack is entirely composed of Leonard Cohen songs, which feels so appropriate against its tropical background and themes of disillusionment.

I'm a bit perplexed by its original release, it was put out by MGM but is in academy ratio. I could find no further information about it.

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Re: 1990s List Discussion and Suggestions (Lists Project Vol. 3)

#483 Post by Mr Sausage » Mon Jul 19, 2021 11:04 am

Crimson Tide (Tony Scott, 1995)

Tho' generally more comprehensible, this is still Tony Scott at his most Michael Bay. Jackhammer editing, hard closeups, lense filters, high contrast lighting (often backlighting), extreme foreground/background compositions, pounding and intrusive Hans Zimmer score. It speaks to the strong identity and influence of Bay that one thinks of this style as being Bay's when Bay cribbed it from Scott (and Fincher) and only released his first movie this same year. The critical cliche would be to call this movie's script crackerjack. And it is. The drama crackles. The weak link is Scott's hock-fisted direction, which overplays every big moment and drowns every small one. This is an exciting movie, constantly, perpetually, endlessly. The story makes little sense as a Simpson/Bruckheimer vehicle: despite the intense background narrative and stabs at ethical dilemmas, the story is essentially a tense interpersonal drama, a battle of wills. The actors carry this ably, but the movie around them acts like this is The Rock. I sound down on the movie, but it does work. It's gripping. I just wish the movie were more mature, had aims beyond gripping us by the throat. That it had embraced the drama of its script, the battle of wills, rather than the action; had been an adventure story in the Conradian tradition over a summer blockbuster. But I can hardly be upset at watching a successful exciting movie, either. It's weird for this to be both a let down and one of the best 90s action vehicles.

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John Cope
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Re: 1990s List Discussion and Suggestions (Lists Project Vol. 3)

#484 Post by John Cope » Thu Jul 22, 2021 5:01 am

RIP Film wrote:
Tue Jun 15, 2021 9:58 am
Kiss the Sky (Roger Young, 1998) A hard film to find, but something of a hidden gem. You can't stream it anywhere, except for a crappy Youtube upload, and there's no blu ray release that I'm aware of. I ended up buying the DVD.

It stars William Petersen and Gary Cole as two burnt out careerists searching for something more out of their lives when they go on a business trip to the Philippines. The tagline for this film is kind of brilliant "In search of paradise they made one mistake... they brought themselves". There's supporting roles by Sheryl Lee and Terrence Stamp (as a Buddhist monk). First glance may give you the impression it's a softcore porno, particularly from the marketing, but there's a prevailing respect for the audience and story being told.
Without doing a plot outline I'll just say I quite enjoyed it, particularly its honesty in dealing with what one might call a midlife crisis. There's a sweet earnestness that cuts through its wrapper of clichés, making it almost feel as if it has been lived by the creators. The soundtrack is entirely composed of Leonard Cohen songs, which feels so appropriate against its tropical background and themes of disillusionment.

I'm a bit perplexed by its original release, it was put out by MGM but is in academy ratio. I could find no further information about it.
I am another great fan of this movie and consider it quite daring and genuinely provocative as well as genuinely "adult". There is some nice cross over here too with a couple of other excellent Sheryl Lee films from around exactly this same year (I'd recommend a triple feature): Lance Young's deeply moving and beautiful Bliss from 1997, which also very memorably co-starred Terrence Stamp as "a sex therapist operating on the edge of the law", and Philip Haas's superb 1997 The Blood Oranges, another idyllically set drama exploring some similar terrain of sexual boundaries and freedoms. Lee actually had an exceptional 1990's. It's too bad she couldn't continue as consistently but, boy, what a run of great films.

