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JJL is one of our best actresses and this is unquestionably her decade

and don't forget the hudsucker proxy...now there's an inspired performance. amazing to think it was winona ryder's role to begin with...and btw the same movie also has my favorite cameo ever-peter gallagher as vic tenetta...most probable to make my list.

A quick rundown of JJL this decade, with extremely brief recs / admissions of inexperience where needed

Miami Blues -- Listworthy
Buried Alive -- Entertaining Tales From the Crypt riff but not worth going out of your way to see
Backdraft -- Have not seen since I was a kid. Hope to revisit
Rush -- In unwatched stack
Single White Female -- Listworthy
Short Cuts -- An okay film, but people here really enjoy it a lot so YMMV
the Hudsucker Proxy -- Have not seen since I was a kid. I don't like the Coens so I'm not necessarily the one to ask anyways. In unwatched stack to revisit
Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle -- Listworthy
Dolores Claiborne -- Great film, won't be making my list but worth seeing
Georgia -- Listworthy
Kansas City -- In unwatched stack
Bastard Out of Carolina -- In unwatched stack
Washington Square -- In unwatched stack
A Thousand Acres -- In unwatched stack
the Love Letter -- Unseen. It's a TV movie, not sure if it's even circulating?
eXistenZ -- Listworthy

Another great actress that had a glorious 90s was Lily Taylor. She stars in two of my most cherished films from this decade: Dogfight and Household Saints. In Dogfight she plays a homely girl who is preyed upon by River Phoenix and eventually has the best night of her life, and in Household Saints she plays a misunderstood, spiritually aware girl who spends her days worshipping a saint in hopes of one day becoming worthy of God’s love. Both are very recommended.

Sadly, Household Saints is still unavailable on DVD.

As an aside, she also stars in the wonderful The Addiction and meets JJL in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle.

And both are in Short Cuts too.

As I recall, Bastard Out of Carolina feelss a bit Lifetime Channely, taking a book that was a fairly rounded sort of bildungsroman and reducing it to a sort of highlight reel of inescapable events of abuse, and reducing the heroine to a fairly passive victim. The performances were the strongest part of it, and JJL has an one of the more complex (in a Stella from Streetcar kind of way) characters, so I suppose it'd be worth seeking out if you were looking for her evolution as an actress or whatever.

I'm glad to see the lovefest that I started for JJL. I agree, she is truly one of the best at her craft, with an ability to excel in any genre. She's just truly magnificent! My only major gaps in her 90s output are Rush, The Hudsucker Proxy, Washington Square, and Bastard Out of Carolina. I had already planned to watch the first two for the project. I suppose that I might as well give all four a whirl.

Oh, and thanks for the advice on Strip Jack Naked. One of the benefits of working for Gary is that I'd periodically get a box of unsolicited discs from him when he wanted to make space in his collection. He once sent me the BFI double BD release of Nighthawks I & II. I didn't much care for the original, so I sold it off without watching the sequel. I'll track it down for the project though.

I'm pretty sure my first post in the last 90s List Project Thread was about JJL too. She's a good conversation starter I guess! And hey, turns out the Love Letter was put out on DVD by Hallmark. And it's OOP and running for forty bucks on Amazon Marketplace. So now we'll know who the true JJL fans are

anvilscepe wrote:Another great actress that had a glorious 90s was Lily Taylor...

As an aside, she also stars in the wonderful The Addiction and meets JJL in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle.

Lili Taylor also had a role of a career playing Valerie Solanas in I Shot Andy Warhol. Though on the flipside she was also in that terribleJan De Bont remake of The Haunting (ready and available to vote for this decade!), although she was probably the best aspect of the film!

It has been a while since I watched Backdraft, but I seem to remember the female characters there weren't focused on much at all - was JJL playing the female character who is making whoopee on the firetruck with William Baldwin as it gets called out on an emergency? Or was she the lady who has a heart to heart with a character (I think Kurt Russell's character in that scene) as they are fixing the roof of their house (in a beautifully shot scene).

I noticed Lili Taylor's in a Japanese-Icelandic road movie called Cold Fever

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109028/

Seijun Suzuki's in it! Anyone see this?

Watched a few 90’s films in the past couple of days.

Billy Bathgate
Dull Gangster drama. As is inherent to these types of narrative, the titular character is something of a blank slate (no fault of the solid Loren Dean) designed to introduce us to a glamorous and exciting world of crime. Except it isn’t glamorous or exciting; in fact a life of crime comes across as a real snooze. Hoffman’s lacklustre performance compounds the boredom, Kidman is miscast in a romance plot that goes nowhere and amounts to nothing, and the whole thing looks cheap despite, apparently, costing a bomb.

The Limey
I enjoy The Limey as a love letter to its two stars as much as anything else (even its abundant formal qualities). Both leads are wonderful and Soderbergh makes full use of their baggage-the Poor Cow footage is hugely affecting.
Stamp is obviously great but it also features one of my favourite Peter Fonda performances. Rather than adopting his usual ‘internal’ screen persona he’s sleazily charming and almost garrulous (the little introduction to him Soderbergh gives us makes great use of his smile). Having watched the Hired Hand recently it’s intriguing to see him here as an, older, corrupted version of the person and temperament that made that (great) film possible. Will feature somewhere on my list.

Dick Tracy
Striking to look at and endlessly watchable due to this, but it feels empty and, despite the grotesque make-up of the villains and primary colours, it’s just not much fun. Beatty’s dull and Pacino grates as the villain. But despite hating most of the musical numbers, I think this is one of Madonna’s best roles- as a combination of femme fatale and Monroe-ish breathy sexuality she is perfectly cast (and costumed).

