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34Q1/2000: The Revland Quarter in Movies

©2000 John Tynes



A few months ago I posted a piece called "161 in 1999," which contained capsule reviews of the 161 films I watched in 1999. Well, everybody and their dog apparently loved it, and I loved doing it, so I'm not stopping. Instead of waiting 'til the end of the year, however, I figured I'd post these quarterly so they're not quite so imposingly huge. Between January 1 and March 31 of 2000, I watched 34 movies.

The rule is the same: I write down and briefly review every movie I watch, whether it be in a theater, on video, or on the tube. Note that many of these films were not new in 2000--the list is "movies I saw," not "new movies I saw," meaning there are films here that were released many years before. If it's here, it just means that I watched it in the first quarter of 2000. Many of these I'd also seen before, but my tally is by number of titles, not number of viewings. Films are listed in the order I saw them.

My friend Steve Hatherley liked this idea so much that he did it himself, only with books. You can read his reviews of Q1/2000 titles he's read at his website. I'd like to do the same, but to the best of my recollection I haven't read an entire book for pleasure in the first quarter of 2000. (I've read two novels and two short-story anthologies in manuscript form on behalf of my publishing company, but those don't count.) I have read portions of a few, though, which I hope to finish in Q2: Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women by Ricky Jay, Pricksongs & Descants by Robert Coover, and Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto. Wish me luck. (Update: I forgot! While traveling in Ireland I read a trilogy of books by Philip Kerr published in the omnibus volume Berlin Noir. This is a series of hard-boiled detective novels with a nasty twist: they're set in Nazi Germany. Great, chilling reading. I also read a hundred or so pages of Ulysses while in Dublin but lost interest after I left.)

Hey, what's up with the links? Each movie title is linked to its entry on Amazon.com. (If you want to know more about my relationship with the online retailer, you can read my brief essay "Why I'm in Bed With Amazon.com.") Where available, the links lead to the DVD edition of each film; if no DVD is available, the link goes to the VHS version. If there is no entry for the film on Amazon, the link instead goes to the Internet Movie Database. The link for Mission to Mars links to neither, instead directing the reader to a parody site featuring photographs of items of furniture engaging in simulated sex, because you'll have a lot more fun there than at Mission to Mars.


Awards
Someone asked me if I was going to start giving awards to the films I reviewed, so I figured what the heck. These categories are arbitrary and are likely to change from quarter to quarter.

The Sucked Its Own Ass Award for Q1/2000: MISSION TO MARS

The Most Eye Candy Award for Q1/2000: TITUS

The Best Movie I'd Seen Before Award for Q1/2000: BEING THERE

The Best Movie I'd Never Seen Before Award for Q1/2000: ERIN BROCKOVICH


The Matrix
So good it's frightening. Technically dazzling, tightly scripted, and executed with the precision of an Escher drawing. Not the most soulful of films, certainly, but still such an impressive display by members of what Roger Avary has identified as the first generation to grow up with VCRs, able to see the history of film on demand, that I think it truly points towards the future of filmic storytelling. There are many films I love more, but I think this is one for the history books.

L.A. Confidential
Terrific adaptation of James Ellroy's novel. The book remains better, but the writer and director did an amazing job of distilling the soul of the book while filtering out characters and storylines.

Time Bandits
Terry Gilliam's original big hit, the success that gave him the opportunity to do Brazil. Still mighty fine, and those cow-skull monsters in the black robes are as unsettling as ever.

Black Dragons
Yellow peril! Bela Lugosi stars in this film from the 1940s about the threat of Japanese spies in America. Terrible, terrible movie, but fun to watch with friends. Lots of murders and Bela being sinister. I saw this at a midnight screening at the Grand Illusion theater--a little shoebox theater with about thirty seats. Great fun.

Alice
Jan Svankmayer's amazing retelling of Alice in Wonderland, using his own library of personal symbols and strange stop-motion animation. Very inventive, very strange, but pretty accessible.

Magnolia
Wow! I found this film to be a real writer's feast, owing to the jam-packed assembly of characters and storylines. Had the film just been about any one plot, it probably would have sucked. But the density made it a rich offering, a curious and rare instance of quantity trumping quality. I enjoyed it, despite a few excesses and missteps. It was just very refreshing to see this much pure *story* packed into a film.