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Re: 1990s List Discussion and Suggestions (Lists Project Vol. 3)

#485 Post by domino harvey » Sun Oct 23, 2022 7:56 pm

Image

Anna Oz (Eric Rochant 1996)

Charlotte Gainsbourg vacillates without warning between two states of existence, one "real" in Paris, another dreamt in Venice, in this intriguing fantasy that anticipates a lot of more well-known films, including Lost Highway, L'amant double, and Inception (and a touch Primer in some of its more "What the fuck is happening right now" moments). Recurring motifs, including fire-breathing and the ever-present threat or execution of eye-gouging are not the only signs not all is well in this film co-written by frequent Polanski scribe Gerard Brach (responsible for 2/3's of Polanski's "Apartment trilogy," to give you some idea of where this falls). The film eventually manifests the normal emotional response of wanting to return a dream into a fascinating imperative: What if we preferred our dreams so much that we tried to influence not our dreams from reality but our reality from our dreams? The path the film takes to get to where it arrives is never overwrought, over-stylized, or obvious-- this is a film of small pleasures and increasing enjoyment once an audience realizes what's going on. It also has a sense of humor about itself, which is what sets itself apart from some of the films which came after it. Take the great scene where Gainsbourg, prompted to go see a therapist in Paris, is induced into a hypnotic trance in which she appears in a therapist's office in Venice and then tells the Venetian therapist to call her French therapist to confirm that she's actually dreaming the therapy session in Venice. How can you not love the bizarre nature of such a scenario? Highly recommended.

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Re: 1990s List Discussion and Suggestions (Lists Project Vol. 3)

#486 Post by therewillbeblus » Sun Nov 27, 2022 8:00 pm

Image

Basic Instinct

I've been trying to find a way to write about this film for a while, but the recent conversation on TÁR has motivated me to try, since I think Basic Instinct is a film where Verhoeven accomplishes the impossible: Successfully navigating a path to sustainably engage with a character's subjectivity and also keep it restrained to the perfect degree; effectively translated through extrapolating the surrogate from character to audience member to general psychology to society and culture to abstract themes on internal and social confrontations with immaterial material, whether a film, delusion, projected desire... you name it.

I used to shrug this movie off, but over the years I've grown to love it for both very simple and very complex reasons, which are inevitably intertwined by Verhoeven’s own dual focus. Yes, he’s taking Joe Eszterhas’ unironic script and making lemonade by lampooning it, but he’s doing so with calculated precision, and masterfully balancing concurrent audacious overflow and restraint. Verhoeven chops this up and shoots it like a Hitchcock or De Palma suspense film- it’s beautiful, involving, economical without an ounce of fat, and genuinely entertaining on a pure formal level. He’s also initiating satire, but careful, tougher satire than the cheap shots at low hanging fruit a lesser filmmaker would settle for. Verhoeven is satirizing society, gender roles, power dynamics, the artificialities of movies and the artificiality of the personas we don from watching movies, but he’s also validating these as at least somewhat (but not too much) worth exploring instead of snubbing our noses at them. And this is because he understands that the audience, and our relationship to movies, is part of this process. Verhoeven isn’t playing a joke on us, but engaging the audience on an adult level around schlock, repurposing it as an exercise to be both superficially entertained by -in blatant transparency of the plot’s vacuous nature- and challenged into critical thinking and feeling, around the infinite potentials to approach this kind of material with dignifying encouragement. He succeeds in part through employing a narrative (divorced from ‘plot’) that doubles as a mature scavenger hunt for us to unlock gems in every domain of cinema’s possibilities.

Verhoeven somehow finds a comfortable distance by which to acknowledge the western male's mental obsessions and physical compulsions, and also peripherally balk at the psychology and behavior. But he goes several steps further, first by metaphysically refuting the practice of earnestly allotting time and energy to such meritless endeavors of investigating Douglas' Nick's psyche (for artist, audience member, and all voyeuristic/vicarious participants), and then by reflexively making that part of the text; as Nick fruitlessly, pointlessly, yet pathetically and fatalistically embarks on his own 'investigation' of the murder case and Stone's Catherine's involvement. These are occasionally seen as the same thing by Nick, but more often than not they are kept ironically separate (forced apart by Nick' own competing impulses and that of Verhoeven's stratified targets), when we all know they are one in the same. Nick also proceeds towards these goals in both half-assed and full-measured methods, split between the sincerity of his job, morality around murder, etc. and the id impulses of his sex drive, addictions, conceit. This feels like the most successful cinematic adaptation of Nabokov's style in approaching the solipsism in Lolita, indulging in simultaneous sincere participation and ironic critique.