La fille de d'Artagnan (d’Artagnan’s Daughter/Revenge of the Musketeers)
Tavernier makes this comedy swashbuckler look lovely- the opening sequence of horses chasing a man through the forest is a real knockout, the cast are game, Sophie Marceau is a spirited lead, and it is genuinely funny in parts. However, it’s light as a feather and accordingly ends up leaving little impression. Also, although Tavernier does a wonderful job of choreographing the equestrian action, the swordplay is incredibly limp and amateurishly staged which, even if it is mostly played for laughs, is a problem when you give over so much screen time to it.
If memory serves it’s one of the weaker swashbucklers/costume dramas to come out of France in the 90’s, but I need to revisit a few I have fond memories of (Le Bossu, Cyrano, Ridicule, La Reine Margot, etc.).

To pile in on the JJL-fest, I’m a big fan of Dolores Claiborne and Kansas City and also have a soft spot for Backdraft which, although Leigh is not given much to do in it and William Baldwin is a charisma vacuum, features some prime Kurt Russell action and a fantastically wild-eyed performance from Donald Sutherland.
Didn’t expect this project to lead to it but, due to Domino and bamwc2’s recommendations, I’ve got a Georgia/Single White Female double-bill lined up for this evening.

knives wrote:I think I'll go with Alan Berliner's Nobody's Business as my spotlight

I'd also recommend Intimate Stranger, which is a good build-up to Nobody's Business. Taken together, the films explore each side of Berliner's family (mother's side in Intimate Stranger, father's side in Nobody's Business). As an added bonus, the subject of Nobody's Business offers his unique perspectives in Intimate Stranger via voice over narration (he's the humorously cantankerous one).

thirtyframesasecond wrote:I noticed Lili Taylor's in a Japanese-Icelandic road movie called Cold Fever

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109028/

Seijun Suzuki's in it! Anyone see this?

Yes, it's a great road movie film (it has a great change in aspect ratio from 1.33:1 in the early scenes in Japan to 2.35:1 widescreen as our main character flies into the wintery Icelandic landscape), and it was really the film that put Icelandic cinema on the map in the 90s, at least in the UK. Here's a segment from the BBC's Moving Pictures series from 1996, which took the release of Cold Fever as an opportunity to explore Icelandic cinema as a whole.

Guide: Abel Ferrara in the 90's

Ferrara is known by most almost exclusively for his 90s films -- sure, there's some cult love for 80s gems like Ms. 45 or China Girl (Ferrara's personal favorite of his films), and even 1979's The Driller Killer, but generally his legacy rests on the films he made in the following decade; and indeed, I believe it comprises one of the very finest runs of any filmmaker in cinema history (it may be too early to give a verdict on his 00's and 10's films, either way, except to say that I think 2001's 'R Xmas is a near-masterpiece and found the others largely disappointing, though I need to re-watch them). Anyway...

King of New York (1990): Ferrara's most widely-seen and widely-praised feature is also perhaps his most uncharacteristic; indeed, Ferrara himself has repeatedly downplayed its importance in later interviews, even calling the film "fascistic" in its aesthetic perfection on his priceless DVD commentary. But while Bojan Bazelli's luminous cinematography is certainly more ostentatious and glamorously stylized than any other Ferrara film, this is still very much in keeping with the director's oeuvre: with his interest in sinners trying to do good (Walken's Frank White, here), with his love of the gritty underbelly of NYC, with his emphasis on visual storytelling over verbal, with his at once sleazy yet refined and philosophical approach, with his admiration of silent cinema (the Chinese gangster's impromptu Nosferatu screening is almost unnecessary to let us know Ferrara's love of Murnau, when one just looks at the Expressionistic use of shadow and intentionally gaudy/"fake"-looking sets throughout). While this may be the least substantive of Ferrara's masterpieces, it is still a remarkable piece of pure cinema, a fable-like tale that glides along with a lyrical hip-hop rhythm. Throughout, there are a few clunky scenes involving the police bent on catching White, but these small flaws are easily overshadowed by such outstanding sequences as the wordless opening minutes, the similarly wordess ending, and the chaotic shootout in a blue-tinted party followed by one of the most wrenching cop/criminal showdowns in all of cinema.

Spoiler

The coked-up Jimmy Jump's maniacal laughter (morphing into desperate screams) as he is riddled with bullets is at once hilarious and wretched, haunting and grotesque

Bad Lieutenant (1992): Ferrara's most formally rigorous -- and perhaps greatest -- masterpiece finds transcendence in the grit, rather than just wallowing in it (as many complain). The sparse, nonjudgmental long-shot compositions bring to mind names like Bresson and Antonioni, and the film's radically moral, shattering conclusion bears such references out by offering an imaginative kind of quasi-remake of The Passenger's spiritually attuned penultimate shot. Yet the end result is pure New York, pure Ferrara: a mixture of artifice and documentary, a intensely painful purging of the endlessly desiring soul trapped in a feeble body that can no longer support it. There's never been a film quite like this one -- such immaculate stillness of the camera against such torturous howling of the drugged-up, sinning soul -- nor a performance quite as soul-baring as Keitel here.

Dangerous Game (1993): A step down after the previous two works, but not a tremendous one. I admit to a bit of a dislike of the film-within-a-film genre, but this is a rare exception, a typically raw and traumatic film that bypasses any directorial egoism by the sheer power of its scenes. Above all, this is a film that rests on its performances, and Keitel, Russo and Madonna (yes, seriously) are all absolutely incredible, especially Keitel. Even Ferrara's then-wife, Nancy Ferrara, gives a remarkably emotional and believable performance for a non-actor. This isn't one of my very favorites, but it's still bracing, unforgettable stuff.

Body Snatchers (1993): The only big-budget studio picture Ferrara has ever directed, and while it's a little choppy -- mostly in the final third, which feels too conventional compared to what came before -- it's still a great little film. I don't have a good enough memory of the earlier and more lauded entries in this string of remakes to comment on that aspect, but Ferrara and his longtime co-writer, the immensely talented Nicholas St. John, do the story well by moving it to a military base in Alabama. It's also very well-served by the extraordinarily evocative 'scope compositions by Bojan Bazelli, Ferrara's lone use of 2.35 widescreen. A little slight, but very creepy and tautly paced; never content to make just a genre picture, there are intimations here of the tragedies of Nazi Germany and Hiroshima/Nagasaki, but Ferrara would build on this theme of human evil much better and at more length in his next picture.