Fatherland
Made-for-Showtime adaptation of a novel, positing what if the Nazis had taken Europe? Set in the 1960s, as a reporter begins to uncover the hidden secret of the Holocaust. Interesting premise, somewhat mediocore movie. Very nice visual realizations of a 1960s Nazi Berlin, complete with Beatles posters and lots of Speer architectural projects never completed in reality.

The Crossing
Made-for-History Channel rendition of George Washington's crossing of the Delaware. Jeff Bridges made for a sympathetic Washington, and the film had a number of good scenes. The best had to be a really chilling bit where young Alexander Hamilton and another soldier are dispatched to a small farmhouse to kill four Hessian sentries. This was amazing because it was so elemental: the two of you will go in that house and kill four men, using your swords and your fists. Terrible, brutal fight, and the circumstances were so simple and so powerful that it gave a strong feeling of war and conflict, even though the film as a whole was pretty by-the-numbers. Worth watching just for this sequence.

Creepshow
Grisly fun from Stephen King and George Romero. I'd forgotten how interesting the cast was...Hal Holbrook, Adrienne Barbeau, Ted Danson, Leslie Nielsen, E.G. Marshall, Fritz Weaver, and Ed Harris.

Tales From the Crypt
Similar to Creepshow, but without a sense of humor. This early-1970s anthology film has a surprising, bloodthirsty venality to it. Worth watching--it's nothing like the much more recent HBO TV series. Very faithful to the spirit of the original EC comics, but even their leering humor has been pruned away in favor of cold-blooded horror. One of the stories is about a cruel administrator at a home for blind veterans. They finally get their comeuppance by trapping him in a narrow basement maze where the walls are lined with razor blades. They sic his prized mastiff--who they've been starving for several days--on him for a desperate chase through the maze . . . and then turn out the lights. Shudder.

The Thomas Crown Affair
Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo get it on. Well done, but not as good as I was hoping. The Magrite chase scene in the museum was a delight.

Get Carter
Semi-legendary work starring an angry young Michael Caine in a brutal gangster thriller. I was half-asleep while watching, which didn't help, but it wasn't the fault of the film. Goes on the list with Straw Dogs and Bonnie & Clyde--films that were terribly violent and provocative for their time.

Ordinary Decent Criminal
John Boorman did this same story as The General a couple years ago, but there it was a gritty drama; here it's played for laughs. The true story is that of a Dublin gangster who had nothing to do with politics or the IRA--he was, in the parlance, just an ordinary decent criminal. This was a little Irish film starring Kevin Spacey and Linda Fiorentino, and was released in early 2000; I saw it in Ireland while I was visiting. Don't expect it to show up in the U.S., despite Spacey's starring role. Maybe on video eventually. Decently entertaining little caper flick.

Titus
--> Winner of the Most Eye Candy Award for Q1/2000 <--
Julie Taynor's adaptation of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus is a visual feast, daring and original with some incredible imagery. Watch it. Also, if it's out there, look for her American Playhouse short Hopfrog, a stunning short film based on a Poe story, starring the midget from Twin Peaks and a cast of marionettes.

MST3K: Manos, Hands of Fate
Mystery Science Theater 3000 gives the business to Manos, Hands of Fate, an ultra-obscure low-budget horror film from the mid-1960s, financed and directed by a Texas fertilizer manufacturer. Jaw-droppingly bad and, thanks to MST3K, achingly funny.

MST3K: Mitchell
Another MSTy flick, this time with Joe Don Baker poorly cast as a flabby action hero in the mid-1970s. Hilarious treatment of a terrible film. The scene where he romances Linda Evans by picking up a six-pack of Schlitz with his toes is amazing.

Mountains of the Moon
I saw this in the theater years ago, and it's better than I remembered. The true story of Burton and Speake searching for the source of the Nile. Wonderful adventure yarn with great performances and production. Directed by Bob Rafelson of all people.

MST3K: The Brain that Wouldn't Die
Back to the MSTy vaults for this horror gem. The film itself actually has some real moments of disturbing tension. Whenever the severed head of the mad doctor's wife sits there and pontificates about how horrible life is, the film is genuinely interesting. Then the bikini catfight starts and it's all downhill.

Twin Falls Idaho
Very interesting film about conjoined twins, written and directed by identical (but not conjoined) twins who star in the lead roles. Nicely done. Sort of a kinder, gentler version of Cronenberg's Dead Ringers.