Though it's this all-encompassing engagement Verhoeven omnisciently commits to every shred of his material that makes it work. If Nick represents both us as audiences and Verhoeven himself as a filmmaker, what does that say? Is the pathetic and deterministic nature of Nick allowed to be broadly pitied along with deserving dark laughter? Don't we all feel split, and aren't we all to some degree powerless to actualize the perfect logical sobriety we secretly yearn for- to essentially be God (as Verhoeven comes as close as anyone has in his vast scope of attention with this film), impeded by all the same handicaps Nick has, at least generally speaking? Don't we all have narcissistic parts inherently binding us to a narrow scope of vision, just like him? Isn't life ironic, and is it possible that the silly movie-fake murders in Eszterhas' screenplay are actually of less worth than the sex drives that usurp Nick' focus and dominate the narrative, since they command our attention more than any actual mystery or bare-minimum care about plot? I think Verhoeven is pretty clearly but cheekily (and ardently but leisurely) asking these questions, and leaning into the latter as truth, which itself tangles up the meta-commentary by further validating Nick' stupid choices within the context of a dumb movie but also real life, which is pretty dumb too, with a bunch of Nicks/us walking around.

It's noteworthy that I adore this film, but tune Nick out almost the entire time, despite his role as a faux-surrogate. Whenever he's on screen, I'm almost always giving more of my attention away to the scenery, or the sleek camera movement, or Verhoeven's mastery over the form, or the characters he's playing off of. Douglas' Nick is a critical aid in granting a lot of the elasticity necessary for Verhoeven to achieve his unthinkable equilibrium in examination, but not in the function one expects. He is, quite simply, the worst in every way; the worst character, the worst performance (by Douglas and bordering on any actor ever), and the comically-worst representation of the prototypical western man's worst qualities - which, thankfully, doesn't discount the utility embedded in stereotypes, and only emphasizes the reading that he's not worth fleshing out or allotting investment in on any level of equality. Nick's vehicle is uninteresting, brutish, weak, overconfident, impulsive, and vapid. By making him the main character, Verhoeven has a ripe opportunity to pull off this impossible task of model engagement: Nick is so repelling that he subverts the accessibility of himself as a surrogate. We follow him around, but never identify with him emotionally. He's not aware he has any emotions, or doesn't properly show them when they do seem to come verbally; they're either buried deep, nonexistent, or, in a vacuum, but it hardly matters- for a delusional man this undignified, digging for what nobody wants to find is a waste of time and energy for all. However, we can identify with what he represents for us cerebrally, if we wish. We can meet him on his appropriate level of reductiveness for pathologizing, that can in turn reveal a lot about sweeping trends in humanity, and our relationship to vicarious consumption in private spaces, safely facilitating a process of realising our worst qualities without becoming fully sober to them.

Catherine, on the other hand, is the embodiment of the femme fatale through an unimaginative male gaze, and a pleasure to watch regardless of her thin characterization. Verhoeven knows this, and makes her alluring while never once trying to sincerely endorse a reading that she's either innocent or actually interesting beyond a cookie-cutter acidic doll. And yet, we as the audience don't mind being wooed by her blunt sexually-charged one-liners and actions that fulfill both dominant and submissive fantasies for men. She's an incarnation of Nick's (and all he represents, including parts of us deep down) absurdly-impossible and unwanted-in-real-life Dream Woman: mysterious, flirtatious, independent, sexually adventurous, and elusive- always game for being chased, but still showing up on his doorstep when he craves her presence for just a taste of a tease. Her existence sparks the extremism of Nick's dual impulses, just as she represents dualities: compelling and alienating, solicitous and cold, exciting and frightening, dominant and submissive, inhibited and disinhibited, independent and dependent (both predictably and unpredictably around sex), intelligently intuitive and habitually drawn to seemingly irresistible urges... She's superficially fun, but her character is trash and welcomes trashy activity beneath the veneer of austere luxury, much like Verhoeven's strategic execution of his ethos. In real life, she wouldn't be fun or particularly stimulating in most areas that she is here, and this mirage is a key to unlocking the point of the movie.

