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

[Mr Sausage]

I've found it impossible to watch any Manoel de Oliveira. I assume there are films I could buy from Amazon but I couldn't find anything to stream, not even anything on Youtube with English subs.

The Convent is available to rent on Netflix or to stream on Amazon.

I'm in the UK. British Netflix is terrible.Can you stream from Amazon US Instant Video if you're in the UK?

You'd probably have to get a VPN and set it to a US IP address.

[John Cope]

I've found it impossible to watch any Manoel de Oliveira. I assume there are films I could buy from Amazon but I couldn't find anything to stream, not even anything on Youtube with English subs.

Well, A Caixa at least is available on Youtube with subs. I say "at least" simply because it's my least favorite of his work during this decade. It's not bad but just seems comparatively lesser surrounded by all the rest. It does, however, maintain the continuity of his very particular and refined formalist aesthetic from this period so it will give you a sense of that. Frankly it's just never seemed funny enough to me to come off.

[Tommaso]

Well, I wondered why you don't seem to like A Caixa very much. Do you see it as a comedy? In this respect, it's indeed not very funny, but I'm not sure whether Oliveira actually inteded to make this a comedy. For me, it rather came across as film with some lighter ironical/satirical moments, and as a fine - though rather stylized - portrait of the lower classes in a Portuguese city. But the way the blind man is mistreated even by his daughter and the ending when his box is taken away from are far too serious, and pretty touching, to be meant as light-hearted.

As to The Convent, for me this is the weakest of Oliveira's films I've seen so far. It's visually striking as always, but the whole idea of letting the Malkovich character somewhat relive the Faust story, combined with Luis Miguel Cintra's overdone Mephisto figure, somehow doesn't work, probably because the whole film seems somewhat underdeveloped - or simply too short - for the mass of material and allusions Oliveira packed into it. Not a good place to start if you haven't seen any other Oliveira before.

[John Cope]

Well, I wondered why you don't seem to like A Caixa very much. Do you see it as a comedy? In this respect, it's indeed not very funny, but I'm not sure whether Oliveira actually inteded to make this a comedy. For me, it rather came across as film with some lighter ironical/satirical moments, and as a fine - though rather stylized - portrait of the lower classes in a Portuguese city. But the way the blind man is mistreated even by his daughter and the ending when his box is taken away from are far too serious, and pretty touching, to be meant as light-hearted.

As to The Convent, for me this is the weakest of Oliveira's films I've seen so far. It's visually striking as always, but the whole idea of letting the Malkovich character somewhat relive the Faust story, combined with Luis Miguel Cintra's overdone Mephisto figure, somehow doesn't work, probably because the whole film seems somewhat underdeveloped - or simply too short - for the mass of material and allusions Oliveira packed into it. Not a good place to start if you haven't seen any other Oliveira before.

I think A Caixa is a bit too on the nose for me as social commentary. And in certain respects that directness itself seems meant to be funny and it just isn't enough.

I adore The Convent but again you have to understand that partially through my adoration of Agustina Bessa-Luís whose work it was sort of based on (actually her novel is not all that similar but it functioned as a precis or outline for MO). It's a profound consideration of the idea of evil, both elusive and intensive in its approach as is characteristic of their collaborations, but I also genuinely do find it very, very funny (as with all the obviously, heavily portentous moments that refer to horror cinema tropes). There are a lot of moments which blatantly telegraph the subtext (e.g. the massive pentagram in the background of the monastery great room) or make reference to the genre of film to which we would normally assume this one belongs (e.g. extreme, performative gestures of certain potentially evil characters). Having said that, in every one of these cases a closer, more tempered consideration reveals them to be properly of a piece with all the rest, including the profoundest of theoretical or poetic reflections. The music by Gubaidulina, for instance, seems ludicrously over the top at times for what we are seeing but this very discordance causes a prolonged consideration of what that music is actually doing, beyond signaling “evil”. And the demonstrations of subtext are also enigmatic, insofar as we come to understand they denote merely a superficial reality, an “easy reading” as it were.