The Addiction (1995): Ferrara's cinema is a cinema of pain, of suffering; it is to his merit that he never wallows in this but rather questions its existence, questions Evil itself. His characters consume alcohol like water, heroin or cocaine like candy, and blood like the insatiable psychic vampires they are, and they consume it all with a feverish necessity that goes far, far beyond rationality and beyond prior and accepted cinematic conventions of such consumption -- we might even say that Ferrara's characters do not consume substances, the substances consume them, transform them, make them mad. This is a far cry, indeed, as Justin Vicari noted, from the soft, advert-ready romanticism of Travolta booting up in Pulp Fiction, his "habit" (if it can even be termed one) fully under control. No, that is not the world Ferrara inhabits, or the one he displays for us in his cinematic world. His is a cinema of vampires (no mistake, then, that The Addiction may be his most defining work to date) -- people feeding on others to satiate their own base desires, everyone fucking everyone else, capitalism/pleasure-principle at its purest gone amok and the results shown through a wide-angle lens with a compassionate yet harsh detachment. The Addiction feels like the most draining and powerful of Ferrara's films, with the possible exception of Bad Lieutenant; I have such a personal connection to it and I am so overwhelmed by it every time that I hardly feel qualified to ruminate more objectively on the source of its affects, except to say that it is a flat-out masterpiece of personal, low-budget filmmaking, and that Lili Taylor gives the performance of a lifetime.

The Funeral (1996): Often regarded as one of Ferrara's finest, I find this more of a flawed, if interesting and often moving, experiment. The ensemble cast is marvelous, giving juicy parts to Walken and Penn but also great turns for the undervalued Rossellini and Sciorra as the doubting, deeply Catholic wives of these equally conflicted gangsters. While most Ferrara films perfectly inhabit their characteristically brief 90-100 minute running time, I'd honestly have preferred a lengthier and more in-depth examination of these characters; such as it is, the (admittedly shattering) final scenes of the film feels a little too abrupt, and not in the way it was surely intended. I'm not saying this is anything less than a very fine picture, but it feels at once too rote, what with its gangster-revenge plot, and too eloquent, with these gangsters speaking more like Harvard grads talking about their thesis. And yet, it is hard to shake off the manic-depressive, devilish intensity of Chris Penn's performance -- a truly outstanding, haunting, almost possessed piece of acting.

The Blackout (1997): The beginning of Ferrara's commercial and critical downfall also happens to be the beginning of his most artistically adventurous and mature period. Here, we see an increasing obsession with the dissolve as primary editing transition, and it is very fitting for such a hazy, drugged-out/drunken distant memory of a film. Anyone who's dealt with addiction will find much to painfully relate to here, and Modine gives probably his overall best performance yet as the self-absorbed and reckless yet generally well-meaning actor; Ferrara again draws some mysterious energy from his lead actor which results in some of the most nakedly truthful and emotionally shattering cinema since Cassavetes. This is also something of a semi-remake of Vertigo, with its doubled central woman and the obsessive male who pines for her; but, ultimately, it's a uniquely Ferraran (?) creation which announces a new and even more mesmerizing film-form that he will use to great effect in his next several features.

New Rose Hotel (1998): Ferrara closes out the decade with his most forward-looking film, a William Gibson adaptation that takes place in the kind of cutthroat capitalist near-future that Assayas elaborated on a few years later with the brilliant demonlover. But Ferrara's crowning acheivement is even more of a piece of "pure" cinema than that masterwork. Functioning like a visual symphony of luscious reds and blacks intermittently spiked with grainy, blown-out surveillance footage, this otherworldly cyberpunk trip is ultimately more an experimental film about the meaning of images than the plot-heavy genre piece that a brief synopsis might suggest. The mise-en-scène is strikingly solipsistic throughout, emphasizing shallow-focus fragments over expected establishing shots or anything that would orient the viewer in a given space. The result is a chillingly alien aesthetic tone poem that represents the peak of Ferrara's abilities as formalist and maker of sensually inviting mood pieces and opium-den meditations on memory lost and regained. Thematically, the film more or less dwells in the same register of sexual obsession and delusion that his previous Blackout did, but with a new clarity of vision and overall formal sumptuousness that remains unparalleled in recent American cinema. An intoxicating masterpiece, redolent with melancholy and a potent sense of lack and longing; probably doomed to only be appreciated by auteurists and aesthetes.

This is just a pre-list viewing dump.
My Own Private Idaho
This probably owes a little too much to Midnight Cowboy and Derek Jarman, but even with that considered this is something that's going to have me reevaluate van Sant's whole career. I'm not sure how much it is this being before Good Will Hunting (what with Drugstore Cowboy and all) or even just the temperature of the times (what with everything this side of Tim Burton and all), but this is a completely unheard of text with regards to understanding van Sant for me. Nothing seems to be left over and to be fully honest I think I prefer a lot of what is on display here. There's something exciting and still after all these years daring to the collage pop art sensibility of (relative) the film that his recent stately efforts haven't captured. Even the Shakespeare thing since a just there to have something doodle rather than any defining aspect of the film. The film is basically a mess, but it's such a compelling and, most rare for van Sant, fun mess that I can't help but love it.

Fucking Amal
I have to admit that the set up for the movie bothers me a lot with excessive direction, angst, and aimlessness. I'm sure an argument could be made for it reflecting Agnes which it certainly does well, but it comes across far too whining and self pitying for me to enjoy. Fortunately Elin basically knocks her and the movie into being infinitely better and more interesting place just at the time when it is going to hit its nadir of these negative qualities. The entire last fifty minutes or so are so good though that it almost makes me want to rationalize an enjoyment for the first thirty-five. Their interaction is so honest in its naivety, selfishness, and friendship that it comes from someone so different from them is shocking.