She's highly intelligent, apparently, and also may have superpowers to conjure behavior into being, but the physicality of her desire drives the compulsive behavior that causes her to need to use her intellect. That comes second, along with the drive to write. She's first and foremost an insatiable predator, but in exploiting the femme fatale and inverting it into bald-faced satire, Catherine Tramell is a mirror held up to western men, dissolving their worth and posturing at wider, abstract repudiation for the value in virtue itself. This is distinct from nihilism, since there's plenty of meaning to be found in the gorgeous construction of this film, and in the philosophical deconstruction of the specific moral channels of meaning we flock towards; though in consideration of morality (something this film ensures we do wonder about), it retains recontextualized value. We're more interested in the sexy, flashy, cinematic digestibility of the movie, to the point where we can forsake the plot and our main character in favor of the schematic flourishes. A humanist film, this is not- but it's one that invites a wealth of engagement with the crevices of human psychology without patronizing the audience.

So thematically, this is at once a deeper exploration of our human drives, and an evisceration of the absurd ones that create and sustain myopia and facilitate narcissistic harm onto others, while also cautiously respecting the unavoidable intrinsic nature of them. That's a simplified summary, but intentionally written as three parts, with the second flowing back into the first for a significant reason. If it was just a "Yeah x.. BUT Y!" the film would fail, but instead Verhoeven imbues a layered fluidity between an approach that genuinely encompasses interest and dedication to craft and themes, with camp that mocks our psychologies through the characters and narrative devices, and then back to the fervency in devotion to the concoction that makes it all work: which could be, and is among many things, a fully-absorbed exhibition of the conflicting influences and wills in anthropology and life itself. Verhoeven doesn't offer a solution, a way out, or a didactic response... he just lays it bare: like an optical illusion that can be consumed as pulp extravaganza or good-movie making or thematic profundity or absurdist psycho-existential wry, dry comedy.

Verhoeven essentially creates a fourth dimension to play around in and make his sandbox, and it’s a blast to do that for two hours. I can’t think of another film that does what this one does- Showgirls is fine, but it’s only ever operating on the superficial side of this film’s strengths. In Basic Instinct, the subtext and text intermingle and occasionally conflate, without the auteur ever losing sight of which is which, resulting in the kind of confident and earned smoothness that's wildly impractical, but also a wholly novel strand of aesthetically poetic satisfaction you didn't even know you wanted until you figured out it can exist. In its gradual percolation, the rewards are infectious and expand every sense we use to ingest the content of the medium, toward consummating the sublime (in a way Nick will never achieve with his ridiculously extreme and hollow acts with Catherine, delusional as he may be; and that Catherine impermanently attains through ridiculously extreme and hollow acts of id impulses despite her superhuman intellectual skills; another of the many meta in-jokes this film provides for the taking). In Verhoeven's lucid process of locating, manipulating, and exercising this smoothness, he achieves Art that is reflexive on every level of the cinematic experience. Films like this make me thirst for more like it, and in coming up empty, I only appreciate the rich singularly more.

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Re: 1990s List Discussion and Suggestions (Lists Project Vol. 3)

#487 Post by therewillbeblus » Sun Jan 15, 2023 9:07 pm

Un héros très discret is an interesting, if uneven entry in Audiard's filmography. It starts off strong, delivering one of the best first acts fitting within (what I guess I'll refer to as) the fictional biopic Let Me Tell You My Life Story subgenre that demonstrates the blurry lines in how one fantastically plays with truth to suit their preferred narrative. It’s often funny and unpredictable in its front-heavy series of episodes relentlessly spilling into one another, which is probably the most perfect 40ish minutes Audiard has put together across his work, completely liberated from typical cinematic and narrative constraints. The focus there is on the immature youth's inferiority complex in friction with rigid ambition pointed towards a fixed ideal, and takes its time to meditate on Kassovitz's hypervigilant observances which pick up unexpected details in a messy series of shot-distractions mimicking his wandering eye and echoing Desplechin's best work of constant rule-breaking in structure. Unfortunately once Kassovitz abandons Sandrine Kiberlain, the film itself abandons the eccentric mania it established so confidently, and turns into a more concentrated sociopolitical satire in its ensuing, straightforward and relatively foreseeable bulk activity. There's a tragicomic undercurrent in the lonely impetus to manipulate subjectivity with delusions that can only occasionally evade the reality of traumas and hardships, but this raw emotional reactivity doesn't bleed through Audiard's primary interests in the scathing engagement with historical French/Nazi relations, or the ironically productive psychology of the protagonist whose own awareness of his deceit is not just celebrated but useful for those he's trying to impress. The wry tone stumbles to mix with drama in the back half, but the ironies that pile up in its denouement kind of work, and the vapid point of the story in line with the delusional outcome seeks to obliterate the value of the mockumentary footage of people talking about our lead as an important figure worth mentioning at all. I just couldn't tell who the joke was on, as the existential aims are broad and abstract in their cumulative destination. It's still worth watching, if only for that thrilling forward momentum in the first act, but I admired the film overall for its breadth of aspirations filtered through a unique, diverse approach - even if it does feel a bit sloppy along the way. I guess that's how our "hero" felt and functioned and deluded himself from accepting while clearly feeling it in doses of sobriety, so us having the same kind of experience doesn't feel entirely inappropriate.