[domino harvey]

Reminder that if you don't get to it this week, the Convent is one of swo's spotlight titles for the Faith list, which is also in desperate need of participation (and goes on for another two months)

[bamwc2]

List in:

Films watched for the project: 84

Films watched for the project that made it into the list: 6

Next ten:
51. Three Kings (David O. Russell, 1999)
52. In the Land of the Deaf (Nicolas Philibert, 1992)
53. The Grifters (Stephen Frears, 1990)
54. Irma Vep (Olivier Assayas, 1996)
55. Before Sunrise (Richard Linklaer, 1995)
56. Salaam Cinema (Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1995)
57. Heat Wave (Hideo Gosha, 1991)
58. Europa, Europa (Agnieszka Holland, 1990)
59. Time Indefinite (Ross McElwee, 1994)
60. The People vs. Larry Flynt (Milos Forman, 1996)

Countries: Australia: 2, Canada: 2, Czech Republic: 1, Denmark: 1, France: 6, Hong Kong: 3, Japan: 1, Poland: 1, Taiwan: 1, UK: 5, USA: 27

Directors with Multiple Appearances: Paul Thomas Anderson, Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, John Woo

[Tommaso]

Sent my list in, too. And although I thought it would definitely make my list, Irma Vep also ended up somewhere in my fifties and thus didn't make it. On the other hand, Before Sunrise went up higher and higher on my list thinking about it every month, especially after I had seen the sequels, too. It ended up as #14 on my list. Is it really that good? Especially as I don't particularly like Rohmer's talkative films, which might somehow serve as a comparison. I guess Before Sunrise is a film that I love because it is a romantic dream which everyone would like to experience him- or herself, and which is conveyed so convincingly that you simply have to believe it is true.

[zedz]

I failed to do the major overhaul I'd planned, mainly due to lack of time, but also largely because my existing 'short list' is already up to around 150 films.

Here are the 'next ten' that I couldn't squeeze on:
51. Love’s Debris (Werner Schroeter, 1996)
52. The Suspended Step of the Stork (Angelopoulos, 1991)
53. The Winslow Boy (Mamet, 1999)
54. Rats in the Ranks (Anderson / Connolly, 1996)
55. Let Forever Be (Gondry, 1999)
56. Only Yesterday (Takahaka, 1991)
57. S’en fout la mort (Denis, 1991)
58. Calendar (Egoyan, 1993)
59. L’Age des Possibles (Ferran, 1995)
60. Obsessive Becoming (Reeves, 1995)

All great films that you should check out if you can find them.

Meaningless stats:
Six directors with multiple films on my list, with Claire Denis in the lead with four and Edward Yang and Abbas Kiarostami just behind her.
Nineteen countries represented: USA, France (nine films each); Taiwan (six); Iran (four); Russia (three); Germany, Hungary, UK, Japan, Austria (two); and Spain, Korea, Poland, Hong Kong, Switzerland, China, Australia, Ukraine and Estonia represented by single films.
Short films: ten
Experimental films (all but one a short): nine
Films four hours or longer: three
Films four hours or longer in my top four: three
Films four minutes or shorter: three
Films four minutes or shorter in my bottom four: one

[Tommaso]

Films four hours or longer in my top four: three

Hmm... "Satantango", "Taiga" and "La belle noiseuse"? These would be a really great choice. Although the Rivette misses the mark by 2 min., according to imdb.

[domino harvey]

A Brighter Summer Day is zedz' favorite film, so that's probably one of them!

[swo17]

See also the spotlight section...

[zedz]

See also the spotlight section...

If that's not clear enough, the number two film in my top ten is longer than all the other films in my top ten combined (yep, even with two 4+ hour titles in there and another one coming in close to three).

[domino harvey]

My top ten combined equals eighteen hours and twenty-four minutes. Only one of the ten films is over two hours long. This is dumb.

[bamwc2]

As someone who is "dumb", I was the most unsatisfied with this one out of any of the lists that I've submitted so far for these projects. As you can see, my picks overwhelmingly favored American fare, and looked fairly jejune when I submitted it. That being said, I can't imagine going another way on a lot of these. Hopefully I'll get many viewing ideas when the master list becomes available.

[thirtyframesasecond]

I've done a provisional list, the top fifteen or so films are more or less as last time, some films have shifted around depending on my biases last night!

As for lengths of the films in my top ten. Three are between 160-180 mins; two are Palme D'Or winners!

[domino harvey]

Fun (Rafal Zelinski 1994)

The 90s played host to a lot of American independent films exploiting the effects of violence as pure entertainment in the wake of Tarantino's accessible flippancy, with of course some films condemning this tendency as well (perhaps most notably, and ineffectively, Natural Born Killers, which too closely resembles that which it claims to satirize). Sometimes this new trend worked, never more notably than Matthew Bright's Freeway, which embraced its utter tastelessness and succeeded where countless QT ripoffs failed by knowing the words and not merely humming along. The Republican sweeps of 1994 also brought in a fresh swath of moral panic, and films like the finger-poking Kids did little to quell nightmares of the decay of youth (and the laissez-faire attitudes of the young as reflected in the Gen X movement surely didn't put the moral gatekeepers at ease). It's of some value to consider the context for a film like Fun, which is one of the best depictions of the banality of violence and "evil" (even that word seems to strong for the total blasé treatment violence is given here by the protagonists) I've ever seen. Far better than the overrated Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, which painted its protagonists with a po-faced languor and telegraphed its motions, to be sure. No, Fun succeeds by being more than grim statistical analysis or morality tale and instead being a keenly observed and wonderfully acted tale of youth itself.

