0006. Favorite Films 1995-1999
Submitted by lbangs on Tue, 02/20/2001 - 09:16
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- 1) Life is Beautiful - Yeah, make wiseass cracks all you want. He did it; he made a comedy out of the Holocaust. I'm still not sure HOW he did it, but I laughed until the credits rolled, then sat in the theater and bawled.
- 2) Casino - Scorsese losing his touch? Not at all. This was unjustly overlooked by a bunch of whiny critics who noticed that Scorsese had made films with characters from the mob before. They did not notice that the similarities ended there. Great cast (even Sharon Stone turned in an excellent performance), an assured, mature, and exciting directing turn from Scorsese, and a complex, interesting script with an epic feel. Wonderful.
- 3) English Patient - Again, laugh all you want. These romantic weepy films get blasted because 99% of them suck. This is the one that didn't.
- 4) Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels - Clever script shot through with pure adrenaline. Creativity bursting through each frame. This is the directorial calling card everybody mistook Boogie Nights for, at a fraction of the budget.
- 5) Emma - The movie Sense and Sensibility wanted to be. One of Jane Austin's finest is finally treated like the sharp book it is, not a costume drama. Gwyneth deserved the Oscar for this one, not Shakespeare in Love, and she wasn't the only great actor here.
- 6) Being John Malkovich - While it is nice to finally see a good film win Best Picture (after the boring, name-checking-yet-uninspired Shakespeare in Love and the overblown, obese Titanic), American Beauty must bow before this film. Witty, dark, creative, and brimming with bravado acting, this film threatens to fall apart into whimsical goofiness at any second, but luckily holds together until the end.
- 7) Pi - Horribly over-looked, this small, no-budget nightmare will one day get its due.
- 8) City of Lost Children - The ultimate in adult fairy-tales. The visuals in this film overwhelm, but the novel story is as good.
- 9) Before Sunrise - Again, I am terribly uncool, but I find this to be Linklater's best. Awkward and exciting, just like love, and sad and melodramatic, just like the bastard life sometimes is.
- 10) Fireworks - Foreign films usually take awhile to trickle into the American video market. This gem is here and worth seeing. If Scorsese tried to do one of his gangster films using the style he employed in Kundun, it might look something like this. Hypnotic.
Author Comments:
Off the top of my head, my ten favorite films of the last five years (1995-1999)...
I probably missed several, and I will probably change my mind tomorrow, but for now, there it hangs.
Great news! I just discovered that Fireworks will be released on DVD in the next two weeks, making every film on this list now available on the format. Excellent.
Shalom, y'all!
L. Bangs
Some random comments, great list.
1. Life is Beautiful was wonderful, even dubbed which I usually hate. It in fact was so funny that I just kept waiting for the Roberto Begnini character to be alive and pop out of a tank at the end. I think that the humor made it all the more poignant.
2. My memory of Casino was that it was really long. I liked it, but I had to go to the ladies room for about the last hour of the picture, and I kept thinking the end would be about % minues away... but I was just waiting and waiting and waiting.
3. The English Patient was an almost perfect romantic movie with fine actors and beautiful pictures of the desert.
I haven't seen the rest, in fact some of them I'm ashamed to say I haven't heard of, but I have been greatly looking forward to Being John Malkovitch.
Forgive my meddling, but I've cloaked a portion of your post above. And as a friendly reminder to anyone who reads this, check out this Listology spoiler link.
I love both Lock Stock and Before Sunrise; totally agree with your sentiments on both. Pi disturbed, annoyed, frustrated, bored, and pissed me off. Worst of all, my friend would not let me fall asleep in the theater. Lost Children and English Patient are both excellent, and Emma is very good. I have not seen Fireworks, and I had to walk out of Casino, time constraints and annoying patrons, but I typically love Scorsese besides Bringing Out the Dead, yuk. I thought the first half of Malkovich was great, and the second half lost a lot of momentum for me. However, tons of people love Malkovich and Life is Beautiful which is a complete mockery of Holocaust concentration camps. Therefore, I find it unwatchable despite it being one of the best movies to showcase a father's love for his child. Nevertheless, I still think Benigni is a great filmmaker and performer, Monster and Johnny Steccino are wonderful.
Thanks for the compliments! Pi also disturbed and frustrated me, but I cannot say it bored me or pissed me off. You'll have to catch the rest of Casino, since I belive the film improves drastically as it progresses. Malkovich did lose steam toward the end, and who knows, maybe next year and a few viewings later it will vanish from this list. I'll have to see it again.
As for Life is Beautiful, I can understand your reservations. At the same time, I also understand the healing quality of humor, even in the bleakest circumstances, and the desire to mock the Nazis into total obscurity (a technique Mel Brooks' also tried in the Producers). I still love it, but a few of my best friends do not, and I can respect that, even if I can't agree.
hey bangs. I saw all these movies and i like them all(no exceptions).I am most impressed with CASINO abd BEING JOHN MALKOVICH.As for Scorsese losing his touch, me and you know better, dont we bro'.?.