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therewillbeblus
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Re: 1990s List Discussion and Suggestions (Lists Project Vol. 3)

#488 Post by therewillbeblus » Thu Feb 09, 2023 11:48 pm

See You in Hell, My Darling (Nikos Nikolaidis, 1999): The logical next step after the one-two punch of Morning Patrol and Singapore Sling, this bizarre quasi-chamber piece plays out like a perverse version of Sartre's No Exit, detailing an affectionate yet toxic dynamic between two women that also includes a non-entity male figure to contextualize a complex love triangle (or perhaps serve as a vehicle of distraction to make their complicated feelings tangible or deceptively rational), as they exist in some kind of purgatory cottage. There's an apocalyptic vibe to both the elastic spatial and temporal signifiers, as well as the central relationship's history coming to a boil as the irreconcilable distrust and overwhelming infatuation (to both codependent and individualized degrees of authentic love) clash in an eruption of absurd behavior and erratic expressions of emotion. The fears intruding on any security achieved become cemented as reality and disrupt the hopeful facade of permanent catharsis, and at times set off projections and visual ideas that more closely resemble horror than anything Nikolaidis has done before.

It's a wild Pinteresque theatre piece, with optical flourishes, sadomasochistic and violent explosions, and calm pockets of true intimacy; characters confident and harmonic in actualizing their wills, but also struggling with memory, psychological stability, and misunderstanding rules 'defined' by the relationships - only developed in isolation by single members and assaulted or teased at others, talking or acting past one another without the hope of receiving the already-unintelligible intent from the invading agent themselves. The oscillations between tranquil straightforward bits of play-encounters and unnervingly intrusive shocking activity is strange, but it's a great film to watch chronologically in Nikolaidis' filmography as it incorporates a lot of what he's just been doing, complete with the neo-noir playfulness that began with Morning Patrol's dystopian twofer and extended into Singapore Sling's triangular interplay and eclectic swarm of influences. This is another three-character chamber piece like that one, but a bit more grounded aesthetically, rawer emotionally, stalling for longer during uncomfortable moments of eroding sanity and fumbling self-expression. But, like the other two, it engages with fatalism, the insular nature of subjective purpose, and is chock full of switching femme fatales, which could feasibly describe all characters, even male ones. Leave it to Nikolaidis to make gender fluid and triple-down on the perversity -either in formal strategy or sexual content- to inform these noirish themes and elevate them to places only an underground experimental auteur like him could possibly dream about and externalize for our own charity.

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Re: 1990s List Discussion and Suggestions (Lists Project Vol. 3)

#489 Post by therewillbeblus » Wed Mar 01, 2023 8:17 pm

Magic Hunter (Ildikó Enyedi, 1994): Really curious to hear feihong talk about this elliptical fable, which I watched on his indirect recommendation from the All-Time thread. It’s a balanced blend of Faustian fantasy and paranoia flick, which I’m surprised hasn’t been done more- but even if it had been, it wouldn’t be as artful as this. I read the tone as dark comedy that's much more focused in its intelligence than its elastic narrative path lets on, particularly in how it works as a reflexive reinforcement of our narcissistic psychological part's grandiose desires through Gary Kemp's dual role spanning time and space. He's cast into the part of an inconsequential god as the star of his own movie, not just through his deal with the devil, but in reveals from random extras talking about him as the film winds down and works to close his narrative loop. This might be how The Truman Show would play out if one's supreme significance was purely superficial and unearned by sorcery, and only in service of achieving the death of their significance. This was a very strange, but captivating movie- and the two temporally-dissonant worlds attended to, coupled with an abstract stylistic translation of ideas, make it seem like the primary inspiration for The Fountain. It's at least equally ambitious, but way more fun, well-executed, and coherent. The nebulous nature of the film isn't just art for art's sake - there's clearly an internal logic here that's more interesting and inviting than Aronofsky's film.