Trainspotting
A blast of pure energy and Scotland/England flavor (flavour?), with more heart and soul than the somewhat similar Go. My dad wandered randomly into this film in a theater thinking it would be something about trains; when it turned out to be about Scottish heroin junkies, he realized that while he wouldn't have chosen to see it, he was really glad he did. After seeing this film, my dad and I each got our hair buzzed short like Ewan MacGregor. Good God.

Being There
--> Winner of the Best Movie I'd Seen Before Award for Q1/2000 <--
I always knew I liked this movie about Peter Sellers as an idiot mistaken for a visionary, but watching it again I realized just what a terrific movie it is. The script is just fantastic, and it's matched by wonderful performances, editing, and production design. Up there with Network in the pantheon of great subversive film concepts of the 1970s.

Rear Window
Restored version of Hitchcock's film. I think it's a bit over-rated--I suspect many of the film's strengths could be found in the original Cornell Woolrich story rather than being inventions of Hitch's. Flat and unengaging for a while, but then it sort of weirdly gets involving after the detective buddy does his serious dismissal of Jimmy Stewart & Grace Kelly's murder theory. The climax is interesting visually, but somewhat lacking in tension once Raymond Burr comes in and starts getting menacing. I'd like to watch more Hitchcock; I'm beginning to suspect that his films are not aging well.

The Ninth Gate
Very enjoyable occult thriller by Roman Polanski, starring Johnny Depp. It's got an excellent premise, a terrific mystery, and some great characters--the various book collectors are all quite nifty, as is the book-collecting underworld they move in. The film's conclusion is telegraphed much too strongly, making the final revelation not a revelation at all and hence not a very satisfying conclusion; I suspect it worked better in the novel this is based on. Still worth watching.

A New Leaf
A terrific Walter Matthau comedy by and also starring Elaine May. May is probably best known today for making Ishtar, the semi-legendary comedy flop with Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman. But in the early 1960s she was part of a breakthrough comedy duo with Mike Nichols, pioneering forms such as audience-suggestion improv comedy. Nichols went on to direct films such as The Graduate, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and some other, less-notable works. They re-teamed for Primary Colors, the Clinton campaign pastiche. At any rate, A New Leaf is a very, very funny story of a once-rich playboy hitting the skids, with six weeks to find and marry a wealthy woman to preserve his way of life. Matthau and May are terrific, and the movie is just funny as heck. Supposedly the film was chopped heavily by the studio, and it seems to show in the somewhat shaggy conclusion. But it's a marvelous, biting comedy about the idle rich, and very much recommended.

Donnie Brasco
Johnny Depp and Al Pacino act without overacting in this fine gangster drama based on a true story. A very well-made movie with a solid cast, and some nice undercutting of Coppola-style mob movies: these guys are in the grungy, shallow end of the mafia pool, where they spend their time ripping off parking meters and cases of cigarettes instead of living large on palatial estates. Excellent stuff.

Mission to Mars
--> Winner of the Sucked Its Own Ass Award for Q1/2000 <--
Wow. Easily the worst big Hollywood film I've seen since the execrable Sphere, and this was in some ways even worse in terms of its numbing pacing and fatuous sense of self-importance. I knew going in that this film was widely reputed to be a massive stinker, so I hooked up with three friends. We went out for a few beers and then swerved into a Tuesday afternoon matinee of the film specifically to heckle it. When it started with accordion music I burst out laughing, and pretty much didn't stop for the next two hours; the scene of the astronauts exercising to a David Lee Roth song was a definite highlight. I normally despise talking during a film, but this was a very special circumstance for a very special movie. Terrible, terrible work from start to finish, pausing along the way only to steal blatantly from other space flicks. A monstrous work of staggering ineptitude. Where is MST3K when you need them? As my friend Ray Winninger said after we left the theater, "This movie sucked so hard it's like it was suffocating and it thought my balls were full of air."

Rushmore
I bought this on DVD in its edition from the Criterion Collection, and I highly recommend this one if you like the movie. It's got a great little booklet and a fold-out poster showing the world of the film, all drawn in a great sort of precocious-kid style. The disc has all kinds of great bits, like storyboards and interviews and so forth. A really wonderful presentation of one of my favorite films; I just wish Criterion would do the same treatment to these guys' first film, Bottle Rocket.