Deconstructing Harry
This is pretty different for Allen. Not necessarily new since a lot of these themes, characters, what have you are old hat for the man, but a lot like the earlier Husbands and Wives it seems like an attempt to morph the Woody Allen film into something different with a side effect of being more callous. It starts right away from the shortened opening credits which add some editing to the mix which I don't think he had done since the mid '70s and only steam rolls from that. I suppose the vulgar vaudeville act that supports the frame of the film is a trite hook, but it works for the most part as a way to give himself the middle finger. The film lays on thick Allen's history which pretty consistently works though if he wasn't verbalizing how tough he was being on himself so constantly the film might actually feel like a tough act of self reflection.

One area where the film really seems to excel without me needing to add an asterisk is in the editing which suggests a bunch of inspirations I had never really considered for Allen. It's not exactly a new take on jump cuts. In fact it's intensely familiar, but as a way to disturb the rhythms of Allen it's amazing. Really it does a better job of the deconstruction of Allen than the actual script or performances does (Tucci probably makes the best faux Allen though). The little plays on religion and culture also tickled me pink. Maybe it's just me being biased, but the angry, over the top, explanations and teasings is not really something I attribute to Allen who tends to leave things to surface borscht belt with no interest in self reflection on the matter. Here though he blames it for everything wrong with his life and gives a really thorough breakdown of why. Like having the son to Tucci's Allen (again favorite segment) be a deformed Hillel is hilarious to the situation in a way that Akiva or someone like that couldn't be due to his importance in codifying the orthopraxy which is naturally the source of their break. That just a few scenes later the real Allen refuses to give a blessing connects and damns the scene further. It's lumpy but pretty good for reasons besides what Allen says it is for which probably describes the whole film.

Hamlet--Brannagh
I respect and admire Branagh for making a cinematic film of the full version of Hamlet, but dear if it isn't the least interesting adaptation of the play I've yet encountered and the perfect argument to all others hacking it down. It's an all surface take unfortunately.

To Die For
First things first, Buck Henry's script is as great as you'd expect from the man though I think I'm more excited that he wrote it than necessarily its content. Now I know why van Sant radically shifted gears at the end of the decade. That style he had been practicing post-Mala Noche is really and truly perfected here. Partly that's through Kidman who just gives the best possible performance this style could offer like Jayne Mansfield turned into a loser. It's awfully pathetic in a way that only hints at being something other than fabulous. The other thing is the odd subtlety that the film presents its cotton candy explosion with. Some of that probably is the subjectivity. Kidman is the only cartoon here and nobody else either notices or cares. The world is basically one where she could see the magazine scene from My Own Private Idaho or Dillon's high musings but no one else which is a funny take.

Far From Home
Surprisingly good adventure film staring the kid from King of the Hill. The first half of the movie is okay enough, but the second half which goes full Robinson Crusoe with only a small number of cuts away to his family searching for him is some of the better family entertainment I've seen from the '90s. The relationship with the dog is pleasantly touching too.

A Simple Twist of Fate
This is one of the bigger why films I've ever encountered. Why did Steve Martin think this was good material to adapt to himself? Why adapt it in this way? Why play his character this way? Why dye his hair? Why cast so many comedic actors if not one joke is going to be told? Why does the poster make this look to be a sequel to Father of the Bride? Honestly the only thing about this film that doesn't present a question is the casting of the least talented Baldwin and that's only because he's supposed to play an immediately hateable character and he's an immediately hateable person. This is just a dull and ugly film without purpose or the ability to properly handle the scope of its story. There are some good adaptation choices here such as reducing the three Cass to two (though leaving only one would have been a better idea), but there aren't enough here and they aren't focused in a way to make for a consistent tone. The film is not without its charms mostly because Steve Martin is so charming, but it is pathetically small especially next to its source.

Frauds
I think this was aiming to be a Tim Burton style dark comedy, but tonally it is just such a severe mess never really connecting it's play at horror with the aloof approach to cartoonish comedy it seems to be trying for. Some moments play out like a serious drama while others are done with pure, crass, nonsensical comedy.This callous clashing of styles just makes all of the characters seem utterly repulsive. I hate every last character in this movie and wish that they would just die so that the film could end. Phil Collins, in what I hope remains his last significant role, plays his Drop Dead Fred boogeyman with all of the charm of a bed of nails coming across only as creepy rather than the right sort of balance that, say, Michael Keaton achieved in Beetlejuice. Even the lone good quality of the film, the production design, has been done better by just about even other late '80s to mid '90s film trying this tone. This is just a creepy and loathsome film and I felt like taking a long bath after seeing this movie.

Romy and Michele's High School Reunion
This film is so beautifully '90s and makes me a bit mournful at the loss of this specific type of cinema. Not only are the title characters hilarious in their vapidity in a manner that isn't malicious towards them or others, but the film is filled to the brim with wonderful one-off characters whose humour comes from being legitimately interesting rather than any sort of recognition. The film almost by virtue of the style of the day has this soft Tashlin day glow look which makes the attempts to move out of it all the more effective and clashing. It's also a pretty fascinating period piece due to how interested it is in culture. The music is great, but the most amusing bit is the flip phone used to show off.

Jacquot de Nanets
It's almost saddening how radically different in terms of vibrancy and quality of photography the Varda segments are from the Demy. Even degraded film clips of his best work like shown here are alive like no other and makes me desperately wish he had lived long enough to fulfill this film himself. Maybe then it would work less like a tack being beaten by a hammer in terms of connecting his art to his life. The film isn't bad and I do recommend it to both Varda and Demy fans, but it is so much less than what it could have been.