Fun alternates between color flashbacks leading up to and culminating with the senseless murder of an elderly woman by two teenage girls and black and white 16mm cinema verite sequences set inside a correctional facility as the two girls interview with a counselor and a magazine reporter. The film is based on a stage play and there are times the dialog and patter gets a bit cute, but mostly the scenes are overwritten in ways absolutely true to our central characters. Hilary (Renee Humphrey) is the more practical of the two girls, a writer of poetry and more outwardly surly and skeptical. Her insights have the smartly-tuned voice of a fifteen year old girl who is convinced of her own brilliance, and there's some nice interplay between her and the magazine writer as he attempts and mostly fails to massage her ego. Her character is by nature and narrative overridden by Bonnie, the wild fourteen-year-old brilliantly played (in what is absolutely one of the best youth performances I've ever seen) by Alicia Witt. It's not surprising that a film as uncompromising as this wouldn't gain any awards traction, but I was gratified that at least the Independent Spirit Awards tossed her a nomination (and she with Humphrey received a special award of recognition from Sundance). There are sequences where Witt flitters around in and out of frame, spinning elaborate, breathless lies and getting high on her own aggrandizements that just left me agog and I kept thinking "Here's a girl we've all known, maybe been (minus the murdering, I hope), but rarely seen in film." Hilary is no angel and is a willing participant and instigator of much of what goes wrong in the film, but it's easy to see how Bonnie drew her in. As the magazine reporter quickly realizes, Hilary's in love with Bonnie, and the correctional institute keeps them separated, leading to anguished sequences of them screaming out for each other in the dead of night through layers of metal bars and doors.

The flashbacks in the film are often filled with such unbridled giggling teenage girl loquaciousness that the film at times comes off as Du côté d'Orouët From Hell. The picture wisely presents the events of the fatal day out of order, so as to build up the dread for the fatal act. I'm spoilering this part of my discussion concerning the murder itself, though it's not really a narrative spoiler since there's no doubt of what happens from the outset of the film:

SpoilerShow

I expected something more akin to the murders in Oswald's A Kiss Before Dying, drawn out and anguished in anticipation, but the stabbing here surprised me. The film rather than building it up rightly presents it matter-of-factly and the act initially comes off as quite dull, Bonnie's tentative stabs having a surreal quality that for once in a film actually made me consider the actuality of what I've seen thousands of times over (and maybe more than that thanks to those damn slashers). The act is as empty as the motivation for it, and it's only when Bonnie's own aggrandizement and realization of the act takes over and she pummels the knife in over and over, covering herself in the torrent of blood spilling out of the old woman, that the violence becomes more "conventional" (and mirrors the attitudes of the girls marvelously)

This may make Fun sound like grim or painful viewing. Mileage may vary, of course, but it was one of the few movies in recent memory where I kept checking the time not to count down the clock but to see how much longer I got to stay with these characters, who are fascinating despite and maybe because of the innate emptiness to their actions and behaviors. Kids got a lot of attention for being a parent's worst nightmare, but I think this film has it beat: this is humanity's worst nightmare, teenage girls being teenage girls who also brutally murder strangers. The film even wisely avoids easy diagnosis of the impetus behind the behavior by

SpoilerShow

revealing Bonnie's stories of molestation and convoluted sexual history are all phony, taking away the armchair diagnosis of "Here's what effects molestation/rape can have on a young psyche." That may be true for Hilary, but Bonnie not only acts the part of your typical fourteen-year-old, she also lacks based on what we learn in the film any potential trigger for her behavior, and she's the more aggressive/dangerous of the two.

There's no answer offered here, and that's as it should be. What we get instead is a fascinating question with no solution, and time spent with two young girls who have inflated and aggrandized their own relation to each other and the world to such juvenile extremes that, as with many sullen teens, the consequences are overruled by the immediacy of emotions. This is one of the best films about youth I've ever seen and one of the best films of the 90s and has caused me to completely reconfigure my Top 5 (sorry again Swo!). It's that good. The DVD is OOP and going for stupid money, but it's up You Know Where and if you can fit it in, I obviously give it my strongest recommendation.

