Best Movies of 1990The Usual Choices
Dances with Wolves (Kevin Costner)
Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese)
The Grifters (Stephen Frears)
Miller's Crossing (Joel Coen)
But how about...
Mountains of the Moon (Bob Rafelson)
Burton & Speke's 1857 Central Africa expedition is one of the great True Stories of Exploration, told rousingly in the 1982 book Burton and Speke by William Harrison (a must-read), and in this wonderful movie. Surprisingly human for an epic (the natural grandeur + the glory of discovery take a backseat to the sheer fortitude of the two men...and the deterioration of their friendship), the film manages to enthrall whilst giving a history lesson. The two lead actors (Patrick Bergin and Iain Glen) give strong individual and partnership performances and the temptation to push the stirring soundtrack music way up front and often has been largely controlled. And, while some of the violence is necessarily graphic, at least Burton's exotic sexual exploits are merely mentioned rather than shown to us for gasping titillation. In the end, this film is a trip that other Voyage of Discovery stories have never taken you on: to the up and the down sides of striving to be The First.
...and what about...
Metropolitan (Whit Stillman)
Don't bother viewing this if you don't have an ear for dialogue...man, can these people TALK. A group of upper-class first-year college students get together during their winter break and, at first, they appear to be competing with each other in pretension, self-absorption and pettiness. Inspiring-to-be intellectuals, they reveal their emotional immaturity with every phrase of conversational white noise that is shared. Initially, all the characters irritated the bejeezus out of me...and then I remembered my college years, my friendship group of six, our constant interaction and cringing attempts at being adults, but unable to completely shrug off adolescence. It made me realise that even The Vapid have their stories to tell. And when these young self-occupied airheads finally discover compassion for one another, they become charming in motive and sweet in emotion...they grow up. That was when they had me...but it took a while, so hang in there.
...not to mention...
Blood Oath aka Prisoners of the Sun (Stephen Wallace)
While the name Nuremberg is synonymous with war crime trials (and rallies), the Pacific / Japanese counterparts have been comparatively underknown. This powerful movie tells the tale of the uncovering of a mass grave of more than 300 Australian soldiers on the Indonesian island of Ambon. The war is over and the victors want atrocities committed by the vanquished to be atoned for. Bryan Brown plays the prosecution counsel who is prevented from convicting the main Japanese leaders (the Yanks need them to help create a smooth peaceful transition, therefore they are untouchable), so he goes for the lesser guys...yep, the ones whose only defence is (all together now) they were just following orders. Perfectly acted by the entire cast, with some necessarily shocking scenes, this movie clearly outlines how the potential for horror lurks in us all. And how war will always tap into that.
...and one personal unmentionable...
Lord of the Flies (Harry Hook)
Read the book? William Golding's permanent-fixture-on-the-High-School-English-syllabus is a Swiss Family Robinson / The Coral Island take with a message for humanity swirled in: it doesn't take much for people to become primitive. (Golding actually conducted a camp-out with a group of boys to see what would happen if the rules were taken away...yep, they became little savages...very anti-BP Scouts). What makes the 1954 novel (and, to a slightly lesser extent, the original 1963 film) work is that the group of stranded children was made up of English schoolboys being evacuated from Blitzed-London...ever so proper, well-mannered and used to following strict institutional rules. Their change into violence was a distinct moral descent.
In this American remake, the boys are already little bastards. Modern, foul-mouthed, immune to violence due to TV and spoilt rotten by rich parents, their conversion to a feral state is hardly surprising...in fact, the boys who remain ethical are the weirdos. It's just not as powerful, or as engrossing or as meaningful. This is just another action-reality show...Survivor for kiddies.
PS And read William Golding's The Inheritors. It's his masterpiece.