Spotlight title: Eggs (Bent Hamer, 1995). I know Hamer's later films Kitchen Stories and O'Horten has some fans here, and those who've enjoyed those ones could do a lot worse than checking out Hamer's debut, a very funny comedy about two elderly brothers living their dryly funny routine-based lives together pretty much secluded from the rest of the world. Hamer creates the comedic situations through a clever mise-en-scene favoring a static camera and a seemingly endless repetition of the brothers' daily routines. The brothers have lived together all their lives, except for one weekend when one of them went on a trip to Sweden. The trip resulted in the birth of son, now grown up, who out of the blue comes to live with them, disrupting their lives. He brings with him his collection of eggs.

I'll probably also be voting for Hamer's follow-up, En dag til i solen (1998, given the rather odd English title Water Easy Reach, chosen by Hamer himself), about a young sailor, Almar, stranded in a small coastal town in Spain, where he meets up with an older Australian sailor, played by the great Nicholas Hope. The lead is played by a rather stiff amateur whose performance puts a lot of people off, but I always found it a fitting choice giving the role of this naive young outsider to an amateur, and his detached performance is effectively contrasted with the other performances, particularly the warmth conveyed by Ingrid Rubio, as the girl he meets and falls in love with. What brings me back to this one is it's dreamy atmosphere, owing mostly to a moody score by The Flesh Quartet and the exotic location. Also, Pilar Bardem appears, smoking a cigar with her vagina.

Good luck finding these though. The only DVD releases I'm aware of are the Norwegian ones, now OOP. They were rather underwhelming (and non-anamorphic) discs anyway. Arrow Films, hear my prayers [-o<

Great comments on Abel Ferrara's films oh yeah! I often think that The Addiction and The Funeral make a good matched pair as despite their seemingly totally opposed style, era and genres they both end with a scene of a shockingly visceral outburst of violence that acts as a horrible final full stop to the action.

Your comments about King of New York reminded me that Laurence Fishburne steals almost every scene he is in, which is no mean feat amongst this cast! I checked on YouTube and was glad to find the restaurant scene was on there. The aspect that I most like about King of New York is that sense that while our focus is primarily on Walken's kingpin character, there is also almost as much time spent with the cops, and the compromised moral complexities of their own actions, as well.

thirtyframesasecond wrote:I noticed Lili Taylor's in a Japanese-Icelandic road movie called Cold Fever

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109028/

Seijun Suzuki's in it! Anyone see this?

Not great, but it has some passionate fans. Too much designer misanthropy (which you get a LOT of in Icelandic cinema of the period) but some pretty landscapes. As I recall it does that ABBA The Movie trick of opening up into CinemaScope early on, but there's not much else of formal interest.

So, incidentally the first two films I watched for this round shared the Palme d'or at Cannes in 1997 (I only learned about this afterwards), but they left a vastly different impression on me.

Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami, 1997): the first film I've seen from this much-admired director, and I have rather mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I liked its minimalism, just seeing the suicidal main character driving around in his car in the desolate outskirts of Teheran, and I do seem to understand that the various characters he picks up in order to ask them to bury him all represent people that are probably outsiders in the Iranian society (or at least represent its ethnic or cultural diversity). In this respect, the film seems to use its simple plot to give some portrayal of the state of things in the country, and it largely succeeds at that. But when it comes to the 'message' of the film, I'm largely unconvinced. I've heard the story the old taxidermist tells about the broken finger many times before (and not from people who have seen this film, I'm sure), so it's terribly unoriginal, and the whole idea that a look at the morning sun and the taste of cherries might change the outlook of a suicidal person also feels pretty clichéd. I have nothing against the idea of sudden epiphanies, but what the film proposes here is simply far too... simple. The all-too-easy idea of having the main character drive all the time through these desert-like landscapes (probably as an illustration of his state of mind) didn't convince me either, especially given that Antonioni did something like it much better in "Il deserto rosso". And well... then there's that ENDING. It's been much discussed, I've found out, and even though Rosenbaum offered an overelaborate defense of it, I found it completely unconvincing, and for me it marred a film which up to that point I felt I wouldn't want to dismiss. But after that, it's hard for me not to do that. That sort of thing really makes sense in Jodorowsky's "Holy Mountain" or in Monty Python's "Holy Grail", but most definitely not in a film like this.

But the second Palme d'or winner of that year was The Eel (Shohei Imamura, 1997), and if any film deserved to win the prize in that year, it certainly was this one. Remarkably toned down in comparison to Imamura's more challenging films from the 1960s, this is actually also a very simple story about a man who out of jealousy murders his wife (quite graphically depicted) and then eight years later, after being free on probation and opening a barber's shop, rescues a suicidal woman who reminds him of his wife and with whom, somewhat against his will, he begins to form a bond. A very humane, deeply felt film which introduces a lot of weird characters, among them a shy man who has trouble connecting with people and tries to allure UFOs to come to his place instead, and indeed also the pet eel that the main character keeps as some sort of alter ego. The film shifts effortlessly from drama to romance to comedy and even an almost slapsticky fight scene near the end, and in spite of these disparate tendencies it all comes together wonderfully and it's curiously much more believable than anything in the Kiarostami film. Probably because it doesn't carry its message on its sleeve. Try to see the full-length original version which is about 20 min. longer than the international cut released by AE. It's been released in Italy in a fine-looking anamorphic transfer (another advantage over the AE, it seems), although you'll have to consult the backchannels to find an English-friendly version.

I think a huge part of your problems with Taste of Cherry seems to be ignoring that the suicidal man still commits suicide. It's not like anything the old man says changes reality in any way. That is how the film would have continued no matter what happened. If we're going to take the tactic you do of the other characters being representative of larger Iranian culture than it wouldn't be too weird to assume that what he says is simply representing education in Iran with the mixture of secular and Koran schools (which the little parable of the taxidermist could be a part of). While certainly connected to the film thematically I don't think the parable is connected in the way that you seem to be suggesting especially since part of your complaint is with the originality which strikes me as being totally beside the point. This isn't profound so much as basic moral knowledge.

knives wrote:I think a huge part of your problems with Taste of Cherry seems to be ignoring that the suicidal man still commits suicide.