The Sacrifice
Andrei Tarkovsky was my favorite film-maker until Wong Kar Wai toppled him with Chungking Express and Fallen Angels. Sacrifice is the story of a dysfunctional family, interrupted by the outbreak of nuclear war. The father vows to God that he will give up everything he loves if only the day will start over again and the war avoided. God apparently says yes. A wonderful movie, which I enjoyed more this time than any other viewing I've given it. I'd also forgotten how absolutely *beautiful* the film is. It's just full of amazing images and light, thanks in large part to Bergman's cinematographer, Sven Nykvist. This was Tarkovsky's last film, made while he was dying of cancer. Bergman essentially handed Tarkovsky his usual actors and crew, including Nykvist, to make his last movie go as smoothly as possible. The result is a wonderful tale of a rational athiest embracing the irrational for the sake of those he loves, something I'm rather in tune with myself these days.

Erin Brockovich
--> The Best Movie I'd Never Seen Before Award for Q1/2000 <--
Hey, it's a Julia Roberts movie! I would say that's not my usual cup of tea, but then again I do own the DVD of My Best Friend's Wedding, but then again it was a gift from a lady friend a while back, but then again I really enjoyed it . . . anyway. Erin Brockovich was directed by Steven Soderbergh, responsible for sex, lies, and videotape, <fast forward> Out of Sight, and The Limey, the latter being two of the best-crafted films I've seen. I was curious to see what he'd do with a project like this. As it turns out, quite a lot. It's a terrific film. Great story, great cast, and shot with a nice sense of fair play and credibility that undermines your expectations of glossy Julia Roberts vehicles; in other words, it shows the lives of normal people without making them any more or less than they really are. Definitely worth watching.

Romeo Must Die
Hong Kong martial-arts maestro Jet Li in his first U.S. leading-man role. I greatly enjoyed this kinetic crime thriller that owes only minor debts to Romeo & Juliet. There are some definitely plot problems, but the film is otherwise well-crafted and the fight scenes are just amazing. The occasional X-Ray shots showing bones breaking in slow-motion CGI--ripped off The Story of Ricky--are real crowd-pleasers.

MST3K: Red Zone Cuba
It's back to the Satellite of Love for another episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, this time with the jowl-flappingly awful adventure movie Red Zone Cuba. The plot in a nutshell: a crook on the run and two ex-cons get work as mercenaries on the Bay of Pigs invasion, then go to Arizona to dig for tungsten before a final shootout with the cops. The Bay of Pigs scene is great--it involves approximately six actors, one of whom plays Castro. The lack of a cast means that actors whose characters are killed off turn up immediately as other characters. Just amazingly awful. The weird thing is, I thought the three leads had great character-actor "looks" and the gritty, low-budget, mid-1960s feel meant that if you just stumbled into the film while channel-surfing you might think you'd found something really interesting. Of course, a couple minutes of watching would disabuse you of that notion. Coleman Francis played the lead as well as writing & directing. In brief intervals he's actually got a nicely laconic, menacing style, but soon you realize that's just his idea of acting and he's not very good at it.

Fist of Legend
Jet Li remakes Bruce Lee's The China Connection (aka Fist of Fury) in this 1994 Hong Kong actioner. Great fu action from start to finish, with very little in the flying-wires school of embellished action--it's much more straight martial arts. The stunt coordinator also did The Matrix a few years later, and it's interesting to see just how familiar the fights in The Matrix are to scenes in this film; you'll recognize lots of signature moments from The Matrix in this film made five years earlier. Oh, the plot? 1937 China, Japanese aggression, whatever. The story is generally not very interesting; it's Jet Li's moves that make the film a must-watch. The DVD comes dubbed, unfortunately.

The Limey
I think I watched this film three times in theaters in '99, and now on DVD. Fantastic film, which definitely holds up to repeated viewings. My friend Jesper Myrfors watched it with me and said quite cogently: "This film is pre-digested. Watching it is like thinking about it after you've seen it."

MST3K: Cave Dwellers
Okay, so me and my roommates have been on a MST3K kick lately. Cave Dwellers stars Miles O'Keefe as Ator, some sort of barbarian post-apocalypse mystic warrior idiot. Another awful film, which looks like it was filmed during a science fiction convention with the winners of the costume contest.


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