[swo17]

Updating a list only takes me a minute, you don't need to keep apologizing!

[knives]

Helas Pour Moi
Beautiful and moody film that manages to take Godard's beloved noir (or at least the tone of it) to a place of myth and fairytale that doesn't ever stop becoming thought provoking. Sometimes his tendency for humourous non-sequiturs feels like padding for a marketable length, but they essentially function as inserts making them at least pleasantly brief in most cases. It's probably the most solid example of that semi-mainstream vein he was playing with starting in the '80s though personally I prefer some of the sloppier films at least at the moment.

Vincent and Theo
While not anywhere as good as Pialat's film from a couple of years later this is still a fantastic movie in a completely different mold. Surprisingly given how the visual style and even most of the narrative form seems to be duplicating Vincent's teeth Paul Rhys' effete Theo is easily the more interesting part of the story. His wasting away is much more mundane and less egotistically self sacrificing. Roth does great with the material given, but its too blatantly and boringly playing up the crazed, great artist trope to sustain itself. The film just feels pregnant with idleness during his scenes, but they remain necessary to appreciating Rhys' frustration with the art world. In no way could this be mistaken with one of Altman's best films, but a few excessive scenes of shouting aside it's a more than suitable replacement for the usual ticks.

Naked
This is easily the second best Leigh feature I've seen if just because David Thewlis is such a perfect conduit for Leigh's peculiar mode of drama. He really should be far more annoying with his quirky, faux intellectual, Britishness than he winds up being pretty much because Thewlis mixes a pathetic and loving quality to his brusque asshole antics and language. The bits of the story away from his don't work as well, but function with the humour of some of his shorts nearly as well letting them at least function as pleasant distractions. The highlight of the film doesn't come with any of the romances or drugs or anything like that, but the short tour with the guard which just plays to all of Leigh's strengths perfectly. It's a totally ridiculous concern over a ridiculous subject in a ridiculous way played with so much seriousness that it basically hypnotizes. Even the monotonous score somehow manages to work as an eerie compliment to their useless philosophizing. Though what really cements the sequence as great is the way Leigh and Thewlis just destroy his goodwill in that next scene. That said he's not the only great part to the film. All three women, especially the blonde who I don't know the name of, are great and really function more as the center then him which is probably another reason why Thewlis doesn't wind up like Roth in Vincent and Theo. When they finally all come together in the last half hour or so the film finally becomes perfectly structured and turns into such a final word on a lot of Leigh's biggest concerns he could have retired right there as a success.

[zedz]

Fun (Rafal Zelinski 1994)

This film was wildly hyped after its Sundance screening, but then seemed to die away without ever becoming the zeitgeist film it threatened to be. I saw it at the time and found it overhyped, and my strongest memory of it is that the two central performances were way better than the film, which would have been very ordinary / predictable without them, deserved. But maybe it warrants a revisit.

Your description (twisty flash-back-and-forth around a horrible crime, intense co-dependant relationships, superb performances) reminds me of a generally forgotten film that made my own list, Rowan Woods' The Boys. That's another film I haven't revisited and probably should, but I can still remember the shiver that went down my spine at the film's last devastating line, and haven't wanted to potentially spoil that.

[colinr0380]

Gosh, I was literally just thinking of pulling out my videotape of Fun earlier this week to have a quick watch through as a potential wild card for the bottom of my list, but veered off to another tape instead (which is why I've put Leaving Lenin on there, more of which in a while!). 1994 seemed like the year of teen girl murderers, what with Heavenly Creatures and arguably Juliette Lewis's character in Natural Born Killers.

I vividly remember Fun turning up in Channel 4's Extreme Cinema season back in 1997 (sponsored by Stella Artois beer and with little bumper bits into and out of the adverts involving a chap visiting a lady's apartment only to be dragged in, blindfolded and tied up in bondage with a roll of film! That's the Fifty Shades of Gray film I've always had in mind since!) and Fun certainly held up there, although I do remember preferring the films scheduled around it - Dangerous Game, Bitter Moon and especially Bad Boy Bubby and Clean, Shaven, a little more.