Is that really clear in the film? He lies down in his grave, yes, and there's the lightning coming up and so on, but that's how the film ends (apart from the 'ending'). We don't see him buried by the old man, nor do we learn anything about what's happening the next morning. He might get awake even if he did take those sleeping pills, and he even asked the taxidermist to make a little bit more sure of his death than he did in case of the first two 'candidates' (he runs after the old man, after having reflected on what the man has said, so in a way what the taxidermist says does change his perception). So I regard this as pretty much open-ended, unless you see the film's final ending as a vision of a happier afterlife, which for me doesn't make any sense.

colinr0380 wrote:Great comments on Abel Ferrara's films oh yeah! I often think that The Addiction and The Funeral make a good matched pair as despite their seemingly totally opposed style, era and genres they both end with a scene of a shockingly visceral outburst of violence that acts as a horrible final full stop to the action.

Your comments about King of New York reminded me that Laurence Fishburne steals almost every scene he is in, which is no mean feat amongst this cast! I checked on YouTube and was glad to find the restaurant scene was on there. The aspect that I most like about King of New York is that sense that while our focus is primarily on Walken's kingpin character, there is also almost as much time spent with the cops, and the compromised moral complexities of their own actions, as well.

Thanks! Addiction & Funeral do form something of a pair (though that trait of ending with one final, shockingly excessive act of violence seems to characterize many other Ferrara films as well!) I keep on reading or hearing that both were released simultaneously in U.S. theaters (though I always thought they were a year apart, but who knows). Also, more significantly, I believe that Nicholas St. John wrote both scripts very closely together and very quickly, right after the death of his son, a deeply cathartic act. Ferrara also said that The Funeral's script was basically totally translated to screen with no changes made by him, and it does seem like the purest distillation of St. John's artistic essence. It's too bad, also that he seemed to retire from the business after 1996. It's interesting to look closely at these 90s films and suss out all the different creative influences -- although Ferrara's an auteur, he's definitely more a collaborative Cassavetes than a single-minded Kubrick -- like for instance the very discernible stamp of the late, great Zoe Lund on Bad Lieutenant (depending on who, and whose agenda, you believe [Zoe's ex-husband Robert seems to have a thing against Abel, not always for no good reason] -- she either wrote about half the script, with Ferrara contributing an even amount, or Lund penned basically the whole thing while Ferrara idled around on crack and perhaps contributed an idea here and there). With St. John, Ferrara's films have a fundamentally religious, Catholic concern as their focal point, an interest in Evil and how it's come to be and how it might be resisted. By contrast, the films Ferrara penned without St. John -- specificallly, the Blackout and New Rose -- tend toward more autobiographical tales of alcoholism/drug use and/or romance woes, all sliced and diced through a filter of delusional hazy half-memories. With these two films the thematic focus is more explicitly psychoanalytical, which makes sense considering they were both co-written by psychiatrist Christ Zois (who has a small but important role in Blackout as Modine's therapist).

And yes, Fishburne is second only to Walken in terms of the film's performances. That scene in the chicken joint is hilarious and endlessly rewatchable; I also like how the inconsequential detail of Jump "loving chicken" is put back on him later in the film in a much more harrowing circumstance. There's just so many great, lusciously filmed scenes in King, and very smart editing, too. To name my two current favorites just from the opening sequence alone: Walken leaving prison in the limo as the exit gate at Sing-Sing slo-o-o-owly slides shut and finally CLINKs into place harshly as we cut to a very beautiful young prostitute in a super-saturated, colorful drug dealer's den, a strong contrast to the previous setting; and Joe Delia's hauntingly beautiful synth score (at first intermingled wonderfully with strains of Vivaldi) finally coming in at full blast as we drive past unearthly-looking views of the George Washington Bridge at what must be around 4-5AM (the sky's a medium-blue in color), the credits finally coming to a close. It's one of the most beautiful opening sequences to any film I know.

I seem to remember that after the opening sequence we continue on to Walken washing the prison off himself in his shower, turning and looking almost directly into the camera, which is a great shot too, preparing both the character and the audience for the tasks ahead in the film.

While I can see where Ferrara is coming from in his comments about the luxurious glamourisation going on in the film of a criminal lifestyle (though no more than a 30s Warner Bros film could be accused of glamourisation in a film such as Little Caesar or The Roaring Twenties, etc), part of what makes King of New York such a great film is that it doesn't just unthinkingly revel in the allure of Walken. It builds up into a lightly-sketched but omnipresent portrait of various stratas of society and all the different social and cultural groups operating and in a sense mutually dependent on each other (the swanky restaurant scene, fund raising dinner, visit to a hospital for sick children, etc is observed as lovingly as the drug hideout later on and perform similar wryly saritirical contrast that scenes in the later Chris Nolan Batman films do). Despite its gangster genre trappings, the texture of the film and the observation of its various characters trapped within their roles in their social groups (some angry at being pigeonholed that way, some revelling in their notoriety) perhaps has as much to say about race (and ethnicity with the Irish cop scene), money, class and the complicated and messy intermingling of all three as Do The Right Thing does. So complicated that any notions of simply judging characters based on their race, or the group they are allied with, as entirely defining their individual behaviour is shown up for being the ridiculous generalisation it always was.

In that sense the, low key for Ferrara, end of Walken's kingpin character that takes place the heart of the busiest area of the city is sort of the crumbling of that delicate balance, and the end of a certain era for that city. All of that effort brought down and leading to a quiet, exhausted conclusion.

Abel Ferrara also directed the music video to 'California' by Mylene Farmer which stars Giancarlo Esposito and her in dual roles as film star/wife and pimp/prostitute.

