We have arrived at the final film-by-film section of the first round. Also, for the first time, the RNG hit me with two duplicates we’ve already looked at. We’re not really far enough in this process to use that, so we’ll just note them and move on. Today we have:
#750: The Motorcycle Diaries
#370: Primal Fear
#373: Sexy Beast
#763: Outland
#377: The Beat that My Heart Skipped
#323: The Interview (1998)
#844: Pulse (2001)
#794: Tomorrow Might Not Come
#403: 6ixtynin9 [dupe]
#567: Young Frankenstein [dupe]
And so, on with the show(s)!
The Motorcycle Diaries (Walter Salles, 2004)
For a while there, it felt as if Gael Garcia Bernal were poised to take over the world. Every movie he came out with was a guaranteed winner–the same energy Brad Pitt had up until Interview with the Vampire. The Motorcycle Diaries was late in this period, but still solidly within it (Bernal’s Interview was, of course, Babel two years later). Salles was hitting on all cylinders for once, though when Bernal was in the zone, the best thing a director could do was point the camera and get the hell out of the way. The two of them create a portrait of Che Guevara that is not unbiased–I’m not sure anyone could create an unbiased portrait of Che this late in the game–but, by focusing on his pre-revolutionary life, they created something that was able to skirt bias without feeling ridiculous about it. There are very few biopics in my thousand best list (though two of them are in the top twenty, which is still weird to me), and all that are there earned it big time. Don’t see this one needing to move, but it should definitely be there.
Primal Fear (Gregory Hoblit, 1986)
Another movie like Pit Pony, in that there’s an eight hundred pound elephant in the room–this is the movie that launched Edward Norton’s career. And Norton, like Bernal and Pitt above, was bankable as hell. Guaranteed quality (Norton’s Interview was The Score, but you can’t really blame Norton for that one) with every movie he released. He created some of the screen’s most iconic nineties characters, from Derek Vinyard to Worm, and they were all perfect, albeit horrific most of the time. But none of them even came close to touching Aaron Stamper. Aaron Stamper was perfect. It felt like the role Edward Norton had been born to play. And it was his first lead. He took a screenplay where he was third-billed behind Richard Gere (turning in his best performance in over a decade) and Laura Linney (in the middle of a career-defining tear of amazing performances) and mopped the floor with them.
The only film in this batch rated higher than this is another Big-Ass-Acting-Spectacle movie, which should probably tell me something. I don’t see this going anywhere but up, but at the moment, there’s not much up for it to go unless I kick it up to four and a half stars. Which is now under consideration (but I haven’t decided yet).
Sexy Beast (Jonathan Glazer, 2001)
One of the rules I try my best to stick to when rating media is to focus on the piece at hand and not let my feelings about the rest of the corpus of a particular contributor affect me. But, in this case, I’ve got two of those pulling from opposite ends. First off, this is pretty much a bog-standard British Gangster movie with the added presence of Ben Kingsley. And make no mistake, Ben Kingsley is fabulous in this movie. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him better (though Sneakers and Suspect Zero are probably its equals, at least in this aspect). But Kingsley is, to say the least, inconsistent, and he’s known for slumming it (need I mention anything other than BloodRayne here?); the mere presence of Ben Kingsley, no matter how good he is in the role, does not automatically elevate a picture. Which brings me to the other half of this: every other movie of Jonathan Glazer’s I’ve seen I have absolutely loathed. This, of course, leads me to wonder whether Sexy Beast is THAT BIG an anomaly, or whether I just plain missed something. I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt; after all, I’m certainly not going to hit The Motorcycle Diaries because Salles followed it up with that godawful Dark Water remake. But Sexy Beast is an entire other galaxy, when it comes to scope here, and I can’t get that out of my head. I see this one taking quite a plunge, though probably not disappearing altogether until I give it another watch.
Outland (Peter Hyams, 1981)
I remember reading a review of this (given that it was 1981, it was probably in Twilight Zone magazine, of which I was a fanatical devotee) that called it “High Noon in space.” I to this day don’t know whether that was supposed to be a credit or a debit. I liked it a bunch, though, when I saw it on HBO back in the day. I watched it again much more recently (after I finally got round to watching High Noon, which I also love) and I caught a lot more than I did back when I was a teenager and the entire draw was people talking breathlessly about the decompression scene in the hallways of my middle school.
Everyone remembers Sean Connery, but damn, Frances Sternhagen is incredible here, to the point where I wonder if I’d like it nearly as much were she not involved. (I remember feeling that way back then as well, but memory is, well, what memory is.) Pretty sure this is what the kids call these days a complete banger. Definitely deserves to move up.