Naked
This is easily the second best Leigh feature I've seen if just because David Thewlis is such a perfect conduit for Leigh's peculiar mode of drama. He really should be far more annoying with his quirky, faux intellectual, Britishness than he winds up being pretty much because Thewlis mixes a pathetic and loving quality to his brusque asshole antics and language. The bits of the story away from his don't work as well, but function with the humour of some of his shorts nearly as well letting them at least function as pleasant distractions. The highlight of the film doesn't come with any of the romances or drugs or anything like that, but the short tour with the guard which just plays to all of Leigh's strengths perfectly. It's a totally ridiculous concern over a ridiculous subject in a ridiculous way played with so much seriousness that it basically hypnotizes. Even the monotonous score somehow manages to work as an eerie compliment to their useless philosophizing. Though what really cements the sequence as great is the way Leigh and Thewlis just destroy his goodwill in that next scene. That said he's not the only great part to the film. All three women, especially the blonde who I don't know the name of, are great and really function more as the center then him which is probably another reason why Thewlis doesn't wind up like Roth in Vincent and Theo. When they finally all come together in the last half hour or so the film finally becomes perfectly structured and turns into such a final word on a lot of Leigh's biggest concerns he could have retired right there as a success.

I particularly like that Johnny is the most charismatic character but he also does some of the most abominable things. Everyone else seems beaten down or upsettingly passive in the face of the world around them, just taking the knockbacks (amongst other things!) as their lot in life. And the film upsettingly seems to suggest that disengaging, and definitely not learning too much and becoming too sensitive, might be the only rational response to such a world. Johnny's treating the world with the contempt it deserves, as nothing, but that turns him into a thief and borderline rapist. His fierce intellect is in the process of curdling too, going from railing at the world for its callousness to needing that callous world to be in opposition to and define himself against. He's a (performance) artist without an art, or an audience that gives a damn about what he thinks.

EDIT: I get the impression that Johnny needs an audience to perform for whilst simultaneously not caring about them and how people respond to his rants except perhaps for wryly enjoying the provocations of them. Yet he doesn't seem to realise how that is diminishing him in its own turn.

Also, as someone who occasionally finds themselves waffling on at other people about silly stuff that the person I'm speaking to obviously doesn't care about, I find that re-watching this film is a good wake up call for me sometimes to hold myself in check! I haven't started rambling about barcodes as yet though!

[thirtyframesasecond]

Naked features very highly in my list. It's a cracking film. I don't even particularly like Mike Leigh's movies usually, and Happy Go Lucky is one of my pet hate movies for sure, but this is so atypical that maybe I subconsciously cut it way more slack. Gone is the comedy of manners about the English middle classes, replaced by this overwhelming atmosphere of aimlessness and existential despair. What redeems Johnny somewhat is the utter loathsomeness of the landlord. Johnny is charismatic, intelligent, challenging everything around him, whereas next to this creep, he's a saint. It's set in Dalston.....take a trip there now and it seems very different.

[Mr Sausage]

Fun (Rafal Zelinski 1994)

This film was wildly hyped after its Sundance screening, but then seemed to die away without ever becoming the zeitgeist film it threatened to be. I saw it at the time and found it overhyped, and my strongest memory of it is that the two central performances were way better than the film, which would have been very ordinary / predictable without them, deserved. But maybe it warrants a revisit.

Your description (twisty flash-back-and-forth around a horrible crime, intense co-dependant relationships, superb performances) reminds me of a generally forgotten film that made my own list, Rowan Woods' The Boys. That's another film I haven't revisited and probably should, but I can still remember the shiver that went down my spine at the film's last devastating line, and haven't wanted to potentially spoil that.

Domino's description (minus the twisty structure) reminds me me of Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures, which I haven't seen in years but remember finding sensitive and well-observed. I ought to revisit it to see how well it holds up. Taking place in the past and being based on a real event, it has no pretentions to capturing any zeitgeist and is probably the better for it.

[bamwc2]

Any hints, Swo?

[swo17]

Alright, so far, three films have been fighting it out for the #1 spot. One French, one American (I'm very pleasantly surprised by these two!), and one...well, if I told you, it would give it away.

[knives]

Naked features very highly in my list. It's a cracking film. I don't even particularly like Mike Leigh's movies usually, and Happy Go Lucky is one of my pet hate movies for sure, but this is so atypical that maybe I subconsciously cut it way more slack. Gone is the comedy of manners about the English middle classes, replaced by this overwhelming atmosphere of aimlessness and existential despair. What redeems Johnny somewhat is the utter loathsomeness of the landlord. Johnny is charismatic, intelligent, challenging everything around him, whereas next to this creep, he's a saint. It's set in Dalston.....take a trip there now and it seems very different.

Yeah, what I loved about this one, and Vera Drake, is how atypical of Leigh they are. That said I find that even his comedy of manners tend to be very different from the usual, as if he was a step removed from what he was observing. It's not exactly a taste I enjoy, but his style is very different from the model he works in.