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I recently did some writing on 90s U.S. queer cinema, so I thought that I would put together a viewing guide for some of the major films and movements of 90s U.S. queer cinema. This is by no means even close to complete (I notably leave out mainstream stuff like Philadelphia), but hopefully will be of help to anyone interested in exploring an incredibly important development in U.S. indie cinema. I hope that others more knowledgeable than me can add to it and perhaps undertake guides for global queer cinema as well. Also, though it obviously isn’t U.S., I have to agree with the recommendations of one of my favorite queer-related films of the decade: the wonderfully funny, sweet, and overall lovely Fucking Åmål.

(Partial) Guide to U.S. Queer Cinema

I’ll begin with the movement B. Ruby Rich called “New Queer Cinema," the greatest filmmaker of which is certainly Todd Haynes:

Poison (1991) is a staggeringly brilliant film uses stories by Jean Genet as a springboard into a complex examination of film genre, form, and sexuality. The B-monster movie style AIDS allegory is especially powerful, partially as a way of working through how AIDS can be articulated through cinema in a way different than something like Parting Glances, but also as a meditation on the use of cinema to allegorically represent social fears in the first place. By using the Cold War B-monster movie frame, which was always already allegorical, Haynes raises questions about cinema’s ability to articulate social traumas and what the implications are for those living through those social traumas. The other two stories are similarly brilliant—a mediation on 90s mass media and critique of suburbia that remains relevant and a tragic prison love story that works through themes of humiliation and the representation of the male body in transformative and transgressive ways. Can’t recommend it enough.

Dottie Gets Spanked (1993) is the Haynes most in danger of being overlooked, but it really is worth a viewing (and will only cost you about 30 minutes). Freud’s “a child is being beaten” is certainly a relevant context, but I think one could also look past the psychoanalytic stagings of the film and find a powerful sense of how popular media opens up a potentially Utopian space for non-gender conforming children who are in the process of being forced into the normalization of heterosexual adolescence. The dynamic between the young boy’s parents is quite poignant as well, as is his interactions with his female classmates. The DVD I have also contains a hilarious short film by Mary Hestand that parodies Davy and Goliath.

I won’t say much about [SAFE] (1995), except that it is obviously essential viewing (there is also a wonderful conversation ongoing in the CC section of the forum that far exceeds anything I could say about it). It has no manifest queer content, although if we understand ‘queer’ as simply a critique of heteronormative culture, it can certainly be read in that way. I think the second half is also working through the way in which neoliberal ideology—or the belief that everything is about the individual and their responsibility for their actions without regard to larger social structures—functions to cut people off from each other and possible support systems. Beyond all that, the film is formally stunning. I can’t imagine that this not finishing in my top 10.

Velvet Goldmine (1998) is a lot of fun, especially coming off the heels of the disturbing viewing experience that is [Safe]. I like the nods to the Citizen Kane structure, and there is something wonderfully excessive about the representation of the glam rock era. I’m too young to have any nostalgia for the era myself, but Haynes does a good job at showing how this earlier moment in which gender codes were completely up in the air and male bisexuality was acceptable (or even the cool thing to do!) can serve as a way of critiquing the stifling heteronormativity of the Christian Bale character’s present. I like the ending’s nod to a queerness traveling throughout history, too. It’s not a perfect film—I also don’t like Christian Bale at all, so that made it harder for me to love—but it’s certainly worth a look.

Gus Van Sant is another other key figure of NQC. My Own Private Idaho (1991) is another film that doesn’t need my recommendation: it is wonderful, poignant, funny, tragic, and every bit as good as everyone says it is. The collectivity of queers, hustlers, and petty criminals that forms around the Bob (or the Falstaff character) is wonderful. Will certainly be on my list. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1993) is a goofy follow-up that reconfigures some of the themes of the earlier film—especially the formation of a queer collectivity, only this time a lesbian one instead of the mostly-male one in Idaho. The humor of the film doesn’t always work, although there is a delightful campiness to the whole thing that I enjoy a lot. It’s certainly worth a look, even if it doesn’t quite reach the heights of his previous film. To Die For (1995) is a nice, perverse neo-noir that Kidman does a good job with. It’s in no danger of making my list though. Good Will Hunting (1997) is like a summation of everything that I hate in cinema, so it might be best if someone else tackles that one. I have very mixed feelings about his infamous shot for shot remake of Psycho (1998) because I have a feeling that everything bad one might say about it might be precisely the point Van Sant is trying to make. I’d love to hear a theoretical defense of it, though.

Another famous NQC film is Tom Kalin’s brilliantly shot Swoon (1992), about the Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold murders. Swoon is a good indicator of the politics of the NQC in general, with its absolute refusal of only portraying queers in a positive light and insisting on the queerness of Loeb and Leopold’s relationship. Would make a good double bill with Claire Denis’ great I Can’t Sleep, about another real-life case of a queer serial killer.

The last of the major auteurs of NQC is Gregg Araki, whose 90s filmography also maps the overall trends of 90s queer cinema in an interesting way. The Living End (1992) is a bleak and powerful look at the devastating subjective transformation of a young film critic who finds out he is HIV-positive and goes on a cross-state rampage with another HIV-positive drifter. The guerilla-style of the film matches the content well. The film functions as a hate letter and revenge fantasy to everyone in power who is indifferent to the AIDS plague.

Araki’s next three films are grouped together as the “teenage apocalypse trilogy” and thus continue some of the themes in The Living End in a much broader context: many of the characters in Nowhere (1997) are heterosexual, for example, but are just as much in crisis as the queer characters in his other films. Nowhere, which I find the least interesting of the three, is also the only one of his 90s films unavailable in R1, but there is a cheap R2 release. Of these three films, Totally Fucked Up (1993) is my favorite, even if his homage to 60s Godard (really just Masculin Féminin) is a little too on the nose. One character in the film describes L.A. as the “alienation capital of the world,” which seems an apt description of the film and much of Arraki’s cinema. The film is both moving and incredibly bleak in its portrait a series of queer teens, their boredom, expose to poverty and hate crimes, and (with the exception of the film’s lesbian couple), their troubled relationships. The Doom Generation (1995) is sort of a reworking of The Living End in that an accidental killing causes a couple and a bisexual male stranger who joins them to hit the road. The film does some interesting things with queer spectatorship—heterosexual sex scenes are filmed with the other male character watching/masturbating, playing with triangulated desire and hailing the viewer as a queered voyeur. The apocalyptic conclusion seems to foreclose the queer potential of the men’s relationship, though, which I think is precisely the point Arraki is trying to make.