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Re: 1990s List Discussion and Suggestions (Lists Project Vol. 3)

#490 Post by Mr Sausage » Wed Jun 14, 2023 8:24 pm

La Femme Nikita / Point of No Return

People complain about shot-for-shot remakes, but I think they're fascinating. They can reveal the subtle differences in who and where they're made. Or, as here, they can give you a better idea of what makes a movie work. Because these two are the exact same movie, and yet Point of No Return just sits there while La Femme Nikita feels charged with life. Why is that?

Part of that is the director: Luc Besson is just a better director than John Badham. The latter is a reliable hired hand who can direct a handsome film, but he's not a stylist, he has no feel for action, and he doesn't do prankish comedy, so most of what animates this uncomplicated story is not in his wheelhouse. Badham tries his best, but his imagination stops at slow motion and canted angles. I think what the producers had in mind was a Simpson/Bruckheimer-esque vehicle. Tony Scott would've been a better choice--at times Badham even seems to ape him, putting backlit fans into scenes and cramming his frame with white sheets and bric-a-brac. But overall the wrong sensibility is at work.

Besson is more likely to make unusual or off-centre choices, too, while Badham falls back on hackeyed tropes. For instance, Besson shows the progress of the couple's relationship obliquely and through elision, using a dissolve where the couple's apartment changes from chaotic to homey. It's blunt, but clever and efficient. Badham falls back on an old a rom-com cliche, the cute montage set to music. Besson has Nikita try to negotiate with the Cleaner, who has his own way of doing things; Badham makes the Cleaner a straightforward bad guy who Maggie first works with then fights. Besson is making a big action film, but underplays the dramatic scenes, lets important things go unsaid, and shows an anarchic sense of comedy; Badham plays everything straight, makes the dramatic moments bigger and the romance schmaltzier, states subtexts and motivations explicitly, adds action scenes, and overall just puts a point on everything.

Then there's the cast and acting choices. The original has an unusual cast who make offbeat acting choices. Anne Parillaud is the obvious example, but Tcheky Karyo plays off his natural sinisterness with this still, quiet gentleness that you don't know what to make of; Marc Duret is quietly funny, amused, and without aggression; and even Jean Reno makes his small character into something weird and unpredictable, so that you can never tell what his character will do in a situation. Badham casts his version well, but they all make the obvious choices and, worse, have no chemistry with each other. Dermot Mulroney undermines the romance by making his character aggressive and unlikeable. Brigitte Fonda gives an earnest performance, but doesn't inhabit Maggie as a character. Gabriel Byrne hides nothing from the audience. Harvey Keitel is quietly frightening, but there are no surprises with his character. You know exactly how things'll go when he shows up.

The original is not a complicated movie--it's a loud, commercial crowd pleaser--but Badham takes what complexities and subtleties it does have and flattens them. So the movie feels both louder and less exciting. You can tell that Besson felt something about the emotional stratum of his movie, that he cared about the odd duckling at the heart of the story. The movie has charm: it can be touching, funny, and often not what you expect it to be. Badham and co. don't seem to feel much of anything about their movie. It's just a lot of stiff drama and unconvincing character interactions punctuated at rare intervals by unexciting action. Everyone's going through the motions.

There's also an HK knock off, Black Cat, that I wrote about here. What's funny is that Black Cat is inferior in nearly every way to Point of No Return: the acting is terrible, the script half-baked, the characters poorly defined, the action illogical, the production cheap. And yet it's way more entertaining. It has that bizarre, unaccountable HK craziness enlivening it. It's bad, but not boring. Point of No Return is technically competent and a total bore.

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