My Top 10 Films of 1990
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| A sure sign you've had a bad facelift. |
#02 A The Grifters (Frears)
#03 A- Mountains of the Moon (Rafelson)
#04 A- Edward Scissorhands (Burton)
#05 A- Blood Oath / Prisoners of the Sun (Wallace)
#05 A- An Angel at My Table (Campion)
#06 A- Miller's Crossing (Coen)
#07 B+ Metropolitan (Stillman)
#08 B+ Death in Brunswick (Ruane)
#09 B+ The Godfather Part III (Coppola)
#10 B+ Mr & Mrs Bridge (Ivory)
Overflow: More A-/B+ Films
#11 B+ Total Recall (Verhoeven)
#12 B+ White Hunter, Black Heart (Eastwood)
#13 B+ Internal Affairs (Figgis)
#14 B+ Alice (Allen)
#15 B+ The Witches (Roeg)
Sorry, They Didn't Make It...
> B Postcards from the Edge [falters every time it strays away from the central relationship]
> B A Shock to the System [Michael Caine Dark featuring a voiceover which doesn't entirely work]
> B Pretty Woman [a classic 90's rom-com...which says a lot about the 90's]
> B Dick Tracy [comicbook movie which looks FANTASTIC but isn't as much fun as it should be]
> B Everybody Wins [very unusual murder-mystery where the bigger mystery is the woman]
> B Father [war-crime story injured by a couple of questionable stagings (opening scene; climactic reveal)]
> B Green Card [I can see why he wants her; I can't see why she wants him]
> B Reversal of Fortune [a did-he-or-didn't-he murder mystery which isn't as good as The Jinx or The Staircase]
> B Darkman [DC-style superhero / Universal Horror hybrid which I tried hard to like more than I actually did]
> B Back to the Future III [a better 90's Western than Dances with Wolves and City Slickers...big deal]
> B- Vincent & Theo [I infinitely prefer Vincente & Kirk's Lust for Life...it's half the running time for a start]
> B- Avalon [a soft, nostalgic look at a time when America welcomed refugees...as long as they came from Europe]
> B- Home Alone [aggressive slapstick for all the family that's a rehash of The Three Stooges]
> B- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead [well-acted absurdism which requires more patience than I possess]
> B- Awakenings [isn't this just a prestigiously-casted rejig of Charly?]
> B- Dances with Wolves [a Western where every fingernail is trimmed and every tumbleweed is fluffed up]
> B- Mermaids [minor sex-infatuated comedy about how an artificially-quirky family met Bob Hoskins]
> C Ghost [one of the sappiest romance movies ever made]
> C Misery [painful & obnoxious is not the same as frightening & psychotic]
> D Captain America [I bet the future Marvel guys looked at this and said "Well, we're not gonna do that."]
> D Lord of the Flies [A Personal Unmentionable]
> D Wild at Heart [wants to be cool and fascinating...but not for me]
> E The Exorcist III [despite its labelling, this is actually a rather hysterical and lousy serial killer movie]
"Ah!..Sweet Mystery of Life...": 1990 Films I Apparently Still Need to See
The Ambulance (Cohen); Arachnophobia (Marshall); Bad Influence (Hanson); Begotten (Merhige); The Comfort of Strangers (Schrader); The Company of Strangers / Strangers in Good Company
(Scott); Coupe de Ville (Roth); Dancin’ Thru the Dark (Ockrent); Fellow Traveller (Saville); The Field (Sheridan); The Fool (Edzard); The Freshman (Bergman); Gremlins 2: The New Batch (Dante); Hidden Agenda (Loach); The Hot Spot (Hopper); The Hunt for Red October (McTiernan); Impulse (Locke); Jacob’s Ladder (Lynne); Joe Versus the Volcano (Shanley); The King of New York (Ferrara); The Krays (Medak); Life is Sweet (Leigh); Longtime Companion (Rene); Memphis Belle (Caton-Jones); Miami Blues (Armitage); Mister Johnson (Beresford); Narrow Margin (Hyams); Pacific Heights (Schlesinger); Paper Mask (Morahan); Peacemaker (Tenney); Presumed Innocent (Pakula); Q&A (Lumet); Quigley Down Under (Wincer); The Reflecting Skin (Ridley); The Russia House (Schepisi); The Sheltering Sky (Bertolucci); Shipwrecked (Gaup); State of Grace (Joanou); To Sleep with Anger (Burnett); Tremors (Underwood); Truly, Madly, Deeply (Minghella); Trust (Hartley); Tune in Tomorrow (Amiel); The Two Jakes (Nicholson)
Best Performances of 1990
Kathy Bates in Misery
Robert De Niro in Awakenings
Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost
Anjelica Huston in The Grifters
Jeremy Irons in Reversal of Fortune
Joe Pesci in Goodfellas
Meryl Streep in Postcards from the Edge
But how about...