The Beat that My Heart Skipped (Jacques Audiard, 2005)
Audiard decided to do a bunch of things differently with this movie than he’d done before. The two most important ones were jettisoning most of the usual suspects he worked with (Matthieu Kassovitz, especially) and remake an earlier film. A really, really good earlier film. No matter how much hate you have for James Toback, you gotta admit Fingers is a burner. Harvey Keitel’s solipsistic obsessiveness is played with a (slightly) lighter touch here by Romain Duris, and holy cow does it ever work. Audiard’s got a different vibe, but the end result is just as compelling–maybe even more so. Special shout-out to Neils Arestrup for being so slimy I wiped the screen with a towel a couple of times. This seems fine where it is.
The Interview (Craig Monahan, 1998)
There are a handful of films, almost all of them on my thousand-best list, that have a subgenre that applies only to me–“stuff I caught at random whilst flipping channels, stopped to look for a minute, and then got entirely engrossed”. Unleashed is one of them. Gladiator (the James Marshall flick, not the Russell Crowe). A Pure Formality. Se7en. A few others not immediately coming to mind. The Interview is one of them, but with the added cachet that I spent years trying to figure out what this movie was after I saw it. Once I did manage to figure it out, it went right on the list without a second thought, though I hadn’t seen the entire thing yet. It would take me another few years to track a copy down and actually see the whole thing, front to back. I wasn’t as completely taken with the first bit, to be honest, but once we get down to two people in a room talking at each other, it gets just as good as I remembered. (Two people in a room talking at each other is another frequently-seen subgenre on the list; Closetland has been #3 on the list since its inception, and was #2 on the original hundred-best list until 2000, as one example.) Of course, when the bulk of your movie is two people in a room talking at each other, you need some top-notch acting. Hugo Weaving is actually better here than in The Adventures of Priscilla, and he drags in some of that camp in a few scenes. This is very much his canvas, and the pictures he paints on it are fine indeed. Already quite high on the list, and that’s where it belongs.
Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2001)
I am one of the seemingly very, very few people on Earth who didn’t hate the American remake of Pulse (though I thought it unnecessary), and even despite that, the first thing I need to say here is “don’t let the American remake of Pulse affect your judgment here”. Kurosawa is a master stylist, and Pulse was smack in the middle of the kind of tear few directors ever achieve (let me put it this way–between 1995 and 2009, an incomplete list of Kurosawa’s triumphs includes Cure, Charisma, Séance [his remake of Séance on a Wet Afternoon), Pulse, Eyes of the Spider, Loft, Retribution, Bright Future, Penance, and Tokyo Sonata–at least three of which you could make a case for being Kurosawa’s best film overall). It could be the dumbest plot ever and Kurosawa’s stylistics could still pull it off.
Honestly, that’s kind of what we got. Ghosts carried through electricity. It’s standard fifties technophobic nonsense brought into the computer age (and presaged the entire raft of social media-centric horror films we have today). Even better/worse, it’s pretty standard Japanese New Horror fare. 2001 was peak JNH, and Kurosawa was all too willing to work with the conventions of the genre. This thing shouldn’t be anywhere near as good as it is. And yet it is–and that, in and of itself, is a big part of its appeal. It’s like making a standard grilled cheese, but using casu marzu. 844 seems a tad low (come the next article, we’ll be looking at the positions of some other Kurosawa films to see how far, or even whether, we want to kick it up the list.
Tomorrow Might Not Come (Karan Johar, 2003)
The film that introduced me to Bollywood, SRK, and Preity Zinta (and how wonderful has it been watching her get back into acting over the past few years?). Hugely overlong, full of ridiculous subplots, with big dance numbers and insanely catchy songs (my ex and I used to torture her younger sister with “It’s the Time to Disco” in the car). In other words, I got Full Bollywood from the get-go, and I was overwhelmed.
It does have its drawbacks, some of which are cultural. Specifically, there’s a mistaken-for-homoerotic running joke that spans the entire second act. I should probably be offended by it, but it’s the celluloid version of Blowfly’s song “Maricon”; even if it’s aimed at me and is meant in a derogatory way, I still laugh at it. So even if I feel like I should be hating on it, I’m not going to. This is probably right where it needs to be.
And so for the final films we’re looking at in round one, we have the following:
Primal Fear +/++
Outland +
Pulse =/+
The Motorcycle Diaries =
The Beat that My Heart Skipped =
The Interview =
Tomorrow Might Not Come =
Sexy Beast -/–
Next up: putting it all together and moving stuff around!
Popcorn for Breakfast 