Scorsese is so consistently fantastic that most critics seem to grade his films on a different scale than that used for average films. They set each new film against, say, Taxi Driver or Raging Bull, and as a result, many of Scorsese's newer films get much lower ratings than obviously inferior films by other directors. A shame.
Still, even compared to his masterpieces, I deeply believe Casino holds up perfectly well. I could live without Saul Bass' silly credit senquence (my wife and I were actually giggling as De Niro's body flew through the flames like the lost Charlie's Angel), but I love the film as a whole, and if it had been directed by just about anybody other than Scorsese, Casino would have been praised to seventh heaven.
Good thing you and I know better... Scorsese wasn't one of the greats. He IS one of the greats, and his powers still hum at full capacity. I have yet to see Bringing Out the Dead, but so far, it seems like Marty is nearly incapable of directing a terrible film.
On another note, I am very glad you liked both Lock, Stock and Pi. For some odd reason, most of my friends tend to like one film and hate the other.
Thanks for the comments!
Shalom, y'all!
L. Bangs
I gotta disagree with you on Life is Beautiful. Most of the people I know loved the movie, and I generally enjoy Roberto but I didn't find this movie all that funny. I'm guessing that one of the reasons is probably the fact my family was directly affected by the holocaust(I am French). On the other hand, Casino, man what a classic movie. I can't understand why people generally don't like it all that much, and I think you're probably right in the fact that critics expect so much from Scorcese that they treat his newer movies more severely than they would other directors. I don't quite agree with your saying that American Beauty should bow down to Being John Malkovich, but I have to say that it certainly is at the same level. I definitely have to check out Pi one of these days.
I completely understand why one might feel that Life is Beautiful is a mockery, but as somebody who was not directly affected by the holocaust, may I suggest that Life is Beautiful and Garden of the Fitzi-Continis work where most holocaust films fail for one important reason.
While most films focus solely on the massive amount of death the Nazis created, both of the films I mentioned above also focus on the lives of those destroyed. They show the magical, romantic, and frustrated existence of the victims well before the holocaust began, and by giving us an idea of the people affected, they also give us a greater feeling for what wonderful life was destroyed by the death camps and the slayings.
Life is beautiful, and by giving us a portrait of a vivid individual drug into the holocaust, Roberto rams home the truly tragic nature of the horrible events of World War II.
Many feel that Roberto's film has too much comedy too close to the horrid events of history. I admit it is a risky move. I do believe, however, that for every friend I have who finds the entire effort tasteless, I know at least two friends who cried in sorrow by the time the film was over. I bawled in my seat for ten minutes straight after the credits rolled, and I still feel pain every time I think about the film.
Perhaps these two films are more aimed at those of us who did not have relatives involved. We have no loved ones associated with the tragedy, so they attempt to provide them for us.
As I said, I can understand not liking the film, but I would remind all that for many of us, the film did not mock the tragedy of the holocaust, but amplified it.
I'm glad you also liked Casino (a terribly under-rated film that time will hopefully critically elevate) and Being John Malkovich. I liked American Beauty, but I did prefer Malkovich, although I didn't really mean to imply that it was a sort of god to American's mortal form. Both are good; I simply meant that Malkovich was, in my opinion, better. Perhaps my language overstated my point...
I'd love to hear your thoughts on Pi when you see it.
Thanks for the comments!
Shalom, y'all!
L. Bangs
I have to jump in for a minute of the Life is Beatiful thread. I really enjoyed the movie, and I did not feel that it was a mockery of the holocaust (I am sort of a holocaust movie aficianado) I felt that the humor only deepened our understanding of the tragedy. The thing that I felt was very strange and troublesome about the movie was the way the father decieved his son. It seems to me very cruel, because I would think that it would be obvious, even to an eight year old, that this was not a game-- that people were starving and dying. I know this was necessary for the movie, and all in all I applaud Life is Beautiful. I do feel, however, that in general, we don't give children enough credit for how they will respond to horrific circumstances, and do them more damage by trying to deceive them into believing that everything is alright, when it apparant is all wrong.
I started combing through your lists looking for pad out my Netflix queue, and noticed Fireworks here. I've queued it, of course, as I've enjoyed Takeshi's other movies (and because you liked it so much!), Sonatine and Zatoichi. Have you seen either of those?
I've seen Sonatine, and I enjoyed it. I still favor Hana-Bi, however, and I bet you will love it.
I haven't caught Zatoichi yet...
Shalom, y'all!
L. Bangs
I'm looking forward to it! Sonatine was an interesting movie for me. I liked it, but a bit unenthusiastically as I was watching it. I found in the subsequent weeks that it stuck in my head much better than many other movies, though.
It occurs to me—probably because I'm talking to you about it and not because there's any real similarity—that it shares a somewhat "atonal " (for lack of a better word) quality with the Hal Hartley movies I've seen.
As for the other, I loved Zatoichi! What a joy ride. I don't feel like I have a good handle on whether you'd like it as much as I did (as much as we see eye-to-eye, I can't quite pin your tastes to the board when it comes to the action genre, and I'm not just saying that because of The Bourne Identity... :-).