Julia Blake in Father
Primarily acting with her eyes and a middle-European accent that is real enough to not stand-out, Australian Julia plays a victim of the Nazis who has spent her life in search of her tormentor. She tracks him down in a Melbourne pub, living a life of a twinkling grandpa, under a stolen name. Haunted by horror (shot as a child and left for dead in a pit), all the woman wants is justice...and for the facade to go. Julia portrays a survivor of the unimaginable with conviction: you can feel the burden she has carried for 50 years and her despair in the possibility that she still may fail those in her past. Masterfully subtle in a role that could have easily tipped into "hey everybody is this great acting or wot", this performance goes beyond laudatory art or mere professional craft. Julia as Iya Zetnick is flesh and soul.
...and what about...
John Turturro in Miller's Crossing
Few actors can do odd as perfectly as John Turturro. A hark-back to the Golden Age of Character Actors (Peter Lorre; Edna May Oliver; Eugene Pallette; Una O'Connor etc. etc.), John immediately holds your attention, momentarily dimming-down the performance of many a lead player. In Miller's Crossing, John plays a weaselly, unscrupulous degenerate (the film's era-appropriate codeword for homosexual) who you simply know has LOSER etched into his DNA. No grabs for audience sympathy, John ditches anything resembling "cliche" and presents a character that is solely his own invention. I mean...how can you deliver a new take on the old "please don't shoot me"? But John does...out in a forest, about to be gangland-executed, John begs the gunman: "I'm praying to you. Look in your heart", turning it into a mantra, in looped terror, bleating it with every step towards the grave. Startling and off-putting and not entirely of humankind as we usually know it. Slightly odd in fact.
...not to mention...
Michael Caine in A Shock to the System
The Man in a classic Michael Caine role: rage + humour + cunning. Michael is a past-his-prime advertising-exec who has been passed over for a promotion; the injustice of this is enough to make Michael re-evaluate his life...and he finds it wanting. So, being a pro-action type, he takes charge, murdering the people who are obstacles in his pathway to rightful success. His wife (who keeps reminding Michael of failure) and then his boss (who makes the mistake of being young and arrogant). Unfortunately, the film is laced with an unnecessary and poorly-scripted voiceover...Michael is skilled enough to convey internal dialogue with his eyes and body language. Black comedy is tough to put across; premeditated murder as a career move even tougher. But the actor here is Michael Caine, so that's no problem at all. At all.
...and one personal unmentionable...
Matt Salinger in Captain America
This joins the infamous ranks of Ioan Gruffudd + Jessica Alba + Chris Evans + Michael Chiklis (Fantastic Four) and George Clooney + Chris O'Donnell (Batman & Robin) and Helen Slater (Supergirl) (and many others) as the worst portrayal of a beloved superhero. It must be tough to have to put on a ridiculous-looking costume (I'm sure part of why Hugh Jackman worked as Wolverine was that he didn't wear the iconic yellow outfit) and jump around the place in pretend-action while grizzled stuntmen look on. Add usually-pitiful dialogue (corny; leaden; dumb) and a villain who 9 times out of 10 steals the spotlight, and you have a performance destined for the bin. This pre-MCU movie is woeful; Matt as Cap fits right in with that.