Given the overall bleakness of these four films, Arraki’s final film of the decade comes as a huge but kind of wonderful surprise: Splendor (1998) is a polyamorous romantic comedy (the first?) about a relationship between a woman and two wildly different men that she meets and falls in love with on the same night. The film is interestingly vague about the relationship between the two men, although there is a scene where she get them into physical intimacy with each other and is clearly turned on by it. I like that the film’s drama (which I won’t spoil) isn’t about the internal dynamics of the polyamorous relationship as such—her issue with the relationship would be identical if there was only one of them. I have a lot of love for this film and I think it would be interesting to think of it in relation to the boom of hetero romantic comedies of the time: for instance, it reverses the cliché of the gay male best friend with a lesbian best friend (who I love, even if her character isn’t very fleshed out).

Indeed, another major trend of U.S. queer cinema in the 1990s, and one that I have an huge amount of affection for, is the queer romantic comedy. One of my goals is to rehabilitate this genre. One of the most important is Go Fish (Rose Troché, 1994), which is formally experimental even as it integrates a romantic comedy narrative structure. It is also a quite lovely at queer communities and the possibilities of imagining relationships outside of the heteronormative world. The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love (Maria Maggenti, 1995) is another early one that notably interrogates the relationship between class and sexuality. My favorite part of the film is a hilariously placed reading from Rubyfruit Jungle by one of the minor characters of the film (maybe this is partially because I was teaching the book this summer when I was watching all these films, so I recognized the lines right away before we see the book cover). The final one that I’ll give a recommendation to is But I’m a Cheerleader (Jamie Babbit, 1999), which wisely plays up its campiness in a way that oscillates between annoying and funny (although I think it’s more funny) and the two leads are adorable together.


Moving beyond the NQC and the romantic comedy, another major project of queer filmmaking in the 1990s was the documentation and recovery of queer life, both in the past and present. The best is Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning (1991), which I wrote up as my spotlight title for the documentary project. Since I don’t know how to link to my previous post, I’ll just re-paste my comments here: Livingston's footage of drag performances of various kinds by predominately African American men in NY in 1987 is on the one hand a document of a specific queer subculture, but it also effortlessly spirals out to suggest insight into the larger cultural moment of the late 1980s: heteronormativity, racism, the specter of AIDS, the poverty exacerbated by neoliberal economic policies, consumerism, and, perhaps above all, the complicated ways in which we all negotiate our various identities (race, class, gender, sexuality) against the backdrop of socially constructed norms. Yet there is no voiceover describing these issues for the viewer; Livingston simply allows these issues to build organically from the stories of some of the participants in the Balls (the drag contests). The footage of the Balls is wonderful and creates a utopian space within the film in which all normative codes are effortlessly exploded. Not only do some of the performers dress up in what we traditionally think of as drag, but there are also contests for who can best “pass” as a straight person, showing us how straightness is every bit as performative and constructed as queerness. The discussion of “houses,” or the chosen and created families that many of these participants belong to, shows a powerful utopian alternative to normative family structures. The film is simultaneously hopeful and tragic (there is a particularly devastating moment in the film's 1989 coda), but is an absolutely indispensable study of a unique subculture. This well be making my 90s list for certain.

Another film about the present is Ballot Measure Number 9 (Heather Lyn Macdonald, 1995) is about a 1992 anti-gay ballot initiative in Oregon that would have legalized discrimination against gays and lesbians. It depicts the coalition strategies used between different progressive groups to stop the initiative. It’s short and worth a look if you are interested in documentaries about political organizing.

Another interesting, and better known, queer documentary of the era is The Celluloid Closet (Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, 1995), a crucial summing up of queer representation in U.S. cinema. It both celebrates the wonderful queer moments of Classic Hollywood and the devastating representations of gay life in 60s cinema. It’s a bit too triumphalist at the end, but it is an important document. I would also advance a recommendation for the great Su Friedrich’s study of queer childhoods, Hide and Seek (1997). Friedrich’s Sink or Swim (1990) is far more well-known and is, to be sure, the better film, but Hide and Seek is worth a look as well: it expands the biographical focus to look at the concept of lesbian childhoods by intercutting present-day interviews with lesbian women recounting their memories of growing up with a fictionalized narrative of a young girl who experiences some of the same things.There is also Out of the Past (Jeff Dupre 1998), which is dreadfully boring in its formal presentation, but interesting juxtaposes an ongoing struggle of a LGBT high school group being shut down the conservative school board with discussions of several queer figures whose queerness has previously been erased from history.

A movie that kind of falls into this category of ‘recovery of the past’ narratives is Cheryl Dunye’s interesting The Watermelon Woman (1995), which looks at race as well as queer visibility in Hollywood through a fictionalized story of a woman making a documentary about an imaginary black lesbian actress whose name is given as “the watermelon woman.” I give it a recommendation as well. A kind-of related film is Hilary Brougher’s The Sticky Fingers of Time (1997) that uses a science fiction narrative to imagine re-writing the past. It might be the only queer science fiction film of the decade (at least in the U.S.), so that counts for something.

Nice to see some praise for the (admittedly campy) But I'm a Cheerleader, which in addition to the candy-colored set and wardrobe design features a sugary, Dressy Bessy-styled soundtrack (I used to have an unofficial copy of the wonderful soundtrack culled from probably Soulseek [!] back in the day that I lost when that computer crashed). It's in no danger of making my list, but it's a sweet, cute film.