My 10 Favourite Performances of 1990
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| "So she's the Grand Poobah of the Mickey Mouse Club. Have you got a problem with that?" |
#02 Joanne Woodward in Mr & Mrs Bridge
#03 Ray Liotta in Goodfellas
#04 Gary Oldman & Tim Roth in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
#05 John Turturro in Miller's Crossing
#06 Julia Blake in Father
#07 Talia Shire in The Godfather Part III
#08 The ensemble cast of Blood Oath
#09 Richard Gere in Internal Affairs
#10 Michael Caine in A Shock to the System
Overflow: More List-Worthy Performances
#11 Pat Hingle in The Grifters
#12 Andy Garcia in The Godfather Part III
#13 Joe Pesci in Goodfellas
#14 Kerry Fox in An Angel at My Table
#15 Annette Bening in The Grifters
#16 Mia Farrow in Alice
#17 John Cusack in The Grifters
#18 Dianne Wiest in Edward Scissorhands
#19 Jeremy Irons in Reversal of Fortune
#20 Robin Williams in Awakenings
#21 Meryl Streep & Shirley MacLaine in Postcards from the Edge
#22 Elijah Wood in Avalon
#23 Dustin Hoffman in Dick Tracy
Sorry, They Didn't Make It...
> Kathy Bates in Misery [played so large as to be inappropriately cartoonish]
> Robert De Niro in Awakenings [all twitch & shudder with no nuance]
> Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost [a joke role in a romantic movie which is impossible to take seriously]
> Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman [I just don't believe she'd choose to be a prostitute]
And so...onto the annual awards (with a nod of appreciation to Danny Peary)...
The Alternate Oscars for 1990 are:
FILM of the YEAR
GOLD: Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese)
SILVER: The Grifters (Stephen Frears)
BRONZE: Mountains of the Moon (Bob Rafelson)
LEAD ACTOR: PERFORMANCE of the YEAR
GOLD: Ray Liotta (Goodfellas)
SILVER: Richard Gere (Internal Affairs)
BRONZE: Michael Caine (A Shock to the System)
LEAD ACTRESS: PERFORMANCE of the YEAR
GOLD: Anjelica Huston (The Grifters)
SILVER: Joanne Woodward (Mr & Mrs Bridge)
BRONZE: Kerry Fox (An Angel at My Table)
SUPPORTING ACTOR: PERFORMANCE of the YEAR
GOLD: John Turturro (Miller's Crossing)
SILVER: Pat Hingle (The Grifters)
BRONZE: Andy Garcia (The Godfather Part III)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: PERFORMANCE of the YEAR
GOLD: Julia Blake (Father)
SILVER: Talia Shire (The Godfather Part III)
BRONZE: Dianne Wiest (Edward Scissorhands)
ENSEMBLE or PARTNERSHIP: PERFORMANCE of the YEAR
GOLD: Gary Oldman & Tim Roth (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead)
SILVER: Bryan Brown & George Takei & Terry O'Quinn & John Bach & Sokyu Fujita & Tetsu Watanabe & John Clarke & Deborah Unger & John Polson & Russell Crowe & Nicholas Eadie & Toshi Shioya & Ray Barrett (Blood Oath)
BRONZE: Meryl Streep & Shirley MacLaine (Postcards from the Edge)
JUVENILE: PERFORMANCE of the YEAR
GOLD: Elijah Wood (Avalon)
SILVER: Alexia Keogh (An Angel at My Table)
BRONZE: Macaulay Culkin (Home Alone)
The Alternate Razzies for 1990 are:
CRAP FILM of the YEAR
The Exorcist III (William Peter Blatty)
CRAP MALE PERFORMANCE of the YEAR
Matt Salinger (Captain America)
CRAP FEMALE PERFORMANCE of the YEAR
Sofia Coppola (The Godfather Part III)
